This is an absolutely brilliant addition, thank you for that. It’s funny because I was also thinking, with regards to training, that I think that people also don’t always….get…..when I talk about the evolution between Old Irish, Middle Irish, and Early Modern Irish….WHY that’s so hard, and why it can be so difficult to do proper editions.
So: I was trained in Old Irish. I have been training in it for nearly a year and a half at this point, and, in every linguistics class I’ve had, I’ve made top marks. I made top marks in paleography. I’m not the best at it, I’m not the most experienced, I’m still a BABY. I want to emphasize that. I’m not the smartest. But I am on par with anyone else in my program, and that’s good enough for me.
I was assigned a quatrain to analyze and translate and I nearly went into TEARS at this thing. Keeping in mind that I’ve been training for a YEAR to do this and had a week to do it.
TEARS. I was having all these terrible visions of being absolutely humiliated in front of the program.
One line in particular threw me off: “tearc éun do dheanamh mionadh”. Keep in mind: I didn’t have to do an edition of this text. The edition was already made for me (thank you to the head of the seminar who did this - I actually feel a little guilty for posting it on here since it’s HER work, not mine, but also…it’s a small bit of a longer text, and it’s virtually unrecognizable here), I just had to compare the different recensions against one another and go from there. But translating these four quatrains alone nearly broke me, because they were in Middle Irish, and they were poetry, which I also wasn’t trained to read, and that means the syntax is different. Old Irish is fairly strict as far as Verb-Subject-Object, unless you have a copula + relative situation going on. Here, it would appear to be subject + preposition + verbal noun + object. In Middle Irish forms, not the Old Irish I was trained for. Imagine being trained to read Old English and then having to parse through Chaucer. It’s not like anything I was trained for. Yes, I could recognize “Tearc”, I could recognize “Én”, I could recognize “do denam”, which is presumably lenited due to the preposition before it, as a form of “do-gni”, but it was still VERY difficult to string them together.
I think, at times, that I can fall into the problem of making it seem like Old Irish or the translation process is easy, especially *simple* Old Irish, but it isn’t.
Also, keep in mind: This is ONE quatrain. There are over a hundred in this poem. Imagine one person doing that. Imagine one person going through multiple manuscripts line by line to get the best possible reading of it (the one I supplied was one of eight that exist) and then translating it line by line, word for word, for over 100 quatrains of Irish that, at times, was written to be deliberately difficult, as the scribes-well, they were men of letters, men of the written and spoken word. They’d trained in their field for YEARS, and they were rightly proud of their knowledge of the Irish language, of the esteem that they had built for it, and they also wanted to show off to their patrons what they were paying for. So, a lot of the times, poems like this are written in VERY difficult Irish.
Anyway, there’s a reason they call it “Publish or Perish”. Because so many of us are early career academics who really, really need what little money we can get + some amount of respect, since it can be VERY hard to build your name in the field. (Also, in my personal experience….even harder as a mythographer.)
I’d love to just be able to release the two editions I did and be like “GO LONG, GUYS”, but that wouldn’t be helpful to me and, really, not to the field as a whole, because no one would be able to peer review it, either. With the line above that gave me such a headache, I could say to you, right now, that it means “The little bird shits on my window” and you would have no way of knowing that it was true or not.
You might look at “tearc” and “én” and be able to parse, with a dictionary, that one means “few, scant” and the other means “bird”, and then you’d hit a dead end at the rest and go “well….she got the first couple of words right, so she’s probably right about the rest.” The problem would be that it would be wrong, because that is categorically NOT what it means and I’d have been lying through my teeth the entire time. Even if I wasn’t being malicious, sometimes, scholars, even the BEST scholars, make mistakes. I was once in a class with one of the best in the field, where he was casually like “Oh, yes, I believe this translation I made in 2003 had an error, where it actually says this-” The original translators of this text certainly believed that it was something else, and, in my capacity as a scholar, I disagree with their interpretation. Which is great, because that’s how it’s SUPPOSED to work, but if I was to just post these things online, you’d have no way of knowing WHAT you were getting. (Also why it can be so hilarious to read scholarly reviews online, because they can get VERY heated over things like how to properly format an edition or translation errors, and there are quite a few ongoing feuds in the field that REALLY come out during those times.)
It might SEEM like it’s not helping the public to not have immediate, easy access to them and, in many ways, it ISN’T (hence why we’re facing our current crisis in Celtic Studies, where there’s a MASSIVE gulf between researchers and the public), but there is also a certain method to our madness, because you do, also, want to be sure you’re getting the best possible reading of the text that you can get.
