I HAVE NEWS FOR YOU

This solstice, I would like to share with you an anonymous lyric poem from the 9th century. A few years ago I read various translations (including one by Flann O’Brien) and cobbled together my own version. It’s a bit of a collage of the previous iterations in which I stick to the three syllabic lines of the original. The poem is untitled but is generally known as ‘Scél lem dúib’ (‘I Have News for You’) and here it is in both Early Middle (?) Irish and English: 

Scél lem dúib: 

dordaid dam, 

snigid gaim, 

ro-fáith sam: 

*

gáeth ard úar, 

ísel grían, 

gair a rith, 

ruirtheach rían;

*

rorúad rath, 

ro-cleth cruth, 

ro-gab gnáth

giugrann guth; 

*

ro-gab úacht

etti én 

aigre ré: 

é mo scél. 

I have news:

the stag bells

winter snows

summer goes

*

cold high winds

sun down low

short its day 

swollen sea

*

red bracken

shapeless now

wild-goose sounds

wonted cry
*

coldness grips

wings of birds

time of ice—

that’s my news

If we accept Susan Sontag’s definition of a writer as ‘someone who pays attention to the world’ it must be noted that this anonymous poet plays the role quite admirably. In registering the change of season, this is a poem that shows us how the arrival of winter is felt on a Northern European island. About this very poem, Seamus Heaney declared: ‘I can think of only a few poets in English whose words give us the sharp tooth of winter anywhere as incisively as that: the medieval poet of Gawain and the Green Knight managed it beautifully, and so did Shakespeare, and Thomas Hardy.’ As the best nature poets do, the anonymous poet of ‘Scél lem dúib’ displays an awareness of the connections that exist between us all and our natural habitat. Hundreds of years before Basho’s frog, the images of the withered and reddened bracken and the icy wings of birds still resonate, even if you’re writing this, as I am, in the not-too-cold environs of Tamaulipas. Happy Solstice.

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