The Tain Read online

  PENGUIN CLASSICS

  THE TÁIN

  CIARAN CARSON was born in 1948 in Belfast, where he is Professor of Poetry at Queen’s University. He is the author of nine collections of poems, including First Language, which won the 1993 T. S. Eliot Prize. He has written four prose books; Last Night’s Fun, a book about Irish traditional music; The Star Factory, a memoir for Belfast; Fishing for Amber: A Long Story; and Shamrock Tea, a novel, which was longlisted for the 2001 Booker Prize. His translation of Dante’s Inferno (2002) was awarded the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize, and in 2003 he was made honorary member of the Irish Translators’ and Interpreters’ Association. In 2005 he published The Midnight Court, a translation of the classic Irish text ‘Cúirt an Mheán Oíche’, by Brian Merriman.

  CIARAN CARSON

  The Táin

  A New Translation of the

  Táin Bó Cúailnge

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland

  (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

  Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand

  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank,

  Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  www.penguin.com

  This translation first published 2007

  Published in paperback in Penguin Classics 2008

  1

  Translation and editorial material copyright © Ciaran Carson, 2007

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the translator has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject

  to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,

  re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s

  prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in

  which it is published and without a similar condition including this

  condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  978-0-14-190009-4

  In memory of the storyteller John Campbell

  of Mullaghbawn, Co. Armagh,

  born 1933, died 2006

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  Further Reading

  A Note on the Translation

  Pronunciation Guide

  I The Pillow Talk and its Outcome

  II The Táin Begins

  III They Get to Know About Cú Chulainn

  IV The Boyhood Deeds of Cú Chulainn

  V Guerrilla Tactics

  VI Single Combat

  VII They Find the Bull

  VIII The Great Slaughter

  IX The Combat of Cú Chulainn and Fer Diad

  X The Multiple Wounds of Cethern

  XI Skirmishing

  XII The Ulstermen Come Together

  XIII The Final Battle

  Notes

  Acknowledgements

  I am first of all most grateful to Marcella Edwards of Penguin Classics, whose idea it was to commission this translation. It would never have occurred to me otherwise. Thanks are due to Liam Breatnach, Greg Toner and Michael Cronin, who provided me with useful reading lists of background and critical material. Conversations with Bob Welch, Aodán Mac Póilin and Brian Mullen helped me to clarify some aspects of the translation. My wife Deirdre read the work in progress, as she has done with all my work since we met some thirty years ago; as always, her response and her suggestions were invaluable.

  Introduction

  Táin Bó Cúailnge is the longest and most important tale in the Ulster Cycle, a group of some eighty interrelated stories which recount the exploits of the Ulaid, a prehistoric people of the north of Ireland, from whom the name of Ulster derives. The authors of these stories are anonymous. Briefly, the Táin tells of how Queen Medb of Connacht, envious that her husband Ailill owns a prize bull, Finnbennach the White-horned, the superior of any that she possesses, decides to go on an expedition to steal the Donn Cúailnge, the Brown Bull of Cooley, in the province of Ulster. At this time the Ulstermen are laid low by an ancient, periodic curse1 which renders them unfit for battle, and the defence of the province is undertaken by Cú Chulainn. At the beginning of the Táin Cú Chulainn is a shadowy figure, but he gradually emerges as its chief protagonist, a figure of immense physical, supernatural and verbal resource who engaged the attention of many later Irish and Anglo-Irish writers. By a series of guerrilla tactics, chariot-fighting and single combat, he holds off the Connacht army until the Ulstermen recover. Fer Diad, Cú Chulainn’s best friend, is tricked by Medb into challenging him to single combat and is killed by Cú Chulainn. A final battle ensues. Medb and her forces are defeated. The two bulls clash. They die fighting each other, and a peace is made between Ulster and Connacht. Such are the bare bones of the story; its origins, its transmission and the modus operandi of its authors are a more complicated matter, and have been the subject of much scholarly debate.

  There are several legends, or versions of the same legend, concerning the transmission of the Táin. A typical example is that given by Maghnus Ó Domhnaill, a lord of Donegal, in his account of the life of St Colm Cille, written under O Domhnaill’s direction at his castle in Lifford in 1532. The story, referring to events of some 900 years earlier, can be summarized as follows:

  Senchan the High Bard of Erin comes to stay with Gúaire, a prince of Connacht, together with his entourage of three fifties of master poets and three fifties of apprentices, each and every one of them with two women and a servant and a dog. They eat him out of house and home, since Gúaire is forced to gratify their every whim for fear of satire. When Gúaire’s brother, the hermit Marbán, hears of this he curses them, taking away their gift of poetry until such times as they can recite the whole of the Táin. For a year and a day they scour Ireland interviewing bards and storytellers in search of the Táin, with no success, for only fragments of that long story survive. At last Senchan goes to Colm Cille, who takes him to the grave of Fergus Mac Róich, one of the chief protagonists of the Táin. Fergus, summoned from the grave by Colm Cille, proceeds to narrate the whole story, which is written down by St Ciaran of Cluain on the hide of his pet dun cow: hence Lebor na hUidre, ‘The Book of the Dun Cow’.

  This story is an allusion to another famous legend concerning Colm Cille himself: admiring a certain book belonging to St Finnen, Colm Cille asks him if he can copy it; the book deserves a wider audience. Finnen refuses. Colm Cille secretly copies the book anyway. According to Ó Domhnaill, the room in which Colm Cille works is illuminated by the five fingers of his hand, which blaze like five candles. Colm Cille is spied on by a youth, who, attracted by the preternatural light, peers through a hole in the church door, whereupon his eye is plucked out by Colm Cille’s pet crane. The youth goes to Finnen, who restores the eye. (I note in passing that a plausible etymology for Finnen is ‘fair bird’.) Finnen disputes Colm Cille’s right to the copy, and the two cleric
s ask Diarmaid, the High King, to resolve the issue, whereupon he makes what has been called the first copyright judgment: ‘To every cow her calf; to every book its copy.’ For books then were, quite literally, made from calves, as borne out by the English word ‘vellum’, from Old French vel, a calf.

  As it happens, the book known to us as Lebor na hUidre or ‘The Book of the Dun Cow’ – now in the keeping of the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin – does indeed contain a partial version of the Táin, as well as an account of the life of Colm Cille; but this text (of which only 67 vellum leaves survive from a total of some 130) was written in the year 1100 or so, and not in the sixth century when Colm Cille lived. However, it is thought that much of ‘The Book of the Dun Cow’ is derived from texts of the ninth century, now no longer extant, which might in turn have been based on texts of two or three centuries earlier. But we cannot know to what extent these putative antecedents were based on oral accounts which would themselves have been transmitted in several versions, changed, improved or corrupted as they were recounted by different storytellers with different historical, cultural and artistic agendas.

  So it is with the Táin itself, which has been collated as two main versions or recensions. Recension I is a marriage of the Lebor na hUidre text and another partial but complementary text found in the fourteenth-century ‘Yellow Book of Lecan’. It is made up of several linguistic strata, and includes many interpolations, re-writings, palimpsests, redundancies, repetitions, narrative contradictions and lacunae: evidence, perhaps, that this version of the Táin was compiled from an oral tradition which would include variant performances. Recension II, found in the twelfth-century ‘Book of Leinster’, is an attempt to present a more unified narrative. It contains the introductory ‘Pillow Talk’ episode absent from Recension I, as well as a much fuller account of Cú Chulainn’s combat with Fer Diad. Although it resolves many of the inconsistencies, and has been deemed a more ‘literary’ version by many commentators, Recension II often has a florid and prolix style less congenial to modern taste than the laconic force of Recension I.

  Frank O’Connor2 has called the Táin ‘a simply appalling text… endlessly scribbled over’, and its interpretation ‘a task better suited to the archaeologist than the literary critic, because it is like an excavation that reveals a dozen habitation sites’. The Táin might well be an archaeological site, but it need not be an appalling prospect. One could equally well see it as a magnificently ruined cathedral, whose fabric displays the ravages of war, fashion and liturgical expediency: a compendium of architectural interpolations, erasures, deliberate archaisms, renovations and restorations; a space inhabited by many generations, each commenting on their predecessors. Or one can see the Táin as an exemplar of what has been called ‘the supple stylistic continuum’3 of early Irish writing, a fluid mix of poetry and prose. The prose itself can be separated into three main stylistic strands: the straightforward, laconic style of the general narrative and dialogue, particularly evident in the earliest version of the Táin; a formulaic style found primarily in descriptive passages, especially where an observer describes a distant scene to an audience; and an alliterative, heavily adjectival style typical of the later writing. The poetry, which is rhymed and syllabic in form, is spoken by characters at certain heightened points of the action. The Táin also includes passages of the genre known as rosc (pl. roscada), or ‘rhetorics’. These are by far the most problematic elements in the text, and may represent its earliest linguistic stratum. They might, however, include deliberate archaisms. They are usually marked in the manuscripts by ‘.r.’ in the margin, indicating that the medieval scribes recognized them as a distinct formal element. They are written as continuous blocks of unpunctuated rhythmic prose, densely alliterative and syntactically ambiguous. It has been suggested that they might in fact be poems written to archaic metrical principles, using a stressed rather than a syllabic line. Whatever the case, their gnomic quality has resisted translation until comparatively recently. Whether their obscurity is due to unintentional or deliberate garbling is open to debate. Roscada, like the verse in the Táin, are spoken by characters in the course of the action, and can at times be interpreted as verbal jousting or an exchange of veiled threats: a good example is the dialogue between Ailill and Fergus just after Cuilluis, Ailill’s charioteer, has stolen Fergus’s sword.

  The Táin, then, is a compilation of various styles.4 In this context one might dwell on the range of possible meanings embodied in the Irish word táin. The Irish title Táin Bó Cúailnge has been translated as ‘The Cattle Raid of Cooley’, and táin can indeed mean an act of capturing or driving off, a raid, a foray, or the story of such an exploit. There are seven such tales in the Ulster cycle, known collectively as tána: they thus constitute a genre. But táin can also mean a large gathering of people, an assembly, a conglomeration, a procedure. Without stretching it too much, one could say that táin can mean a compilation or anthology of stories and verse, which is precisely what the Táin is: words captured on calf-skin. The naming of Táin Bó Cúailnge thus enacts and embodies its own narrative and scribal procedures.

  The Táin is obsessed by topography, by place-names and their etymologies. Or rather, their alleged etymologies, for many if not most of the stories behind the names are retrospective inventions: by virtue of narrative licence, they come after the names and not before them. Some of the place-names might not exist at all, but are literary fictions, created for the greater glory or shame of whatever hero fought or died in that imagined realm, or to commemorate whatever foul or noble deed occurred there. A typically laconic example goes as follows:

  Lethan came to his ford on the river Níth in Conaille. Galled by Cú Chulainn’s deeds, he lay in wait for him. Cú Chulainn cut off his head and left it with the body. Hence the name Áth Lethan, Lethan’s Ford.

  A likely story, we might say, given the fact that the most obvious meaning of Áth Lethan is ‘broad ford’. But we are taken in by the narrative drive, for this is one of a series of such encounters, and for that moment we summon up a warrior called Lethan, ‘the Broad’. And we note that the ford is ‘his’ even before he comes to it. His fate is predicated by the name. After his death he pays no further part in the story, but the story renders him memorable. He becomes an item in the landscape of the Táin, embodied in its elaborate dindsenchas, ‘the lore of high places’.

  That mode of thinking, of landscape as a mnemonic map, is still current in Ireland. I once had the privilege of accompanying the late Paddy Tunney on a car journey through his native County Fermanagh. Known as ‘The Man of Songs’, Tunney was a living thesaurus of stories, songs, poems and recitations, and as we drove through this townland or that, passing by otherwise unremarkable farmsteads or small hedgy fields or stretches of bog, by this lake or that river or wellhead, he would relate their history, lilt an accompanying reel or jig, or sing snatches of the songs that sprang from that source, and tell stories of the remarkable characters who once dwelt there.5 I have no idea how many thousands of words were thus encompassed in that extraordinary memory of his, but I do know that for him place, story and song were intimately and dynamically connected, and that his landscape spoke volumes. Entering it at any point led to immense narrative consequences.

  Indeed, we might address some of the alleged deficiencies of the Táin as a text if we consider it not as a straightforward story-line running from A to B, but as a journey through a landscape, with all sorts of interesting detours to be taken off the main route, like a series of songs with variant airs. My foray with Paddy Tunney into Fermanagh was, like the Táin, a compendium of different genres – storytelling, verse, song, speculation about the origin of this place-name or that. Another journey on another day would have produced different results, or similar results differently ordered. The landscape is a source-book. So it must have been for the authors and the audience of the Táin. Each would have been familiar with the general lie of the land, and some would have been more knowledgeable than others wit
h regard to one or another detail of its topography. Different performers would treat its various elements differently. There would have been a few master navigators, like Tunney, who had the whole map in their heads. So I have no difficulty with the proposition, disparaged by some scholars with no experience of a living oral culture, that a narrative of Táin-like dimensions could have existed in several or many oral versions. The prodigious memory of some preliterate or illiterate individuals is well attested. That is not to deny the interaction of oral and literate cultures which began with the arrival of Christianity in Ireland. One must have influenced the other.

  In this context the story of how St Ciaran writes down the Táin at the dictation of Fergus can be seen as a parable of the superiority of Christian learning over mere Irish pagan lore: as if to say, even your own history is unreliable, recorded in the fickle human memory, whereas our words, inscribed in books and their copies, shall flourish and survive unaltered for all time. The monkish redactor of the ‘Book of Leinster’ felt compelled to add to the end of the Táin, ‘a blessing on everyone who shall faithfully memorize the Táin as it is written here and shall not add any other form to it’. He both disparages and privileges the art of memory. He writes that sentence in Irish, the language of the lay person, and then adds in Latin, the language of the cleric:

  But I who have written down this story (historia) or rather this fable, give no credence to the story, or fable. For some things in it are demonic deceptions, and others poetic figments; some are possible, and others not; while still others are for the entertainment of idiots (delectationem stultorem).

  The shift in language is telling. This is a man who dwells in both languages, and the pagan and the Christian worlds they represent. He has a foot in both camps. He wades in a ford of meaning.