The verse passages

The Táin is mostly prose, and the prose is often interrupted by verse. A reader of Kinsella's book will see the verse at once, because some of it is set in short lines that step across the page, each line indented further than the one before. Kinsella calls these passages rosc or retoiric. He says in the Introduction that for this one kind of verse he withdraws his guarantee completely.

What they look like

One of them comes in the book's first tale, when the poet Muirgen sits at the gravestone of Fergus mac Roich and addresses it as though it were Fergus himself. The lines are printed in steps, with every second line pushed to the right:

‘If this your royal rock
         were your own self mac Roich
 halted here with sages
         searching for a roof
 Cuailnge we’d recover
         plain and perfect Fergus.’

Kinsella's note on the passage says only that it is a passage of the rosc or retoiric verse discussed in the Introduction. The stepped form runs through the whole translation.

Why they are obscure

In the original, Kinsella says, these passages are extremely obscure. The reason he gives has two parts. It is generally believed that they are more archaic than the prose around them. And it seems likely to him that in some places, where the utterance is "deep" or prophetic, the obscurity is also deliberate.

Scholars, he says, have preferred on the whole to leave these verses unattempted. He thought it worthwhile to try to make some sense out of them, especially where something central to the action is going on. His example is the long sequence in chapter VI.

What he aimed at

The aim was to produce passages of verse that more or less match the original for length, ambiguity and obscurity, and that carry the phrases and motifs and occasional short runs that can be deciphered in the Irish. So where the stepped lines read as nonsense, or as a pile of nouns, that is meant to resemble the state of the original.

He is blunt about the result. The versions are highly speculative and may reproduce little if anything of the original effect. He also says no attempt has been made to follow the Irish verse forms.

His notes repeat the warning at particular places. Of one passage of rosc he says that the translation of it, "and the others throughout the book, is very conjectural". A note on another passage in the pre-tales marks as obscure its lines about a frothy river making a woman leap and a sorrowing autumn, and says the translation of these and similar passages is very conjectural. Of a line in the tale of the two pig-keepers, "overlooks the ox of the earth", the note says the Irish is literally "more than a hill of the ox of the earth", and calls it obscure.

In a note on a run of extravagant descriptions he adds that, as with the verse passages, greater liberties are taken with them than elsewhere.

Help

He says it would have been impossible to attempt these passages without expert help. For most of those in the Táin itself, the help came from Proinsias Mac Cana of University College, Dublin, with what Kinsella calls tolerance, patience and generosity. Mac Cana's suggestions were offered as starting points for the imagination, and they underwent, Kinsella says, much violence in the process that followed. For that violence the translator is solely responsible.

An example near the end

Near the end of chapter XII a chant is given in the western camp, by Cormac Connlongas or, some say, Ailill mac Mata. It lists a great truce at Cuillenn, a great plot at Delind, great herds of horses at Assal and a great plague at Tuath Bressi. Kinsella's note says the place-names in this rosc occur in the story but are not associated with these incidents. The last of them, Tuath Bressi, is taken from the Book of Leinster text.

How old

Kinsella says some of the verse passages may be two centuries older than the eighth-century language of the earliest form of the story. And he reports Frank O'Connor's suggestion that the earliest layer of the story, incompletely preserved in the rosc passages, is the remains of an ancient ironic anti-feminist poem. He gives it as one scholar's suggestion among others, and says that such larger questions are outside the scope of his book.