Sweeney Astray, Buile Shuibhne

1 Seamus Heaney's Famous Translation, 2 Corpus Electronic Edition Celt.UCC

Favorite extant epic tale/poem. Ireland’s Buile Shuibhne, AKA Sweeney Astray. Or The Frenzy Of Suibhne. A Middle Irish Romance

Buile Shuibhne

Seamus Heaney wrote a translation adaptation that is SIMPLY glorious -

Proper Link to Intro and First Page of it

A LITTLE MORE BELOW got off of Reddit

Then he uttered the poem:

I perched for rest and imagined
cuckoos calling across water,
the Bann cuckoo, calling sweeter
than church bells that whinge and
grind.

Friday is the wrong day, woman,
for you to give birth to a son,
the day when Mad Sweeney fasts
for love of God, in penitence.

Do not just discount me. Listen.
At Moira my tribe was beaten,
beetled, heckled, hammered down,
like flax being scutched by these
women.

From the cliff of Lough Diolar
to Derry Colmcille
I saw the great swans, heard their calls
sweetly rebuking wars and battles.

From lonely cliff-tops, the stag
bells and makes the whole glen shake
and re-echo. I am ravished.
Unearthly sweetness shakes my breast.

O Christ, the loving and the sinless,
hear my prayer, attend, O Christ,
and let nothing separate us
Blend me forever in your sweetness.

Christianity added sections, and viens de: the Sweeney went astray anyway.

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Here is a really wonderful academically discussed and collaborated translation of the original Gaelic.

Corpus of Electronic Texts Edition

celt.ucc.ie/published/T302018.html

FIRST PARA:

Suibhne, son of Colman, has
outraged me, he has dragged me with him by the hand,
to leave Cell Luinne with him,
that I should be for a time absent from it.

He came to me in his swift course
on hearing my bell;
he brought with him vast, awful
wrath to drive me out, to banish me.

Loth was I to be banished here from
the place where I first settled
though loth was I, God has been
able to prevent it.

He let not my hand out of his until
lie heard the loud cry which said to
him: ‘Come to the battle, Domnall’
has reached famous Magh Rath.

Good has come to me therefrom,
not to him did I give thanks for it
when tidings of the battle came for
him to join the high prince.

From afar he approached the battle
whereby were deranged his sense and reason,
he will roam through Erin as a stark madman,
and it shall be by a spear-point he will die.