Ossian to the Setting Sun

Close translation of Gaelic, assumed to be older than 1730,

10. Take thy sleep within thy cave,

11. Oh sun, and come back from sleep rejoicing.

Rushing with might down the plain greensward;

And snatched the loved beam from the hunter;

And the moorland’s soft plants are withering.

23. Gazing aloft to the son of the skies.

Take another example. At page 226, Appendix to the H. S. Report, is a Gaelic passage collected by Macdonald of Staffa about the end of last century. It is not in the language, or style, or metre of popular ballads generally, but it is good Gaelic, and a sort of cantering blank verse. The following is a “close translation,” and imitates the metre:—

It will be seen that each of these lines is complete in sense. The passage might be finished at the end of each line, without making the rest nonsense, which is peculiarity of Gaelic poetry. Whatever the merits or demerits of this passage may be, its imagery is taken from nature, as seen on the tide-washed shores of the western coast; and the words of art are those used by boatmen. “Buinn sruth” is gaining tide the flood stream, when it begins to make strongly; “reabhairt” is the height of springs, when the tides are strongest; and to any one who has danced over the “spring-tide flood stream” in a fishing-boat on a winter’s day, off the west of Scotland, near the whirlpool of Corriebhreacan, the line conveys the idea of irresistible power, which it is intended to give. MacPherson’s English loses all this, and he was a Badenoch man, who was not familiar with such scenes.

(Fingal, book iii., 1763.)

The Gaelic of 1807 is something quite different from either of these passages. (Pp. 148, 149, gratis edition 1818.) Three versions therefore exist—two printed in Gaelic, and MacPherson’s English; and of these I prefer Staffa’s west country Gaelic, with which MacPherson had nothing to do, and which is not a translation of the published English, but a far better version of a similar passage. The Gaelic must surely be the original in this case.

Again, passages composed on the following principle must belong to the language in which the assonance exists, rather than to that which gives the meaning less forcibly, and nothing more:—

There are numerous passages in Gaelic which have a structure as complicated as the above “nonsense verse;” for example:—

Here surely the Gaelic was the original.

Such a passage as Fingal, Duan I, line 413 to 437, the most difficult of critics must admit to be very fine Gaelic, infinitely better than its English equivalent, though that passage will not scan at all.

In short, when I read parts of Ossian in Gaelic, I often feel that this is poetry of high order, of which no translation can give any just idea. Some poet might express the same ideas as well in another language, but no faithful translator can render the meaning and imitate the original.

When I read Fingal in the “original” I feel that this is poetry, that these are grand ideas clothed in magnificent sonorous language; on reading it in English, I often feel that there is something in it akin to bombast. In the one case I am drawn to the side of those who maintain that these are genuine ancient poems, in the other I feel driven to admit that they are not; and when all is done, I return to my first opinion, that Fingal is a fiction founded upon a broad basis of fact; a book of Gaelic poetry of high order, but not poetry composed by Ossian about the time of the Romans.

I hold that it is manifest, from a consideration of the Gaelic poems themselves, that they were the work of one or of many able Gaelic poets. The question now is—when did they live? and who were they?

It has been argued that the language is modern, and, therefore, that the poems are modern; and to hold that the language spoken in the days of Caracalla was the language of the last version of the modern Gaelic Bible appears sufficiently absurd. The modern air of the language may, however, be accounted for.

Traditional poems alter with the age; I have already shewn how rapidly they alter, and in what manner. At page 92 of Sir John Sinclair’s Dissertation, it is stated that the Rev. Mr. Thos. Ross, of Edinburgh, was employed to transcribe the whole work as left by MacPherson at his death in 1796, agreeably to the orthography of the Gaelic Bible, that is, to modern orthography. Mr. Ross found fault with the English translation, but he had no quarrel with the Gaelic.

MacPherson had tried to simplify Gaelic spelling, and having found some classical authority for the use of the Greek character by ancient Celts, he had begun to print Gaelic in Greek letters. Sir Roderick Murchison tells me that he has meteorological registers written in Gaelic, and in the Greek character, by his father.

When a man, whose standard of orthography was the modern Gaelic Bible, got hold of such a work as MacPherson’s Gaelic MS., he would have small scruple in making it suit his standard; and so, between popular changes, MacPherson’s interpolations, simplifications, and restorations, and Greek letters, and his successor’s modern standard, the ancient form of the language, if it was ancient, could hardly survive.

What would become of Chaucer so maltreated, and finally spelt according to modern rules of grammar and orthography? I have found by experience that an alteration in “spelling ” may mean an entire change of construction and meaning, arid a substitution of whole words. I know that a change in the pronounciation of a single vowel sound will suggest such a change as this—

The geese would swim through thy waist.

The winds might float through thy breast.

The passage refers to a man thrust through with a spear. The first is the translation of the line as repeated now and in 1786, and has no meaning, unless it be a ludicrous measure of the size of the wound.

The second conveys the image of the breath swimming painfully through the blood of a wounded man, whose breast and lungs had been pierced, and the only change necessary to suggest these opposite ideas is from “geoidh,” geese, to gaoithe, winds; the dh and the being silent letters. MacPherson would.have made the change: I did not, though I believe it ought to be made.

I have compared versions of the same poem lately written down by different men, from different reciters, in different districts, at long intervals of time, with each other, with older MS., and with still older printed versions; and I find all manner of strange variations, in which rhythm and sounds often remain, while sense and words are altered; and I find that even the printed Gaelic of 1807 varies from that of 1763.

It has also been argued that because there is no mythology in Ossian, therefore it is a forgery; but it has been shewn, that the collectors of former days carefully weeded out all the mythology, because it was not quite reasonable. I have left all that I found, and it savours of Pagan sun worship.

To me, therefore, the modern language and English idioms of the Gaelic of the edition of 1807 appear to be no valid argument against the general antiquity of the poems.

Take one example from Smith’s “Sean Dana,” and the same thing appears; the Gaelic is better than the English. In “Tiomna Ghuill,” page 57, is this line— and it is translated by the English line—

As it seems to me, the beauty of the line is thus lost by a free translation, whereas a close rendering would preserve its meaning better—

The passage describes a “play of fish,” and the Gaelic line conveys to me the idea of a mass of sea birds clustered together, and riding over the long smooth waves of the salt ocean.

It is a true picture in five short words, which every one must recognize who has ever watched a clump of dark razor-bills huddled together under a cliff on a summer’s day. As each long Atlantic wave comes rolling in, the birds rise on the crest, and sink into the hollow trough, and the wave slips under and curls over, and thunders in against the rocks beyond— a mass of broken white water; but the clump of birds are on their “briny steeds,” and they know how to ride them. A stroke or two, and they paddle out into the glassy water at the edge of the surf, and tuck their heads under their wings once more, and sleep. And there they will rest on the waves for hours, beneath a cliff, riding like skiffs (sgoth) at anchor till fishing time comes again; and then they are up and off, to ride their steeds to battle with the herring king.

Then comes a sight which must be seen to be appreciated. The birds gather on the surface in masses; great whales dash up, and spout, and turn over, and dive down again, leaving the sea all glittering with scales, and foaming and surging about their sides. The diving birds scatter and flap along the surface, and scream as they go; great green cole-fish leap high into the air; gulls and terns hang over head, and clatter and yell, and dart down, and the whole do their best to gobble up the king of the seas as fast as they can. And all this was in the mind of the man who composed the passage, in which the rushing of Goll to battle is compared to the rushing of the whale, and his foes to the scattered birds. And to my mind the Gaelic tells the story infinitely better than the English, though this is not the most popular ballad poetry now most commonly recited.

This is my own opinion, but no one is fit to judge whose earliest thoughts were not framed and expressed in Gaelic. One who has been accustomed to hear and speak, and to read all sorts of jargons, and jump at meaning without regard to grammar or spelling, is no fair judge of a written language, in which he does not think; so I prefer the opinion of a shoemaker who reads his Gaelic Bible, and has a multitude of Gaelic stories in his head, and knows very little about anything else beyond his last. He says—

I also prefer the opinion of a man who began life in a Highland cottage, and lives near the place where he was born, who has worked at Gaelic books and traditions, and studied that language, and has taught himself to read half a dozen more, in which he reads poetry; besides acquiring the whole of Euclid, and the Differential calculus, and a good many “ologies” to boot— a man who thinks for himself, and is free from national prejudice at all events.