I and Pangur Bán my cat,
'Tis a like task we are at:
Hunting mice is his delight,
Hunting words I sit all night.
Better far than praise of men
'Tis to sit with book and pen;
Pangur bears me no ill-will,
He too plies his simple skill.
'Tis a merry task to see
At our tasks how glad are we,
When at home we sit and find
Entertainment to our mind.
Oftentimes a mouse will stray
In the hero Pangur's way;
Oftentimes my keen thought set
Takes a meaning in its net.
'Gainst the wall he sets his eye
Full and fierce and sharp and sly;
'Gainst the wall of knowledge I
All my little wisdom try.
When a mouse darts from its den,
O how glad is Pangur then!
O what gladness do I prove
When I solve the doubts I love!
So in peace our task we ply,
Pangur Ban, my cat, and I;
In our arts we find our bliss,
I have mine and he has his.
Practice every day has made
Pangur perfect in his trade;
I get wisdom day and night
Turning darkness into light.
translation: Robin Flower
Question: What do The Iliad, In Search of Lost Time, Gilgamesh, The Magic Mountain, The Bible, and The Master and Margarita all have in common?
Answer: They’re accessible to readers in English (almost) exclusively through translation. (Almost because some of us read more than one language.)
But for most of us, if we want to read it, we need a translation. Which means that much of what makes the original work sing is lost to readers in English. This is a really hard truth, and a particular challenge to anyone who sets out to translate a work, any work. A talented translator can get you close, can balance the two poles of translation: literal meaning and sonic effect. Every translator falls on one side or the other. Literal meaning we all know. But what about sonic effect? It’s the sum total of sound — rhythm, vowels and consonants, meter, rhyme and/or alliteration, and the hundred other tools of the writer’s trade that make a sentence graceful, make its form mirror its content.
For instance, in the original Greek, the opening lines of The Odyssey rise and fall like ocean waves; many scholars think that Homer meant the effect to be one of rising and falling, like Odysseus on the ocean. Listen:
You can hear it, right?
Could you do that in English? No, at least not in the same sonorous grave way that the Greek does. The very form of the poem, the language itself, sets the tone and casts Odysseus out on the waters. But we can’t do the same thing in our tongue, not without abandoning the words and their literal sense. And rather than mirroring the flavor of the original, most translators lean hard on literal side of things.
This tension between the quality of the original language and its translation isn’t limited to poetry, as anyone who’s suffered through the florid translations of Constance Garnett can testify. (Compare her Dostoevsky or Tolstoy to Pevear and Volokhonsky, and try to tell me there isn’t a world of difference.) But it’s in poetry that the tension between language and meaning is greatest, which is why great poems are catnip especially to poets looking for a challenge (that’s a pun, as will be clear soon).
Translation is a specialized and difficult trade. For one thing, it requires, not just ease, but real fluency in both languages, an ear to the nuances and connotations of both tongues, and true bi-linguality is hard to achieve — it takes years of learning and speaking. But that’s not enough: it also takes sensitivity to the language itself and an awareness of what the language can do. It takes a writer’s training. The best person to translate poetry is a poet, someone trained to pay heed to sound, rhythm, and meaning.
What about when the poem to be translated is in a language that no one speaks any longer? Well, it’s both harder and easier. Harder because there are no native speakers to serve as guides; easier because there’s no one around to tell you you’re doing it wrong. Now, we have a really good idea about original pronunciations in, say, Greek — after all, it’s been taught formally since...well, since it was a living language, and I’m talking about both Attic and Koine. Same goes for Latin. But Old Irish? Much more obscure, and much harder for the average scholar, even the average highly motivated scholar, to tackle.
Which brings us to tonight’s work, one of the great poems of Irish literature: Pangur Bán.
You might have heard of ”Pangur Bán” already. It’s featured in the 2009 film The Secret of Kells, has been turned into a book by Jo Ellen Bogart and Sydney Smith, “The White Cat and the Monk,” the latest of a slew of children’s books, and generally appears around with web with cat drawings inspired by the Book of Kells. It has, you might say, quite a following.
The original, the poem “Pangur Bán,” is a ninth-century Irish poem that survives in only one manuscript, a notebook kept by an Irish monk studying at Reichenau, in what is now Austria (the link, from Twitter, explains a bit of what else the manuscript tells us about literacy and scholarship in ninth century Europe, which was a whole lot more cosmopolitan than either the Puritans of yesteryear or the White Supremacists of today would have you think).
Eight stanzas of quatrains, end-stopped lines with a couplet rhyme. And apparently devilish to translate in all its subtlety and allusiveness. A monk and his cat, sharing their quarters, sharing their lives, practicing their solitary skills — our monk hunting the meaning of his text, the cat hunting mice. Even the title is difficult and could have more than one translation: in Old Irish, bán means “white,” — that much we all agree on — and pangur means “fuller,” probably referring to the process of softening wool to make felt, and could refer to the way a cat kneads when it’s happy. Or it could refer to the fluffiness of felled wool1, in which case the title means “very fluffy and white.” Or, (I found this on some usenet thread a while ago and couldn’t find it again to cite it) since a fuller is also the shallow groove down the blade of a sword, the title could refer to the cat’s hunting prowess2.
Usually translators don’t bother messing with the title, so “Pangur Bán” it remains. It’s a tough poem to get your hands around, and not only because of the remoteness of the language. What’s the relationship between the monk and his cat? Is the poem a meditation on scholarship and hard work? Or is it just about a cat? You decide.
Cambridge University has the original side by side with a translation, along with an audio file so you can follow along here. Check it out, give it a listen — it’s quite charming. I’ll wait.
Nice, huh? If you’ll notice, Gerard Murphy’s translation falls on the literal meaning side of the translator’s fence. Very different is Robin Flower’s version, which preserves the form and whimsey of the original, but at some cost to meaning and tone. Looking at the last two stanzas, translated by several different masters, we get very different poems.
Gerard Murphy:
Though we be thus at any time,
neither of us hinders the other:
each of us likes his craft,
severally rejoicing in them.
He it is who is master for himself
of the work which he does every day.
I can perform my own work
directed at understanding clearly what is difficult.
Robin Flower:
So in peace our task we ply,
Pangur Ban, my cat, and I;
In our arts we find our bliss,
I have mine and he has his.
Practice every day has made
Pangur perfect in his trade;
I get wisdom day and night
Turning darkness into light.
Seamus Heaney:
So it goes. To each his own.
No vying. No vexation.
Taking pleasure, taking pains,
Kindred spirits, veterans.
Day and night, soft purr, soft pad,
Pangur Bán has learned his trade.
Day and night, my own hard work
Solves the cruxes, makes a mark.
W. H. Auden threw form out the window entirely and compressed the poem from 32 lines to 10:
Pangur, white Pangur, How happy we are
Alone together, scholar and cat
Each has his own work to do daily;
For you it is hunting, for me study.
Your shining eye watches the wall;
My feeble eye is fixed on a book.
You rejoice, when your claws entrap a mouse;
I rejoice when my mind fathoms a problem.
Pleased with his own art, neither hinders the other;
Thus we live ever without tedium and envy.
Is this even the same poem? Well, yes….and no, as Bilbo would say. Each translation is a reflection of the original, through the lens of another writer’s imagination. Flower kept the quatrain and rhyme scheme, which Heaney thought “changes the packed, donnis/monkish style of the original into something more like a children’s poem, employing an idiom at once wily and wilfully faux-naif.” He drops the rhyme scheme for the greater freedom of vocabulary and closer hewing to meaning.
If there’s a point to this exercise (there is), it’s that translations are, at the best, echoes of the original. They’re also a lens through which we see the translator’s mind at work — why this word instead of another? Why drop these lines altogether? — and a window not only on the original writer’s time and sensibilities, but the translator’s as well. Which is why Flower’s translation is twee but endearing, while Heaney’s is muscular and understated (makes perfect sense if you’ve read a lot of Heaney, who himself couldn’t help but try his hand, not only at Old Irish, but Attic Greek as well). Auden, in his mid-century compactness, excises everything but the nugget, although he’s tripped up by his unfamiliarity with the music in the Old Irish. All of them varied snapshots of a monk and his cat, in a distant cell, in another time.
And all this is preparatory to next week, and the granddaddy of English literature, the poem that everyone pretends to have read, the hero of a thousand translations: Beowulf! A founding document of the fantasy genre: monsters and dragons, heroes and ill-fate. And a new, earth-shaking version by Maria Dahvana Headley that is an absolute must-read.
*And since you’ve stuck with me this far, here’s a bit of trivia: in medieval Ireland, a cat that could purr was worth one and a half cows. A cat that caught mice was also worth one and a half cows. A cat that did both: three cows. Don’t think it was just ancient Egypt that favored cats.
1The fulling process strips lanolin, or grease, out of raw wool, rendering it softer and more amenable to washing. Yes, I have tried to spin wool into yarn. Yes, it’s a craft that takes a lot of practice. I was no good at it. To make things even more interesting, Seamus Heaney, in his translation, says that pangur is an old Welsh word referring to someone who works with white fuller’s earth. In the end, it all adds up to the fact that the cat is white.
2I don’t know Old Irish and am personally suspicious of this particular meaning. It presupposes that Irish and English use the same word for two very different things — wool prep and armory, a consistency that most languages don’t follow. If someone knows, please tell me. For the time being, I choose to think this is simply an Anglicized view of a foreign language, and naive at that.