Page:The poem-book of the Gael - Hull.djvu/38

verses on the fairy-hosts, published by Dr. Kuno Meyer, where, instead of praise of their ethereal loveliness, we are told:

Could anything be more matter-of-fact than the clever chess-playing of the shee-folk and their pride in it?

A collection of translations must always have some sense of disproportion. It is natural that translators.should, as a rule, have been attracted, not only to the poems that most readily give themselves to an English translation, but to those which are most easily accessible. The love-songs, such as those collected by Hardiman and Dr. Douglas Hyde, have been attempted with more or less success by many translators, while much good poetry, not so easily brought to hand, has been overlooked. Dr. Kuno Meyer’s fine translations of a number of older pieces, which came out originally either in separate publications,^[2] or in the transactions of the Arts Faculty of University College, Liverpool, have now been rendered more accessible in a separate collection; but the English ear is wedded to rhyme, and a prose translation, however careful and choice, often misses its mark with the general reader. Long ago, Miss Brooke (in her Reliques of Irish Poetry) and Furlong (in Hardiman’s Irish Minstrelsy) essayed the translation of a number of the longer "bardic remains"; and these earlier collectors and translators will ever retain the gratitude of their country-