(Disclaimer: I received a review copy of this book from the publisher.)
I should say, to start off, that I’m a little skeptical about Coleman Barks’s interpretive practice (see this article) — but this review isn’t about Barks, it’s about Lewis MacKinnon.
This book is a mix of new poems by MacKinnon and (the majority of the poems) translations from Barks, and there’s one translation of an Old Irish poem (“Duan Amhairghine”, from Lebor Gabála Érenn) that appears as well, which I was very pleased to see.
I’ll start with the the translations: as a translator, MacKinnon has done his work well, balancing both Barks’s style and register and a naturalness of language in Gaelic. At times I’d go so far as to say that MacKinnon’s translations are better than Barks’s own poems. See, for example, the end of “Na droch bheusan agad”:
Your defects are the ways that glory gets manifested.
vs.
’S anns na droch bheusan agad a thig glóir am follais.
Barks’s line is quite awkward, but MacKinnon’s translation is perfectly natural and fluent.
There were a few moments where the translations stumbled (as is the case with all translations), but in general: job very well done. I’d especially recommend MacKinnon’s translation of “Duan Amhairghine” — I’d love to see more of this kind of thing from Old Irish in modern Gaelic. It was good, also, to see Barks’s new translation next to it — a trace influence of Gaelic culture on him, perhaps, although he doesn’t speak any Celtic language.
I wasn’t quite so sure about MacKinnon’s new poems, and that’s the main thing that’s causing me doubts about the book as a whole. I’ll start by saying that MacKinnon has written some of my favorite poems in Gaelic — “Duin’ Anabarrach” in Famhair and “Éibh a’ Ghrunnd” in Rudan Mì-bheanailteach is An Cothroman, for example, and they’re not they only ones — and the thing that I loved most in them is MacKinnon’s own voice. This appears at times in the new poems here (in “Luirgean m’athar”, for example), but some of them feel as if he was attempting to write in Rumi’s voice (or Barks’s voice writing in Rumi’s voice) — and because of that his own magic/poetic power gets a bit lost, and what’s left is technically fine, but feels a little...I’m not sure. As if something was missing.
Initially I wasn’t sure about the organization of the poems (according to different holidays in the Nova Scotia Gaelic calendar) — not that it wasn’t working, just that I didn’t understand why MacKinnon chose this particular order. Now that I’m going back through them, however, I see the reason behind it, and it makes sense: the structure and the groupings are fitting for the book as a whole and for the poems themselves.
All in all, then: I’d give the book 4 stars, and I’d recommend it to readers who are interested — I’ve been saying that more translations would be useful to the Gaelic world, and here are some, done well by a (justly) famous poet. I’m both looking forward to seeing more poetry in MacKinnon’s own voice and hopeful that we might see more translations (Acadian poetry in Gaelic?) from him, as well.
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