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Feb. 24th, 2013 04:55 pm
Níl ann ach srathar
So I'm still wrestling with the Ó Flaithearta (alongside the Mann and Marsé) and--as you might expect--it's rather slow going. His prose is pretty simple overall, but there are just so many words I don't know and sometimes looking them up doesn't do me much good.
Case in point: I'm reading a story called Teangabháil[*], which opens with a scene of a spirited Irish colleen riding a white mare across a beach in a snowstorm. (Writing in Irish means you're never further than the length of a leprechaun's wang from cliché.) So far so good. But as soon as she dismounts and the discussion turns to horse tack, I'm lost. To be fair, I'd be having the same difficulty in English, since equestrianism isn't really part of my experience. But![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
monshu grew up with horses and even he couldn't guess what was meant.
The most troublesome word was srathrach. At first it took some casting about just to identify this as the genitive of a velar-stem feminine srathair[*] (though fortunately I did have the model of láir/lárach "mare" to help me along), glossed as "straddle". Not a verb, mind you, but a noun. Besides the story itself, the only real clue I had to its meaning was the saying An tstrathair in áit na diallaite ("A straddle instead of a saddle") given in the entry with the meaning "a poor substitute".
There's mention later of it being made of straw, so the GWO suggested it could be some kind of saddle pad. Wikipedia was of no use; it took some poking around Google Books (with illustrations!) to find that the Old Man wasn't so far off. More precisely, it's a sort of rough pack saddle consisting of a straw pad with two boards attached, held in place by a surcingle (gad boilg to Ó Flaithearta) and a breast collar, and designed to hold two "creels" or wicker baskets for transporting turf or--in this case--seaweed.
I assume from the sparseness of his description that none of this would've been a mystery to Ó Flaithearta's audience, even that portion who were non-native-Irish-speaking urbanites. (Back in 1953, everyone in Ireland must've had country cousins.) I already have a dictionary of Hiberno-English for reading older Irish prose; I wonder if possibly I need to supplement that with an encyclopedia of Irish folkways as well.
Speaking of srathair, here's an amusing saying: D'ólfainn an sop as an srathair "I would drink the wisps [of straw] from a straddle", glossed as "I am a reckless drinker". Sop itself appears in a saying equivalent to the one we started with, Níl ann ach sop in áit na scuaibe "It's nought but a wisp in place of a broom".
[*] A dialect spelling of teagmháil "touch, contact". That's another hazard of reading Gaeltacht Irish, which I am nevertheless a big advocate of.
[**] Historically the dative; the earlier nominative form (still current in Munster) is srathar.
Case in point: I'm reading a story called Teangabháil[*], which opens with a scene of a spirited Irish colleen riding a white mare across a beach in a snowstorm. (Writing in Irish means you're never further than the length of a leprechaun's wang from cliché.) So far so good. But as soon as she dismounts and the discussion turns to horse tack, I'm lost. To be fair, I'd be having the same difficulty in English, since equestrianism isn't really part of my experience. But
monshu grew up with horses and even he couldn't guess what was meant.The most troublesome word was srathrach. At first it took some casting about just to identify this as the genitive of a velar-stem feminine srathair[*] (though fortunately I did have the model of láir/lárach "mare" to help me along), glossed as "straddle". Not a verb, mind you, but a noun. Besides the story itself, the only real clue I had to its meaning was the saying An tstrathair in áit na diallaite ("A straddle instead of a saddle") given in the entry with the meaning "a poor substitute".
There's mention later of it being made of straw, so the GWO suggested it could be some kind of saddle pad. Wikipedia was of no use; it took some poking around Google Books (with illustrations!) to find that the Old Man wasn't so far off. More precisely, it's a sort of rough pack saddle consisting of a straw pad with two boards attached, held in place by a surcingle (gad boilg to Ó Flaithearta) and a breast collar, and designed to hold two "creels" or wicker baskets for transporting turf or--in this case--seaweed.
I assume from the sparseness of his description that none of this would've been a mystery to Ó Flaithearta's audience, even that portion who were non-native-Irish-speaking urbanites. (Back in 1953, everyone in Ireland must've had country cousins.) I already have a dictionary of Hiberno-English for reading older Irish prose; I wonder if possibly I need to supplement that with an encyclopedia of Irish folkways as well.
Speaking of srathair, here's an amusing saying: D'ólfainn an sop as an srathair "I would drink the wisps [of straw] from a straddle", glossed as "I am a reckless drinker". Sop itself appears in a saying equivalent to the one we started with, Níl ann ach sop in áit na scuaibe "It's nought but a wisp in place of a broom".
[*] A dialect spelling of teagmháil "touch, contact". That's another hazard of reading Gaeltacht Irish, which I am nevertheless a big advocate of.
[**] Historically the dative; the earlier nominative form (still current in Munster) is srathar.