The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #78872   Message #3768388
Posted By: keberoxu
26-Jan-16 - 05:37 PM
Thread Name: Pilgrimage songs and pilgrimage.
Subject: RE: Pilgrimage songs and pilgrimage.
How did this thread go to sleep so shortly?

Douglas Hyde published the following English version in 1899. The Gaelic original has no title, it comes from one of the monastic manuscripts and may be twelfth-century. Sean O'Faolain's translation, which is copyrighted, was set to music by Samuel Barber, and opens the Hermit Songs as "At Saint Patrick's Purgatory."    The version in this post comes from A Literary History of Ireland from Earliest Times to the Present Day (1899).

Alas, for my journey to Loch Derg,
O King of the churches and the bells;
I have come to weep thy bruises and thy wound,
and yet from my eye there cometh not a tear.

With an eye that moistens not its pupil,
after doing every evil, no matter how great,
with a heart that seeketh only (its own) peace,
alas! O King, what shall I do?

Without sorrowfulness of heart, without softening,
without contrition, or weeping for my faults,
Patrick, head of the clergy,
he never thought that he could gain God in this way.

The one son of Calphurn, since we are speaking of him,
alas! O Virgin, sad my state!
he was never seen whilst alive
without the trace of tears in his eye.

In (this) hard narrow stone-walled (cell),
after all the evil I have done, all the pride I have felt,
alas! my pity! that I find no tear,
and I buried alive in the grave.

O one-Son, by whom all were created,
and who didst not shun the death of the three thorns,
with a heart than which stone is not more hard,
'tis pity my journey to Loch Derg.