GUEST - I also found this very quickly but I also found out very quickly that this is not a translation but a poem with the same title. It picks up some few concepts from the original lyrics but places them in different context so the meaning is completely different from what the original test says. The advantage is that it rhymes and the author has also succeeded in making a text that can be sung to the melody of the original song.

Some people accept things like this one. Personally I object to them because IMHO the magic of the original song is closely related to the original language and especially its sound. Moreover I know a couple of german text versions of russian songs which also rhyme and can be sung to the original melody but are simply c**p: Making it rhyme and obeying the measure takes so much effort that an author will hardly be able to tell sane things in addition to that.

Regarding the above I could say I would not be very charmed by a green-haired woman whose body looks like a salmon but this would be unobjective. It is the lack of sense in the pictures given what disappoints me. Is green barley shining that much that a woman's hair shining the same way would impress me? Hardly. Or if her body was moving like a salmon? Hardly (wrong direction :-). It rhymes but what is said is -uh- boring, at the very edge of nonsense.

Brían - thanks for your explanation and the link. First I was a little embarassed wondering whether I am getting old because I wasn't able to figure this out myself. But I guess I never was and I never will be. I remember a former occasion whe a statement just like this one confused me: When I was a child I heard the Grimm Brothers' story of that brave little tailor who bought himself not so few of plum-jam, put it on a slice of bread and said "This won't taste bitter." I then spent some time wondering why plum-jam tastes bitter if you don't put it on a slice of bread before I realized that he only wanted to say "This will taste good." What if it tasted like a dead rat?

The example with the pilgrimage to Croagh Patrick is still more extreme: No pilgrimage to Croagh Patrick means no hardship. Hence a pilgrimage to Jerusalem is no hardship? Moreover, getting hanged - this not even being a pilgrimage at all - is pleasant, or what?

Mentioning the lack of something very special in order to express the opposite of some very general feature of this special thing is a thread I simply can't follow. Funny that these two (only!) examples I know both come from elderly texts. Were people in former times used to express their thoughts that way?

Also - "the nut filled forests". *BG* That's poetry. What comes to my mind when I think of a forest and what it is filled with? Trees - of course. Leaves - yes. Game - yes. Fresh air - yes. Peace - still ok. NUTS??? Nuts are grown on specially cultivated trees whose arrangement does not look like a forest at all. Never found many nuts in a forest. Or was that different in former times? Especially in Ireland?

BTW - has 'nuts' the same indecent additional meaning in Gaelic as it has in English? In German it has not - you would have to supply 'eggs'.

Can't remember the last time a song gave me so much fun and so many insights.

Joerg