Current Literature
THE MIDNIGHT COURT and THE ADVENTURES OF A LUCKLESS FELLOW. Two Poems translated from the Gaelic by Percy Arland Ussher. With a Preface by W. B. Yeats. (Cape. 6s. net.)—Many of the Gaelic poets of Munster in the eighteenth century led wild lives like Bums and wrote graceful lyrics, but it was a respectable small farmer, Brian Merriman, who composed the wildest, most rollicking and Rabelasian poem of his times. In a dream the poet is summoned by a fearful hag to the mock court of the Fairy Queen ; a maiden, pleading on behalf of the unmarried women of Ireland, denounces the increasing bachelor tendencies of the young men ; an old man, who has been deceived by his young bride, jumps up and berates the shameless hussy and all her sex. But the birth-rate is declining, as a desperate remedy why shoUld not the prosperous, healthy and vigorous clergy marry ? So the debate rages merrily and abusively, until the chagrined women discover that the poet is =married, though forty, and as they set on him, he wakes up. The poem so full of wild folk-humour and a traditional spirit of mediaeval irreverence that it is hardly appropriate to see in it, as Dr. Yeats suggests, the influence of Swift and later scepticism. The poem, though torrential, is formal ; it has couplet rhyme (assonance), alliteration and three internal assonances in every line. Mr. Ussher shows great ingenuity in his constant reproduction of the original form, and though metrical necessity causes him to generalize at times, his trans- lation is vigorous and spirited.
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