A Little Bit Of Culture...

A little bit of Culture... Poetry from soc.culture.irish

Dánta na hÉireann (poems composed in Irish)

Posted by Gerard Cunningham
on: 14 May 1999

I've translated súil n-glais as "a blue eye", but that's not quite right. In the Old Irish colour spectrum, glas & gorm both covered a spectrum that included blue and green, even tending towards greys. Gorm generally referred to dark blue/green, while glas meant light blue/green. In modern Irish, influenced by the Newtonian redefinition of the spectrum and the ubiquitous influence of the English language, gorm is blue and glas is green. Meanwhile in Scotland, where the Gaelic language developed separately, glas means grey.

Fil súil n-glas Gan ainm [11th century]	Early Irish Lyrics, Eighth to Twelfth Century edited by Gerard Murphy Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1950
**Colum Cille cecinit / attributed to Colum Cille**	*A blue eye - translation by Gerard Cunningham*

Fil súil n-glais
fégbas Éirinn dar a h-ais;
noco n-aceba íarmo-thá
firu Érenn nách a mná.

A blue eye
trans., Gerard Cunningham

A blue eye will look back
to Ireland left behind,
never again to see
Irish men, nor women.

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