Poems and translations — A Closer Reading

A Diction Drawn from Speech

Synge’s poetic language is built from the rhythms and vocabulary of Irish country speech. In “Queens,” he lists seven women—Deirdre, Dervorgilla, and others—in a tone that is both reverent and matter-of-fact: “Seven dog-days we let pass / Naming Queens in Glenmacnass.” The word “dog-days” is not decorative; it anchors the poem in a specific, physical season. In “Danny,” the narrative voice is blunt: “I’ll go to bed and I’ll sleep sound, / For Danny is dead and the world goes round.” The syntax is colloquial, the rhyme almost throwaway. Even in the Petrarch translations, Synge replaces the original’s courtly diction with plain speech: “Let you go down, sorrowful rhymes, to the / hard rock is covering my dear treasure.” The imperative “let you” and the relative clause without a relative pronoun are direct borrowings from Irish English. This is not a poet reaching for the universal; he is insisting that the universal can only be reached through the particular, the local, the spoken.

The Landscape as a Character

Place-names in Synge’s poems are not mere settings; they are active presences. “In Kerry” begins: “We’ll find the quiet in Kerry, / The kind and open-hearted.” The county is personified as a refuge, but the poem undercuts that promise with its final line: “And the world is all the wiser / When the wind is in the leaves.” The wind is not a metaphor; it is the actual wind that carries sound and change. “The Oaks of Glencree” is even more direct: “The oaks of Glencree / Are bending low.” The trees are not symbols of endurance; they are bending, physically, in a specific valley. In “On an Island,” the speaker notes “the smell of the tide” and “the cry of the gulls.” Synge’s landscapes are never picturesque. They are felt as weather, as labor, as the ground underfoot. This is consistent with his preface’s demand for “the strong things of life.”

Translating Through a Single Voice

Synge’s translations from Petrarch, Villon, and others are not attempts at fidelity to the original language. They are appropriations. Petrarch’s sonnets become monologues spoken by a man who sounds like a Synge character: “It is of her only I do be thinking, and she / living and dead.” The habitual aspect “do be thinking” is Hiberno-English, not Petrarchan. Villon’s “Prayer of the Old Woman” is rendered in the same idiom: “I’m a poor / aged woman, was never at school, and is no / scholar with letters.” The syntax—dropping the relative pronoun, using “is” where standard English would require “am”—is consistent across all the translations. The effect is to create a single, unified voice for the entire collection, whether the speaker is a medieval French mother or a Renaissance Italian poet. This is a radical editorial choice: Synge is not translating texts; he is translating speakers into his own world.

The Timber of Mortality

Death is the persistent subject of both the original poems and the translations. In “Epitaph” (one of two in the collection), Synge writes: “A silent sinner, / Breathes his last / Under the weather / Of a wet cast.” The rhyme is off, the meter irregular, and the image is of a body exposed to the elements, not buried in consecrated ground. In “Dread,” the speaker says: “A dread drives me to the hills, / A dread that my heart is still.” The Petrarch translations are consumed by Laura’s death; the speaker imagines her “waiting a little, and turning her head back / to see if myself was coming after her.” Villon’s “Old Woman’s Lamentations” is a monologue from a woman whose lover has been dead “thirty years and over.” Synge does not soften these poems. He lets them be stark, even brutal. The “timber of poetry” he spoke of in the preface is, in these pages, the wood of a coffin.

Because Synge’s translations and his own poems share a single linguistic register, the collection reads less like an anthology and more like a sequence of dramatic monologues. Readers may find it useful to attend to the small grammatical choices—the dropped relatives, the habitual “do be,” the imperative “let you”—that mark every poem as spoken, not written. The preface is not a guide to the poems; it is a poem itself, in prose, about the kind of poetry Synge wanted to write. This edition preserves the 1909 Cuala Press text, with its original spelling and punctuation.

That rainy afternoon, Synge’s stark lines about a lonely Wicklow cottage stayed with me, his plain words for ordinary grief. The way he softened Villon’s old ache into something almost familial was the most intimate part. Later, turning a page, I found myself instead holding Ballades & Rhymes from Ballades in Blue China and Rhymes a la Mode — Key Ideas to Explore, where the same playful melancholy seemed to echo, quietly, from another shore.