Good Friday translation rant, aka an odd insomnia cure

I awoke 4 AM, with a blinding headache, from pulling recalcitrant honeysuckle vines from the engulfed Meyer lemon tree. I was in dire pain and the Advil hadn't yet kicked in, so there I was, with full-on insomnia, resurrecting my rusty Irish translation skills on a Facebook genealogy site. Perfect thing to do on the aftermath of Good Friday, no?

It's almost impossible to resurrect the meaning of Irish placenames as they've been Englishified and phoneticized to death. The English attempt to destroy a language. With no small thanks to the Royal Engineers and the 1833 Ordnance Survey. Irish playwright Brian Friel's play,Translations, tackles the systematic disembowelment of the Irish language by the English hellbent on cultural imperialism. But sometime enough of the original ghost Irish remains behind to see the meaning behind a placename.



One Facebook poster, Amanda Sullivan, was looking for long lost relatives at Gorteenasowna, also spelled Gortnasowney. I began to play with the possibilities of translation. Not quite like translating the Irish epics. But a challenge, nonetheless.

Nearly 20 years ago, I did an entire year of Old Irish at UC Berkeley. I'd get up at 6 am, translate a couple of hours, go to classes, come home and translate again until midnight. I was a terrible student, and I was more often wrong, than right. But I loved every minute of it, unlocking that impossible text, discovering meaning behind those impossible letter combinations that represented a lost epic from the Early Middle Ages. The unknown scribe's hand to my brain across the annals of time. 

When I translated: the enemy of your enemy is my friend, from an ancient manuscript, I got the chills. Someone walking on my grave. It's supposedly from a Sanskrit treatise on statecraft, the Arthashastra, ca. the 4th c. BC, but clearly, the Irish monks transcribing the tales, were intimately familiar with it. The proverb, made famous by Churchill, didn't even enter into English until 1884, and the Irish had been using the phrase since at least the 6th c.  

Using Google to back-translate, I got: Is é an namhaid do namhaid mo chara, which is close enough to the original, sans those Haiches.

So I began my task: first word was easy: Gort is a field; and gorteen (gortin) is a small field. 
And na is an article.

But I was flummoxed by -sowney, or sowna, it really stumped me. I played with possible spellings. Somh_ne__? Sobh_ne__?
Suibhne? Sweeney's field?
Or is it Owen's field?
Or a field near the cave? 

I knew that Uaimh is pronounced owney as in Uaimh na gCat, or Owenygat because I wrote a poem about it.

But there's an S to contend with. What did it stand for? What eclipsed, or subsumed word once resided there? No idea. Irish is a bit like plate tectonics, entire words are consumed by subduction, and what survives are lone consonants, like rocky outcroppings by which to moor meaning to.
 

There is no W or Y in Irish. And W is usually an M or a B (with an added H as a lenition mark) which makes a Y sound, often spelled as: mh, gh or dh.... and, for what it's worth, H is not even a letter in Irish.

Amanda offered another clue, it was in the township of Dunmanway, located in the the geographical center of West Cork, at the confluence of two tributaries, and the River Bandon. Dunman-way. Dang! Those pesky Ws again. 

Dunmanway has been a rallying point since the Bronze Age, there's a late Bronze Age war trumpet in the British Museum collection. During the Irish War of Independence, 18 British Auxiliary Division troops were killed by the IRA at the Kilmichael Ambush, near Dunmanway. The British retaliated by sacking all towns and nearby farmsteads, as well as Cork City. The film, The Wind That Shakes The Barley is based on the Kilmichael Ambush.

OK, Dun is fort. There were two variations in the "original" spelling which, unfortunately, was still a few letters short of a phrase. So I tried:

Dún m aon mhuí
Dún Mánmhaí

Wiki said: "There is disagreement over the meaning and origin of the town's name "the castle of the yellow river," "the castle on the little plain," "the fort of the gables (or pinnacles)," and "the fort of the yellow women."

Yep, none of them are right. For starters, the loanword, castle, would be spelled caisleán, and yellow river would be abhainn buí. Gables is another English loanword: cáblaí, so that's out. And the castle on the little plain would be an caisleán ar an magh beag. Not even close to Dunmanway, no matter how many vowels were swallowed in the process.

The fort of the yellow women would be something like Dún mna nbhuí, or Dún na mban buí. So that's out as well.

Mán m haí Mán mBuí?
No idea Mán, but, it has a fada (accent), as in Mánannan? The sea god?
Or is it maon mhuí = mBuí

Buí, or buídhe is yellow (and mBuí would go to a H, or a Y sound), but yellow is often transcribed as -boy as in clann-na-boy (the yellow clan) so the phonetic sound bite isn't working either.

OK, we can agree that the ending is yellow, but what is maon? I have no idea.
Then I found maoin, which could be a grammatical form of: aon » maon.

Dún m- aon mbuí The Fort of (the) One/Big/Only Yellow? Aon has a million other meanings besides counting. Then there's that M: m-aon doesn't seem to exist. haon, t-aon, yes. So it's safe to say yellow was somehow involved.

Then I found this oddity which may unlock the meaning of the name of the town: "The Irish plant Buí Mór produced a colorfast saffron yellow" (which was a very big deal, BTW, in the Middle Ages.) And it sounds like Dunmanway was a flax, or linen textile center.... hmmm.
But about those women of Dunmanway: dyeing was women’s magic craft, and there was a taboo on dyeing fabric in the presence of men. In the Book of Lismore, St. Ciaran’s mother bade him leave the house, because it was unlucky. He didn't take the boot kindly and cursed the cloth she was dying, which came out streaked. Linen was difficult to dye. And the secret formula: they needed rich yellow piss to set it.
 
Then I found an Irish seanfhocal —Chomh buí leis an mBuí Mór.
There is little/pale yellow and big/great yellow. 

There is yellow and there is SCREAMING YELLOW! 

(Or, saffron—as it's referring to royal colors, or to the Otherworld, or even to Christ. There are many references to yellow and green silk in the Irish epics.) The saffron color extracted from weld (Reseda luteola), a member of the cabbage family (order: Brassicales), yields a bright yellow:

...the old English saffron does not mean crocus but any yellow colour, and generally distinguishes the weld, still retained in many parts of England and the very plant the Irish call Buídhe Mór, or Great Yellow. With this they dye their linen and fine woolen stuffs with different degrees of colour and fix the colour with urine. The yellow thus obtained is bright and lasting. (J. C. Walker, Materials used by the Ancient Irish, quoted in Brid Mahon, p. 118-119)

Buí Mór, or weld, prefers to grow in wastelands, it grows best on dry, rocky, sandy soils, and when weld is mixed with woad (Isatis tinctoria) it produces bright greens. There you have it, the colors of Ireland.

Insomnia strikes again. Enough nonsense. I needs must sleep. I am reminded of one of Flan O'Brien's line, What was the color of the wind on the day of your birth?  In The Third Policeman, the ghost of old Mathers explains to his murderer the colors of the four winds, and eight sub-winds:

“The wind from the east is a deep purple, from the south a fine shining silver. The north wind is a hard black and the west is amber."

But Brian/Myles/Flan lifted that idea from a Middle Irish sacred history canto by Óengus Céile Dé, Saltair na Rann, which mentions a 12-point wind color wheel, as a cosmic map of Ireland. The colors of the wind change to black as one grows towards one's death. The north wind is always black, while the yellow winds are from the south-east—the direction of Wales.

The direction of Dunmanway, which is near Drimoleague, near my family's first farm, Coomanore. Comb-an-nÓr, or The Hill of Gold. Drimoleague (Droim Dhá Liag, or ridge of two stones, has two Standing Stones at Clodagh) and is halfway between Dunmanway and Bantry.

The Top of the Rock, Drimoleague, is where in the 6th c., St. Finbarr “admonished the people to return to Christ, then went on his way to Gougane Barra” (near Bantry). St. Finbarr's feast day, September, 25th, became a two-day pilgrimage route, over three mountain and valley systems: The Ilen, Mealagh and Ouvane, to the oratory in Gougane Barra.

Well, I never did solve the riddle of the meaning of Gortnasowney, I don't know what all this means. But I got a window onto the history of the town of Dunmanway, which led curiously and circuituously back to my own family's farm.

The golden dawn approacheth, tapping at my windowpanes. Perhaps I will dream of amber  colored winds sailing between two rivers, and a dry rocky outcrop covered in yellow flowers facing the onslaught of the sun. At least my headache's gone.

Translations is a play by Irish playwright Brian Friel.