'May God give pardon
To my vexed, sorrowful soul;
May God give mercy
To me now and forever,
Amen!
To me now and forever.'
But translation is poor work. Even if it gives a glimpse of the heart of a poem, too much is lost in losing the outward likeness. Here are the last lines of the lament of a felon's brother:—
'Now that you are stretched in the cold grave
May God set you free:
It's vexed and sorry and pitiful are my thoughts;
It's sorrowful I am to-day!'
I look at them and read them; and wonder why when I first read them, their sound had hung about me for days like a sobbing wind; but when I look at them in their own form, the sob is in them still:
Nois ann san uaiġ ḟuair ó tá tu sínte
Go saoraiġ Dia ṫu
Is buaiḋcarṫa, brónaċ boċt atá mo smaointe
Is bronaċ mé anḋiú.
BOER BALLADS IN IRELAND
Yesterday I asked a woman on the Echtge hills, if any of her neighbours had gone to the war. She said: 'No; but I know a great many that went to America when the war began—even boys that had business to do at home; they were afraid of being brought away by the Press.' On another part of the Echtge hills, where a rumour had come that the police were to be sent to the war, an old woman said to a policeman I know: 'When you go out there, don't be killing the people of my religion.' He said: 'The Boers are not of your religion'; but she said: 'They are; I know they must be Catholics, or the English would not be against them.' Others on that wild range think that this is the beginning of the great war that will end in the final rout of the enemies of Ireland. Old prophecies say this war is to come at the meeting of these centuries; and there is an old Irish verse which seems to allude to this, and which has been thus translated:—
'When the Lion shall lose its strength,
And the bracket Thistle begin to pine,
The Harp shall sound sweet, sweet, at length,
Between the eight and the nine.'