Page:Beside the Fire - Douglas Hyde.djvu/52

xlviii speaker's father, grandfather, or great-grandfather—according to the part of the country you may be in—and there have perpetuated themselves, even in districts where you will scarce find a trace of an Irish word. There are, however, also hundreds of Gaelic idioms not reproduced in the English spoken by the people, and it is difficult to render these fitly. Campbell of Islay has run into rather an extreme in his translations, for in order to make them picturesque, he has rendered his Gaelic originals something too literally. Thus, he invariably translates bhain se an ceann deth, by "he reaped the head off him," a form of speech which, I notice, a modern Irish poet and M.P. has adopted from him; but bain, though it certainly means "reap" amongst other things, is the word used for taking off a hat as well as a head. Again, he always translates thu by "thou," which gives his stories a strange antique air, which is partly artificial, for the Gaelic "thou" corresponds to the English "you," the second person plural not being used except in speaking of more than one. In this way, Campbell has given his excellent and thoroughly reliable translations a scarcely legitimate colouring, which I have tried to avoid. For this reason, I have not always translated the Irish idioms quite literally, though I have used much unidiomatic English, but only of the kind used all over Ireland, the kind the people themselves use. I do not translate, for instance, the Irish for "he died," by