A Celtic Miscellany: Translations from the Celtic Literatures

A Celtic Miscellany is an anthology of excerpts from Celtic literature (mainly Irish and Welsh, but also Scottish, Breton, Cornish, and Manx). It contains a lot of material, from mythology to love poetry to folk songs and prayers to bardic elegies, both well-known tales and many pieces that would likely be hard to find elsewhere. That said, it's kind of an odd book. It groups the pieces by theme (hero-tale, nature, love, etc.) rather than by country of origin or chronologically, and many of the excerpts are quite short and presented without much context or explanation (there's a short introduction to each themed section, and a series of notes at the back, but I'm not sure that either of these is that helpful). Most oddly (I thought), show more the poetry is presented as prose, which makes sense due to the difficulties of translating Celtic verse-forms into English, but makes for a somewhat disconcerting reading experience. That said, however, I did enjoy slowly reading through this book. As I said above, the material is varied and it's likely that you'll find something in it to interest you. This would be a good book to round out a collection of Celtic literature, but I would not suggest it as your first introduction to the subject. show less

I really enjoyed this collection, experiencing a range of Celtic literature.

Unfortunately, the excerpts only whetted my appetite for wanting to read the rest of the works, but then it was time to move on to the next subject.

The author made a choice to not attempt to rhyme the poetic excerpts and instead focus on meaning, which I understand, but I would have liked perhaps to see the original as well, so I could get some idea of the rhythm and rhyme of the native language.

This book has problems that made it nowhere near as worthwhile as I'd hoped:

First, it's full of fragments, except where the wholes are very short, anyway. Excerpts just make me want to see the full thing, to get the context and story properly. Second, there's poetry in here, but it's translated as prose. Whenever someone says, "It's not possible to translate poetry," they really mean, "I'm not up to the task but my ego won't allow me to admit it."

One does get a flavour of the literatures (all six Celtic languages) but it forever left me wanting more or better.

It's really hard, unfortunately, to read this anthology of Celtic literature. Anthologies themselves don't tend to lend themselves to reading straight through, and in many cases in this volume, even with the notes, the references can be obscure. Strictly, I think, for Celtic studies/Old English types.

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