Category Archives: stories

Calling up Irish mythology and legend.

books, stories, , , , ,

As I was listening to Gerard Doyle narrate The King of Ireland’s Son, I kept imagining children listening to their parents read the stories, and that made them even more delightful. Several reviews from parents who did read them aloud, and even the ones who didn’t care for the book themselves, admitted that the children loved them. Many adults said that they’d heard the stories as children and read them on their own when they grew up, often multiple times. This was the case with my dear friend from whom I heard about this book a couple of years ago.

First I listened to the Audible version in bits and pieces, many parts several times over, because I would get distracted or fall asleep and have to backtrack. Though I was captivated by the Irish storytelling style of Gerard Doyle, listening was not the best way for me, not primarily an auditory learner, to keep the characters and their adventures straight. Finally, desperate to make sense of everything, I completed the print edition.

Now, I am still at a loss for how to articulate what charms me so much about Colum’s accomplishment, so I looked to other readers who might do it for me. One reader who enjoyed it many times, as a child and as an adult, wrote, “I am stunned at the beauty of Colum’s language and at his handling of plot. There is a story within a story within a story, with smaller tales that reflect on the main ones and often involve the same characters…. And the stories themselves often have an eerie beauty and an undercurrent of sadness. But there’s lots of humor, too, [The King of Cats is hilarious. -GJ] and lots of adventure, and, among the characters, girls as well as boys get to show spunk and initiative.”

Then the King of Ireland’s Son
mounted his horse and rode away—
His hound at his heel,
His hawk on his wrist;
A brave steed to carry him whither he list
And the green ground under him.

Another reviewer explains how “…what initially appear to be seven different stories actually blend together to become tales-within-tales. The primary tale is a coming-of-age story of the quests of the youngest son of the King of Ireland. During the course of the quest, the king’s son and others in the primary tale relate stories of their own. Characters from these secondary tales then appear later in the primary tale. The end result is a rich and complex tapestry of interconnecting histories and experiences as each character grows and finds out more about him- or herself. It soon becomes clear that for the central characters, learning the stories themselves becomes the goal of their quest.”

A little background on Colum and the book:

“Although the book was written in America in the years before 1916, Colum was a close friend and colleague of some of those who led the Easter Rising. The King of Ireland’s Son was the ultimate calling-up of Irish mythology and legend, and… made many happy hours for children curled up before glowing turf fires to read by the light of Tilley lamps in the long winter evenings of the new Ireland.”

“Asked how to say his name, he told The Literary Digest the last name was the same as the word column. ‘In my first name, the first a has the sound of au. The ordinary pronunciation in Irish is pau’drig.'” (Wikipedia)

Are some of you, my blogging reading friends, familiar with The King of Ireland’s Son? Please tell me about your experience of it. I’m hoping to find a child to read it to very soon!

Padraic Colum sketch by John Butler Yeats

Her every gemstone grew heavier.

poetry, stories, women, , , ,

This poem about Queen Esther of the Old Testament I find fascinating, in the way it portrays the enervating terror Rilke imagines the saint experiencing, as she forces an audience with the king without an invitation. It recalls the truth we all have heard, that courage doesn’t mean you aren’t afraid, but that you do what you must in spite of fear.

Maybe she didn’t know what she would say, exactly, but she knew that she had to do something, to intervene on behalf of her people, the Jews. (You can read the whole story in the book of Esther in the Bible.) The translator guesses that in the poem, what Esther conceives at the touch of her king’s scepter “is, presumably, the plan to save the Jews of Persia from Haman’s plot.”

For seven days her maids had combed the ash
of her grief, as well as the whole cache
of woeful recollections, from her hair,
and had borne it and bathed it in sunshine,

Queen Esther

sustained it and nurtured it with fine
spices day after day; but then and there

the time had come when, uninvited,
with no more respite than the dead,
she finally entered the palace door,
draped upon her women, to see Him —
that one at whose bidding and whim
one dies if one ever dare come near.

He shone so that she felt his brilliance
in the rubies she wore, which seemed aflame;
like a jar she was filled up with his presence,
and quickly she was full to the brim,

before she had reached the third chamber’s end
she overflowed with the great king’s might,
and it seemed that the walls of malachite
flooded her in green. She did not intend

this long walk with her every gemstone
growing heavier as the king shone,
growing cold with fear. She kept walking.

And as she at last approached that one
sitting high on the tourmaline throne,
looming above her like an actual thing,

she was caught by her near-at-hand women,
who bore their fainting mistress to a chair.
He touched her with the tip of his scepter;
and without thought she conceived it within.

-Rainer Maria Rilke, from Rilke: New Poems
Translated by Joseph Cadora

In this telling, the jewels play a big part, in the way they weigh her down; they express something about her relationship to the king, who would have been the giver of them. He was the reason for the events that led to her unique standing as one who had been elevated from being a simple Hebrew girl to the status of royalty. In that role in which she now finds herself, she feels the heaviness of her responsibility. I wonder if Rilke was inspired by this painting by Nicolas Poussin:

Nicolas Poussin, Esther Before Ahasuerus

Joseph Cadora translated all the poems that are included in Rilke: New Poems, the collection in which I found this one. He includes a short commentary on each poem in the anthology, which he says are “mostly a result of reading the poet’s letters, several biographies, and three other works of Rilke’s …” He also writes that “translating New Poems has been a labor of love, and thus, no labor at all.”