Sweeney: an intertonguing Author : Rody Gorman ISBN-13 : 978 1 7394256 1 6 Publisher : Francis Boutle Guideline Price : £25 Buile Shuibhne – or Sweeny’s Madness – is a keystone text in medieval literature. After throwing St Rónán Finn’s psalter into a lake, Sweeney is transformed into a bird-like creature, cursed to live in exile, flitting from tree to tree throughout Ireland. Stripped of human comforts, he journeys into madness, and into nature.
At every juncture in his wanderings, he creates a poem that describes where he is, and his state of mind. The text has been reworked by numerous poets, not least by Seamus Heaney in Sweeney Astray. The late Feargal Ó Bearra’s recent Irish version, Mé Suibhne , casts the story as one of mental illness.
Rody Gorman’s Sweeney: An Intertonguing is a multilingual journey like none other – with poems in modern Irish and Scottish Gaelic, as well as English prose versions that burst with startling composite words charged with the homonyms and synonyms of the original Irish. It is an ocean of gorgeous lyric poems, delicate songs and tidal litanies. Poems will often shift language mid-verse.
It is peppered with beautiful haiku that nod to the marginal poems of Irish monk scribes as much as to Bashō. Sweeney even becomes the itinerant Japanese haiku poet Santōka Taneda: “ar foluain liom féin/ag éisteacht leis an abhainn/chomh geal agus glan” (“wandering on my own/listening to the river/bright and pure”). T.
