Friendship Of The Thighs Poem by gershon hepner

Sweetening the bribes she proffers,
Medb offers friendship of the thighs,
allowing men to fill her coffers
like a champion bull. She tries
to match one owned by Ailill who’s
her husband, Finnbennach—translate it
as White Horned—with the Brown Bull which
belonged to Ulster, and is fated,
attempting to be just as rich
as Aillil, to let Fergus lie
between her thighs, but she gets caught
because his sword is stolen by
her husband’s friend while in Connaught.
Aillil doesn’t mind; without
all jealousy he has no qualms
about the way Medb gads about,
and takes strange men into her arms.
The Brown Bull kills the one that’s White,
but Aillil hardly ever scorns
his wife’s bed-absence for the night
though he receives a pair of horns.
Accepting friendship of the thighs
brings triumph of goodwill to man
and smiles to loving Irish eyes,
and makes of me an Irish fan.


Tim Rutten reviews a new translation of “The Táin, ” by Ciaran Carson (“Translator’s nightmare, this ‘Taín’ is a dream, ” LA Times, December 12,2007) :

WITHIN the West's small but precious hoard of archaic literary epics, 'The Táin' is surely the most complex and least known outside its native Ireland. Even in its homeland, it's a work more often respectfully acknowledged than read. With justice and a bit of luck, this brilliant and altogether engaging new translation by the Belfast poet Ciaran Carson should change all that. Indeed, Carson has performed an act of aesthetic recovery that, in every sense, deserves to be ranked with his old friend and colleague Seamus Heaney's bestselling version of 'Beowulf.' In old Irish, 'táin' literally means 'a raid, ' usually for cattle, though like any good Irish-language word, it has other meanings as well. The ancient epic by that name is often called 'Táin Bó Cúailnge' (The Cattle Raid of Cooley) , and it is, as Carson explains in his introduction, 'the longest and most important tale in the Ulster Cycle, a group of some 80 interrelated stories which recount the exploits of the Ulaid, a prehistoric people of the north of Ireland, from whom the name of Ulster derives.'…

In Carson's skilled and sympathetic hands, however, the version that emerges is compellingly coherent, while fully faithful to its strange, rich and ancient roots. Essentially, the story begins with a quarrel after sex: Ailill and his wife, Medb, the queen of Connacht, fall to fighting over which of them is richest. As it turns out, they're evenly matched in all possessions but one. Ailill owns a great, magical bull, Finnbennach, the White-Horned. Medb vows to resolve the matter by securing the Brown Bull of Cooley from neighboring Ulster. When bribery doesn't do the trick - and Medb knows her way around a bribe - she resolves to take the bull by force, gathers an army and invades her neighbor. The raid is timed to take advantage of the fact that the warriors of Ulster all are abed, suffering under a curse. Years before, they had abused a pregnant woman. She cursed them, so now they regularly suffer the pains of a woman in labor. The only fighter to escape the curse is the superhuman teenage warrior Cú Chulainn, who is the tale's hero. He engages the most formidable of the invaders in a series of bloody single combats, chariot fights and various feats of what might be called - in a literary sense - magic guerrillaism. Finally, Medb tricks Cú Chulainn's best friend and foster brother, Fer Diad, into a final single combat. Cú Chulainn kills, then mourns him, and the men of Ulster finally arrive and defeat Ailill and Medb, who flee back to Connacht with the Brown Bull. The Brown Bull fights and kills the white-horned one and finally succumbs to its own wounds, but only after rampaging across Ireland with its dead foe impaled on its horns.

12/12/07