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I am glad, I am glad, Cuchulain of Muirthemne, I never brought red shame on your face, for any unfaithfulness against you. Happy are they, happy are they, who will never hear the cuckoo again for ever, now that the Hound has died from us. I am carried away like a branch on the stream; I will not bind up my hair to-day. From this day I have nothing to say that is better than Ochone!
There was no trial that Cuchulain could not support, and the fame of him drew on a combat with another Amazonian warrior, Aoifé, who, in the story that I heard, was Sgathach's daughter, though Lady Gregory in her fine book Cuchulain of Muirthemne gives another version.
Most of the translations in this book have already been printed in Cuchulain of Muirthemne, Gods and Fighting Men, Saints and Wonders, and Poets and Dreamers. When in the first month of the new year I began to choose from among them, it seemed strange to me that the laments so far outnumbered any songs of joy.
Everybody knows how, in the dim and distant days when King Conor macNessa ruled at Emain, the war-steeds of the Ultonians neighed loudly in their stalls on the first dramatic appearance of Cuchulainn of Muirthemne at the northern court.
An Craoibhin had already used this Gaelic construction, these Elizabethan phrases, in translating the Love Songs of Connacht, as I have used it even in my creative work. Synge had not yet used it when he found in my Cuchulain of Muirthemne "the dialect he had been trying to master," and of which he afterwards made such splendid use.
Dear O'Grady, if we do not succeed it is not for you to blame us, for our aims are at least as high as your own. Lady Gregory, a fairy godmother, has given to Young Ireland the gift of her Cuchulain of Muirthemne, which should be henceforward the book of its dream.
But it is Lady Gregory, especially in her Cuchulain of Muirthemne and Gods and Fighting Men, who more than any other has found a way to stir the blood of readers of to-day by the romantic hero tales of Ireland. From the racy idiom of the dwellers on or about her own estate in Galway, she happily framed a style that gave her narratives freshness, novelty, and a flavor of the soil.
This use of Irish dialect for noble purpose by Synge, and by Lady Gregory, who had it already in her Cuchulain of Muirthemne, and by Dr. Hyde in those first translations he has not equalled since, has done much for National dignity.
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