Helen Waddell Reassessed: New Readings, ed. Jennifer FitzGerald

Second paragraph of third essay (“Wandering Scholars and Saintly Cults: The Liturgical Legacy”, by Ann Buckley)

Waddell never seemed drawn to ‘Celtic’ nationalism and its tendency towards cultural narrowness and isolationism which in the past has so often dogged progress in research on Irish liturgical and ecclesiastical history and the history of the arts in Ireland. And yet her account fully acknowledges and values the critical importance of Irish achievements in early medieval Europe. Her focus is largely on the intellectual impact of these churchmen (we do not know of any women), illustrated through references to literature and poetry. Complemented by her characteristic eye for detail and signs of individual introspection, she also provides vignettes on their thoughts and emotions culled from anonymous marginalia in manuscripts from former centres of Irish activity which still survive in libraries such as Reichenau, St Gallen, and St Paul in Carinthia. These include verses about Pangur Bán (the monk’s cat), the weather, homesickness, a blackbird – being given new voice today in the poetry of Seamus Heaney and Ciarán Carson, and the singing of Pádraigín Ní Uallacháin. The excitement at these discoveries took Waddell ‘in the legs’, as she said in a letter to her sister Meg.¹

They have an odd grace, the names of wild earth side by side with the sophistication of the older world, something of the strangeness of the Irish glosses in the ninth century manuscripts of Berne, Leyden and St Gall: ‘We are from Inch-madoc, Cairbre and I’, and most moving of all to one who remembers the low grey ruins on the island in Strangford Lough, ‘Mahee of Nendrum.’²

¹ Quoted in Felicitas Corrigan, Helen Waddell: A Biography (1986; London: Gollancz, 1990), 229; Helen Waddell, The Wandering Scholars (1927; London: Constable, 1980), 34-5.
² Waddell, Wandering Scholars, 33-4.

This is a collection of academic essays about Helen Waddell, who I have written about here occasionally – if you still don’t know who she was, I recommend this short and powerful piece by Kate Mosse. I’m far enough out of the academic game that I rate such pieces for entertainment value rather than resonance with the scholarly Zeitgeist, and I found all of these entertaining and enlightening.

I was struck that several of the essays separately mentioned two crucial points from Helen Waddell’s career: the first, her stay in hospital in Paris in 1924, when she remembered hallucinating as Heloïse; and the second, the death of a rabbit at the end of her Peter Abelard novel. Both are moments of intense personal experience, which connect life and art inextricably. You can get it here.

A little bit of a side track, but I was interested to learn from Helen Carr’s essay that although both Helen Waddell and Ezra Pound translated lots of Chinese poetry, there was only one poem that they both published in English, a “brief, enigmatic poem by the painter-poet Wang Wei“. The two translations are as follows:

Helen WaddellEzra Pound
Peach blossom after rain
    Is deeper red;
The willow fresher green;
    Twittering overhead;
And fallen petals lie wind-blown,
Unswept upon the courtyard stone.
Peach flowers turn the dew crimson,
Green willows melt in the mist,
The servant will not sweep up the fallen petals,
    And the nightingales
Persist in their singing.

It took me a while to track down the original, and of course my Chinese is largely machine-translated, but here it is:

桃红复含宿雨,柳绿更带春烟。
花落家童未扫,莺啼山客犹眠。

Táohóng fù hán sù yǔ,
liǔ lǜ gèng dài chūn yān.
Huā luò jiā tóng wèi sǎo,
yīng tí shān kè yóu mián.
The peach blossoms are still tinged red with the night rain,
and the green willows with spring mist.
The fallen flowers have not been swept away by the boy,
and the orioles are singing though the mountain visitor sleeps.

It’s interesting that both Waddell and Pound omitted the sleeping visitor (山客, shān kè) at the end. Daniel Skeens has done a much deeper analysis (based on better knowledge of Chinese than mine) but his headline conclusion is the same as mine: these are both good translations in their own right, which demonstrate the difficulty of translating poetry.

This was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest on my shelves. Next on that pile is Ireland Under Elizabeth and James I, ed. Henry Morley.