how great is the freedom in
which we willingly acquiesce, remembering that the translations which we
treasure as great in literature are in greater or less measure "free."
So checking Lady Gregory's translations we find that they represent a
fair measure of freedom, as so checking the verses of FitzGerald's "Omar
Khayyam" we find in them the utmost measure of freedom, a freedom indeed
that, in certain verses, is virtually a re-creation.

Many, both scholars and literary men, object to the kind of English into
which Lady Gregory translates the stories of Ireland's heroic age, her
"Kiltartan English," the English of the people of her home country on
the borders of Clare and Galway, the English made by a people who think
in Irish. This familiar language, they say, has lessened the dignity of
the old tales, bringing them all to one level by a diction and style
that is one, whether they are romance or folk-tale. This objection can
be taken, however, only to the Cuchulain stories, which were court
romance, and not to the Finn stories, which come out of the thatched
houses. This "Kiltartan English" seems to me in its more familiar
moments, less imposing than that in which I first heard stories of Finn
McCool told by our old gardener, Lawrence Kelly of County Wexford, but
it may be I remember less clearly the homeliness of his "discourse"
than its "grand speaking." It is, however, as peasant English, a fitting
medium for the telling of the stories of Brigit and St. Patrick in her
"Book of Saints and Wonders," for Brigit and Patrick are still household
words among all the children of the Gael. But by its very difference
from the English of all other artists in words save of a few of her own
country and generation, and from such conversational English as I know
well, this "Kiltartan English" brings me a foreign quality. I feel that
the art of these tale-tellers is an art of another race than the
English, just as I feel that the art of the teller of Beowulf is an art
of another race than the English. The literature in our ancestral
tongue is not to me English until it sloughs off the Germanic
sentence-structure of Anglo-Saxon. Here lies, I think, the greatest
difficulty in translating Old English literature. And it will not be
successfully translated, I think, without the use of the syntax of some
dialect that preserves an archaic sentence-structure.

To me, then, it seems singularly fortunate for Lady Gregory to have her
"Kilta