Same Hero, Different Angle

[Gerard]

Here is a Youtube clip wherein celebrated Irish artist Dara Vallely gives an insight into the thinking behind his work based on the life of the Irish Iron Age hero Cú Chulainn - also the inspiration for my character Maknazpy (especially in Blood from a Shadow, Maknazpy unwittingly relives episodes of Cú Chulainn's life).

I posted this in an earlier blog:

The 'Cú' in Cú Chulainn means 'hound' (the boy warrior Setanta was renamed Cú Chulainn after he killed the ferocious watch-hound of Culann) and 'Con' is interchangeable with 'Cú'.

Cú Chulainn is not to be confused with the standard model of a modern hero; he wasn't a wholesome blend of courage and compassion, didn't stand for justice and virtue against the immoral and corrupt. His most obvious characteristic was his 'Ríastrad', the brutal and indiscriminate battle-rage which could erupt against friend as easily as foe.

Maknazpy's ríastrad is attributed to PTSD as a result of his experiences in America's recent crusades to the East. I'm not convinced on that score but he certainly isn't a 'hero' in the Jack Reacher mould, or even Philip Marlowe - whatever he is, his lineage stretches back much further than the modern code which excuses/glorifies brute force as long as the victor can construct a sufficient veneer of moral virtue.

Kinsella's translation has the Ríastrad as:
"The first warp-spasm seized Cúchulainn, and made him into a monstrous thing, hideous and shapeless, unheard of. His shanks and his joints, every knuckle and angle and organ from head to foot, shook like a tree in the flood or a reed in the stream. His body made a furious twist inside his skin, so that his feet and shins switched to the rear and his heels and calves switched to the front... On his head the temple-sinews stretched to the nape of his neck, each mighty, immense, measureless knob as big as the head of a month-old child... he sucked one eye so deep into his head that a wild crane couldn't probe it onto his cheek out of the depths of his skull; the other eye fell out along his cheek. His mouth weirdly distorted: his cheek peeled back from his jaws until the gullet appeared, his lungs and his liver flapped in his mouth and throat, his lower jaw struck the upper a lion-killing blow, and fiery flakes large as a ram's fleece reached his mouth from his throat... The hair of his head twisted like the tange of a red thornbush stuck in a gap; if a royal apple tree with all its kingly fruit were shaken above him, scarce an apple would reach the ground but each would be spiked on a bristle of his hair as it stood up on his scalp with rage."

Ciarán Carson's translation is equally gripping:
"The first Torque seized Cú Chulainn and turned him into a contorted thing, unrecognizably horrible and grotesque." Carson continues, "The hero's light sprang from his forehead, long and thick as a warrior's whetstone, long as a prow, and he clattered with rage as he wielded the shields, urging his charioteer on and raining stones on the massed army. Then thick, steady, strong, high as the mast of a tall ship was the straight spout of dark blood that rose up from the fount of his skull to dissolve in an otherworldly mist like the smoke that hangs above a royal hunting-lodge when a king comes to be looked after at the close of a winter's day".
Like I said, you should buy and read both of these translations!

Ferdia's name offers even better opportunities for the kind of deflected meaning and interpretation I was seeking.
Carson's excellent notes (which give his translation the edge over Kinsella's, I think), advise that Ferdia (Fer Diad) is "One man of a couple" or, possibly, a "Man of smoke".

Watch Dara speak about his interpretation of the Cú Chulainn story in his recent exhibition at the Ulster Museum, Belfast.
Dara Vallely's exhibition is titled:

'Laoch na Laochra' - (A Hero among Heroes).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-S66...