Hello! I hope the following question makes sense and doesn't cause too much head-scratching:
Are the currently publicly-available translations of medieval Irish texts a decent enough approximation of the "cadence" and style of the originals? Such that if I were to write a story to the rhythm of those, it could reasonably be said to be "right"? Would I have written something "like" the TBC, or Tochmarc Emire or whatever--or would I just be writing in the cadence that a late 19th/early 20th century translator thought they ought to have?
(The context is that a friend of mine is writing essentially a mech anime in epic verse with heavy inspiration from middle English Arthurian literature, a project I enjoy hugely. I've occasionally harboured ambitions of doing something similar for the Ulster cycle but always get stuck on where on the scale of medieval to modern language-style to even begin)
& I guess the other part of that is, is it even possible to be "authentic" in English, when you're not writing in a version of the language of the Irish texts? (I'm aware of fun things like that "Tattooine Cycle" article, but that's presenting itself as a translated manuscript, so using the style of older translations makes sense there)
Oh, what a fascinating question!
It depends I suppose on what you take 'cadence' to mean. If you mean the actual rhythm of speaking these stories aloud, unfortunately all modern editions and translations of medieval Irish texts will broadly fail to capture this with any degree of accuracy due to a lack of punctuation in the original medieval texts. Punctuation is something we impose as editors to try to make the material clearer, but if our choices of where sentences start, stop, where commas go, what should and should not be a run on sentence, all of those are modern impositions on the texts.
However, this is also just sort of normal, because modern punctuation styles are commonly imposed on earlier texts in the editing / translating department. So, my gut instinct is that this isn't what you mean.
If, by cadence you mean something more like 'how these stories were read', not considering punctuation, unfortunately that's also entirely unknown. As it so happens, I was just yesterday considering how the character Cuscraid the Stammerer does not stammer in any of his dialogue in the texts, which makes me wonder if this was intended to be something someone reading these tales aloud would incorporate or not. Similarly, if certain lines are intended to be delivered or interpreted as sarcastic or not is not left to us.
However, this is also a problem with written English, where tone, inflection, other important elements of communication are not actually encoded in standard text which requires some slight innovations like emojis or the idea of '/s'.
So, I'm guessing you might mean something along the lines of the basic style of the text? Like, if you have over-extended descriptions, heavy use of epithets, long-sub tales, poetic interjections, and the basic vibes of the sentences? If that is the case, then the early translators were doing, broadly speaking, a rather reasonable job. There are some which are just absolute garbage (essentially any that are trying to translate poetry into poetry, something they lacked the knowledge of medieval Irish metrics to do properly, but those are -extremely rare-), but broadly speaking you'll be fine to draw inspiration from those.
The big warning I'll give you, however, is how stories are written is changing a lot in the medieval Irish period. For instance, if you read the 8th-10th century text Longes mac nUislenn and compare it to the 15th(?) century text Oidheadh Cloinne hUisneach, which is ultimately the same story but being told with different words, you'll see massive differences.
Broadly speaking, the earlier a text is the more clipped and short it will be. With the super-early material seeming almost more like a point-form summary of a tale. The later into the tradition a tale is, the longer, more exaggerated, and detailed tales become. Some of the late Early Modern Ulster Cycle tales for instance will have multiple pages discussing what clothes people are wearing. Similarly, the later a text becomes the more obsessed they seem to be with incorporating elements of earlier tales, but we should note that this may be an illusion. We do not know if our earliest texts are doing this because they could be borrowing heavily from lost materials.
So, what I would suggest is that you pick a specific time period you want to emulate, read a few texts from then to model your story off of (if you have issues, just drop me a message or whatever, let me know the period you want and I can give you texts, or you can give me a text you like and I can give you other contemporary ones).
The broader question of it you can be 'authentic' to these stories in English is... more complex. If I was being extremely academic and pedantic I would say 'absolutely not, every translation itself is a re-imagining of a text'. But, even if you were somehow able to write an entire story in Old Irish with perfect fluency, it still wouldn't be perfectly authentic because you aren't living in 8th century Ireland, so you'll be understanding things differently. And, that's fine. If I am not being extremely academic and pedantic, I'd say 'You can be as good as it matters, if you do a bit of legwork and consideration of things'.
EDIT: I should actually give examples of what I'm talking about. Here are three different versions of Tochmarc Emire, the Old Irish version (fragmentary), the Middle Irish version, and the Early Modern Irish version (called Foglaim Con Culainn, only interested in the later half of the tale).
If you read those, you'll see super clearly how storytelling is changing in these periods.
I hope that helps! And if you need any further assistance, please do not hesitate to toss a rock at me!
