#translators are WEAK why is the uncensored poem hard to find
I hope you don't mind me jumping in! I was intrigued by this as I am not aware of this poem particularly having a history of censorship, so I wanted to look into why it might have been hard to find. I think what you might be running into here is the fact that Fled Bricrenn is. Well. Kind of a nightmare on a textcrit / edition level.
You see, the manuscript tradition looks like this:
As you may notice, none of the manuscripts are complete. So that's our first problem; all the modern editions and translations have to combine manuscripts to get a "complete" text. Not only that, but they are still recovering parts of the text! As in, within the last couple of years! Here's an (open access) article published just under a year ago about text they've managed to recover from the damaged Leiden manuscript, one of only two which contains the ending of the tale. The more manuscript technologies develop, the more details of this tale we might still get to read even now, which is pretty cool, I think.
Even aside from that, we don't have a full academic edition and translation more recent than the one from 1899, which has a few issues. Proinsias Mac Cana was working on one with Edgar Slotkin, but died with it unfinished and incomplete. It's available to read on the Irish Texts Society website in draft form, but it is very much a draft, with gaps, corrections, and errors. This poem is there in that translation, but has various question marks and gaps throughout, including around those two lines, as the meaning of various words isn't clear. The trouble with having fragmentary manuscripts is that if one scribe had weird spellings, or the manuscript is a bit damaged, there aren't other versions to compare it against, and medieval Irish poetry is hard enough at the best of times. It does still contain those lines though.
It is true, however, that the translation in Koch and Carey's Celtic Heroic Age does not. This translation is theoretically based on the one by Henderson (1899), which might be the other one you've come across, since it's available online; I think this is mostly the text from Lebor na hUidre, the most complete manuscript. Actually, though, the Koch & Carey one takes a very non-literal approach to the poetry here and skips out most of the poem, stating in a footnote that "A list of Cú Chulainn's feats follows here. In most instances, it is uncertain what exactly the description refers to." Which, okay. Fair. A coward's approach, but in an anthology, sometimes cuts have to be made, and cutting the bits that would be partially untranslated anyway is not the greatest of crimes.
HOWEVER looking back at Henderson, he actually translates the poem very literally, far more literally than I would guess from how it's been adapted here -- and he does not skip these lines. He just mistranslates them: "nobly his eye looks westward; Bright is the dome he supporteth and ever red are his eyen" (in place of something like "Splendidly does he bring his eye back deep into his head, splendidly does his jawbone spring forward, crimson red his eyes"). He has, for example, confused the idea of bringing your eye "siar" (physically bringing your eye backwards) with looking west (which is the literal meaning of "siar") -- understandable if you're less familiar with the ríastrad and don't have lots of other descriptions of this transformation to compare it to. And bearing in mind that 1899 is several years before the earliest volumes of the medieval Irish dictionary were available and these lines still prompt plenty of "(?)" from translators who DID have access to it, I'm inclined to give him some grace on that one!
So it's Koch and Carey's translation that I'm really side-eyeing, because their whole approach to the poem is wildly non-literal and skips a lot of the details. (And Gantz omits the poetry entirely, but Gantz is a non-academic translation and often makes large cuts like that, so I don't really expect anything different from him.)
But all in all, I think what we're encountering here is not so much deliberate censorship on any aesthetic or moral grounds as a) 19th century translation errors while handling very difficult lines of poetry (he was trying his best), b) the absolute state of Fled Bricrenn as a text (i.e. both its fragmented manuscripts and the lack of a good, modern, rigorous edition and translation), and c) unfortunate abbreviation in anthologies that shorten or cut this poem in general.
Hopefully, at some point, somebody will fix b). It's sort of a Known Issue that we don't really have a proper, decent, full translation of it, but some of that is also because we don't have a full text of it, either. The work the folks are doing on the Leiden manuscript is helping with the latter, so we may hope that from that project, or another, a better edition and translation will emerge.
In the meantime, if you would like to help… ;)
