Hi lovely people! 🙂
Last night I was listening to Kathleen MacInnes and suddenly I realised that, in the whole nearly five years of this blog’s existence, I’ve never shared a single song by her, despite I like her very much and she’s been one of the first Scottish Gaelic (Gàidhlig) singers that I came across when starting to acquaint myself with Celtic music, right after Julie Fowlis. So I figured the time has come to change this, and I might share something else by her, we shall see.
I might have mentioned that before when sharing Julie Fowlis’ songs but when I first heard Julie Fowlis singing in Gàidhlig on a Polish Celtic music radio station that existed back then, I thought it must be Irish, because I wasn’t familiar with the other Celtic languages back then really, I’m not even sure if I knew they existed, so many people here don’t have a clue. Except it sounded kind of different and it really intrigued me – was it some sort of distinct dialect/accent, so distinct that even I as a clueless noob could hear it? Or maybe it was mixed together with some other language, ‘cause sometimes it sounded almost like oriental. – I don’t know about other countries but here in Poland, in my experience, an overwhelming number of people I come across, when they hear a Celtic language (be it a Goidelic one like Scottish or a Brythonic one like Welsh), they say it sounds similar to something like Arabic or Hebrew or things like that. One of my uncles, when he heard me speaking Welsh, he said it sounded like Hindi. 😀 And like I said even I myself had similar associations with Scottish at the beginning even though now I perceive it totally differently and don’t really get how it could sound oriental to me, it sounds just very, well, Celtic, and it’s way too rustling to sound like Arabic. 😀 It’s kind of sad when I think of it, that so many people can’t recognise Celtic languages, even though they’re right here in Europe, and confuse them with languages that are from such comparatively far away places, not to mention that so many people don’t even know that Scottish is a separate language.
Anyway, I believe it took some time before I found out that this language is Scottish Gaelic (my English wasn’t all that good in practice back then, mind you, and there isn’t a whole lot of information about Celtic culture or languages available online in Polish compared to English) but even once I did find that out, the language continued to really grab my attention more than Irish and I found it really strange but beautiful in that strangeness. Now, although I still don’t speak it, I’m a lot more familiar with it so it doesn’t sound strange at all and doesn’t make such a jaw-dropping impression on me anymore, but it’s still beautiful, perhaps even more beautiful now. And so there was a time where I’d listen to people like Julie Fowlis, or Kathleen MacInnes and some others, and wonder what their songs could actually be about. I immersed myself in that so much that I actually started to hear Polish words in the Gàidhlig lyrics which was quite funny because it rarely made much sense or sounded absurd to be the lyrics of a song. Or sometimes I heard in it some gibberish words that sounded kind of like they could be Polish neologisms and thought they sounded cool and thought what they could mean if they were real words, or what they actually mean in Gàidhlig though usually I think these were bits of a few different words since obviously I had no idea when every single actual Gàidhlig word in the lyrics began or ended. With Jimmy Mo Mhile Stor, I particularly remember hearing something that sounded to me like “Farofluriś”, and I thought that was such a cute, if very eccentric word, and I was imagining a creature called Farofluriś and what it would be and look like. I don’t remember much of that anymore except that I thought it would live somewhere among rocks and be very fluffy. Now I think it would be more appropriate for a Farofluriś to live among flowers, because the legit Gàidhlig words that my brain created the Farofluriś are “Far ‘eil fhraichean” (except I think without the last syllable in the last word) which come from the verse that translates into English as ” With flowers aplenty there”. 😀 Also nowadays Farofluriś sounds kind of flowery/flourishing to me lol.
Actually, this song is originally Irish. it’s a traditional Irish song, and the Scottish translation is contemporary and written by Seonag Monk. As you will be able to figure out for yourselves from the translation, it is about a girl who longs for her lover, who has gone to sea.
As for Kathleen MacInnes, she’s from South Uist in Outer Hebrides so grew up in the Scottish language, and currently lives in Glasgow. In addition to being a singer, she is also a TV presenter and an actress.
The translation below comes from Celtic Lyrics Corner, and they do not translate the “mo mhile stor”, because it comes from the Irish original, but I also know that literally “mo mhile stor” means “my thousand treasures”, as a term of endearment, so that’s what I went with for the title of this post.
A year ago my heart’s love left me
For faraway places
He’ll never return
til he sees the wide world around
When I’ll see my love coming
I’ll give him all my love
And smother him with honey kisses
Jimmy mo mhile stor
My father and mother
They never can give me ease
I’m tired and fed up
And tormented with this life
I gave my love to the fairest
Without asking I kissed him
And he went off to sea
Jimmy mo mhile stor
I’ll go to the woods
And spend there all of my time
With no one around
Listening to birdsong
Beneath the rowan tree
With flowers aplenty there
Giving love to the most heavenly
To Jimmy mo mhile stor