Translating the Untranslated

How I translated a previously undeciphered title for a Robert E. Howard poem

Jun 27, 2025

black sailing boat digital wallpaper — Photo by Johannes Plenio on Unsplash

Out of the blue, Deuce Richardson from DMR Books, an independent publisher of heroic fantasy that has featured some of my stories, reached out to ask if I would help translate the title of a Robert E. Howard poem from the Irish language: “Feach Air Muir Lionadhi Gealach Buidhe Mar Or.” He explained that the title had not been translated (at least properly) before, and would be featured in DMR’s upcoming publication Celtic Adventures (set to release July 1st, 2025). Naturally, I jumped at the opportunity to help provide a translation for one of my favorite authors and contribute to the scholarship of his works.

This is the story of how I came about translating the untranslated.

The biggest thing I had to keep in mind when attempting this translation was that Robert E. Howard was not a native Irish speaker. Although his storytelling style and elements of his dialect may have had inherited some traits from Irish literature and language, most of his knowledge of the language itself came from dictionaries. He specifically cites O’Donovan and O’Reilly’s 1864 Irish-English Dictionary in one letter to H.P. Lovecraft as a source. It is possible he could have known about Irish grammatical concepts, but very few seem to have been implemented in the title of this poem when it comes to conjugating the various cases. In Howard’s defense, most dictionaries do not provide comprehensive grammatical rules, cataloging only the headwords (i.e., unconjugated words). He did, however, know enough about the basics to place the adjectives after nouns~~, unlike some popular romantasy authors today~~. Some minute details to note is that Howard doesn’t include length-marks (accents), definite articles, or prepositions in the title. In some cases when it comes to poetry or songs in Gaelic, some liberties with traditional grammar could be taken in order to make something sound better when recited. I’m not sure if Howard would have been aware of these devices in traditional poetry, but since only the title is in Irish I figured he would have let the poem itself draw the most attention.

I also—and my audience will have to realize this as well—acknowledged that I am not a modern Irish-speaker. As I’ve said many times before, I know Scottish Gaelic at an intermediate level and can translate Old Irish (Medieval Gaelic) when given enough resources and time. Although Scottish Gaelic and Irish come from the same original language and language family, they are quite different when it comes particular words and how most phrases are said. However, I felt confident with my knowledge of Gaelic to take this on, especially since this piece wasn’t written by a native speaker either.

When it comes to making a new translation of something, the first thing scholars usually do is read whatever translations are currently available. The Internet Speculative Fiction Database contains an entry on “Feach Air Muir Lionadhi Gealach Buidhe Mar Or” (hereafter abbreviated to “Feach Air Muir”) with its own attempt at a translation: “The sea fills me with gold.” As we will see, this is wildly incorrect and seems to replace or skip entire words from the original title. Deuce also provided a possible translation along with entries of each word from the dictionaries on teanglann.ie: “Behold the Ocean/Sea and the Golden Full Moon.” This was much closer than the isfdb translation but, with respect to Deuce, didn’t quite line up with the exact words or grammar of the title. Before diving straight into the exact translation, I gathered the materials I would need to assist me, utilizing primarily the Foclóir Gaeilge-Béarla by Ó Dónaill (1977) on teanglann.ie and located another dictionary that would have been around in Howard’s lifetime: Foclóir Gaedhilge agus Béarla by Dinneen (1904)—I did not find out about O’Donovan and O’Reilly’s until later. Then, I made a hypothetical translation based on what I thought each word meant: “Look upon (the) sea full (of the) Yellow, Big, Gold Moon.” I tried to not let this sway my final translation too much as I expected there to be new developments once I looked at each word and possible alternatives, but again I had to keep in mind I was simply coming up with potential translations for an American writer that had used a dictionary for this little line of Irish rather than a full medieval manuscript.

I will now walk through my process of translating the title, word-by-word, including

Feach

Conveniently, this word falls neatly in place with Irish’s Verb Subject Object word order since it is most definitely supposed to be the verb féach — “look.” This definition appears in all other dictionaries I consulted along with several additional variations on the verb and slightly different translations. This notably includes féachaim in Dinneen’s dictionary, as well as féach! (meaning “lo!”) and féach air (“look at him/it”).

Air

There are several words in Irish that either have air as a form or element. I assumed the most likely case for this word was that it was the preposition for “on.” I am used to seeing this word spelt a-i-r in Scottish Gaelic, however it seems ar is the general, unconjugated form of the word. Irish and Gaelic have an interesting grammatical concept where prepositions combine with pronouns in certain instances and creates an entirely new word. In this instance, we would take ar “on/upon” and combine it with e “he/him” to create air “on/upon him” and since Irish and Gaelic do not have neuter pronouns this can also mean “on/upon it.”

Muir

The “it” which the new form of ar is referring to is likely muir, which is the word for “sea.” This is pretty straightforward especially since it is the subject of the sentence, which would place it in the nominative case, leaving it pretty much unchanged.

With the three words we have so far, this gives us the phrase “Look upon (the) sea…” You’ll notice here I’ve added the definite article for “the sea” in parentheses because Howard, for some reason, left it out of the title. Without inserting the definite article when translating literally, the phrase would be “Look upon a sea…” Since “sea” is usually referred to as “the sea” it makes more sense to include the definite article. This is another thing translators have to keep in mind especially when creating translations for a modern audience—we usually have to think about how we normally talk nowadays and provide a little bit of leeway to avoid confusion that can often arise when doing a word-for-word translation.

Lionadhi

This word started to make things a little trickier, which I noted in the other translations I referenced prior to starting mine. Although Irish and Gaelic use the VSO word order, it is also possible to have verbal nouns come after the subject of a sentence especially in instances such as “Person A is making food” (“making” being the verbal noun). Verbal nouns stem from regular verbs, so we will start there for the breakdown of this word—

Líon is the verb for “to fill” and it becomes the verbal noun “filling” when -adh is added, making it líonadh. Something you’re likely wondering (which I still am as well) is what significance does the -i at the end of this word have? In all honesty, I don’t know other than maybe Howard might have inserted it for some kind of syllabic effect. In Old Irish, verbs usually had different forms depending on the case, however I have never seen verbal nouns directly affected by case usually. In my translation, I simply had to move past this little quirk and see where the word actually fit. Irish and Gaelic verbal nouns also usually have the particle ag (sometimes a') preceding them which means “at,” which when translated literally

I think another aspect of this word that’s caused confusion among previous translators is the exact placement or intent of the verbal noun. Since it comes after “(the) sea,” I assumed it was referring to the sea filling with something. I didn’t want to make any concrete conclusions, however, until I had the rest of the title sorted out.

Gealach

Gealach means “moon” in Irish. This is also pretty straightforward but one thing to note is that since Howard’s original meaning of the title is uncertain, I can’t be too sure what case he would have intended this to be in. The lack of any prepositions preceding it makes it all the more confusing since those would have helped Howard better convey the idea of this title.

Buidhe

Another straightforward translation; this word means “yellow” and combined with gealach we have “yellow moon.” Something you’ll note is that this adjective comes after the noun as is standard for most words in Irish and Gaelic.

Mar

I went back and forth on this one a few times since I originally thought it to be another adjective following gealach. The word for “big” in Irish, mór, can also be spelt with an á (making it már). I have only seen this done a few times in actual practice, but the dictionaries I consulted did offer the alternative spelling. Since Howard did not include the length-marks, it was difficult for me to settle on it actually being an alternative spell of mór when taking the last word in the title into consideration.

I then looked at the word mar, which is the preposition “like” used normally for comparisons. Taking this in stock with gealach buidhe and the last word of the title, I decided this was the best fit.

Or

This is another word which could have used a length-mark to help indicate what this actually was. Put together with gealach buidhe (“a yellow moon”), this is definitely ór “gold.” With the preposition mar, the second half of the title is “a yellow moon like gold.”

The Final Translations

Once I had all the words individually translated, I needed to put them together into a phrase that made sense. As I said above, translators usually need to consider a way to both provide a translation that makes sense for a particular audience’s language while also preserving the meaning and essence of the original. I came up with several options for which I left up to the editors at DMR Books to use whatever they felt fit best with their collection.

The literal translation of this title is “Look upon a sea filling a yellow moon like gold.” Although this could be a serviceable translation, I felt it might not exactly convey the original intent; it also doesn’t precisely make sense logically with the idea of the “sea filling the moon.”

The more probable translation I came up with was “Look upon (the) sea filled (with the) yellow moon like gold.” Since Howard did not include the definite articles or additional prepositions, I included those with this translation for further clarity. In this instance, the moon is filling the sea (i.e., with its light or reflection) which makes sense when considering the VSO order of Irish as “moon” technically comes after the “verb.” However, as we went over in the section on Lionadhi, it is a verbal noun and usually follows regular nouns. Going by this, I figured it would be right to attempt an alternative variation of the Irish title:

“Féach Air an Mhuir Líonta le an Gcealaigh Buidhe Mar Ór”

You’ll notice I have added definite articles, and some prepositions which drastically changes the other words in the title. Additionally, I’ve changed “lionadhi” to líonta, which is the past participle of líon in order to get the full phrase “filled with the moon.” Gealach itself has undergone the most change as it is not only converted to the dative case, thus replacing the -ach ending with -aigh, but the first letter has been “eclipsed.” This is a quality of Irish that didn’t exactly carry over to Scottish Gaelic (at least not in a visible, written manner) where certain words or particles can change the first letter of a word that follows them.

I expect, however, Howard’s skill in Irish didn’t quite reach this level of fluency. It is nonetheless interesting to find certain words or attempts at the language in his stories and it was a pleasure attempting this translation for DMR Books!

Be sure to order a copy of Celtic Adventures, available on July 1st!

Thanks for reading this week’s post! If you are a native Irish-speaker, please do let me know if there was anything I missed or got wrong! I’d love to get a quick lesson in the comments!