|
- Dora Carrington, Spanish Landscape With Mountains.
Photograph: Public Domain
|
|
Liam Ó Muirthile: Camino de Santiago,
Dánta, Poems, Poemas
|
|
A mountain pass ahead of us. Yellow, green,
green, yellow, all the fields. The sheen
that comes from all living colours.
In all of this chameleon show,
hang on to each and every stem,
dragging your feet, until the day’s statement
blossoms into a prayer, resting gratefully,
lightly on your tongue.
“Beetle”
|
|
MANY WRITERS HAVE extolled the virtues of embarking upon the Camino de Santiago or the Way of Saint James, serving as a pilgrimage to the shrine of the apostle, Saint James the Great, in the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia in north-western Spain: Jennifer Lash’s On Pilgrimage charts her journey in the wake of a breast cancer diagnosis; Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises depicts his bohemian experiences in the Camino Spanish town of Burguete; and Paulo Coelho’s The Pilgrimage, probably the most well known of all, is a dialogue with his guide, Petrus, who teaches him to understand the nature of truth through the simplicity of everyday life.
Irish poet, Liam Ó Muirthile, a passionate Francophile, similarly walked his own Camino Francés, a total of 770 km, across the Pyrenees from Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port in France to Santiago de Compostela in Spain, during the autumn of 2015. Travelling alone, carrying only a small backpack and staying in the pilgrim hostels en route, he recorded his experience both in prose—Oilithreach Pinn [Pen Pilgrim]—and in poetry—Camino de Santiago, Dánta, Poems, Poemas composed in both Irish and English, together with translations in Spanish and Galician. The recollections of his spiritual peregrination form some of the most beautiful ever written.
|
|
|
|
