No, not the fairy tale by Comtesse d’Aulnoy (though that’s on my mind at the minute too). This White Cat is the subject of one of the most famous old Irish poems, found written in the margins of a Latin manuscript copy which its author, an Irish monk, had been writing in a central European scriptorium during the eighth century. (The original manuscript is now in the Stadtsbibliothek in St. Gallen, in the northeastern part of Switzerland, near where it was written.)
Pangur Ban, “[My] White Cat”, is the title of the poem in Irish Gaelic. It’s just turned up in a collection of best-loved Irish-language poems, “The Great Book of Gaelic” or “An leabhar m�r”, published online by Archipelago. The poems in the collection were selected by a group of Irish and Scottish poets, each of whom nominated a poem and a favorite translation: some of the links on the “Great Book” page have sound as well, so you can hear the poem in question being read as Gaeilge.
(Incidentally, there’s a downloadable .PDF version of the whole journal here, if you’re interested.
(Thanks to Languagehat for the link.)
