Pangur Bán

Pangur Bán — the name means "white fuller" in Old Irish — is the white cat of an unnamed 9th-century Irish monk, and the subject of one of the oldest and most charming pet poems in the world. Written in the margins of a manuscript (the Reichenau Primer) by a monk far from home, the poem affectionately compares the scholar's nightly work hunting for words and meaning to his cat's contented hunting for mice: "I and Pangur Bán my cat, / 'Tis a like task we are at." Rather than a saint's life or a theological treatise, the monk simply set down a tender, witty meditation on the companionship between a working scholar and his cat, each happily absorbed in his own craft through the long hours. The poem survived the centuries and has been translated many times — most famously by Robin Flower and W. H. Auden — and Pangur Bán has become a symbol of the timeless bond between people and their cats. More than a thousand years on, a sleepy monastery cat is remembered by name simply because someone loved him enough to write him into the margin of a book.