Abstract
In this article, I reflect on my own practice in translating Duncan Bàn Macintyre’s eighteenth-century Gaelic poem, Moladh Beinn Dóbhrain, into a twenty-first century ‘ecopoem’. Macintyre’s Moladh Beinn Dóbhrain has been praised for its naturalism. My translation of this long poem emphasises the immediacy and biological specificity of Macintyre’s descriptions. I explore how the act of translation might intersect with contemporary ecological concerns. My poem is not simply a translation, but incorporates Moladh Beinn Dóbhrain into a new work which juxtaposes a free English version of Macintyre’s work with original material concerned with contemporary research into deer behaviour and ideas of ecological interconnectedness, including biosemiotics and Timothy Morton’s ‘dark ecology’. This article is a reflection on my production of a twenty-first century excavation and reimagining of Macintyre’s Moladh Beinn Dóbhrain. I consider how the difficulties of translation might be turned into imaginative opportunities, and explore how translation has the potential to function as exposition and expansion of an original text, in order to create a poem which is itself an ecosystem, comprising of multiple ecological, cultural and political interactions.
Highlights
In this article, I reflect on my own practice in translating Duncan Bàn Macintyre’s eighteenth-century Gaelic poem, Moladh Beinn Dóbhrain, into a twenty-first century ‘ecopoem’
I consider how the difficulties of translation might be turned into imaginative opportunities, and explore how translation has the potential to function as exposition and expansion of an original text, in order to create a poem which is itself an ecosystem, comprising of multiple ecological, cultural and political interactions
My version of Moladh Beinn Dóbhrain is an attempt to draw out particular ecological aspects, explicit and implicit, of the original, and in so doing create a work that might be read for its own merits in the target language, rather than functioning as a resource for introducing the Gaelic poem to non-Gaelic readers
Summary
With the piper’s drone with the coarse fabric of the land in greens and greys and purples, the lines of hoof and song that cross it. My version of Moladh Beinn Dóbhrain is an attempt to draw out particular ecological aspects, explicit and implicit, of the original, and in so doing create a work that might be read for its own merits in the target language (especially its exploration of environmental themes), rather than functioning as a resource for introducing the Gaelic poem to non-Gaelic readers. Macintyre’s Moladh Beinn Dóbhrain offers scope to consider intersections between ecology, ecocriticism, ecopoetics and translation This is because producing an English version of it is obviously the translation of a literary text, and because the poem itself is concerned with a range of vocal and non-vocal biosemiotic communications: The zoosemiotic world of signs between individuals and groups of red deer, and the ecosemiotic world in which humans and non-humans ‘read’ one another. A poem which challenges the permanence and stability of its own literary creation is a way to explore such ecological ideas in the form and content of a literary work
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