Opportunities Seized: From Tolstóigh to Pelévin

Abstract

From the start of the Gaelic Revival in the 1890s to the present day, various Russian authors have appeared in Irish in translation, from Tolstoy, Chekhov and Pushkin in the early days to Kharms and Pelevin in more recent times. Although it is unlikely that many of those who have translated into Irish were doing so from the original Russian, this was indeed the case in several instances. The aim of this paper is to thus take a look at several of these translations from Russian in more detail, namely some of those done by Liam Ó Rinn, Maighréad Nic Mhaicín, an tAthair Gearóid Ó Nualláin and, in more modern times, by the author of this paper, and to examine the translators’ approach to the texts, in order to see how they made use of them to present their Irish-language reader with diverse cultural, linguistic or literary information. From the point of view of culture, this paper will also look at how they set about the task of rewriting Russian names and nouns in their Irish texts, looking at whether they relied on English forms, or attempted to rewrite them in Irish according to its strict orthographic rules. This is in contrast to the English – and other – translations of the same eras, which tended to ignore such opportunities to expand their readers’ knowledge of Russia and the Russians and about which, in relation to one recent translation, one reviewer said it was “a missed opportunity”.