The Celtic Strobe Light: Thomas Kinsella, Trevor Joyce and the Translation of Nationalist Residues in the Mid-Twentieth Century

Abstract

According to John Goodby and Marcella Edwards, ‘many Irish poets in the 1960s and 1970s turned to translation from Irish in a way that suggests the difficulty of coming to terms with rapid modernization’. Although this may sound like a reasonable conclusion to make of a period of significant social, cultural and economic upheaval, Goodby and Edwards rely on a false binary in their assertion. Referred to by Joe Cleary as the ‘repression-modernization dyad’ through which ‘all sorts of things get drastically simplified’, this is the notion that a clean break was effected by the transfer of power from Éamon de Valera to Seán Lemass in the late 1950s; that traditionalism and economic nationalism were replaced wholesale by dynamism and economic progressivism. According to such an unnuanced view of mid-century Ireland, then, the ‘difficulty’ faced by those poets who turned to translation from Irish appears to be the difficulty of reconciling traditional literary categories with the onslaught of a modernising agenda which apparently reserved no space for them. This article problematises such a ‘drastically simplified’ account by arguing that poetic translations from Irish in the Lemass years and shortly thereafter played a variety of conflicting cultural roles, as opposed to merely articulating the complexities of rapid economic and social change. The crux of such a claim revolves around a paradox in mid-century Ireland: namely, the persistence of what Raymond Williams would call ‘residual’ nationalism, which jarred with the expansionist economic agenda of the Lemass government. As such, this article juxtaposes Thomas Kinsella’s Tain (1969) with Trevor Joyce’ The Poems of Sweeny Peregrine (1976) to illustrate how some texts proved amenable to the state’s newfound ‘paradoxical conflation of the “economy” and the “nation”’, as Conor McCarthy puts it, while others sought to expose the ‘contradictions and gaps within Irishness as it is now’.