“Through My Dream”: Trevor Joyce’s Translations

Abstract

Almost all Irish translators work with what Lawrence Venuti calls a “domesticating” model of recreating a translated poem as if it had been originally written in the target language. However, some of the most important Irish translators of the past, notably James Clarence Mangan and Brian Coffey, have used what Venuti terms a “foreignizing” strategy which, on the contrary, highlights the difficulties and resistances of the source text to transparent re-presentation. The two approaches roughly correspond to two modes of translation evident in the work of the most influential anglophone poetry translator of the early twentieth century, Ezra Pound. In his translation of the Buile Suibhne as the Poems of Sweeny Peregrine (1976), which cites Poundian precedent, the contemporary Irish neo-modernist poet Trevor Joyce (b. 1947) uses both modes to produce a destabilised, postmodern “working” which exploits the original’s gaps, scribal interpolations and narrative contradictions, as well as poignantly rendering its expressivist lyrics. Radical translation strategies can be seen to inform other aspects of Joyce’s work, from his use of Japanese and Chinese forms and materials in Stone Floods (1995), to cut-up and collage in Trem Neul (2000), and from folk-song and poetry from the Finno-Ugric, Hungarian and Irish in What’s in Store (2007) and Courts of Air and Earth (2008) to, most recently, the unpublished Rome’s Wreck, which “translates” Edmund Spenser’s “The Ruines of Rome” (1591) “intralingually”, to use Roman Jakobson’s term, that is, from one form of English into another.