Abstract
Translations in Ireland (between Irish Gaelic and English) take place in two very different scenarios. In the southern Republic, the Irish language is officially the first national language, but it is now spoken by a bare fraction of the population, and is steadily declining as a living language. Translations between Irish and English are supported by the Republic ’s government in various schemes, but are often viewed with suspicion by many of the Irish Gaelic speakers as yet another colonialist move. In the North (Northern Ireland), the long history of repression has made the language a rallying point for nationalists. It is in this political minefield and threatened linguistic zone that both writer and translator must operate. Creative hybridity is revealed not as free of political enmeshments, but rather the reverse: the creative vitality of this particular bilingual writing zone (of both author and translator) results precisely from its highly pressurized milieu. This article argues that translations are served by the reflexive postcolonial understanding of the role of the translator and translation, as well as the original text, within the larger socio-political context.
Highlights
Background and ethnographic settingThis example serves to illustrate the larger contours of postcolonial translations in Ireland
The early conversion into Christianity was accompanied by the entrance of written literature, there remains a possibility of pre-Christian literature – according to Stevenson various lists indicate that the pre-Christian priests had been “experimenting with literature” for at least 200 years before the arrival of St
Joined to the tiny but dedicated group of Irish-language writers is the ‘small army’ of translators, most of whom have the best interest of the language at heart. It remains to be seen whether a vibrant, living language community that maintains its unique linguistic outlook onto the world will be able to survive
Summary
This example serves to illustrate the larger contours of postcolonial translations in Ireland. The subjugation and subsequent racialization and belittlement of Ireland reached peaks during the macabre scenario of the Great Irish Potato Famine of the mid 1800s During this time period, Ireland lost approximately a fourth of its population through death or emigration, while food was being exported to England for the profit of English and Anglo-Irish landowners. This was a period of extreme actions and reactions, perhaps encapsulated most tellingly a bit earlier in Swift’s sarcastic “A Modest Proposal” (1729) which outlined a plan whereby Irish children would be chopped up to provide food for the pecuniary benefit of English (and Anglo-Irish) merchants Even such savage sarcasm failed to dent the colonial outlook, which increasingly relied on racialized theories of innate Irish inadequacies in all areas of mental, cultural, and political functioning. For so long a bastion of literacy and scholarly ability in western Europe before (Stevenson 1995), but even more so after the fall of the Roman empire (a point detailed in Cahill’s How the Irish Saved Civilization 1995), the Irish were presented in the hegemonized discourse of the colonial realm as ignorant savages, their language good for little besides the most primitive of conversations
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