Internationalist Review of Irish Culture

Translation allows people to reach back to a lost universal harmony of a world before Babel, but only in the knowledge that it can never be fully repossessed. Every text, like every translation, will retain a sense of the strangeness and even foreignness of its originals. To translate Ireland is, of course, to invent it all over again – as in De Valera’s constitution of 1937 which was mostly written in English but which proclaimed the Irish into which that English was converted the first official language, guaranteed to prevail even in the event of a mis-translation. For a contemporary parallel that strange enterprise, one could cite the boy-narrator of Seamus Deane’s Reading in the Dark, who writes the secret history of his troubled family and translates in into Irish in his school exercise copy, before reading that version aloud to a father who cannot understand a word. Or for an equivalent irony, we might think of Friel’s Translations, whose characters speak English on stage but are (in the main) to be imagined as speaking Irish ...

Declan Kiberd