Internationalist Review of Irish Culture

Published in 2005, the Romanian version of At Swim-Two-Birds introduced Flann O’Brien for the first time to a public already familiar with the international modernism of Joyce and Beckett, but less familiar with Irish mythology, history and national ethos; a gap that the volume’s introductory study and its 250 footnotes attempted to bridge. The present paper presents the translator’s perspective on the challanges posed by the novel’s intricate layering of styles, metafictional comment and ironic ambiguity. Moving from one sphere of difficulty to another – from the lexical and prosodic to the cultural and intertextual – the paper surveys the alternatives that the translator considered, the dilemmas that he had to face and the creative way some solutions were found.