Editor’s Introduction

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION Irish literature began in acts of translation as medieval Christian monks wrestled with the intricacies of a new language and religion by glossing Latin texts. Often, these glosses provided no more than a student’s trot, with a familiar Irish equivalent inked in over the exotic Latin. Thus a monk working with the psalms translated the obscure foreign sacrilegium as the more vivid native díltod dé (rejection of God), while another scribe put the Latin sententia into Irish as in dígal (the vengeance). On occasion, however, it was the more elusive connotation that engaged the interest of the monastic scholar. For instance, when a down-to-earth Irish cleric read St. Paul’s comment in Galatians that the birth of Abraham’s son by his wife Sarah occurred non secundum voluntatem carnis, he felt obliged to note: arna robatar accobra colna leosom i ssuidiu. cétach abracham, noíchtech sarra (for they did not have carnal desires therein, Abraham being one hundred and Sarah ninety). These dual aspects of translation—to convey a precise sense of the literal text and to capture some understanding of a more elusive wider nexus of implications and importances—have continued to play a significant role in both of the nation’s languages throughout Irish literary history. Indeed as Michael Cronin illustrated in his seminal 1996 study Translating Ireland: Translation, Languages, Cultures, the Irish have never hesitated to draw on foreign sources for material unavailable to them in their own languages. Throughout the centuries Gaelic scholars have brought into Irish not just literary texts from the classical and continental traditions, but also historical works, medical and astronomical treatises, and devotional material. This easy embrace of translation as an essential component of a full intellectual life has subsequently been obscured for many students of Irish culture by a more problematic, even manipulative use of translation by writers of both English and Irish over the past two centuries. Certainly since the late-eighteenth-century controversy over Macpherson’s putative Gaelic sources, many with a knowledge of Irish have regarded translators as cultural plunderers, eager to grab what they can from the older language to serve the needs of the jaded reader of English in quest of the authentic, EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION 5 the exotic, or some idiosyncratic blend of the two. Yeats’s praise of Lady Gregory’s Cuchulain of Muirthemne (1902) as “the best book to come out of Ireland in our time” must have been motivated at least as much by his awareness of the treasure trove to which she had provided such easy access for writers like himself as it did to his friendship with and indebtedness to its author. At any rate, the book’s availability to those more eager to exploit than explore the Gaelic tradition was in the forefront of Eoin Mac Neill’s mind when he congratulated Lady Gregory on its publication in a letter whose whimsical tone fails to fully defuse an underlying concern: “A few more books like it and the Gaelic League will want to suppress you on a double indictment, to wit depriving the Irish language of her sole right to express the innermost Irish mind, and secondly, investing the Anglo-Irish language with a literary dignity it has never hitherto possessed.” William P. Ryan shared Mac Neill’s worry but was confident about the ultimate triumph of the Irish language then being revived, writing in a rather condescending review of Cuchulain of Muirthemne in The Leader: “I believe that the work as a whole will do a temporary good, but we may trust that in ten or twenty years it will be regarded as entirely out of date, or as possessing a sort of historical interest as a specimen of the contrivances that served a purpose as Ireland returned from the desert.” Needless to say, that particular desert has involved a long and winding exodus with no end in sight. Lady Gregory’s work continues to be read with appreciation a century later, and most scholars and general readers alike know what they know about “the innermost Irish mind” as revealed in the varied riches of literature in Irish not...