Cathal Ó Searcaigh and Aspects of Translation

CATHAL Ó SEARCAIGH AND ASPECTS OF TRANSLATION1 NOBUAKI TOCHIGI since the late 1980s, translations from Irish to English have stimulated the general interest in literature written in the Irish language. Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s collections in English translation and the recent bilingual anthology, An Crann Faoi Bhláth/The Flowering Tree: Contemporary Irish Poetry with Verse Translations, edited by Declan Kiberd and Gabriel Fitzmaurice , have reached a wider range of readers than ever. Two volumes of Cathal Ó Searcaigh’s poetry, published in 1993 and 1997, add to those landmark works. Ó Searcaigh’s poetry has rapidly been gaining recognition since the publication of An Bealach ’na Bhaile/Homecoming in 1993. This volume of his selected poems contains the poet’s Irish texts set together with English versions translated by leading Irish poets, among them Seamus Heaney. Another dual-language collection of his poems, entitled Out in the Open, appeared in 1997. The titles of the two books, Homecoming and Out in the Open, respectively, imply the poet’s present situation: the former, his return to his native Donegal after spending years going back and forth between Donegal and large cities in Britain and Ireland, and the latter, an expansion of his audience to the English-speaking world. Born in 1956 to a couple who lived on a farm at the foot of Mount Errigal in the remote Irish-speaking village of Gortahork, County Donegal, Ó Searcaigh, an only child, was brought up and educated in the Irish oral culture. He says, “When I was growing up, my mother made the fairies so real that they were no different from the neighbours for me: maybe that’s why I became a fairy” (White 11). When Ó Searcaigh was ten years old he fell in love with a boy who was four and realized that he was gay; now he CATHAL Ó SEARCAIGH AND ASPECTS OF TRANSLATION 139 1 This paper was originally read to the 15th International Conference of The International Association for the Study of Irish Literature, Japanese Branch, 19 September 1998. celebrates the homoerotic in his poems. He states in an interview that he learned about homosexuality through English: “I discovered the existence of other gay people through English literature. . . . I’ve always believed that I have a guardian angel, and I was led to certain books.” By the time he was fifteen, Ó Searcaigh had made a Who’s Who of gay writers: Oscar Wilde, Allen Ginsberg, W.H. Auden, Walt Whitman, Joe Orton, and Gore Vidal, among others (Gallagher, 12). He became aware of an international constellation of gay writers through the pursuit of his own sexual identity, and the voracious imagination of his adolescence was nourished by different facets of translation. Thus his experience inevitably entailed modifications/adaptations not only of language but also of culture and sexuality. Ó Searcaigh’s Irish poems reflect the process of translation in the poet’s mind, and they have now been translated into English for a wider audience. In the following pages, these aspects of translation functioning in and around Ó Searcaigh’s poetry will be examined. The importance of translating from Irish to English is underscored by Theo Dorgan, who notes that poets writing in Irish will “remain on the margins except when carried to a general audience by translation.” Of the two bilingual collections of Ó Searcaigh’s poems, Out in the Open was completed by a single translator, Frank Sewell. Following “Paul Muldoon ’s co-piloting of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s Astrakhan Cloak voyage,” Sewell seems more positive in what can be gained in translation. He observes in the preface: “As long as translation is necessary, it should (and often does) earn its keep by striving to become a craft or art-form of its own, mirroring the standards of the original. For example, it can be as important for the translation to be as caint na ndaoine—based as it is for that which it translates; otherwise, it will be folksy and daft, not foxy and deft” (14). As Sewell himself puts it, the important point is how a piece of translation will work as caint na ndaoine, or “talk of the people” in the target language. A short poem, “Briathra agus Bráithre...