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  • Reassembling the Broken Jar
  • Moya Cannon

The desire to know what mysteries people are communicating in a foreign language is primal; a world where a writer might be confined to the literature of only one language is as impossible to envision as a world without music. It is, in fact, a contradiction in terms. To cite the most obvious of examples, there is no Western literature that has not been influenced by Homer or Dante. And we are, as no previous generation has ever been, heirs to all the treasure that language has ever netted. It is a truism to say that scholarship and technology have made possible a degree of cultural exchange inconceivable even fifty years ago. This has not made the task of the translator any less demanding or less intriguing. Good translation is still unspeakably difficult.

Like a large proportion of the world’s children, I spent my childhood between languages. My first language, my mother tongue, was Gaelic, or Irish as we usually call it. I lived in a village, Dunfanaghy, which is situated only a few miles outside the Irish-speaking Gaeltacht area of County Donegal. It had at one stage been a garrison town, and the Irish language had died out in this part of Donegal during the postfamine period. My parents, who had met at an Irish-language college, were enthusiastic that we should learn Irish, so, for the first few years of our lives, they spoke to us almost exclusively in that language, on the understanding that we would pick up English when we reached schoolgoing age or a little before.

When I was three years of age, a carpenter named Jack—a genial, humorous Englishman who lived locally—was working in our house, fitting shelves in the cloakroom. I fell in love with him. My mother said that I learned English at breakneck speed in order to be able to communicate with him. She would tell me in Irish to tell Jack that dinner was ready or that she was putting on the kettle for tea. I would run to where he was shaving curls of wood from a board to deliver the message in my fresh English. In the peculiar way in which memory, particularly very early memories, can operate, the clean smell of the wood shavings [End Page 9] which I was allowed to play with and the texture of silky, planed wood are associated not only with the new words—saw-dust, plank, cubby-hole, wood-plane, chisel, brace-barrel—but also with all the energy and excitement of making, the satisfaction of precision and with the middle-aged, squarish figure of Jack Smith, the carpenter, with his checked shirt, his horn-rimmed glasses, and his Yorkshire accent. Even the name “Jack Smith,” the most ordinary of all English names, was exotic to my ears, surrounded as I was by the Irish and Scottish names common in the area of the north west of Ireland where I was born: Andersons, Alcorns, McGinleys, McGarveys, McFaddens, Gallaghers.

My first conscious memory of translation is therefore associated with pleasure, with encountering the exotic in the person of a Yorkshire carpenter, and of his language, accent, and craft. The latter represented another world of sensation, of concepts, another world of making—added to the worlds of making and doing I already knew—my mother’s baking, sewing, and knitting, my father’s gardening. All of this was inextricably bound up with the opening up of a world beyond the house in which I had been born. It was to be the first of many openings, one window after another opening into the sensibilities of other literatures, other languages, other dimensions of feeling, other modes of encountering the world, and other ways of making.

The weight of a word in any given language never balances precisely with its apparent equivalent in another language. The specific cultural, political and economic histories of national linguistic groups always differ. “Milch,” “milk,” “lait,” “leche,” “latte,” “leite,” and “bainne” might appear to mean exactly the same thing, yet the words are merely cousins who know little enough of each other’s intimate histories. How well, for instance, does...

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