Translation in Postcolonial Context, 1999, María Tymoczko.

Chapter 4. “The Two Traditions of Translating Early Irish Literature”

The translation of early Irish Literature into English can be divided into 2: *
Literary translations: there are readable translations, constituting achievements in
English, but departing from the textual material, formal properties and linguistic
structures of the Irish sources.
*Scholarly translations: there are close textual transpositions, almost unreadable
translations.
(Translations are distinguished by dichotomies such as acceptable or adequate, source or
receptor oriented, formal or dynamic equivalence, and literal or free.)
The scholarly and literary translations of early Irish Literature in English are
polarized in their orientation, their translation strategies, and their practitioners.
In many ways, the scholarly tradition of translation is easier to define and
characterize. They are generally supporting to editions, they can be called linguistic aids
to the texts themselves. Their purpose is clearly secondary to that of the edition and they
are subordinate to the Irish texts, in part because of the English grammar and syntax
follow Irish patterns. English is full of borrowing words, loan translations, loan
creations, calques, morphosemantic transfers, and unusual collocations.
Scholarly translation strategies are simply literal renderings, uninfluenced by
cultural and ideological imperatives. It´s important to note that scholarly clarification is
circumscribed by ideological constraint.
In a translation, if the translator omits a passage from the ST and adds a
comment about the omission, the translation techniques and strategies used are a
representation of the scholarly translations.

Literary translations are intended for a non-scholarly audience. They take care
to produce an English text that has literary qualities and literary language, i.e. the norms
of English literature. In literary translations, textual shifts can be made such as the shift
from indirect speech to direct speech for the sake of smoothly following text.
Either in scholarly translations or in literary translations, some elements can be
omitted in the text that might be offensive to the sensibility of readers (humours or
grotesque events).

There are 3 cultural elements which govern the divergence of the translation
strategies of scholarly and literary translators of early Irish literature into English: 1) the
Macpherson controversy and its impact on Irish antiquarianism; 2) the influence of
Irish nationalism on the translation programme; 3) and the influence of the Irish
language movement on the treatment of Irish-language literature in English.
Macpherson: (translations of Scottish literature, esp. Celtic literature, on Irish
translation). Macpherson’s duty in translating is to renew the material in the context of
the receptor literary system. In his model, the emphasis is on the domestication and
creative adaptation of the source material to the receptor literary system. To sum up,
Macpherson created a translation that was self-standing within the English literary
system and made his English texts readable by English literary standards.
Nationalism: is a response to the Macpherson controversy. It had a more direct
impact on the patterns of translating early Irish literature into English in the 19th and 20th
centuries. Nationalism stimulated the scholarly translation of early Irish texts, because
the edition and translation of manuscript materials had become a nationalist priority,
documenting the antiquity and substance of Irish culture. From the point of view of
nationalism, it didn’t matter what the literary quality of an early Irish text or its
translation was. The essential thig was to document the existence, antiquity, and gravity
of native Irish culture. The first major projects were the translation of the early Irish
laws and the Irish annals. In fact, the documentation of the national’s political history
and its legal tradition (both of which testified to Ireland’s ability to be self-governing)
was more important than the reclamation of nations’ literary heritage. In the 19 th
century, scholarly translations were a secondary concern within the nationalist
programme, subordinate to the reconstruction of the meaning of documents with
historical and political implications for the formation of an independent nation. This has
continued up to the present.
Paradoxically, nationalism also affected the tradition of literary translation. In
the 19th century, Anglo-Irish literature was relatively young and weak as a literary
system. It almost depended on English literary standards, English poetics, and English
linguistic standards and so on. In the 20th century, changes and developments in literary
translation in Ireland are inseparable from the growth of the Irish literature, in which
literary translations, literary adaptations and Irish literature became central to the
literary movement. Literary translations of Irish texts in English become more
innovative than in the 19th century.
Anglo-Irish literature was an incomplete literary system if it was compare to the
large system of English literature. At the time of the Irish literary revival, Irish literature
in English developed an alternative orientation for some of its literary standards. The
most innovative writers also acted as translators and the phenomenon of
pseudotranslation arose, in which literary composition was presented as translation. This
is precisely what happened during the Irish literary revival and it has continued since
Irish writers working in English, such as Yeats, Gregory and so on, have used Irish
material to fuel their own creative literary impulse. Others, Joyce, have pawned off their
adaptations of Irish literary material and poetic as original literary creations.

Irish language movement: the idea of this movement is that only the Irish
language and culture could distinguish Ireland as a nation. This view reflects a 19 th-
century romantic ideology about nationalism. What is distinctive in a nation’s heritage
is its language? This orientation affects the enterprise of translation for it implies that
the significance of texts in a national language is speaking untranslatable and example
of this is Douglas Hyde’s position.
The Irish language movement became a cornerstone of nationalism. The logical
conclusion being that in Ireland the English language should give way to Irish. As a
result the Irish language comes to assume a privileged position in the cultural system,
during the period between 1890 and 1922. The presupposition of the language
movement continued to shape public policy during the 20th century. These influenced
the scholarly tradition of translating early Irish texts in several ways. * They help to
explain the extreme literalism of scholarly translations, which emphasizes the Irish
language. The translations are gloss translations, principally aimed at the explanation of
the Irish text, this transposing Irish syntax and other linguistic features of the Irish
language into English. This makes many of the scholarly translations extremely difficult
to read. The reader is continually sending back to the Irish text.
*Translations are often presented in the scholarly translation as subordinate to the Irish
texts (they are published as appendices, printed in smaller type, or positioned following
the originals, as well as in facing format). For these reasons, the scholarly translations of
early Irish texts have often a different status from the source texts. Literary texts are
translated into non-literary texts and the translations refer to the Irish sources more than
they represent them.
Literary translations have been less affected by the Irish language movement,
but some influence is reflected in the development of Anglo-Irish idioms. The use of an
Anglo-Irish idiom in a translation preserves aspects of the Irish source text (including
certain features of phonology, idiom, lexis and syntax). They are a means of developing
distinctive Irish discourses within the framework of the English language (of
maintaining the values of language movement without abandoning English). On the
level of language, the use of Anglo-Irish idiom in a literary text suggests that the work
is a translation from Irish. A literary work of this sort is marked as a pseudotranslation
and a translation using the Anglo-Irish idiom avoid the problems of fluency and
domestication. In fact, it´s a translation per se and it represents an other language and
culture.

The influence of the Macpherson publications, Irish nationalism and the Irish
language movement on the translation of the Irish texts into English indicates that
similar historical conditions produced very different results between scholarly and
literary translators. In each tradition, different aspects of the early Irish texts were
privileged in translation. Any one of these aspects can’t explain the radical differences
between the two translation lineages. The result was that these two lineages of
translation of the early Irish texts into English became polarized. The scholarly
translations moved toward a painful literalism, whereas the literary translations moved
in the direction of adaptation and free refraction that shaded imperceptibility into
literary creation. The outcome is two sets of intellectuals / translators with the same
audience and the same interests, the promotion of Irish literary tradition. These two sets
confirm the traditional binarisms of translation theory: literal vs free, formally
equivalent vs dynamically equivalent, adequate vs acceptable and so on.
The particulars of these two translation traditions are complementary in their
functions and symbiotic. That is, together the two traditions of translation form a single
system of translation, which is a subsystem of the literary polysystem. The symbiosis of
these translation traditions facilitates a balance between the two halves of Ireland’s dual
tradition.