Abstract
This chapter uses a microhistory of a discussion in 1832 over the relative merits of translations from Italian compared with translations from the Irish language in order to illustrate how competition between translation traditions could be used to bolster and galvanise rival sides. The chapter examines the declared functions and utilities of translations from Irish as opposed to translations from European languages to question how the vernacular interacted with the continental in nineteenth-century discourse. It explores translation trends from Irish and from Italian in order to contextualise this collision point and to understand how translation activities interacted with literary prestige, competition, valorisation and mobilisation on a European stage.
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Notes
- 1.
Dublin Penny Journal, Vol. 1, No. 12, 15 September 1832.
- 2.
O’Donovan says that the poem is translated from a copy in the handwriting of the late Edward O’Reilly, transcribed from a very old vellum manuscript in the library of William Monck Mason, Esq. He says that the poem was also published in Mr Hardiman’s Irish Minstrelsy, Vol. II., p. 372, but not translated. O’Donovan hopes that the present translation will be acceptable to ‘that gentleman, who has laboured so industriously in the cause of Irish literature’.
- 3.
The involvement of state institutions, ruling classes and members of the Ascendancy in the translation from Irish into English has given rise to lengthy discussions on translation in Ireland as an imperialist enterprise.
- 4.
The Irish Celtic Society said in its prospectus that it aimed to ‘publish either in monthly parts, or in larger volumes and at intervals more distant, as may hereafter be decided on, original Irish manuscripts, with faithful translations and annotations, historical and explanatory of the customs, manners, etc. of the Irish people; also historical and topographical sketches of the various localities in which the scenes of the subjects treated on, are laid’ (The Nation, 6 September 1845).
- 5.
Chuto cites a letter from O’Donovan to O’Reilly where the latter speaks of publishing the translation in the Dublin Penny Journal, ‘a little publication which appears to me very respectable and which has a very wide circulation’ (Chuto 1976, 171).
- 6.
Like most periodicals from this era, however, it had a short lifespan, lasting only 56 issues, before being sold in 1833 to Philip Dixon Hardy who radically changed its editorial direction. The periodical eventually ceased publication in 1836.
- 7.
The translation process was further complicated as the antiquarians translated texts from Old and Middle Irish, forms of the language which were even further distanced from both the Irish- and the English-speaking nineteenth-century population.
- 8.
At the close of the century, during the revival period for the Irish language, Stopford Brooke said in an essay on ‘The need and use of getting Irish literature into the English tongue’ that ‘[…] with the perishing of the Irish language as the tongue of the people—and it is perishing with accelerating speed—the popular interest that once gathered round her past literature is vanishing away. A few scholars still love and honour it, and know the tongue in which it is written, but the politicians on both sides and most of the peasantry have lost their lingual tie to the past; they have no literary nationality’ (Brooke 1893, 20).
- 9.
Translators could be perceived as field workers ‘in the scholarly dig of antiquarianism’ or champions ‘of an imperilled culture’ (Cronin 1996, 95). An enlightening insight into how different approaches to translation from Irish could be deemed culturally and politically appropriate can be found in Samuel Ferguson’s four articles on James Hardiman’s collection of translations in his Irish Minstrelsy where he put forward a case for a completely different approach to that championed by Hardiman. DUM, April, August, October, November 1834. On Ferguson’s own translations from Irish, see Hodder (1994), Welch (1988).
- 10.
‘The English is a brook—it issued but yesterday from its fountain—a poor, meagre, prattling rill, into whose uncapacious bed it is impossible to transfer the enormous volume of Irish copiousness’ (The Nation, 14 November 1857). ‘On the other hand, though I have generally succeeded in conveying the spirit of the original, I must allow, with sorrow, that in various parts of these songs, the fugitive sylph-like grace of the Irish has been sadly marred in my attempt to clothe them anew in the comparatively rude and cambering English dress’ (The Nation, 3 July 1847). ‘Until the Anglo-Saxon tongue become more flexible, we must not attempt a translation’ (The Nation, 2 October 1858).
- 11.
In McDonough (2014, 109).
- 12.
Fucilla says that Metastasio’s minor works were, between 1750 and 1825, the ‘most profusely imitated and translated lyrics of the times, equalled only by versions from Anacreon’ (Fucilla 1952, 13).
- 13.
For more on Metastasio and Ireland, see O’Connor (2016).
- 14.
Ironically, one of the criticisms of translations from Irish into English in this period was that they did not pay enough attention to the metre of the original Irish, and the musicality and orality of the literature (Ó Háinle 1982). The Irish poetic stress and the accentual prosodic movement of Irish verse were elements with which translators struggled in the transfer from Irish to English.
- 15.
The lines he included with this rebuttal were a translation of the aria XXIX ‘Se a ciascun l’interno affanno/Si leggesse in fronte scritto’. It is interesting that this fragment of a translation was not, in fact, by Mangan himself but rather by the Irish poet Charlotte Nooth. She had originally published this translation of Metastasio in her collection entitled Original Poems in London in 1815. This has been identified and pointed out by Francesca Romana Paci (Paci 2014, 194).
- 16.
‘Those memorials which have hitherto lain so long unexplored, now appear to awaken the attention of the learned and the curiosity of the public; and thus, the literary remains of a people once so distinguished in the annals of learning, may be rescued from the oblivion to which they have been so undeservedly consigned’ (Hardiman 1831, i).
- 17.
The poem that O’Donovan included in the Dublin Penny Journal was also published in Hardiman’s Irish Minstrelsy but not translated.
- 18.
‘The subjects and language of these insular poems afford internal evidence of an antiquity transcending that of any literary monument in the modern languages of Europe’ (Hardiman 1831, v).
- 19.
Hardiman is here quoting from Reminiscences of Michael Kelly, London 1826.
- 20.
In a further comparison with Italian, Hardiman even questions the literary lineage of metrical structures in the European tradition. He claims that some of Ireland’s most admired lyrical composition are in the measure of the Octava [sic] Rima, or eight-line stanza of Italy, which itself ‘was borrowed from the Spaniards, who had it themselves from the Troubadours and Italians, perhaps not earlier than the end of the fifteenth century, and in it have composed some of our finest songs’ (Hardiman 1831, xxxvi).
- 21.
Ireland gave its music to Scotland, and thence it may be traced in the modern history of the art, imparting its beauties and sweetness to Italy. According to the poet Tassoni, ‘the ancient music of the Scotch or Irish […] was imitated by Gesualdus, the chief of the Italian composers, and greatest musical improver of the sixteenth century’ (Hardiman 1831, ix).
- 22.
In an article on Irish cultural nationalism and its European context, Joep Leerssen uses the example of Hardiman’s translations and, in particular, a paratextual comment by Hardiman in which he compares his endeavours to those of a French anthology by Claude Fauriel, Chants populaires de la Grèce moderne. Leerssen argues that Hardiman’s collection should be seen in a European rather than just in an Irish anti-Unionist context (Leerssen 2002, 170–174).
- 23.
Hardiman wrote that ‘The nature and character of these works are deserving of peculiar attention. They do not possess any of the wild barbarous fervor of the Scandinavian Scalds; nor yet the effeminate softness of the professors of the “gay science” the Troubadours and lady-bards of the period to which we are now arrived. The simplicity of expression, and dignity of thought, which characterize the Greek and Roman writers of the purest period, pervade the productions of our bards’ (Hardiman 1831, xvi).
- 24.
For more on the perceived prestige of the Irish language in the nineteenth century, see Wolf (2014).
- 25.
Leerssen makes the point that competition was central in the creation of national literatures in the nineteenth century: on the development of ‘national classics’, he says that ‘[…] the process appears one where the very act of competition serves to give a clear outline to the competing parties, whose rivalry is subsequently retrojected into the past, and given historical roots, by the act of claiming certain textual and cultural heirlooms as “theirs” to the exclusion of others’ (Leerssen 2008, 25).
- 26.
In another example of mutual co-existence, the Magazine of Ireland (Bolsters Quarterly Magazine), November 1826, published a very Irish offering of county histories, Irish tales, sketches of excursions and a legend of the South of Ireland by Croften Croker, but it also included three translations from Metastasio.
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O’Connor, A. (2017). ‘Very Pretty, Signor’: Vernacular and Continental Currents and Clashes. In: Translation and Language in Nineteenth-Century Ireland. Palgrave Studies in Translating and Interpreting. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59852-3_8
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