Abstract
The introductory chapter situates the research in a transnational framework and examines how translation can contribute to the study of the movement of people, ideas and forms beyond national and linguistic borders. It contextualises the importance of agency and patronage in a study of translation history and considers the specificities of the nineteenth century for investigations of transnational flows. It draws attention to the (in)visibility of the foreign in nineteenth-century Ireland and the importance of providing a corrective to the methodological parochialism that has dogged historiography of the period with the sustained focus on the Irish–English nexus. Through the study of translation and language in a European perspective, the chapter argues for a new reading of Ireland’s relationship to the European mainland.
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Notes
- 1.
Hofmeyer says that one key methodological challenge in any practice of transnational history is how one deals with circulation and how one tracks the movement of objects, people, ideas and texts (in Bayly 2006, 1450).
- 2.
Lefevere has observed that ‘Translation Studies has begun to focus on attempts to make texts accessible and to manipulate them in the service of a certain poetics and/or ideology. Seen in this way translation can be studied as one of the strategies cultures develop to deal with what lies outside their boundaries and to maintain their own character while doing so […]’ (Lefevere 1992a, 10).
- 3.
- 4.
The German original is cited as: ‘Eine jede Sprache ist ihrer Grundlage nach etwas transnationales’ (Akira and Saunier 2009, 1047).
- 5.
Apter, for example, in discussing the ‘translation zone’ argues that she wishes to explore an ‘intellectual topography that is neither the property of a single nation nor an amorphous condition associated with postnationalism, but rather a zone of critical engagement that connects the “l” and the “n” of transLation and transNation’ (Apter 2006, 5).
- 6.
For example, the recently published The Global Dimensions of Irish Identity: Race, Nation and the Popular Press, 1840–1880 by (McMahon 2015) is a study of 20 American and 2 Australian newspapers.
- 7.
For a lengthier discussion on Irish history’s neglect of Europe, particularly in the nineteenth century, see Barr and O’Connor ‘Introduction’ in Barr, Finelli, and O’Connor (2014). See also Heffernan et al. (2012) and Whelehan (2015) on the possibilities for greater integration of modern Ireland into the European context. In contrast, Irish cultural commentators and critics have long been aware of transnational dimensions to Irish cultural developments. For further considerations of these investigations, see Malouf (2013).
- 8.
To take but two examples, The Oxford History of the Irish Book charts publications in almost all aspects of the book trade in Ireland in the nineteenth century, but neglects to address translations (Murphy 2011), while The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English contains only a small element on the Irish contribution to translation history and focuses entirely on ‘Celtic’ literature (France 2000). Cronin’s Translating Ireland (1996) and recent doctoral work by Milan (2013) are some of the few instances where translations from European languages in Ireland have been the subject of scholarly attention.
- 9.
In order to chart translation history of a country or language, even when limited to just one century, in many cases, it has been necessary to put together multivolume and multiauthor collaborations such as the English, French and the Finnish cases (France and Haynes 2006; Chevrel et al. 2012; Paloposki and Riikonen 2013). Others have given overarching narratives of translation in one country (Cronin 1996; Pym 2000). In a single volume, it will not be possible to cover all the areas which concern translation in nineteenth-century Ireland and so scientific translations, medical translations, interpreting, drama and a variety of translators and publishers are not dealt with in this current book.
- 10.
See, for example, recent essays by McCourt and Dunne on Lever and Mahony, respectively, in O’Connor and Badin (2016).
- 11.
As Wolf has identified in her study of translation in the Hapsburg Empire, a focus of a specific period can lead to insightful understandings of the function of translations in that society (Wolf 2015).
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O’Connor, A. (2017). Introduction. 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_1
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