of contemporary nationalist movements”. In 1886, the first Irish Home Rule Bill was brought before parliament but was defeated. The Scottish Home Rule Association was founded in the same year but failed to gain much support. The north-south divide in Wales prevented a united front on the topic of Home Rule from being established, although a bill was eventually introduced in 1914. After three more attempts, the Irish Free State was declared in 1921, the year also seen as the end of the Gaelic Revival there.
3 Celtic Revival and Translation
In the previous sections, it was shown that preservation of language and culture were closely connected for the Celtic nations which were trying to revive their cultural heritage at the turn of the century. In this multilingual environment, translation came to play a decisive role for this endeavour. On the one hand, translation offered a wider audience access to their cultural heritage since the numbers of the speakers of these languages had declined over the course of the nineteenth century. On the other hand, translation was used to some extent to encourage the usage of the respective Celtic language although it should be noted that many of the Celtic language publications at the time were originals and not translated. For each of the languages, the role of translation in the Celtic Revival will be discussed against the backdrop of historical developments of the time. Ultimately, the connections between the different translation traditions will be highlighted.
3.1 Irish Gaelic
As discussed earlier, there are a number of reasons why Ireland has been of particular interest within Translation Studies. As the only Celtic nation to achieve independence, it offers the opportunity today to analyse the role of translation but also language and translation policy in the period of the Celtic Revival which lead up to Irish independence.
The Celtic Revival marks a turning point; until then, translation had been mainly used by the British Empire to colonise Ireland: “Translation […] was a tangible, physical oppression, and it was accompanied by various other forms of dispossession, including the erasure of Ireland’s history and Ireland’s humanity” (Tymoczko 1999: 19). However, translation then was reclaimed by the Irish for their own purposes. A primary function was to make Irish texts available to those who did not speak the Irish language due to the linguistic shift in the nineteenth century (Cronin 2011: 55). Translating thus allowed the revival of the Celtic cultural heritage.
One translator who translated from Irish into English and also published his own works in both languages was Gaelic League founding member and future President of Ireland, Douglas Hyde (Constantine 2009: 298). Hyde’s translations, for example Beside the Fire (1890), a collection of translations of Irish folklore into English, signified a new approach in that the English he used was modelled on the English spoken by most of the Irish (Hyde 1890: xviii). This Irish English was heavily influenced by Irish syntax and idiom and would come to be known as Hiberno-English. Therefore, Hyde’s translation strategy could be described as literal as it retains the lexicon and structure of the source language which still can be recognized when reading Hyde’s translations. His way of translating was groundbreaking as he saw English as a medium he utilized and subordinated to the Irish language in order to draw attention to the “translatedness” of his texts (Constantine 2009: 298). In this way, he reclaimed both translation and language for promoting the Irish language and culture. These translation strategies could be seen as “foreignising”, as suggested by Lawrence Venuti (1995/2008), because they challenged existing power relations.
Lady Gregory, a dramatist and important figure in the Irish Literary Revival, later used the Kiltartan dialect of this new form of English for her translation Cuchulain of Muirthemme (1902) which contributed to Hiberno-English becoming a new literary vernacular for Irish writers (Cronin 1996: 139) such as John Millington Synge, an Irish playwright who was also active as a translator from Gaelic into English (Kiberd 1979: 62–63), and William Butler Yeats, both involved in the Irish Literary Revival.
As can be seen from the examples mentioned above, most of the translations from Irish into English were anthologies containing the translations of old Irish folktales which had previously been translated into English. However, these re-translations were used to “resist and challenge English stereotyping and English cultural isolation. The Irish seized translation of their own cultural heritage as one means of re-establishing and redefining their nation and their people” (Tymoczko 1999: 21). This was also aimed for by translating texts into Irish Gaelic in order to revitalize the language, especially at the beginning of the twentieth century (Cronin 2000: 485).
| Irish Gaelic – Overview What was translated: – More common to translate out of Irish Gaelic – Ancient legends and poetry – Contemporary writers translated themselves Reasons for translation activity: – Revive Irish Gaelic literature and culture – Disseminate Irish Gaelic literature and culture in Ireland and internationally – Recreate the image of Celtic culture – English as the language of the colonisers – Irish should be revived Translation strategies: – Literal translations – “colonise” English – emergence of Hiberno-English – Intralingual translation of legends into modern Irish Translators: – Douglas Hyde – Standish James O’Grady – Lady Gregory – John Millington Synge Aims/Outcomes: – Hiberno-English as a literary vernacular – Interest in contemporary Celtic culture |
3.2 Scottish Gaelic
In the nineteenth century, many publications and translations of Scottish Gaelic texts were inspired by a “hunt for oral and literary ‘remains’ to prove/disprove Macpherson’s Ossianic translation” (Constantine 2009: 302). As previously mentioned, the Macpherson translation of Scottish Gaelic tales, while highly acclaimed after its publication, was greatly doubted concerning its authenticity by contemporary writers and scholars. This endeavour resulted in a high demand for Gaelic tales and legends (Gillies 2000: 182). As a consequence, a number of anthologies containing English translations of folk tales written in Scottish Gaelic were published during the second half of the nineteenth century such as Archibald Campbell’s Waifs and Strays of Celtic Tradition (1889–1895) and Rev. Alexander Cameron’s Reliquiae Celticae (1892–1894) comprising bardic eulogies and elegies. This trend in combination with the political unrest caused by the Highland Clearances fostered the Scottish Gaelic literary revival happening at the end of the nineteenth century (ibid.). Another contributing factor was the increasing cultural contact but also solidarity between speakers of Scottish Gaelic and Scots due to the large influx of Gaelic-speaking settlers in Lowland Scotland (Thomson 2000: 487). As Gillies points out, “Gaelic-Scots solidarity, and to some extent pan-Celtic outreach, dictated that English translations would play their part in this revival, to a greater extent than occurred in Ireland or Wales” (Gillies 2000: 182). For example, Scottish Gaelic poets had become used to preparing an English translation of their work for mixed audiences of speakers of Scottish Gaelic, Scots and English (ibid.: 182–183).
This development, which continued into the twentieth century, was also encouraged by the increasing scholarly interest in Scottish Gaelic literature. Celtic had become a university subject at the end of the nineteenth century which resulted in the publication of a series of scholarly books on Scottish Gaelic poetry and folk tales including their English translations (Thomson 2000: 487) such as Nigel MacNeill’s The Literature of the Highlanders (1892) or Magnus Maclean’s The Literature of the Highlands (1904). Important anthologies of the early twentieth century include Alexander
