The strange divide
Irish literature versus literature in Irish
Hi,
I have been thinking about a problem that people outside Ireland don’t really hear about — and since that’s the majority of you reading this newsletter, I’ll try to keep this clear and digestible. The problem is the near-total lack of interaction between the English- and Irish-language writing scenes.
What prompted me to consider the issue was two things: 1. back-issues from the archives of literary magazine Comhar where Irish-language publishers outline over and over again the same difficulties with getting any support or recognition outside a small bubble, and 2. this week’s article and podcast from Tuairisc which crystallise the same long-term challenges. You can read the Tuairisc article without Irish if you plug it into a machine translation. If you do understand Irish, Comhar (accessible via the Irish National Library) and the podcast give further context on how long these frustrations have been going on and how structurally they extend.
The podcast in particular expands on an under-discussed aspect of the problem: this country is better at producing speakers than readers of Irish. (We’re not great at producing either, but that’s a different conversation.) Some of it’s about vocabulary: as with any language, spoken Irish has a smaller lexical range than its written form, so the latter can be intimidating even to fluent speakers if they’re not used to sophisticated texts.
It’s also a question of habit. There are far more people capable of reading contemporary Irish-language fiction than people who actually do. I have decent Irish, but after leaving Ireland nearly a decade ago, I can count on one hand the number of books I read i nGaeilge until last year when I got back into it. It was learning German and Italian that pushed me to start reading in Irish again: the contradiction seemed absurd between the effort I was making to engage in other countries’ literary scenes while ignoring an important element of my own. As is stressed both in the article and the podcast, it’s not a matter of malice but of ignorance. The books that publicists send you, the books you’re asked to review, the books you see at the front of shops — these are naturally the ones you gravitate towards, all else being equal. But agency exists. I never had any trouble finding that agency when I went out and bought German-language novels while publishers were sending me free ones in my first language.
How to raise attention and respect for Irish-language literature among people who can’t read it is another issue. It would help if the government funded translations to English. Absurdly, they refuse to do this on the pretext that people then won’t buy the Irish. (Because clearly they are doing so right now in droves.) This does not correspond to the behaviour of any actual multilingual person I know: most people much prefer reading the original if they can. It’s often through hearing about an English translation of a work in French/Spanish/Italian/German that I’m prompted to seek out the original; yes, English is easier for me, but I want it in the author’s own words. Why wouldn’t it work that way for Irish? (In fact, one Irish-language book I’ve literally just bought — Lig Sinn i gCathú by Breandán Ó hEithir — was recommended to me by someone who’d read it in English.)
Importantly, translations into English would give those without Irish the ability to engage with all of their country’s literature. But admitting this necessity would require the government to accept that they have failed to teach most people Irish. Out of political cowardice, they place the burden of teaching Irish on Irish-language authors. Just write better, the policy seems to suggest, and then English-speakers will spend thousands of hours teaching themselves a minority language in order to read your books.
Not funding English translations of books i nGaeilge also narrows translation opportunities in general. Many of the continental European writers I know regard being translated into English as a huge career milestone, not necessarily because they are adoring fans of the anglosphere but because it means they’ll be available in the publishing world’s effective lingua franca. Getting translated into English is often what gets you then translated into Turkish, say, or Mandarin.
There’s no end of plámás and béalghrá — unctuousness and lip service — surrounding the Irish language, so I’ve been trying to think of practical contributions we all can make. I’ve been talking to a few editors about ways I could write in English about Irish-language books. I would be happy to blurb Irish-language books in advance to help get them into English-language bookshops, or even to translate sample chapters into English — there are many people more qualified than me on an Irish level, but maybe having it done by a widely translated author themselves could help generate interest with foreign publishers.
(Incidentally, I’m also working on a poem in Irish which I will perhaps perform down the line — more on this later, maybe, if the poem turns out well. I get frustrated trying to write fiction in Irish because I think much faster in English, but in poetry the roadblock is the whole point.)
Anyway, this isn’t something I have a handy takeaway from or a swiftly digestible solution to. But it’s a question all Irish literary people should be thinking about, whether or not they have the language. And for those reading this outside Ireland, I hope it’s at least a glimpse into a topic that isn’t much discussed abroad, where Ireland tends to be equated only with English.
Hope everyone is keeping safe and well. I survived St Patrick’s Day from Dublin. ‘Did you go to the parade?’ a few friends abroad asked me, and I had to break it to them gently that real Dubliners regard the whole occasion as being for tourists and children. But if you came over here to give us money, by all means, be my guest.
Le meas,
N