IT'S a wonderful series of letters written in 1932 to An Phoblacht, the Donegal novelist Seosamh Mac Grianna described how the translation industry known as An Gum was born: "Ernest Blythe having been in Wales and having seen a number of English books translated into Welsh, and Ernest Blythe being thick in the head, came to the conclusion that a similar scheme of translation would be good for Ireland ... He acted as a doctor would, if he were brought to treat two brothers suffering from different diseases, if he insisted on giving them the same treatment because they were brothers." According to Mac Grianna, ten rules for translation were copied from John O'London's Weekly, translated into Irish and circulated to translators. These were paid at a rate of one pound per thousand words, with a reduced rate paid to those who insisted on Gaelic type.
Michael Cronin claims in his study of translation in Ireland that Mac Grianna's anger was misplaced and that "translation became the target by default for writers who were deeply unhappy with state indifference to the plight of the Irish language writer ... The annual appearance of new translated titles in Irish in the 1930s arguably created a critical mass of printed literature which would be indispensable for the post 1945 renaissance in writing in Irish".
This argument presents several difficulties. Firstly, the renaissance in writing in, Irish was primarily brought about through poetry, the very literary form which An Gum refused to publish. Secondly, his argument fails to address fully the consequences for literature in Irish of An Gum translation policy as an ideological function of the state - parallels between An Gum and the orchestration of literary endeavour in the Soviet Union were close. The emphasis on the translation of novels obviated the need for censorship, and ensured that the creative originality and unpredictability of writers such as Mac Grianna would be displaced, a fact which Blythe and his kind were unlikely to regret.
More subtly, the emphasis on translation incorporated into the Gaelic revival writers such as Carleton and Kickham - translated by Sean O Ceallaigh and Mairtin O Cadhain respectively - who were the objects of popular sentiment but who had shown no allegiance to the Irish language, although they had heard it widely spoken. A similar ideological compensation was a work in Amhrdaleabhar Ogra Eireann, a songbook compulsorily purchased by generations of C.B.S. pupils, which contained a large selection of songs in Irish, most of them translations of songs such as O Donnell Abu, thus incorporating into Irish a nationalist song tradition which the language has never had.
Michael Cronin's study draws heavily on translation theory, on which the book is extremely informative, but is less engaged with wider historical consequences of translation. Oddly, the book fails to come to terms satisfactorily with the relationship between the vernacular Bible and clerical discouragement of literacy in Irish, particularly during the 19th century prosleytisation campaign known as the "Second Reformation". The Rev. James O Laveity points out in his account of the 1842 altercation between Father Luke Walsh and the Home Mission, which centred on the teaching of what O Laveity termed "the Protestant Bible in the Irish language" in the Glen of Antrim, that "one lamentable and lasting effect" of the controversy was to destroy "along the Ant rim coast, the Irish language".
Cronin identifies two defining views of translation in Ireland. One is that put forward by, Charlotte Brooke in the preface to her Reliques of Irish Poetry (1789), where she expressed the wish to see the British and Irish muses "walk abroad from their bowers, sweet ambassadresses of cordial union". The opposing view which, Cronin tells us, "was heavily influenced by Humboldtian linguistic relativism, saw translation as a form of coercion which, denied the different world views generated by languages: thus translation was "a strategy by the coloniser to assimilate the language of the colonised and deny their right to be different and free".
Both views have been renewed by the extensive translation activity of the last decade, but Cronin's own assessment of the most contentious area of this activity, the translation of contemporary poetry from Irish into English, is a positive one: "The fact that so many Irish language poets allowed their work to be translated does indeed point to the desire for a form of, recognition in the wider literary community."
The book covers a great deal but omits one important translation phenomenon of recent decades - the simultaneous translation by Irish playwrights (usually aided by cribs) of the work of European masters into the English language and into Irish settings.