Fiction: There is a long tradition in Ireland of multilingual texts, from the verbal fireworks of erudite monks in the early medieval period to the macaronic songs of the 18th century. Poetry has been the traditional playground for the linguistically adept, with prose a more reluctant guest at Babel's Feast, writes Michael Cronin.
In Mapping God/Le Tracé de Dieu we have an Irish-published novel by Fred Johnston with a facing translation in French by Eoghan De Hoog. The tale itself is something of a metaphysical whodunnit set in a small village on the west coast of Ireland. The setting is quintessential rural gothic with plaster saints, sacred hearts, faithless priests, gossipy neighbours and a chorus of broken men living out their lives in a darkness of regret and recrimination. The landscape is predictably bleak and the weather worse: "A rat skittered across the window ledge. It made a sound like sheets of paper falling on the floor. Beyond the ledge, the sea was a dirty, angry green. Like a wound that had festered and now poured over onto the brown, wet flesh of the shore." Or "He could see through the filthy window the rough green rise-and-fall of the sea. The sky was grey and low; fast, dirty brown scraps of cloud fled inland. Dirty rain battered on the glass. The shore, not far off but far enough, looked drenched and filthy with sea-wrack and old, rolled stones."
The difficulty with this kind of deliberate, anti-romantic prose is that it becomes as formulaic and monotonous as the florid clichés it wants to evict. The result is not a greater authenticity but a heightened indifference. It is difficult as a reader to care greatly for characters who are almost invariably the monochrome victims of grim circumstance.
Johnston does show a deft handling of plot and fewer characters with a less conventional treatment of the setting might have served his purposes better as well as living up to the unrealised ambition of the title.
It is difficult to know who exactly the readership is for this book. The French translation from the mistake in the first line ("Guido la-trouva" instead of "Guido la trouva") is undistinguished and does not add to the original in any way. The repeated typos in both languages (three if the two Irish words are included where both words are misspelt) do not make for comfortable reading and makes one wonder about whether poor copy editing was the real culprit in this tale of death visited on a young life.
Michael Cronin is director of the Centre for Translation and Textual Studies. His most recent works are Translation and Globalization (Routledge) and Time Tracks (New Island )
Mapping God/Le Tracé de Dieu. By Fred Johnston, Translated by Eoghan De Hoog Wynkin deWorde, 261pp. NPG.