(Re -)writing Irish literary history: The Irish Texts Society and its translators

My dissertation is a cultural history of the production of the Irish Texts Society's (ITS) editions and translations of Old, Middle and Early Modern Irish texts. It explores the way translation functions within Irish culture in the twentieth century as a mode for negotiating nationalist, religious and proto-feminist issues of the day. The Irish Texts Society considered itself primarily a scholarly and philological organization with no acknowledged political inclinations that would overtly affect its translations. However, translation itself became increasingly problematic in Ireland in the twentieth century, due in part to the country's difficult (post-)colonial relationship with England. The translations produced for the ITS by Father Patrick S. Dinneen, J.G. O'Keeffe and Cecile O'Rahilly reflect this problematic relationship in the issues they choose to foreground in their work; Dinneen and O'Keeffe, translating in the early part of the century, emphasize Catholicism and nationalism, while O'Rahilly explores the role of women in her translation produced in the 1960's. I also use more recent translations of the same texts by such authors as Michael Hartnett, Seamus Heaney and Thomas Kinsella to set off in relief the interpretive moves made by the ITS translators. I maintain throughout that we, as critics and readers, must pay attention to the religious, cultural and political influences upon a translator. These influences cause translators to revise the original text to fit their own (or their nation's) perceived needs, which then affects the way that their audience perceives the text. This does not only hold true for Ireland, where the decline of the Irish language made it necessary to translate Irish texts into English in order to keep past Irish literary achievements in the collective memory; this process applies to any translated text, and proves to be particularly effective propaganda in colonized nations.