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Sentence firstFlann OâBrien on translating Ulysses into Irish
Iâve been reading Flann OâBrien again, having picked up Hair of the Dogma (Paladin, 1989), a selection from his riotous Irish Times column âCruiskeen Lawnâ, which he wrote under the pseudonym Myles na Gopaleen. (Brian OâNolan was the writerâs real name; he had many pseudonyms, of which Flann OâBrien is probably the best known.)
Because Myles excelled at satire and wore many masks, it is hard to tell sometimes just how serious or truthful he is being. But I believe this passage from his article âJ.J. and Usâ (J.J. meaning James Joyce), about a plan to translate Ulysses into Irish, to be essentially on the level:
I suppose uncertainty is the handmaid of all grandiose literary projects. Many motives lay behind that 1951 decision of mine to translate Joyceâs Ulysses into Irish. If they wonât read it in English, I said to myself, bedamn but weâll put them in the situation that they can boast they wonât read it in Irish aither.
Itâs work, though. And black thoughts encloister me, like brooding buzzards. Is it worth being accurate if nobody will ever read the translation? Whatâs the Irish for Robert Emmet? And who will put Irish on this fearsome thing written by Joyce himself: Suil, suil, suil arun, suil go siocair agus, suil go cuin.
See the snares in this business, doom impending, heart-break?
Aither as a Hiberno-English rendition of either is something Iâll address in a future post. What Myles calls a âfearsome thingâ is already in Irish (that being the joke, I suppose), or a version of Irish without accent marks, and occurs in the Ithaca episode of Ulysses as follows:
What fragments of verse from the ancient Hebrew and ancient Irish languages were cited with modulations of voice and translation of texts by guest to host and by host to guest?
By Stephen: suil, suil, suil arun, suil go siocair agus, suil go cuin (walk, walk, walk your way, walk in safety, walk with care).
By Bloom: Kifeloch, harimon rakatejch mâbaad lâzamatejch (thy temple amid thy hair is as a slice of pomegranate).
Stephenâs verse is adapted from the Irish ballad âSiĂșil A RĂșnâ (âWalk, my dearâ, or âGo, my loveâ). Itâs echoed in Finnegans Wake in the phrase âwho goes cute goes siocur and shoos arounâ.
How far OâNolan got in his efforts to translate Ulysses, I donât know. He seems to have put his mind and pen to it to some extent, as the following text from the same âCruiskeen Lawnâ article suggests â though again itâs hard to know for sure how much it reflects reality and how much is dramatised for style and effect or even mischief. OâBrien scholars might know more about this abandoned project.
Recently a chap said to me: Howâs it going? I told him it was going so-so. Slow of course. These things take time. . . . Uphill work when all decent Christians are in bed. The midnight oil. Drudgery of a special kind.
Told you. Bit off more than you could chaw. You and all that B. Comm. crowd is too smart.
No, no, no, I told him. The job COULD be done. There were, of course, difficulties â minute things of rhythm, luminance, impact. The acute difficulty in translation lay in the lucid conveyance of obscurity. Even the hidden thing was susceptible of diacrisis. Not in the same darkness were all dark things enwrapped.
His sceptical interlocutor tells him thereâs no future in it, and that heâd be âa damn sight better offâ playing bagpipes in Bagenalstown. Myles presents him with a sample, reading first the text from Ulysses:
Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eye. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot . . .
And then his translation into Irish, which he reads âfrom my large manuscriptâ:
MionshamhlĂocht dosheachanta an tsofheicse; fiĂș an mhĂ©id sin fĂ©in, intiniocht trĂ© fhĂĄisnĂ©is sĂșl. Lorg an uile a bhfuil agam annso le sonnrĂș, scĂ©ag mara, leathach, an tuile i gcuaird, an bhrĂłg Ășd mheirgeach . . .
My Irish is nowhere near good enough to judge the literary merits of this translation, but it sounds good to the ear, and I would tend to trust in OâNolanâs competence: he was a native speaker who wrote often in Irish, and was an erudite polyglot receptive to puns and rarefied allusions alike.
I also read a very good illustrated biography of Flann, by Peters Costello and van de Kamp, which Iâm told is out of print. There are a few excerpts in this string of tweets, and on my Tumblr quotes from Flann on literature being disgusting, on recasting classic characters in fiction, and, famously, on the thrill of waiting for the German verb.
Finally: anyone interested in the works of this uniquely talented and protean writer will find much to enjoy at the International Flann OâBrien Society, which publishes a terrific journal called The Parish Review, to which you can sign up by email.
#books #FlannOBrien #Ireland #Irish #IrishLanguage #irishLiterature #JamesJoyce #literature #MylesNaGopaleen #translation #Ulysses #writers #writing
Nick
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