A selective study of key themes in modern Irish literature. Texts will include novels, short stories, and poetry and will concentrate on translations of works originally written in Irish. All work will be read in English, but the course will be coordinated with 75 or 115A-115B for those who wish to do some of the reading in Irish.

In the past few decades, translation has become a central concern of literary studies. The importance of translation is nowhere more evident than in the case of the language and literature of Ireland. The first extant verses written in Ireland can be found in manuscripts among texts in and translated from a veritable smorgasbord of languages, and contrary to popular depictions of Ireland as a dark and backward land at the edge of the known world, the island and its languages in fact played a central role in European trade, politics, and literature. Though many have long declared the imminent demise of Irish in the wake of English invasion and colonization, writers have continued to produce extraordinary works of literature as Gaielge long before the cataclysmic 17th and 18th Centuries into the 20th and 21st. Irish Literature in Translation offers a broad historical look into both poetry and prose, with special reference to the practice of translation, from the early marginal verse of Irish scribes to contemporary innovators such as Doireann Ní Ghríofa and Ailbhe Ní Ghearbhuigh. Students will not only read Irish literature in English translation, but we will think deeply about the process of translation itself. To this end, selections from Jeremy Munday’s excellent Introducing Translation Studies, as well as writings by such seminal theorists as Walter Benjamin and Lawrence Venuti, will provide a scholarly framework through which to engage with our literary readings. In light of the oversize role played by poetry in the history of Irish Literature, as well as the recent publication of Brian Ó Conchubhair and Samuel K. Fisher’s definitive bilingual anthology of Irish Language poetry Bone and Marrow/Cnámh agus Smior, we will be focusing especially on poetic texts. We will also be reading a number of important prose texts, including the Old Irish Epic Táin Bó Cuailnge in Thomas Kinsella’s masterful translation, Patrick C. Power’s rendering of Flann O’Brien’s notorious comic novel The Poor Mouth, and Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s astonishing genre-bending book A Ghost in the Throat. Special attention will be paid to the theoretical issues arising from the problems posed by the act of translation in the Irish context as well as the place of Irish literature in a comparative literary canon. All texts will be read in English, but whenever possible Irish Language originals will also be provided. Texts: Kinsella, Thomas, trans. The Táin: from the Irish Epic Táin Bó Cuailnge. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002. ISBN: 9780192803733 Ní Ghríofa, Doireann. A Ghost in the Throat. Windsor: Biblioasis, 2021. ISBN: 9781771964111 O’Brien, Flan. The Poor Mouth: A Bad Story About the Hard Life. Trans. Patrick C. Power. Funks Grove: Dalkey Archive Press, 2008. ISBN: 9781564780911 Ó Conchubhair, Brian and Samuel K. Fisher, ed. Bone and Marrow/Cnámh agus Smior: An Anthology of Irish Poetry from Medieval to Modern. Winston-Salem: Wake Forest UP, 2022. ISBN: 9781943667000 [OPTIONAL] Munday, Jeremy. Introducing Translation Studies: Theories and Applications. New York: Routledge. 3rd Edition (2012) ISBN: 9780415584869 4th Edition (2016) ISBN: 9781138912557

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