‘ROC: Human Rights and Modern Irish Poetry’ (2019)

This research strand investigates the political and the ethical aspects of the act of literary translation. How does literary translation by poets facilitate the circulation of ideas and the formation of conscience in a global context? Translated poems are included in this research as an important part of the Irish poet’s œuvre. This is a radical contestation of the view that literary translation is peripheral to the act of creative writing itself. Interesting examples of literary translations in a human rights context include:

• The anthology Scar on the Stone: Contemporary Poetry from Bosnia (1998), published in the aftermath of the break-up of Yugoslavia, includes translations of Bosnian poetry into English by Irish poets such as Harry Clifton and Chris Agee, and into Irish and English by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill.

• The anthology After Every War: Twentieth-Century Women Poets (2004), with English translations by Eavan Boland, contains the poems of German-speaking poets who witnessed the devastation of World War II. Boland, whose poetry is renowned for its exploration of lived female experience, chose to translate poems that foregrounded “private vulnerability” recorded by these female poets.

• Guatánamo: Cimí an Champa a Chum (2008), a translation into Irish by Gabriel Rosenstock of Poems from Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak (2007), edited by Marc Falkoff, is a notable instance of Rosenstock’s commitment to cultural diversity and his questioning of the hegemony of Western values.

• Pádraig Ó Máille’s translation into Irish of Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, by Afro-Carribean poet Aimé Césaire, was motivated by his interest in postcolonial identity. In his introduction to Nótaí ar fhilleadh ar mo thír dhúchais (2015), Ó Máille stresses the importance of Césaire’s literary text as impetus to explore the postcolonial mentality and its impact on Irish language, culture, and politics.