Loe raamatut: «Historische Translationskulturen», lehekülg 8

3 Celtic Revival and Translation

In the previous sections, it was shown that preservation of language and culture were closely connected for the Celtic nations which were trying to revive their cultural heritage at the turn of the century. In this multilingual environment, translation came to play a decisive role for this endeavour. On the one hand, translation offered a wider audience access to their cultural heritage since the numbers of the speakers of these languages had declined over the course of the nineteenth century. On the other hand, translation was used to some extent to encourage the usage of the respective Celtic language although it should be noted that many of the Celtic language publications at the time were originals and not translated. For each of the languages, the role of translation in the Celtic Revival will be discussed against the backdrop of historical developments of the time. Ultimately, the connections between the different translation traditions will be highlighted.

3.1 Irish Gaelic

As discussed earlier, there are a number of reasons why Ireland has been of particular interest within Translation Studies. As the only Celtic nation to achieve independence, it offers the opportunity today to analyse the role of translation but also language and translation policy in the period of the Celtic Revival which lead up to Irish independence.

The Celtic Revival marks a turning point; until then, translation had been mainly used by the British Empire to colonise Ireland: “Translation […] was a tangible, physical oppression, and it was accompanied by various other forms of dispossession, including the erasure of Ireland’s history and Ireland’s humanity” (Tymoczko 1999: 19). However, translation then was reclaimed by the Irish for their own purposes. A primary function was to make Irish texts available to those who did not speak the Irish language due to the linguistic shift in the nineteenth century (Cronin 2011: 55). Translating thus allowed the revival of the Celtic cultural heritage.

One translator who translated from Irish into English and also published his own works in both languages was Gaelic League founding member and future President of Ireland, Douglas Hyde (Constantine 2009: 298). Hyde’s translations, for example Beside the Fire (1890), a collection of translations of Irish folklore into English, signified a new approach in that the English he used was modelled on the English spoken by most of the Irish (Hyde 1890: xviii). This Irish English was heavily influenced by Irish syntax and idiom and would come to be known as Hiberno-English. Therefore, Hyde’s translation strategy could be described as literal as it retains the lexicon and structure of the source language which still can be recognized when reading Hyde’s translations. His way of translating was groundbreaking as he saw English as a medium he utilized and subordinated to the Irish language in order to draw attention to the “translatedness” of his texts (Constantine 2009: 298). In this way, he reclaimed both translation and language for promoting the Irish language and culture. These translation strategies could be seen as “foreignising”, as suggested by Lawrence Venuti (1995/2008), because they challenged existing power relations.

Lady Gregory, a dramatist and important figure in the Irish Literary Revival, later used the Kiltartan dialect of this new form of English for her translation Cuchulain of Muirthemme (1902) which contributed to Hiberno-English becoming a new literary vernacular for Irish writers (Cronin 1996: 139) such as John Millington Synge, an Irish playwright who was also active as a translator from Gaelic into English (Kiberd 1979: 62–63), and William Butler Yeats, both involved in the Irish Literary Revival.

As can be seen from the examples mentioned above, most of the translations from Irish into English were anthologies containing the translations of old Irish folktales which had previously been translated into English. However, these re-translations were used to “resist and challenge English stereotyping and English cultural isolation. The Irish seized translation of their own cultural heritage as one means of re-establishing and redefining their nation and their people” (Tymoczko 1999: 21). This was also aimed for by translating texts into Irish Gaelic in order to revitalize the language, especially at the beginning of the twentieth century (Cronin 2000: 485).

3.2 Scottish Gaelic

In the nineteenth century, many publications and translations of Scottish Gaelic texts were inspired by a “hunt for oral and literary ‘remains’ to prove/disprove Macpherson’s Ossianic translation” (Constantine 2009: 302). As previously mentioned, the Macpherson translation of Scottish Gaelic tales, while highly acclaimed after its publication, was greatly doubted concerning its authenticity by contemporary writers and scholars. This endeavour resulted in a high demand for Gaelic tales and legends (Gillies 2000: 182). As a consequence, a number of anthologies containing English translations of folk tales written in Scottish Gaelic were published during the second half of the nineteenth century such as Archibald Campbell’s Waifs and Strays of Celtic Tradition (1889–1895) and Rev. Alexander Cameron’s Reliquiae Celticae (1892–1894) comprising bardic eulogies and elegies. This trend in combination with the political unrest caused by the Highland Clearances fostered the Scottish Gaelic literary revival happening at the end of the nineteenth century (ibid.). Another contributing factor was the increasing cultural contact but also solidarity between speakers of Scottish Gaelic and Scots due to the large influx of Gaelic-speaking settlers in Lowland Scotland (Thomson 2000: 487). As Gillies points out, “Gaelic-Scots solidarity, and to some extent pan-Celtic outreach, dictated that English translations would play their part in this revival, to a greater extent than occurred in Ireland or Wales” (Gillies 2000: 182). For example, Scottish Gaelic poets had become used to preparing an English translation of their work for mixed audiences of speakers of Scottish Gaelic, Scots and English (ibid.: 182–183).

This development, which continued into the twentieth century, was also encouraged by the increasing scholarly interest in Scottish Gaelic literature. Celtic had become a university subject at the end of the nineteenth century which resulted in the publication of a series of scholarly books on Scottish Gaelic poetry and folk tales including their English translations (Thomson 2000: 487) such as Nigel MacNeill’s The Literature of the Highlanders (1892) or Magnus Maclean’s The Literature of the Highlands (1904). Important anthologies of the early twentieth century include Alexander Carmichael’s Carmina Gadelica (1900), a large collection of runes, hymns and incantations charms with accompanying translations, Songs of the Hebrides (1909) edited by Marjory Kennedy Fraser and Rev. Kenneth MacLeod as well as The Gaelic Songs of Duncan Macintyre (1912) edited and translated by George Calder.

Many of the translations of the time were written in metrical format (Thomson 2000: 487) as an attempt to convey the antiquity of the original texts (Gillies 2000: 182). Some are linguistically inadequate, or their content was altered in different ways. A possible explanation for these (re-)translations during that period, not only in Scotland but also in the other English colonies in the British Isles, was that they were an attempt to rectify certain images disseminated by original texts or translations written by the hegemonic power. As Tejaswini Niranjana puts it: “By employing certain modes of representing the other – which it thereby also brings into being – translation reinforces hegemonic versions of the colonized” (Niranjana 1992: 3). (Re-)Translating texts was seen as a way to promote the self-image of the colonized people.

3.3 Welsh

During the mid-nineteenth century, translations from English into Welsh, though considerably fewer than translations from Welsh into English, had evolved from mainly religious texts (e.g. Calvinist texts translated from English or German into Welsh) to more secular texts. Much of the literature on Welsh translation in the nineteenth century focuses on mid-century texts. Literary translation from Welsh into English had gained popularity a century earlier, when an interest in Celticism was prevalent among English writers. Although this initial interest eventually subsided somewhat as Welsh was not seen to be as “ancient” as other Celtic languages due to its widespread presence in Wales, a clear interest in Welsh literature remained (Gramich 2000: 1493), with a sustained period of translation into English emerging in the nineteenth century for the first time. One translation which was particularly well-received in Wales, but also internationally was Lady Charlotte Guest’s 1849 translation into English of The Mabinogion, a collection of Welsh tales first written down in the fourteenth century. Guest’s approach to translation involved combining her own knowledge of the Welsh language and “antique” prose style with the work of the scholars who assisted her by producing very literal translations of the original (ibid.). Her versions of the tales are very accessible and still read today.

A number of contrasting trends in Welsh translation can be seen around the time of the Celtic Revival. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, translations of Medieval Welsh literature were quite common, with translators often adopting archaic, Romantic language in an effort to present the translations in the same antique or perceived “mystic” light as the originals. This changed in several ways with the foundation of the University of Wales in 1893. Translations were produced for scholars of Welsh literature, which was taught through English, and so, the translations tended to be quite literal (Miguélez-Carballeira et al. 2016b: 129). At the end of the century, however, there was a move towards translating contemporary Welsh-language poetry by translators such as AP Graves and Edmund O Jones. While such work indicated new interest in current Welsh culture, some translators attempted to minimise the difference between Welsh and English, producing nativised or “domesticating” translations (Venuti 2008). Constantine (2009) observes that this may partly be a result of the “cultural insecurity” that followed the 1847 Blue Books Report, citing Jones’ Welsh Lyrics of the Nineteenth Century (1896) as an example of the English-language reader receiving “a milder (and much meeker) dose of Wales”. Reynolds (2005: xiii) suggests that this inferiority complex could be traced back to the previous century: “There was no Welsh university, the bardic order had long since collapsed, and though Wales sustained a vibrant folk culture, the educated, and Anglicized, elite looked to England for instruction in all matters.”

In the early twentieth century there was “a renewed burst of translating activity”, which Gramich suggests may have been partly due to the Irish literary Renaissance (Gramich 2000: 1493), with anthologies still in the majority. Alfred Perceval Graves, an Irishman with an interest in Welsh culture, translated Welsh Poetry Old and New (1912), and a collection of George Borrow’s translation work, Welsh Poems and Ballads was published in 1915 by Ernest Rhys.

3.4 Manx, Cornish and Breton

The literature on Celtic-language translation tends to focus on Irish, Scottish Gaelic and Welsh, with considerably less research available on Manx, Cornish and Breton. Reference works such as the Encyclopedia of Literary Translation into English (Classe 2000) or The Oxford guide to literature in English translation (France 2000) offer dedicated sections on each of the former, with the latter three mentioned only in passing.

Although Cornish was no longer spoken as a living language, and very little written Cornish has survived, there were a handful of translations carried out in the nineteenth century, many of which Constantine (2009: 303–304) sees as “dry [and doing] little justice to the flashes of humour and beauty of the originals”. However, such literal translations served to awaken interest in the language and contributed to the small-scale revival of spoken Cornish that would take place in the following decades.

Partly due to the rapid decline of the Manx language in the nineteenth century and also due to the comparatively small corpus of literature, few translations were written at the time of the Celtic Revival. A.W. Moore is the most prominent translator of the time, publishing collections of folk songs and traditional Manx carols entitled Carvalyn Gailckagh (1891) and Manx Ballads and Music (1896).

As the only remaining Celtic language whose decline makes way for a language other than English, Breton tended to be translated into/out of French rather than English, and translations of Breton work into English were often based on French translations of the original. A key figure in the context of the current research was Anatole Le Braz, a Breton poet who translated old Breton songs, poems and stories into French and published his own poetry in French from 1888, as well as being chair of the Union régionaliste bretonne (Breton Regionalist Union). Another member of the Union, François Taldir-Jaffrennou, is seen as the leader of the Breton bardic movement which emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century. He wrote not only in Breton and French, but occasionally also in Welsh. He is responsible for the unofficial “national anthem” of Brittany, Bro Gozh ma Zadoù (Old Land of My Fathers), which he translated from the Welsh national anthem. Favereau (2007: 131) sees Jean-Pierre Calloc’h as “the most gifted poet of his generation”. He wrote in Breton, and his volume of poetry Ar en Deulin was published posthumously accompanied by French translations in 1925.

3.5 Celtic translation culture(s)

Based on the above analyses of translation traditions in the Celtic regions, the most striking similarity between these traditions during the Celtic Revival was the trend towards translating from the Celtic language into English (or French in the case of Breton) rather than into the Celtic language. This was due to the fact that English had become the predominant language in the British Isles and, thus, the medium which made texts available to the widest audience, although English was seen as the language of the colonising power by many. It also made texts accessible to an international audience interested in Celticism. However, the key aim of many of these translations was to allow people in the Anglicised parts of the Celtic regions to learn more about their cultural heritage and literature and the majority were ancient legends, tales and poetry, published almost exclusively as anthologies, as was the case throughout much of Europe at the time (see e.g. Seruya et al. 2013). In Wales and Ireland, also contemporary literature was translated into English which included self-translations by the authors themselves, such as Douglas Hyde, but also translations of contemporary literature which were included in anthologies alongside medieval literature.

Another reason why translators focussed on ancient literature was to recreate the image of Celtic culture for this new audience. This led to a situation where the hegemonial language which had become dominant in the British Isles was reclaimed by the colonised people for their own purpose. Concerning the use of language in a colonial situation, Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin, who investigate the language use in the British Empire and its colonies, make a distinction between abrogation and appropriation – abrogation meaning the absolute denial of the language of the hegemonial power by the colonised people while appropriation is understood as the use of the hegemonial language by the colonised people in their own interest (Ashcroft et al. 1989: 38–40). Many of the translations which were written during the Celtic Revival were very literal, retaining the original syntax and idiom; English as a language was colonised. As a result, Hiberno-English emerged as a literary vernacular, it was appropriated. Efforts were made to also retain the style of the original, which often resulted in the use of archaisms in order to convey the antiquity of the texts. A further translation strategy involved writing metrical translations, which made certain adaptations to the text necessary.

At the time, universities started to play an important role in Celtic language translation. The emergence of Celtic Studies as a university subject increased the demand for English-language versions of Celtic literature. As the main function of these texts was to serve as material for academic analysis, they needed to be quite literal for scholars who were not fluent in the language(s).

Despite similarities between the translation cultures during this movement, there are certainly also many differences. The status and usage of the languages under investigation, for example, varied to some extent. Additionally, there appear to be no clear patterns in relation to who the translators were during the Celtic Revival. However, to explore the parallels and differences between the translation cultures of each of the Celtic regions would be beyond the scope of this paper. Looking at languages can be a way of moving away from nations’ borders and allows for a more integrated approach concerning the translation history of the British Isles when analysing translation processes between all languages involved.