Translation

  • It is a minor but regular disappointment to the present writer that translators of Madame Bovary into English have not taken the opportunity to fully translate the title, choosing to keep the heroine’s French honorific in place of the preferable Mrs. Bovary. While Mrs. is a horrible word—and no one would want to read a…

  • Let us look at a single aspect of Carson’s Greek, her translation of plays by Sophokles and Euripides. Carson’s engagement with this literature has offered her the opportunity to explore a mind-world in which the immortality of certain entities, and the nature of Hades as a location to which one might travel—a place in which…

  • Let us take a journey from the political realm to Macdara’s true native land: literature. As a starting off point for exploring the work of Anne Carson, legend of letters, let him begin with a digression relating to his other artistic mother, Joan Didion.  Reading Didion’s work, Macdara has experienced a kind of disbelief: while…

  • I In the lamentable 2020 Programme for Government signed by three parts of Ireland’s permanent Partitionist Party, we find that the English-language introduction ends with a single long sentence in Irish. Then at the end of the réamhrá that follows—this being the Irish-language introduction to the document, that is, a translation of the introduction that…

  • I Tom Murphy’s Bailegangáire does not exist—town without laughter—but almost any town in Ireland could be called Bailegangaeilge—town without Irish—except that it would be known instead as Ballygongwailga. It surprises and disappoints this writer that the Irish people consent to live in a land of makey-uppy placenames. The worst recent example that your correspondent has…