One of the most frequent and urgent recommendations made to us concerned what is almost an established practice with weighty precedents, of leaving personal names and placenames untranslated, in order to root the text in its original setting in time and space. There is point to this; one doesn’t want to be pretending that Caitríona and her neighbours are buried in some present-day English graveyard. But there are other ways of preserving a whiff of the book’s setting, its irreducible foreignness, across the linguistic gulf. The countless mentions in Cré na Cille of little stony fields, seaweed harvesting, holy wells, and so on, and the occasional references to a motor car, a movie, a woman in trousers, sufficiently locate it in a rural seaside community at a period when its folk ways are being invaded by modernity. (Also, if precedent is to be given weight in this debate, there is on the side of translation the splendid example of Brightcity, Eoghan Ó Tuairisc’s version of Ó Cadhain’s name for the city of Galway, in “An Bóthar go dtí an Ghealchathair.”) The point is this. Placenames are semantically two-pronged. The placename on the one hand denotes a location, and on the other bears a load of connotations with it, including the associations that make a place, an element of a life-world, out of the bare location. But the places mentioned in Cré na Cille are fictional, which complicates the relationship between denotation and connotation; the only existence of these places is in the text, and all we know of them is what the text tells us, which it does partly through the placename itself. What is denoted is constituted by the connotations. Of Lake Wood, all we know is that there is or was a lake and a wood; but given the general setting we can imagine the place. Pasture Glen, the Common Field, Mangy Field, Flagstone Height, Donagh’s Village, West Headland, Colm’s Cove, Woody Hillside, the Deep Hollow, Roadside Field, the Hill Field, and so on, and so on — cumulatively these names paint a picture of a small-scale, well-worked countryside intimately known to its inhabitants. To replace them all with strings of letters the non-Irish-speaking reader will not even be able to pronounce would entail a tremendous loss of texture, of precious discriminations, of meaning. Of course there are difficult choices to be made in translating some of them. To avoid a touch of the English suburban estate we have rendered Lake Wood as Wood of the Lake, and Pasture Glen as Glen of the Pasture, for instance. Also, it’s not possible to give the full sense of tamhnach in one or two English words — but such obstacles are just the usual ones that make translation a joy frustrated.
A similar argument applies to personal names, but in the present text it is not so pressing, since the English or anglicised equivalents of most of them — Cáit, Bríd, and the like — are obvious anyway. A few that are just English names spelled in the Irish phonetic system, such as Jeaic, we have let revert to their English forms. However, we found it necessary to translate nicknames, as they are indicative of status, appearance, ancestry, or the community’s attitude towards the person named. So we have “Siúán the Shop” and “Máirtín Pockface,” for example. As with placename elements there are some puzzles, of course: what exactly is implied by the nickname of Tomás Taobh Istigh we think we know, but the ambiguity of Jeaic na Scolóige’s name is not just in our minds but commented on (unrevealingly) by other characters in the book.
Translation theorists speak of the “target language.” I don’t like the aggressive term; I’d rather think of a “host language” and what variety of it might most generously welcome this demanding but rewarding text. The formal principle — a bold invention — of Ó Cadhain’s novel is that it is entirely composed of direct speech, with no explicit indication of who is speaking. So, for the reader to be able to ascribe each speech to the right speaker by its tone and vocabulary as well as its content, a dialect of English with a notable range of expressive means is called for, and of course in Ó Cadhain’s own territory a Hiberno-English that has for centuries been living next door to and borrowing household items from the Irish language offers itself. The English of the Conamara Gaeltacht can range from bardic frenzy to cocksure modernism; but it is a potent brew, to be used with discretion; it is no use translating Irish into an English that itself calls for translation or has been debased by Paddywhackery.
Finally, and despite our sense of the enormity of what we have undertaken in opening to non-Irish readers’ eyes a book so long aureoled in distant respect, I must say what a pleasure the task has been. I hope too that our partners Bairbre and M have found that their considerable contributions have been repaid in the wild humours of Ó Cadhain’s Graveyard Clay.
Tim Robinson
CHARACTERS AND DIALOGUE CONVENTIONS
CAITRÍONA PHÁIDÍN Caitríona (daughter of) Páidín. Newly buried
PÁDRAIG CHAITRÍONA Pádraig (son of) Caitríona. Her only son
NÓRA SHEÁINÍN’S DAUGHTER Pádraig Chaitríona’s wife. Living in same house as Caitríona
MÁIRÍN Girl-child of Pádraig Chaitríona and Nóra Sheáinín’s daughter
NÓRA SHEÁINÍN Nóra (daughter of) Seáinín. Mother of Pádraig Chaitríona’s wife
BABA PHÁIDÍN Baba (daughter of) Páidín. Sister of Caitríona and Nell. Living in America. A legacy from her expected
NELL PHÁIDÍN Sister of Caitríona and Baba
JACK THE SCOLÓG Jack (son of) Scológ. Nell’s husband
PEADAR NELL Peadar (son of) Nell and Jack
BIG BRIAN’S MAG Daughter of Big Brian. Wife of Peadar Nell
BRIAN ÓG Young Brian. Son of Peadar Nell and Big Brian’s Mag
BIG BRIAN Father of Mag
TOMÁS INSIDE Relative of Caitríona and Nell. The two of them contending for his land
MURAED PHROINSIAIS Muraed (daughter of) Proinsias. Next-door neighbour and life-long bosom friend to Caitríona
Other Neighbours and Acquaintances
Guide to Dialogue Conventions
— Speech beginning
— … Speech in progress
… Speech omitted
GRAVEYARD CLAY
~ ~ ~
Time
Eternity
Place
The Graveyard
Regimen
Interlude 1: The Black Clay
Interlude 2: The Spreading of the Clay
Interlude 3: The Teasing of the Clay
Interlude 4: The Crushing of the Clay
Interlude 5: The Bone-Fertilising of the Clay
Interlude 6: The Kneading of the Clay
Interlude 7: The Moulding of the Clay
Interlude 8: The Firing of the Clay
Interlude 9: The Smoothing of the Clay
Interlude 10: The White Clay
