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EL
“But what is the opposite of fidelity?' asked Professor Playfair. He was approaching the end of his dialytic; now he needed only to draw it to a close with a punch. 'Betrayal. Translation means doing violence upon the original, it means warping and distorting it for foreign, unintended eyes. So, where does that leave us? How can we conclude except by acknowledging that an act of translation is always an act of betrayal?” (R.F.King, Babel.)
Some of you may agree with that or even with some of that, but that will change after you have read EL, By Thaddeus O Buachalla who wrote EL ,in the Irish language in 2022. It was awarded Irish Language Novel of the Year at the An Post Irish Book Awards AND won an Oireachteas Literary Award. The author is an Irish language author, poet, and musician from Cork City who has toured with his show Immram an Phréacháin, a long epic poem depicting a journey through Cork City at night. He has now translated EL into English and in doing so has captured all the nuances, gloss, blás and innuendo found in the original written in our own native language. O Buachalla says, “While actually translating the novel myself may have had its own benefits, I cannot say that I found the process to be entirely an easy one. No two languages operate in the same way, and simple technical differences can have huge effects on the style of the language. Translating your own work has its own set of challenges in that you will be more precious about a text on which you’ve already expended so much care and devotion.” Perhaps the challenges that he refers to are partially the reason for the perfection in this work. All aspects of the original are preserved and yet the English version stands very much on its own.
This work is the story of an academic, Sean, from Cork (Where else) Who makes a discovery of microscopic humanoid beings living inside flies, The story is set in a modern day Cork City and the narrator leaves no stone unturned to show how the urban densely populated area is today and how the everyday scene can be transformed by a fertile imagination. It is a work of fiction today but like ski-fi works of the past, who is to say that it won’t be fact in some distant or not so distant tomorrow. Where did the idea come from? Better ask the author, “I was sitting at a kitchen table one evening in Cork City and noticed a couple of flies making misshapen patterns around the overhead lightbulb. Zipping around each other, or occasionally engaging in what seemed like a dogfight, I imagined them not to be little insects at all but rather tiny flying machines piloted by microscopic people within. “
I always wondered what Political Science was all about but Kate a fictitious character who is studying that subject provides some information for me and other readers like me, if such exist,
“Choose systems that are controversial and will incite the public “ she says, "but rather to the person with their most righteous-sounding voice. Tell them that not only what you’re doing is righteous but it’s the most righteous thing in the history of the world. Always remember that your audience was raised looking at epic films and has an enormous desire to be in the midst of a great historical event.” And Kate has given another bit of advice which has already been taken on board by many of our politicians, “Accuse your opposition of the things that you yourself are guilty of , so that when they rebuke you for it, it will appear that they’re just copying you and don’t have proper arguments of their own. If they put ‘facts’ before you, it doesn't matter. Let the public believe that these facts were created only to have an undue influence over them.” O Buachalla has succeeded in seamlessly joining the experiences of Sean at the back-lanes of Cork in this modern age of smartphones and Laptops and such 21st century gadgets with those of Jan Swammerdan in Leiden in the Netherlands on 03rd of September 1663.
And the gap between Galilio and Brexit is neatly filled with a mixture of historical fact and fiction. But is the fiction really fiction or simply a premature fact?
The work is written in three “acts”, each with several scenes. And that is right and proper because EL is nothing short of a classic drama. In the 12th and final scene of act Three, Sean gives the reader plenty of food for thought, food that takes some digesting. But. . . he comes back in the epilogue to bring us up to date on what happened to each and every character after he and they left us at the final curtain.
IL is published by Mercier Press. www.mercierpress.ie
Happy reading and remember who told you about EL.
And speaking of great literature, Ireland’s, if not Europe’s greatest literary festival will open for the 55th year on May 27th. Here’s the Link:
https://writersweek.ie/about/ and I’ll have an update from the Culture capital of Ireland next issue .
See you in May/Jun issue.
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