‘Death and Renewal’: Translating Old Irish Texts in Nineteenth-Century Ireland

Abstract

This article investigates the conflicted cultural identity of those Irish-speaking antiquarians working on translations of Old Irish texts. Giving voice to the translators, this article will show how they were frustrated in attempts to turn their own knowledge into authority by being members of the Catholic Gaelic Irish in a country dominated by the Protestant Ascendancy. It will examine contemporaneous writings and correspondence to reveal how the translators felt about being accused of being accomplices to the Anglicisation of Ireland’s literary heritage they were participating in the erasure of their own language, traditions, and their world by means of their translations into English for the Anglophone world.