1
See Boyde (1971: 26-39) on different theories of
"non-style".
2
Parks (1997: 18): "Il concetto che ispira i prossimi
capitoli è il seguente: confrontando l'originale
con la traduzione, e identificando i punti in cui la
traduzione è risultata problematica, possiamo
arrivare ad apprezzare meglio le qualità e le
complessità dell'originale, e allo stesso
tempo capire più a fondo quel fenomeno chiamato
traduzione" (emphasis mine).
3
Ciaran Carson was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in
1948. After graduating from Queen's University, Belfast,
he worked for the Arts Council of Northern Ireland until
1998. His collections of poetry include First
Language: Poems (1993) and The Ballad of HMS
Belfast: A Compendium of Belfast Poems (1999). His
prose works include Fishing for Amber (1999) and
Shamrock Tea (2001). He is also an accomplished
musician, and author of Last Night's Fun: About Time,
Food and Music (1996), a study of traditional Irish
Music.
4
Cf. "Introduction" (xix): "Many Dante scholars are of the
opinion that one should not translate at all, since
traduttore traditore".
5
Cf. Wallace (1993: 250-5) on the tradition of an Irish,
as opposed to English, Dante: "The claiming of Dante as
poetic mentor and ancestor has obvious advantages for
Irish poets writing in English. Irish Catholicism brings
them (for better or for worse) closer to the urban,
national and universalizing culture of Dante than any
American or English poet can imagine. From the Irish
vantage point, T. S. Eliot (despite his striving for the
imperial and impersonal authority of Latinitas)
may look parochial and eccentric in mutating from (in
Heaney's words) 'the intellectual mysteryman from
Missouri' to 'the English vestryman'. Aspects of Catholic
dogma and practice that have long proved a stumbling
block to the Anglican English offer rare expressive
opportunities for Irish poets" (253-4).
6
Heaney, "Introduction" (xxiii-xxiv): "Sprung from an
Irish nationalist background and educated at a Northern
Irish Catholic school, I had learned the Irish language
and lived within a cultural and ideological frame that
regarded it as the language that I should by rights have
been speaking but I had been robbed of (...). I tended to
conceive of English and Irish as adversarial tongues, as
either/or conditions rather than both/and, and this was
an attitude that for a long time hampered the development
of a more confident and creative way of dealing with the
whole vexed question - the question, that is, of the
relationship between nationality, language, history and
literary tradition in Ireland".
7
Cf. again Heaney, "Introduction" (xxiv-xxv): "Luckily, I
glimpsed the possibility of release from this kind of
cultural determination early on, in my first arts year at
Queen's University, Belfast, when we were lectured on the
history of the English language by Professor John
Braidwood. Braidwood could not help informing us, for
example, that the word 'whiskey' is the same word as the
Irish and Scots Gaelic word uisce , meaning water, and
that the River Usk in Britain is therefore to some extent
the River Uisce (or Whiskey); and so in my mind the
stream was suddenly turned into a kind of linguistic
river of rivers issuing from a pristine Celto-British
Land of Cockaigne, a riverrun of Finnegans Wakespeak
pouring out of the cleft rock of some prepolitical,
prelapsarian, ur-philological Big Rock Candy Mountain -
and all of this had a wonderfully sweetening effect upon
me. The Irish/English duality, the Celtic/Saxon
antithesis were momentarily collapsed and in the
resulting etymological eddy a gleam of recognition
flashed through the synapses and I glimpsed an elsewhere
of potential that seemed at the same time to be a
somewhere being remembered. The place on the language map
where the Usk and the uisce and the whiskey coincided was
definitely a place where the spirit might find a
loophole, an escape route from what John Montague has
called 'the partitioned intellect', away into some
unpartitioned linguistic country, a region where one's
language would not be simply a badge of ethnicity or a
matter of cultural preference or an official imposition,
but an entry into further language".
8
Cf. B. Reynolds (1987: 137): "The exhilaration was so
great I was obliged to go out into the garden and run and
leap about. I was rejoicing, not in my own cleverness,
but in the English language".
9
Cf. M. Reynolds (2003, online): "Never before in English
has the poem sounded less allegorical and more
humane".