It’s Never One Thing: On Translation and Subversion; a Conversation with Dr. Sorcha de Brún

Dr. Sorcha de Brún is an Associate Professor of modern Irish at the University of Limerick, a creative writer, and a literary translator. She has published on Irish language fiction, film adaptation, and literary translation. Sorcha is an awardee of the John and Pat Hume Scholarship, the Máirtín Ó Cadhain Short Story Award, the Duais Foras na Gaeilge, numerous Oireachtas literary awards, as well as a national Teaching Hero Award. She is the Irish language Editor of Literary Encyclopedia. Her monograph on masculinities in Irish language fiction will be published by Arlen House in 2025, funded by the Royal Irish Academy. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

PAPAROUNA: Let’s start by talking about fidelity in translation, staying “true” to the original. What does that mean to you? One of my mentors talks about “honouring the text.” How did you handle the Shakespearean sonnets you translated to?

SORCHA DE BRÚN: What I managed to do was to stay true to the iambic pentameter and to translate the Shakespearean use of language, that slightly archaic use of language. I’ve managed that in Irish, but that took me literally years. It was gestating for a long time. But there were individual words I had to lose. For example, the word “lark” in one of Shakespeare’s songs, it just didn’t fit the meter, and I decided to let it go, but I managed to find another word that describes a lark without using the word lark.

That applies to films as well, in relation to the whole idea of fidelity in adaptations of books. According to some commentators, fidelity is not considered to be important; you don’t have to stay true to the original. It’s the general consensus that this idea of being faithful in art is sometimes not really possible, in order to make something very creative, but at the same time, I think this is a kind of balance. I love that word, honour: that’s a great way of describing the process. I do think it’s possible, as your mentor said, to honour, but it’s also possible to stay true. It’s possible to do a few things at the same time.

P: What is it that draws you to particular translations?

SDB: It’s never one thing, but generally with Shakespeare’s sonnets, it was the emotional impact and the feeling of what he was writing about. The poems that I’ve translated so far are about people feeling like they’ve been unlucky, they haven’t been acknowledged. They haven’t been recognized. That’s always what drives me towards a text. It’s the feeling that I’m writing about people who are feeling very much on the margins.

Shakespeare doesn’t, obviously, use that phrase, but all his descriptions speak to me of people who are on the margins. I’m interested in his response to that as well, the fact that he turns it around, he turns this into almost an advantage in the sonnets, and I find that totally fascinating. I think, as somebody who thinks about these things, I’ll always be drawn to that, first and foremost.

P: Let’s talk for a minute about this adage of what is “lost in translation.”

SDB: At the moment, I’m reading The Idiot. I don’t speak Russian, apart from some basic phrases, but I feel I’m missing something in the English translation of The Idiot. And it’s considered to be a very good translation. I’m just not quite sure what it is, but it’s as if some of the emotional impact has been lost. Maybe it follows the original narrative very closely. But I would love to read another version of that book, and think about, what’s the difference here between these two translations? So, I think there’s something lost there, but it’s quite difficult to say.

Sometimes in translation it’s worth losing certain aspects of the original. Let’s look, for example, at the Irish translation of Dracula by Seán Ó Cuirrín which is an amazing translation. It’s just unbelievable, the skill with which the writer translates, but also the language that he uses to describe what Bram Stoker wrote about in the original and the narration of the original. There’s actually quite a lot that’s missing. Yet, for whatever reason, it doesn’t affect the translation. The translation has become a new work, a new, fresh, original work in its own right. And the stuff that’s been lost for an Irish speaker doesn’t seem to matter that much, because you read a book in a very holistic way, so when you’re reading the translation, you’re approaching it with a new and fresh mind. You’re not doing it in an analytical sense, you’re doing it in a very holistic sense, so it seems like a perfect little round egg, like a perfect whole.

P: In your article about this translation, you say that, “Dracula’s character is reimagined, creating a more nuanced narrative than the original.” So the process of losing some things might give us the opportunity to gain some things.

SDB: Exactly. It’s like gaining a different aspect to the character of Dracula. If we think about books as personalities, if you think of a certain book as a masculine text, it gains a feminine side to itself, or if there’s a feminine text, or a feminine sort of personality, it gains something masculine to the translation, so it gains a completely different aspect. We almost see a personality change in the text, and I just find that really fascinating. The original is still the bottom line, the golden standard, for want of a better word, but I don’t think of these things in hierarchies. As an Irish speaker, I approach a translation with a very open mind, and see it as a holistic experience, because I think it is an experience. Maybe it comes down to the difference between how people approach literature. Some people approach it in an analytical way, and obviously with translation, there are elements of analysis, but I think of literature as something that we actually experience. Stories are something that I feel we go through. We pass through them as much as they pass through us. That may be the fundamental difference. How is it that we approach literature ourselves as individuals is an interesting question.

P: Emotional resonance is very important to you in what you translate. How do you translate emotion on the page?

SDB: That’s very interesting as well, that whole idea of how emotions get translated. I mean, that’s one of the most difficult things to do. In a way, it probably sounds a bit wacky, but I almost go into a trance-like state, and I’m completely in that moment. I get into the poem; I literally climb into the poem. I almost swim with it, and I let the emotion go through me, and I go through the emotions. It’s a very, very unusual experience. I think that’s why I enjoy it so much, because it’s a very immersive experience. I find myself literally swimming in language, and I really enjoy that.

P: Let’s talk a little bit about voice, both in general and how we handle voice in a translation.

SDB: That’s so difficult to do. It’s easier to do that with music, obviously. It’s probably the most difficult thing about writing to find that voice. That just shows how closely aligned creative writing and translation are, and how much the act of translation and the practice of translation tunes our minds to the creative writing process. I think it’s a real tool, an amazing and excellent tool for any creative writer, and I think it’s no coincidence that many top creative writers in Irish, since the foundation of the state, were also translators, for example Máirtín Ó Cadhain, author of Cré na Cille. That was their main job. They would have translated material. It’s no coincidence because I think voice is like one of the Holy Grails of writing.

P: Do you surrender your own voice to the voice of the author that you’re translating, or does the translation end up becoming an amalgamation of your voice and the voice of the author?

SDB: That’s a great question. No matter what poems I translate, say, recently I was translating a bit of Mark Twain, what I feel when I translate these poems is an affinity with the author. I don’t mean the actual author as a person. I mean the actual author as a writer. For me, it is a conversation between me and the author, and it feels like I’m actually engaging with something deep. That’s a very rare experience, so I think that’s one of the amazing things about translation, that it can bring you so, so close to an author. I think it’s very much like playing music. For example, if you play a piece of music by a particular composer, say, Schubert or Bob Dylan, it doesn’t matter what genre it is. If you really love that piece of music, and if you feel it in your heart, if you can feel that music, and if you can translate that music into something that people will want to hear, that’s a connection with Bob Dylan, the artist, or with Schubert, the artist. And that’s a very, very unique experience. I think it’s outside of time, which is an amazing thing as well, to connect with them even if that person lived a few centuries ago, or in a different place, or if you’re never going to meet them, or never hear them in concert.

For me, it is a conversation between me and the author, and it feels like I’m actually engaging with something deep. That’s a very rare experience, so I think that’s one of the amazing things about translation, that it can bring you so, so close to an author.

P: Tell us about how your training as a musician influenced you as a translator.

SDB: In the Academy, we were trained in exactly how to recognize, first of all, the era of the piece and the music, but second of all who that might be? Which composer? I think music training is an amazing background for anything to do with language, because of how it attunes your ear to, obviously, alliteration, meter, repetition but also to prosody in poetry, the sounds themselves, the effect and the emotional impact that sounds can have on us. I’m very interested in sound. Not just in music, but in sound as well, and the impact of different kinds of sounds, whether that’s in film or in poetry and translation and prose.

P: Let’s talk about domestication vs foreignization in translation. You’ve said that the Irish translation of Dracula is very Irish, uses a lot of Irish idioms and proverbs.

SDB: It’s funny about the domestication arguments, because I’m really interested in that too, and I think sometimes people are drawn to translations that are just that bit tidier and neater, and they have nice endings, and it’s nice and happy. That’s a big generalization, I know it is. But that translator creates a slightly wilder version of Dracula, and a funny version of him. So, we get this funny man. He uses so many idioms in Irish, which are quite funny, they’re quite off-the-wall, and Ó Cuirrín the translator has incredibly colorful descriptions of Dracula and the situations that he gets himself into. He may not mean it to be funny, but it is funny. Even though it’s been cut down and he’s tethered it a bit, and he’s thrown out bits and pieces, and he’s added in God here and there and everywhere but at the same time, the wildness at the heart of Dracula remains. This kind of uncontrolled, but in this case, crazy old man, is still there.

It’s funny when you talk about domestication in the context of feminist writings. There’s another storyteller, Peig Sayers, whom I’ve also written some articles on. She was a native Irish speaker from the Gaeltacht and lived on the Kerry Blasket Islands, and she was a seanchaí, which is basically a storyteller, but her life story was written down and then that was translated into English. There’s a couple of different translations. The main English translation was very good, but it presented her as an old woman rather than the young girl she is in the original. The old woman is much more inclined to cliche, she’s much more inclined to fall back on proverbs and general wisdom. Whereas, the young girl in the original has been lost to some extent because so many people read the translation rather than go to the original. That’s one of the things I was trying to do, to turn people’s attention to this young, very vulnerable, but very raw girlish experience, this girl who experienced all the structural inequalities of the time. I think I did manage that, through articles that I’ve written about her. A couple of people have said to me that they’ve changed their views about her since reading those articles, so I’m very happy about that. I suppose that’s my own feminist perspective: that she wasn’t always an old lady. This was a girl who had experienced all sorts of injustices, structural and otherwise. It was one of my life’s ambitions, to be honest, to write that article, nothing to do with promotions, or my career, it was very important to me to write about a girl of that era. She was born in the middle of the 19th century, and she lived into the 1950s. So, she lived a long and fruitful life, but women at that time, and girls, would have had such difficult lives in many ways. To me, that was my feminist take on translation. I was saying, okay, the translation is great, but you know what? Go to the original and look again at this girl. Find the girl in the original. Not the old lady who had become famous and who was kind of coming out with cliches and who was feted by the international scholars. So, it does matter. It matters a lot to me.

P: English is a colonial language vis-a-vis Ireland and many places in the world. Let’s talk about the hegemony of the English language, and to what an extent do we reinforce it when we translate into English, or when we read an English translation? To what degree do we subvert it?

SDB: That’s a really good question, because again, I don’t think there’s any one correct answer to that. By translating some contemporary Irish novels into the English language, there’s a case to be made that this is not the best thing for the Irish language, because it means people are going to go to the translation rather than the Irish language, etc. It’s being translated into the language of the coloniser. But there’s an argument to be made for translation into the language of the coloniser, simply because the vast majority of the populace, including immigrants, now speak English. And in some cases, in Ireland, people with lower levels of education might not have knowledge of the Irish language. There’s a kind of a class element to this, which is not really talked about, that’s a very hush-hush kind of topic. I think it’s just something maybe people are a bit uneasy talking about, because it’s difficult and very nuanced. It’s not a black and white issue.

This is one of the reasons I think it’s important to translate into English, to introduce people to Irish works in the English language. For most of the population in this country, English is a language we share, even if it’s not their first language. It’s a shared language although, of course, there are many different dialects. I think for that reason, it’s very powerful to introduce people who have also suffered at the hands of colonisers to our experience. So, translation can turn the language of the coloniser into a tool for inclusion and change and knowledge.

P: English is also the lingua franca of our times. There are a lot of people in the world who read English even if it’s not their first language, who wouldn’t have access to literature in Irish unless it’s translated.

SDB: Absolutely, that door is shut to them if I don’t engage with them initially through English. That door is closed firmly to the vast majority, unless they make an absolutely massive effort. But the reality of life is such that if people are struggling to bring up their kids, put food on the table, they aren’t going to be able to spend the time to engage with learning the Irish language. It’s only going to be the preserve of the minority, of more elite groups in society. It’s not that I’m not interested in those groups, don’t get me wrong, but I’m interested in reaching the masses. I’m interested in reaching ordinary people, and that’s one of the reasons why I enjoy writing about Irish literature in the English language. What I’m saying is, okay, so we all went to school, we all had these experiences with Irish, but you know what? I’m going to give you a bit of a different slant on it. Introduce you to something about Irish literature that maybe you haven’t thought about before, and that might kickstart somebody’s journey. Whether that’s a short journey or a long journey, that’s totally up to them. It might be an interest, it might even just be an awareness, might be a temporary thing, and that’s okay too, as far as I’m concerned. It’s why I’m very interested in learning French. There are so many immigrants who come to Ireland who are African. They speak French as well as their own indigenous languages. I’d love to be able to speak to them, and if their English isn’t that good, one of the ways I can get to speak to them is through the language of another coloniser, which is French. So, it’s a bit like that. It’s a subversion, turning something around that was used against us, and that was forced on us.

You always have to meet the language where it is at the moment. I need English where it is now. I don’t see it as English versus Irish. I don’t have that attitude to it. I don’t think of it as the two languages at loggerheads. I think of them as in dialogue, as they are in many different places in the world.