translation from the Irish into English and Latin began when scholars, chroniclers [see Anglo-Irish chronicles], and ideologues sought to describe the culture of a civilization whose written records were exclusively preserved in manuscript form. One of the first records of translation having been made from the Irish occurs in Edmund Spenser's A View of the Present State of Ireland (?1596, published 1633), where he expresses concern that the invention he found in bardic poetry is being abused for seditious purposes. In 1627 Conall Mac Geoghegan translated the Annals of Clonmacnoise into English, thereby saving this material from oblivion, as the original text was subsequently lost or destroyed. While Geoffrey Keating was finishing Foras Feasa ar Éirinn Michael Kearney from Ballyloskye, Co. Tipperary, was translating it into English. Meanwhile a coordinated programme of research, based in St Anthony's College in Louvain, was amassing hagiographical material in Irish and Latin throughout Ireland, resulting in John Colgan's Acta Sanctorum Hiberniae (1645). In Ireland James Ware employed Dubhaltach Mac Fhir Bhisigh to translate for him as he studied early Irish history. In 1660 John Lynch translated Keating into Latin. In the early years of the 18th cent. there was a renewal of interest in Gaelic material, especially in Dublin. Dermod O'Connor produced a translation of Keating's history. By the middle years of the 18th cent. the first wave of Celticism had begun to make itself felt in the literary culture of London and Edinburgh. James Macpherson's Ossian stimulated a widespread debate about the quality and authenticity of Scottish and Irish materials. Joseph Cooper Walker's Historical Memoirs of the Irish Bards (1786) was the first major literary outcome of the influence of Celticism in Ireland. Charlotte Brooke, one of Walker's contributors, went on to compile an anthology of translated Irish verse, Reliques of Irish Poetry (1789). Thomas Moore drew upon the story of Deirdre [see Longes mac nUislenn] in ‘Avenging and Bright’ in the Irish Melodies (1808-34). Theophilus O'Flanagan's Transactions of the Gaelic Society (1808) included translations from the Deirdre story, but also a translation of Tadhg mac Dáire Mac Bruaideadha's hortatory ode to Donnchadh Ó Briain. From the early 19th cent. there is a steady flow of translated Irish material, particularly poetry, but also, with the foundation of bodies such as the Irish Archaeological and Ossianic Societies, scholarly translations of prose texts. Amongst the 19th-cent. poets who adapted and translated Gaelic material are: J. J. Callanan; Samuel Ferguson; Edward Walsh; James Clarence Mangan; Standish Hayes O'Grady; George Sigerson; and Douglas Hyde. Scholars who edited and translated Irish prose texts include Eugene O'Curry and John O'Donovan. A second wave of Celticism broke out in the 1890s, leading to the founding of the Gaelic League, which had a policy of editing and translating Gaelic texts. This new Celticist impluse had as one of its manifestations the popularist cult of the so-called Celtic Twilight; but it also led to the foundation of the School of Irish Studies in Dublin, and the beginnings of a distinguished tradition of modern Irish scholarship.
Bibliography
Michael Cronin, Translating Ireland (1996).
