Darach Ó Séaghdha Author and linguist

In Calling 353, bestselling Motherfoclóir author and podcaster Darach Ó Séaghdha casts a linguistic eye on how we talk about what it means to be Irish, the signs we post to each other about Irishness – and what really lies beneath it all. 

IN 1923, THE newly-minted Free State had a mission and a mandate for big changes.

After fighting for freedom and independence for so long, there was a reasonable expectation that when it arrived, things would feel different. And one of the big changes expected was a new, central place for the Irish language in Irish life.

Then, just as now, politicians and thinkers approached the Irish language with different amounts of enthusiasm. Additionally, there was no universal agreement on the best approach to promote or support the use of the language in the diverse range of human activities where language might be used.

However, the cynicism and fatalism that attends much discussion around Irish language policy had not yet sunk in, and the proposal to get Ireland reading hit bestseller novels in Irish was not dismissed out of hand.

While novels were the storytelling tradition of industrial countries with middle-classes, the Irish literary tradition was rooted in poetry and drama. But people in the new state, undergoing a process of massive electrification, they wanted novels.

Should the Free State find exciting new literary voices working as Gaeilge and bring them to a wider audience, or should they focus on translating bestselling titles that readers had already heard of?

Finance Minister Ernest Blythe took the latter view. In particular, Blythe was very interested to discover that the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works had a clause at the time regarding translation rights.

If an author of a particular work had not asserted their right to have that work translated into a certain language within ten years of publication, a publisher in that certain language could have a crack at translating and publishing it without paying royalties.

This meant that Blythe and the publishing scheme, An Gúm, had free access to a range of beloved works to translate and publish for a reading public keen on preparing for the inevitable and imminent transition to an all-Irish speaking country. From the mid-1920s onwards, translations were commissioned of works by H Rider Haggard, Joseph Conrad, HG Wells, and Arthur Conan Doyle among others.

But the translation of Dracula by Dublin’s own Bram Stoker was of particular interest.

I Loves Me County… And Me Cló Gaelach

The man chosen for the job was Waterford’s Seán Ó Cuirrín, a respected scholar and author in his own right. So respected was he that rather than just applying for a translation job like some randomer, he was approached for the task and asked which novel he would choose from the range available if he would deign to translate one.

He chose Dracula. However, there was friction almost immediately when he found out the translation would be printed in a Roman typeface instead of the Cló Gaelach, the font and typeface which was created with the grammatical and spelling features of the Irish language in mind.

Ó Cuirrín lamented at length about how ugly all those Hs looked where elegant little ponc séimhithes should have been – and he wasn’t too keen about the letter V either, which raised its own problems translating a book about vampires featuring a character called Van Helsing.

Translating character names in works of fiction is a messy business – should a German translation of Die Hard call John McClane “Johannes Merkel” or something? Most of us would think not.

Ó Cuirrín took a mixed approach, changing English names – John Harker becomes Seoin Uí Earcair, Mina Murray becomes Mín Ní Mhuirí and later Mín Uí Earcair, Lucy Westenra becomes Laoise Westenra (Westenra being an Anglo-Irish name, something which Stoker would have been acutely aware of).

Van Helsing, however, as a character who presents as foreign to the narrators, does not have his name changed to Irish to maintain this difference. And Dracula is, of course, Dracula – Cunta Dracula to give him his full title in the translated work.

Just because Van Helsing had a V in his name didn’t mean that Ó Cuirrín was going to sprinkle them everywhere and he had no intention of translating vampire as vaimpír, which you will see in some dictionaries. Instead he chose the word súmaire – an old word meaning something that sucks, like a leech or a whirlpool that pulls ships under the sea. In some cases, the word had also been used to refer to a drunkard.

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When writing an adventure story set in strange lands, the loanwords from these places can add to the mystique of the narrative. This is something that translators have to struggle with. The German word for a bat is fledermaus (winged mouse, or flutter mouse) which has a very different music to it than the blunt syllable of the English word.

And while lots of lovely words for bat exist in Irish, Ó Cuirínn chose one that reflected this syllable-count and overall vibe – feascarluch, flutter mouse. This was a word which Father Dinneen defined as “dormouse” in his dictionary, but they both came from different Gaeltachts so maybe it’s a matter of regional differences rather than one of them being right and the other being a big fool.

But replicating that foreign feel in other parts of the text was a bridge too far for the translator. For example, how did Dracula speak? In the original book and in the many cinematic adaptations of Dracula, the Count’s voice, accent and stilted formality are as distinct to him as his cape and teeth.

But Ó Cuirínn wanted to flaunt his fluency with this main character far more than he wanted to mimic this, and he made the Transylvanian toff speak Irish like a Waterford fisherman, with all the poetic alliteration that phrasing that is closer to the heart of the language than memorised rules.

After a very long translation process, the Irish version of Dracula was published in 1933, when a new government had taken over. After Blythe’s approach of going for maximum appeal (and, in fairness, the translation of Dracula was a bestseller) the new Fianna Fáil government moved the emphasis to capturing stories about life in Gaeltacht areas before these were lost forever.

The afterlife 

The seven year meticulous translation of the vampire masterpiece no doubt infuriated the officials who were paying the bill, but unlike many of the other translations from this period which were delivered on time and under budget, Ó Cuirínn’s Dracula is still available in bookshops and studied at university.

The debate on whether to support new original content in Irish or to translate hits will continue long after I’m gone, but this version of Dracula is a rare example of both boxes being ticked, with the translator’s artistic fingerprints adding so much to the skeleton of Stoker’s novel as to be a new piece of art in its own right.