Translator’s Note: “Switch” by Seán Ó Ríordáin

Seán Ó Ríordáin’s “Malairt” (“Switch”) is a poem all about transformations. Piero di Cosimo was in the habit of painting human faces on animals (as in The Forest Fire), and in “Switch” Ó Ríordáin explores a similarly empathetic exchange between human and horse. This first point of contact, however, is sorrow. Can we truly grasp the horse’s sadness? What use does the horse have for our concern? Related questions face the poem’s translator. Irish and English are very different beasts, and Irish syntax offers many opportunities for “foreignizing” transpositions into English, many of which have fossilized in Hiberno-English. J.M. Synge exploited this to add native color to the dialogue in his plays (“Is it for the like of that you’re wanting?”), but the technique quickly descended into cliche, or “Kiltartanese.” One effect of this style in English is to reinforce perceptions of the Irish text as speaking in a traditional or archaic register, whereas Seán Ó Ríordáin was in fact a radical modernizer of Irish-language poetry. Consciously or otherwise, then, I avoided trying to mimic Irish syntactic constructions, though I did permit myself an echo in the translation’s first word of Christy’s address to his horse in Beckett’s radio play All That Fall.

Much modern Irish-language poetry in English comes to us courtesy of cribs supplied to translators by the authors. I avoided this route, only to find I had exposed myself to a different kind of inauthenticity. Fine translations of this poem have already been produced by Ciarán Carson and Patrick Crotty, and rereading these after my effort I found I had reproduced the title “Switch,” first used by Crotty. While “Malairt” straightforwardly means “transformation” or “switch,” the synonymous overtones of a drover’s rod makes “switch” particularly felicitous. Still, such unanimity among translators is either strangely reassuring or strangely worrying. In his Minima Moralia, Adorno suggested that “ethics today means not being at home in one’s house.” Whether in Irish or English, Ó Ríordáin’s work has an unsettling effect, and “Malairt” leaves us more than a little ill at ease in our own skin. Perhaps a fitting translation of the poem should leave us ill at ease in the skin of our language, too.