“Found In Translation” Remarks on the Irish, Spanish and Latin American Literary Festival (ISLA)
Instituto Cervantes, Dublin, 2nd November 2012
Ambassadors
Distinguished guests
Señoras y Señores, Ladies and Gentlemen
Muchas gracias por su amable invitación. Me es muy grato estar aquí con ustedes esta noche.
[Many thanks for your kind invitation. I am delighted to be here with you this evening.]
It gives me great pleasure to open this Irish, Spanish and Latin American Literary Festival. I am delighted to be present at the first Festival of its kind to be held.
Tar éis dom bhur gclár spreagúil a scrúdú agus tar éis radharc a fháil ar an éagsúlacht mhór de scríbhneoirí, filí, ealaíontóirí, déantóirí scannán, acadúlaithe agus smaointeoirí ildánacha a bheas páirteach faoi théamaí éagsúla sa dá lá romhainn, tá mé cinnte go sásóidh cur i bhfeidhm an mhórsmaoinimh seo go hiomlán na hardaidhmeanna a bhí ag lucht a cheaptha.
[Having studied your exciting programme, and seen the extraordinary array of talented writers, poets, artists, film makers, academics and intellectuals who will participate across different themes over the next two days, I feel sure that the execution of this great idea will fully vindicate the aspirations of those who conceived it.]
I have no great fondness for acronyms and usually make every effort to avoid them. However, I will make an exception for the acronym for your Festival – ISLA – which happily conveys a very apt sense of the mission and tone of this venture. On this island, you are now bringing together a community of people who share a love and enthusiasm for literature that straddles two continents, who are curious to know more about each other and to explore the commonality of ideas and culture that link Ireland to Spain to Latin America. I sincerely hope that ISLA 2012 will be the beginning of many more such Festivals and that they will become a fixture on the Irish cultural landscape for years to come.
I would like to thank and congratulate the relevant Ambassadors, Embassies and also, of course, the Instituto Cervantes and all the other organisers and sponsors, for the great effort and energy they have shown in making this Festival a reality.
Me es especialmente grato estar aquí ya que recientemente he tenido el placer de visitar Chile, Brasil y Argentina, una zona del mundo que ocupa un lugar especial en mi corazón. También me encantó tener la oportunidad el verano pasado de visitar el norte de España y estudiar el precioso idioma y la maravillosa cultura de Cervantes.
[I am particularly happy to be here as I have recently returned from visiting Chile, Brazil and Argentina, a part of the world which has a cherished place in my heart. I was also delighted to have the opportunity during the summer to visit the north of Spain and to spend some time studying the wonderful language and culture of Cervantes. ]
During these visits, I was struck again by the depth of engagement with Irish culture and writing that exists in Latin America and how our two traditions have influenced and enriched each other. With Spain also, as recent research is increasingly showing, Irish ties go back to pre-history, with the Atlantic providing the ever present background to an ongoing fascination with Spain that has left many echoes in our oral culture, our history and of course our literature, both in the English and Irish languages.
Looking at your programme, I was struck by how many participants in the Festival have been active across a range of languages, writing in their own vernaculars but also translating from others and, in doing so, creating in the translation, something new and different from the original work. In this regard, I am reminded of Beckett’s translations of Mexico’s great poets, including the works of Alfonso Reyes, Enrique Gonzalo Martinez and Ramon Lopez Velarde. In this same spirit, I believe that your readings and discussions over the next few days will, in themselves, create something new and valuable, strengthening and renewing the literary engagement and connection between our cultures.
In one of your contributors, Keith Ridgeway, I see you have indeed a direct Irish link to Argentina’s great Master, Jorge Luis Borges, whom Keith describes as having met when he was only five years old. In that piece Keith also describes how Borges told his father in 1963 that there was nothing in the world that was not in Ireland. Borges, of course, referred to Ireland and Irish themes in many of his most famous stories, including “The Mirror and the Mask”, as well as “The Garden of Forking Paths”.
In his seminal essay on “The Argentine Writer and Tradition”, Borges used the Irish tradition as a model for how countries which may be regarded as being on the periphery of another tradition could recreate and reinvent a literature in their own image. He was conscious of the pleasing irony that a country on which the state vernacular of English was imposed was sufficiently adaptive to use that imposition to foster the creative genius of four Nobel laureates in literature. Borges made this comparative reference in 1951 and I think we may say that Latin American writing, both in Spanish and Portuguese, has never looked back.
Apart from Borges, great novels written by Latin American writers with Irish links include Gabriel Garcia Marquez whose “The General in his Labyrinth”, about the last, sad days of the great Simon Bolivar, is based on the memoirs of his Irish aide de camp, Daniel Florencio O’Leary.
More recently, Mario Vargas Llosa’s book about Roger Casement , “El sueño del Celta”, has been widely celebrated, bringing to the consciousness of Ireland and the world an aspect of the Irish revolutionary’s lifework that deserves to be highlighted: his deep commitment to fundamental human rights, and the rights of indigenous peoples to fair ownership and access to communal resources.
Indisputably a man before his time, I am delighted to see that an Irish Government supported exhibition on Roger Casement entitled, “Roger Casement in Ibero-America, Rubber, the Amazon and the Atlantic World, 1884 – 1916”, was recently opened at the Casa de America in Madrid with the participation of Mario Vargas Llosa. I was also very pleased to have the opportunity to discuss Casement – and many other issues – with the Nobel laureate when he and his wife visited me recently in Áras an Uachtaráin.
During my recent visit to Chile, I was privileged to make a visit to the former home and resting place in Isla Negra of the great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. As well as being the author of the most evocative love poetry ever written, Neruda was in his life and work a radical democrat; one who truly, in every fibre of his being, believed that everyone matters – every man, woman and child – and that the human adventure is a common endeavour to which all contribute, none taking precedence over another in the pursuit of dignity, justice and hope. For Neruda, the dead and the disappeared, as well as their memory, also mattered; as he powerfully said, “to be forgotten is to die twice”
Irish writers, perhaps even more than other Irish people, have a long tradition of emigrating, of going abroad to seek new inspirations and to reimagine themselves and their writing elsewhere. We have only to remember James Joyce in this respect. In the more recent past, three critically acclaimed novels published in English have all been by Irish writers writing in New York – Colum Mc Cann’s “Let the Great World Spin”, Joseph O’Neill’s “Netherland” and Colm Tóibín’s “Brooklyn”.
The United States and New York in particular, has always been a source of inspiration for Irish writers but so too, for many years, has Europe and Spain. Long before he wrote “Brooklyn”, Colm Toibín spent three years in Barcleona and drew on this experience to write his first novel “South” and a very fine memoir – “Homage to Barcelona”. He subsequently wrote a powerful novel set in Argentina, “The Colour of the Night”.
For many Irish people, when Irish literature and Spain are considered, Kate O’Brien is the name that might immediately occur to them. Reading those of her books which are set in Spain, the intensity of the Spanish experience, her incredible sense of place and atmosphere is almost tangible. Both in “Mary Lavelle” and in “That Lady”, the strength of the connection felt by the author to the country in which the novels are placed, are a huge contribution to the power of the writing.
The latter novel is particularly effective in conveying a sense of the repressive atmosphere associated with the court of Philip II. For many an Irish young person, in the cold and damp of an Irish winter, these books represented, both in their themes and in their settings, a true introduction to another world.
I am, of course, also delighted at the emphasis on poetry in the festival and am, in particular, impressed by the depth and strength of poetic representation in the programme. Séamus Heaney, in his great collection on “The Redress of Poetry”, speaks of how Poetry balances “the scales of reality towards some transcendent equilibrium”. We hear much in these modern times of the death of poetry and, in this regard, Heaney goes on to say that “poetry cannot afford to lose its fundamentally self-delighting inventiveness”. The ISLA festival, with its strong intercultural elements, and the many poets represented like Máighréad Medbh from Limerick and Lorna Shaughnessy of NUI Galway, who, in addition to their own work, also produced works of translation from other languages, would seem to have that self –delighting inventiveness of which Heaney speaks.
They are of course, as translators, continuing in the fine tradition of Beckett and Borges, who, at the age of 9, published a translation of Oscar Wilde’s “The Happy Prince” for a Buenos Aires newspaper, probably his first published work and the beginning of that lifelong engagement between the great Master and Irish literature which was to result in such wonderful and creative work.
I would like to end here with a story to which I already referred during my recent visit to Chile. This is a story about a poem and its translation which touches on many of the themes which are integral to the ISLA festival. It is said that Oliver St John Gogarty, after writing the original version of the poem Valparaiso, presented it over lunch one day to the Irish polymath priest, poet and mathematician, Fr. Padraig de Brún. Fr. De Brún went on to translate it into Irish on one of the restaurants paper napkins with the remark – on completing the translation – that it was now a good poem. The subsequent publications usually rely on the De Brún poem rather than the Gogarty original – truly a case of poetry being “Found in Translation”.
I would like to leave you with this poem, so emblematic of all that the ISLA festival wishes to achieve over the next few days and so celebratory of the many literary links between English, Irish and literature in Spanish which this festival so beautifully encompasses.
An Long (The Ship)
Tháinig long ó Valparaíso
Scaoileadh téad a seol sa chuan,
Chuir a hainm dom i gcuimhne
Ríocht na Gréine, Tír na mBua.
Translation
A ship arrived from Valparaíso
Dropped its anchor in the bay,
Her name reminded me of kingdoms,
Sunlit countries far away.
Les deseo mucho éxito con sus lecturas y coloquios a lo largo de los próximos días. En esta estación de decreciente luz y escasez de sol, espero que el recuerdo y la promesa de lejanos países iluminados por el sol continúen siendo inspiración para la literatura irlandesa, española e iberoamericana del futuro.
[I wish you well with your readings and discussions over the next few days. In this season of diminishing daylight and scarcity of sun, I hope that the memory and the promise of sunlit countries far away will continue to serve as an inspiration for Irish, Spanish and Latin American literature for the future.]
Señoras y Señores
Quisiera concluir dándoles las gracias por la calidez de su recibimiento.
[Ladies and Gentlemen, may I conclude by extending to you my thanks for the warmth of your reception]
Muchísimas gracias. Go raibh míle maith agaibh. Thank you very much.