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My purpose in my dissertation, from which this paper derives, is to ascertain the religious, political, and/or cultural influences upon translators and how those influences appear in their translations, which in turn have their own impact upon contemporary Irish society. By translating the material in front of them in socially (or religiously or politically) prescribed ways, the translators are adapting the material to conform to the standards of the time in which they were produced. Translation thus becomes a kind of technology that is modified or adapted as times change.
The text I take as my focus here is the Táin Bó Cúalnge (TBC), one of Ireland's originary epics. Lady Gregory's translation of this tale appears in her Cuchulain of Muirthemne, which W.B. Yeats called "the best [book] that has come out of Ireland in my time" (in Gregory [1902] 1970:vii). Gregory's translation is well known because of all she chose to omit from the original: "I left out a good deal I thought you would not care about for one reason or another" (vi). For the most part this includes bodily functions and sexual antics. Joep Leerssen has argued that Gregory should not be condemned for the prudishness of her translation. Instead, he argues, it should be understood as a function of the Victorian time period she was working in, a time that did not condone the open discussion of sexual matters (32).1 However, because Lady Gregory's text was so popular and influential, it became the way English readers understood what happened in the TBC, and thus may have helped to perpetuate the sexual repression of Ireland into the mid-20th century. The influence of a translation often goes well beyond the community of readers it reaches, even into the fabric of society itself.
What I focus on in particular here are the translations provided in the 1960s by Cecile O'Rahilly and Thomas Kinsella. O'Rahilly's translation was produced by two scholarly organizations, the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies and the Irish Texts Society. Kinsella's The Tain was published for a wider audience, and is accompanied by brush drawings by Louis Le Brocquy. Because the TBC is a long text, I limit my focus to their attitudes toward social and sexual relationships as exemplified in...