'Death and Renewal': Translating Old Irish Texts in Nineteenth-Century Ireland

This article investigates the conflicted cultural identity of those nineteenth-century Irish-speaking antiquarians working on translations of Old Irish texts. Giving voice to the translators, this article will show how they were frustrated in attempts to turn their own knowledge into authority by being members of the Catholic Gaelic Irish in a country dominated by the Protestant Ascendancy. It will examine contemporaneous writings and correspondence to reveal how the translators felt about being accused of complicity in the Anglicisation of Ireland's literary heritage, in the erasure of their own language, and traditions, by means of their translations into English for the Anglophone world.