Dr O’Malley recently concluded his short-term visiting fellowship at the Hub where he was conducting research on his project ‘Ireland and Europe: Representations of Europe in Irish Literature and Literary Debate since 1940’. In addition to giving a seminar to postgraduate students on his research and participating in the Hub’s community research initiatives, Dr O’Malley engaged in a fascinating conversation with Professor Michael Cronin on many of the prevalent themes of his research including language and Europe, how Ireland sees itself in relation to Europe (both East and West), and his work on the theatre and publishing company, Field Day.
Dr O’Malley is an Assistant Professor, and Chair of the Literature section, at the Department of English, University of Rijeka. During his two-month fellowship in association with the School of English, he examined the Hubert Butler papers held in Trinity’s Library.
Opening the online Fellow in Focus, Professor Michael Cronin, 1776 Professor of French and Director of the Centre for Literary and Cultural Translation in Trinity College Dublin described Dr O’Malley’s work as “inspirational” and “provocative”, providing an insight into what happens when “one shifts from one language to another, from one culture to another.”
“Identity is always an imagined process”, Dr O’Malley commented as he reflected on how he came to focus on translation. Prompted to think about his own experience of navigating identity, living in both London and Rome and learning a new language, he said that he was “constantly brought back to literature and notions of identity”.
The Field Day play Translations became the “case study” for the project he brought to Florence for his doctoral studies in translation and European identity, and also set the scene for much of his later work, he added.
Although Field Day was “explicitly a cultural intervention into the Troubles” Dr O’Malley explained, its output “hardly touches on the Troubles directly”; instead, its focus “comes down to language all the time.”
When you’re on the periphery of Europe, there is another Europe…Europe is always somewhere else.
Alluding to the contradiction of what it means to be Irish in English, Dr O’Malley said that Translations allows “allows all the problematics to come out.”
Discussing the notion of the translator as ‘traitor’, Dr O’Malley said that in some ways it is necessary to be a traitor; “the traitor is somebody who has a foot in both worlds” but at the same time “an excess of fidelity brings about a betrayal.”
“One of the most important things about translation is that it’s never done, it always has to be redone”, Dr O’Malley concluded adding that identity is likewise a “constant dialogue.”
Turning the conversation to Ireland’s relationship with Europe, and the focus of Dr O’Malley’s research fellowship at Trinity, Professor Cronin asked what is meant when we speak about Europe in Ireland. Dr O’Malley said he is concerned with how Europe has been mobilised in Irish discourse since 1940. Speaking of writers such as O’Faolain, Heaney and Flann O’Brien (Brian O'Nolan), he said that in Ireland, Europe is a concept and is never specified. There is a sense that “one should be more European”, he added, although for many Irish writers this extends only as far as western Europe.
“Paris is always the shorthand” Dr O’Malley commented, contrasting this with his current home in Croatia where Germany is the bigger reference point. “When you’re on the periphery of Europe, there is another Europe…Europe is always somewhere else.”
Podcast:
TLRHub · TLRH | Fellow in Focus with Dr Aidan O'Malley (University of Rijeka)
About Aidan O’Malley
Aidan O’Malley is an Assistant Professor, and Chair of the Literature section, at the Department of English, University of Rijeka. He received his Ph.D. from the European University Institute, Florence, and is the author of two books: Field Day and the Translation of Irish Identities: Performing Contradictions (2011), and (in Croatian) Being Irish in English: Literature, Language and the (Post-) Colonial Experience in Ireland, 1600-2000 (2021). Besides numerous chapters and articles on Irish literature, he has also edited with Eve Patten the volume, Ireland, West to East, Irish Cultural Connections with Central and Eastern Europe (2014), and a special issue of the European Journal of English Studies (17: 2, August 2013) on ‘Myths of Europe: East of Venice’.