Describing him as “Mr Translation Studies” in Ireland, Professor Barry McCrea introduced Michael Cronin as a “pioneer” in bringing translation studies “in new directions”.
Michael Cronin is 1776 Professor of French and Director of the Centre for Literary and Cultural Translation in Trinity College Dublin. He has written widely on the area of translation, including Translating Ireland: Translation, Languages and Identity (1996) and Translation and Globalization (2003) while his more recent works focus on language and ecology or “eco-criticism”, including Eco-Translation: Translation and Ecology in the Age of the Anthropocene (2017) and Irish and Ecology: An Ghaeilge agus an Éiceolaíocht (2019).
Speaking of his own interest in other languages and an “openness to other places”, Professor Cronin spoke of his mother’s passion for the Irish language and literature and how stories of his grandmother, who worked as an English teacher in France during the First World War and later studied in Germany, were also part of a “legacy of stories” remembered by his mother and very much part of his background growing up.
TLRHub · TLRH | Faculty in Focus: Professor Micheal Cronin
The online Faculty in Focus conversation covered a number of topics in Professor Cronin’s work including minority languages, linguistic complexity and post-colonialism, and the power dynamics between languages.
Professor Barry McCrea also questioned the scholar on the relationship between the loss of linguistic diversity and the loss of biodiversity, and how “eco-criticism” has become a dominant theme of Professor Cronin’s work in recent years.
Professor Cronin said his interest in this topic was sparked in some of the earlier work he has done on translation and globalisation and the sense that “language and language change” were completely ignored by economists, geographers, and others.
...one of the reasons we are in the ecological mess that we’re in is that the systems of communication have broken down.
In terms of the current climate crisis, Professor Cronin said that “one of the reasons we are in the ecological mess that we’re in is that the systems of communication have broken down”. This “catastrophic failure” in “inter-species communication” has prompted him to think about how we can, through translation, “maintain the interactions between these different living systems.”
Professor Cronin has also written extensively on travel and tourism, and his forthcoming book with Cambridge University Press will focus on how travel writing has “shaped people’s environmental imaginary” but also acted “as an early warning system” for the environmental crisis. Professor Cronin argued that travel writing invites us “to think about how we, as travellers, are increasingly implicated” in this destruction, adding that the pandemic has prompted us to reflect on the very nature of travel and its role in our lives.
To watch a video recording of the discussion, click here.
Professor Cronin’s new book, Eco-Travel: Journeying in the Age of the Anthropocene is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press.
Barry McCrea is a visiting research fellow at the Trinity Long Room Hub and Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame.