Banville in translation: the "Literature as Translation" project

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If you've followed a link from a university page or a translator's CV and ended up here, that makes sense. This domain used to host Literature as Translation, a project run by EFACIS, the European Federation of Associations and Centres of Irish Studies. That site is no longer online, so here's what it was and where you can still find it.

Looking for a specific translation? The original project pages are preserved in the Internet Archive. You can browse them on the archived EFACIS site. For anything about the project itself, please contact EFACIS directly. We're just readers and have no connection with them.

What was the project?

The idea was simple and rather lovely. Take one short text by John Banville and have it translated into as many languages as possible, by translators and Irish Studies scholars from all over the world. Then put the versions side by side, so readers could see what happens to Banville's very particular English when it travels.

The text was Fiction and the Dream, an essay that started life as a talk Banville gave in Philadelphia in 2005. It opens with a man waking up from a dream that seems to hold some huge truth he can't quite crack, and goes on to compare that feeling to how fiction works on us. It's a great choice for a translation project, because so much of it depends on rhythm and tiny shifts of meaning. Translators had plenty to wrestle with.

Alongside the professional translations there were student translations, often done in groups at universities, plus extracts from Doctor Copernicus and Eclipse, interviews and a bibliography.

The 39 languages

The essay was translated into the following languages, several of them more than once:

Some of these are big literary languages with a long history of translating Banville. Others, like Tongan, Sámi, Maltese or Sinhala, are much rarer, and it's those versions that make the project feel special. It's not every day an Irish novelist gets read in Tongan.

The translators

Credit where it's due. These are the translators and scholars named on the original project, as far as we've been able to piece it together from the archive. Appologies if we've missed anyone or got a name wrong. Let us know and we'll fix it.

There were also several student teams who worked on group translations together.

Why translation matters with Banville

Banville has always done well in translation, often better than at home. He's been more celebrated in mainland Europe than in Britain for much of his career, picking up the Franz Kafka Prize in Prague, the Austrian State Prize and Spain's Prince of Asturias Award (see our awards page). His books are huge in Spain and Italy in particular.

Which is a bit funny, since his English is so dense and so tied to the sound of words that you'd think it would be the hardest thing in the world to translate. Maybe that's the point. Translators like a challenge.

Want to read Fiction and the Dream?

The essay is Banville's own work and still under copyright, so we can't reproduce it here. The original English text and many of the translations can be read on the archived project site. If you're new to Banville and liked the sound of it, The Sea is a good place to see the same ideas about memory and dreaming at full length.