Publication: ‘Languages and Publishing in Contemporary Irish Writing’
Recently, Margaret and I (Tim) co-wrote an essay on ‘Languages and Publishing in Contemporary Irish Writing,’ which appeared in The Routledge Companion to Twenty-First Century Irish Writing (2024), a substantial collection of essays edited by Anne Fogarty and Eugene O’Brien.
The essay comes to focus on a case study of the publication history of The Book of Trivialities, published by project partners Skein Press in 2023. Here’s a paragraph from the opening page that outlines our approach:
‘Irish culture is now characterised by an unprecedented diversity in the languages used on the island, as will be explored in the first part of this chapter; yet this linguistic diversity is still not substantially reflected in Irish mainstream literary production. The second part of the chapter presents the publication history of The Book of Trivialities, a bilingual collection in English and Arabic authored by Iraqi poet Majed Mujed and published by Skein Press in 2023, informed by interviews with the author, translator and publisher. The production history of Mujed’s book demonstrates the many barriers to publication for those writing in languages other than English and Irish, while also illuminating how small presses can contribute to, and advocate for, publishing infrastructures that enable linguistically diverse writing to be created and shared.’
The book is, as we note, a ‘singular work’: not only the first direct Arabic-English translation to be published by an Irish publisher, but ‘a bilingual English–Arabic edition of a set of poems written in Arabic by an Iraqi poet, translated by an Egyptian-American translator and published by an Irish publishing house whose staff is multicultural and outward-facing by design.’
Speaking to Majed, Kareem (translator), and Nidhi (editor), I was struck by, as we put it in the essay, ‘the sheer amount of work necessary to bring this book to publication.’ The amount of labour involved, and the exceptional nature of some of this labour (for example, the need for a typesetting consultant to create a new Arabic typeface to ensure that the original language of these poems could be accurately reproduced) illustrates the amount of personal and institutional dedication as well as the particular set of infrastructural supports (including committed small publishers, dedicated arts funding, interpreting support) needed to publish multilingual writing.
Writing in The Irish Times in March 2025, reviewer Kevin Power noted that the essay ‘thinks carefully about the conditions at present influencing translation, publishing initiatives and arts funding in Ireland’; he also observes that ‘we need to fund more translators.’ We agree, and we hope to pursue this idea in future publications!