Flann O'Brien: Palimpsests, Translations, Intertexts

Flann O'Brien's work is inherently palimpsestic. It consistently overwrites, interfuses and superimposes texts and languages on each other. The multiple names that O'Brien used as author aptly point up the coded nature of his fiction. This collection explores the ways in which O'Brien's writing borrows from, alludes to and recycles other works and intersects with differing stylistic and cultural modes, including journalism, art criticism, cinema and civil service reports. The essays examine his writing processes: how he revises and constructs his collaborative fiction, his far-reaching intertextual engagement with Irish, Anglophone, and European writers such as Heinrich Heine, his absorption of the work of his friends and collaborators, his multilingual layering of languages and his charged interweaving of Irish and English. A further consideration is O'Brien's peculiar interlinking of the animal and the human, foregrounding the ultimate material and biopolitical palimpsest: the pervasive exploitation and commodification of animal lives and bodies in the books we read.

A highlight of this collection is its extensive examination of the role of translation in the dissemination of O'Brien's writing. The authors of a range of translations of his work into Turkish, Hebrew, Hungarian, Spanish, Romanian and French explore their premises and dilemmas. They provide intimate and insightful accounts of how they grappled with and transposed O'Brien's texts by continuing his linguistic games and introducing others and why they imposed new intertextual allusions to bridge the original languages and cultures for their readers. The peculiar challenges posed for translators by An B嶧l Bocht, usually mediated by the English version, are explored. The history of how a pioneering Spanish rendering exceptionally based on the Irish text came into being is vividly recalled.