#rip us

Which one was stitched together from too many manuscripts or recursively translated so badly that by the time its translated into English (or another language) the characterization/dialogue/spelling just completely falls apart?

Unfortunately it's not fun like those, it's just bad and it pisses me off: it's Daragh Smyth's translation of Oidheadh Con Culainn. It's particularly egregious because it is the only published English translation of this text, so people can't even compare it to an actual translation and realise he got half the verbs back to front and actively misrepresented half the plot by not understanding who was doing what, and the fact he decides to cut out all the Christian parts (OF A FIFTEENTH CENTURY TEXT) really annoys me. You don't get to decide that that makes a text less "authentic" according to your made-up idea of what it should look like. Especially when it's FIFTEENTH CENTURY and survives in manuscripts from the 16th-19th century, buddy, once we've got Protestants running around the place you can't even begin to pretend we're pre-Christian.

I got really mad about it last year. I am working on changing the whole "no other translation that people can actually read" part. Unfortunately I do need to, like, actually do my PhD. I translated Van Hamel's edition (which is also the version Smyth is using), but Van Hamel's edition kind of sucks, so then I started looking at the manuscripts, and then I fell down a rabbithole, and now I think if I published a translation I would want it to be of a different version, so... there's been some scope creep. We'll see what happens once I finish the damn thesis.

(Light spoiler territory regarding themes, nothing explicit.)