Abstract

Miklos Vadja, editor of the New Hungarian Quarterly and a distinguished translator, spoke to the Irish Translators' Association in 1987 on the essential paradox of Verse translation: "To believe in the possibility and viability of verse translation means, therefore, to acknowledge the paradox that a poem can lose its language and form, and then have the core of its non-lingual poetic substance, with most of its lost linguistic, cultural, prosodic, and other qualities coded into it, grafted onto another language, like some vital internal organ, with a certain hope for survival. "Translation is a paradox that Irish Writers have willingly embraced in the 1980s and one of the most striking literary phenomena of the decade has been the upsurge in verse translation.