naoise blog 2

It’s been heartening to watch the Crossing Border festival unfold this week. They’ve assembled such a vibrant selection of voices. The anglophone literary world can be myopic, so I admire literary communities whose events show more awareness that the whole world doesn’t happen in English. Even within the anglophone bubble, there’s a tendency, for instance, for US critics to read Irish novels as if they were set in Brooklyn. I aim to approach novels on the assumption I won’t understand everything. It mightn’t necessarily be a problem either with me or with the text, but rather a friction that shows I’m learning.

That same engagement is one of the pleasures of having my own work translated. The translator is showing a level of care it’s an honour to receive, and the effort a reader in translation might have to make to understand culturally specific matters is another degree of close attention again. Plus I get to make people puzzle over the vowel sandwich that is ‘Naoise’.

The last task I completed for Crossing Borders was recording myself reading from my debut novel. I must admit I do the first chapter every time, because it means I can avoid giving any context or describing the plot. A common misunderstanding is that writing books makes you good at talking about them. I’m not good at talking, which is why I write in the first place. I sometimes have to do the talking bit anyway, especially when I’m being interviewed by someone who hasn’t read my work (it’s more common than you’d think), but I don’t like to because I’m inevitably putting an interpretation on it as I do. Right now, a lot of apparatus goes into telling people how to read books. Much of it is beyond authors’ control—I don’t choose anything outside the pages, from how the book is described to which other authors I’m compared to—so I can ignore those things since they’re not of my doing. I’m disorganised and have no attention span, so disregarding things is what one might call a natural gift.

Obviously it’s been a scary week near the end of a scary year. Should you address horrors and absurdities when they’re what you’ve thought most about but you have nothing meaningful to add? My fear and panic are everyone’s. When none of us can escape a feeling, I’m not sure expressing my personal iteration would be a show of solidarity; it feels more like a needless echo. But it would make a strangely inaccurate blog not to mention it at all, so there it is: I’ve been scared.

It was fun having my last blog post go up, and seeing Madelon’s translation. I must admit I don’t speak Dutch, although it’s on the list of languages I want to learn at some point. (‘Some point’ is when I will do 99% of the things I intend to do in life.) I think it’s difficult to be interested in English and not end up interested in most other languages, because it really has absorbed a bit of everything (in part, of course, because of the charming lengths the British took in exporting it). As an Irish person, I find writing in English a charged thing. My Irish is barely functional. I could never navigate literary precision through it, and if I did I wouldn’t be read widely. There are epistemic truths about my people and our history that I will never be able to access because they’re locked into the Irish language. I’ll never know most things about most things either, though, so that’s a chipper note to end on.

Looking forward to the rest of the festival over the weekend!