Abstract

Through an analysis of Irish writer Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s A Ghost in the Throat (2020), this paper contemplates both how death inhibits a writer’s ability to translate their own work and how self-translation might be creatively enacted to overcome this existential boundary. The paper examines the close affinity that Ní Ghríofa establishes with 18th-century poet Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, and posits that this closeness encourages readers to perceive Ní Ghríofa’s Irish-to-English translation of Ní Chonaill’s Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire – which appears in the second part of the book – as a kind of self-translation. Considering the construction, content and context of A Ghost in the Throat, the analysis sheds new light on which features of self-translation tend to be marginalized, who self-translation excludes, and what an ethic of self-translation might look like.