FAR from losing anything in translation, the Irish language has undergone a renaissance in the past 25 years, according to one of Ireland's major poets.
Michael Davitt, who writes in Irish, believes the translation of Irish poetry into English had helped bring it to larger audiences.
"People now know that poets writing in the Irish language are in their midst. We have long since escaped from the ghetto," he said at the Court literary festival in Galway.
Davitt, along with poets Aine Ni Glynn, Gabriel Rosenstock and Cathal O Searcaigh and publisher Miceal O Conghaile, was examining both the advantages and pitfalls of translation. While translation was giving a more universal dimension to Irish poetry there was always the risk that the translation could end up being a substitute for the original work.
"The more you go down the translation road, the more sanitised and packaged the original tends to become," he said.
The way to counter this was to have more poets read their Irish poems in the original even where the audience has a scanty knowledge of the language.
"Irish people have an incredible amount of passive Irish in their heads so that when they hear a poem in Irish it is bound to have resonances for them," he said. "It is not as though we were reading Swahili. I mean, Irish is the national language."
Mr Davitt said Irish people were coming out of the old post colonial hangover that made the Irish language "akin to what happened in the monasteries and the orphanages that we are now hearing so much about."
He added: "It was part of that dark Ireland where things were `bet' into you. People associated the beating with the actual subject. A lot of other things were beaten into us but didn't seem to register the same resentment as did the Irish language."