The Elizabethan conquest of Ireland is that point in history where the fortunes of two languages briefly intersect, then spectacularly diverge. For one, the conquest marks the inaugural episode of its imperialist expansion. For the other, it is the originary moment of a language shift that constitutes the great drama of Irish cultural history. The present book, written from the perspective of an Irish anglophone awkwardly aware that those troubled origins continue to shadow Irish speech, explores how far that moment of encounter throws light on an enduring paradox: that Irish literature in English – a literature rooted in the silencing of Irish and animated by that rupture – itself participates in that most Elizabethan of concepts, ‘the triumph of English’.

A sense of discontinuity, self-estrangement, of living beyond the faultline of a fractured tradition haunts Irish writing. Anglophone Ireland, cut off from its Irish-speaking antecedents, is ‘adrift among the accidents of translation’ (Thomas Davis, quoted in Lloyd, ‘Translator as Refractor’, p. 145). The ‘semantics of remembrance’ are impaired; cultural amnesia is inescapable: ‘there no longer exists any inherited reservoir of meaning’ (Steiner, After Babel, p. 494; Kearney, Transitions, p. 13). The past is available only in translation and not everything – not much – can jump the gap. In a context where ‘mother tongue’ and ‘native language’ do not necessarily seem synonymous, language is made strange.