Pieces of Pearse are translated into Polish
Anna Paluch translated the stories of Padraig Pearse in her book 'Opowiadania'.
IF you found Padraig Pearse's musings difficult to get through as Gaeilge, perhaps you should take a run at the Polish version.
The Easter Rising leader's famous collection of short stories, 'Gearrscealta an Phiarsaigh', has been translated into Polish, with 500 copies of the book going on sale this week.
Entitled 'Opawiadiana', the painstaking translation filled six months of the life of Anna Paluch (30) as the accomplished Irish speaker had to translate from the original to English and then to Polish because of the lack of Irish-Polish dictionaries.
Ms Paluch, who is from Lublin in Poland, said she spent two months translating and a further four months on corrections and trying to make sense of the translations.
"The stories are so similar to Polish stories, and when I learned they were from the 19th century I was completely surprised," she said yesterday. "They're stories about the countryside, stories about children, and similar to works by some Polish authors.
"I decided to translate them with a view to helping out many friends back at my university in Lublin where there is a class on Celtic Studies and there are some basic classes on Irish language that I took myself."
The 30-year-old is currently employed in Dublin City University while she does research for a PhD on modern Irish history and initially became interested in the Irish language as she studied.
"I started coming to Ireland about four years ago and, after doing a course, just started to speak in Irish but I'm better at reading and writing in Irish," she said.
"It helps with my studying and I've learned a lot about Pearse, obviously, through doing this."
She has found a publisher for the book at home in Lublin. It will be available to Polish people living in Ireland through www.norbertinum, she added.
"It is difficult to say which story is my favourite but I was certainly taken by 'An Mhatair' ('The Mother')," she said. "But I just like all of it to be honest."
- Jason O'Brien
