Students of the emerging discipline of translation studies will warmly welcome Michael Cronin's Across the Lines as a wide-ranging inquiry into translation practices in a world which brings us into ever closer contact with other cultures. Starting with the premise that travel and translation function as metaphors of each other - the traveller is a kind of translator, just as the translator is a kind of traveller - Cronin begins by examining the experience of travellers who operate within their own language.
Here he draws on the narratives of popular travel writers such as Paul Theroux and Bill Bryson, pointing out how they and others have often ignored or underestimated the degree to which "intralingual" translation may be necessary among people who assume they are speaking in the same tongue.
One is reminded here of Winston Churchill's famous remark that Britain and the United States are two countries divided by a common language, though clearly Cronin himself does not find this discrepancy a source for humour when he labels it "a treacherous translation labyrinth". Similarly, he warns of some of the pitfalls of travelling in an "interlingual" context (where travellers are speaking a language not their own), and here he takes Bruce Chatwin to task for obscuring those challenges of translation inherent in any such travel experience.
That Chatwin was a masterful practitioner of the travel narrative as literary form hardly figures into Cronin's critique, and it is at such moments that Across the Lines asserts itself primarily as a specialist text and less a book for a general readership. Similarly, those less in thrall to post-modernist theoretical jargon than Cronin may find they are doing a fair bit of translation work themselves just to get to the author's essential arguments.
This is a great pity, because in later chapters Cronin has many imaginative insights into the role of the translator in contemporary life. Leaving aside some of his more fanciful depictions of the translator-figure as changeling, torture-victim and flaneur, he makes a compelling case for translation as both a vocational calling and an undervalued social function that merits a more careful understanding from all of us.
The concerns, too, he registers about the increasing hegemony of English as a world language are obviously relevant, though it is open to debate how effective would be the intervention he advocates to reverse this trend, and indeed, whether it would even be advisable. Ireland as much as any modern country knows just how fraught with unintended consequences programmes for enforced language preservation can be, imposing, as they often do, ethical imperatives which may not reflect the lived experience of those they are designed to serve. Across the Lines is at its best when Cronin steers clear of moral prescriptions and allows his passion for the intricacies of his trade to entice the reader into a voluntary appreciation of what makes linguistic exchange by turns so challenging and gratifying.
R. B. Tobin is among the contributors to the collection of academic papers, New Voices in Irish Criticism, which has just been published by Four Courts Press