Saturday, January 24, 2009

Rough Guide to Evolution on Irish Radio and the Origin in Irish

I was interviewed on the Dublin-based radio station, Newstalk Radio earlier today. You can listen to what I had to say about Darwin, his trip to Ireland and his youthful excesses here:



In preparation for the show, a colleague, Roisin Madigan, read out for me the closing words of The Origin of Species in Irish Gaelic (kindly translated some years back by members of the Irish Gaelic Translation Forum), in the hope that I might be able to read them out during the show:
Ta uaisleacht ag baint leis an dearcadh seo ar an mbeatha – lena cumhachtaí éagsúla ata tar éis a n-infheistithe i ndornán foirmeacha nó in aon fhoirm amháin, agus – tráth a bhfuil an pláinéad seo imithe leis ag cúrsáil de réir dlíthe seasta na himtharraingthe , ó thús chomh simplí sin, go bhfuil – agus go raibh foirmeacha as cuimse atá fíorálainn agus fíorshuntasach ag éabhlóid.

In fact, my mastery of the Irish version never got beyond the first phrase (the part corresponding to "There is grandeur in this view of life...") and in any case, there was no opportunity to recite it during the show. But here you can hear the closing words of the Origin in Gaelic read out by Roisin:





3 comments:

Jonathan Badger said...

In preparation for the show, a colleague, Roisin Madigan, read out for me the closing words of The Origin of Species in Irish Gaelic (kindly translated some years back by members of the Irish Gaelic Translation Forum)

Do you mean that only the closing words have been translated into Irish and not the full Origin?

Mark Pallen said...

Just the closing words I am afraid. Not aware of any Irish version of the whole thing. Although on the BBC radio shows on Darwin a couple of weeks back I think they said that it had just been translated into Icelandic. I have it in Japanese.

Fantastic Forrest said...

Geez, you'd think if they could translate Sponge Bob Squarepants into Irish, they could take a minute for Darwin. Such is the shallowness of our popular culture-based society.

I'm hoping you and your readers can elevate the level of a class I'm teaching to a group of community members on social justice issues. I'll be using (what else?) popular culture films to spark discussion. I'd welcome your question suggestions about evolution at http://halfirishrover.blogspot.com/2009/01/visit-to-bible-belt.html

Thanks!