1940s Irish sci-fi novel features early mecha and gravity assists

by donohoe • 5 months ago

108 32 5 months ago

rekabis• 5 months ago

I think the biggest stumbling blocks is that not many of us can read Irish (Gaelige).

While I am on mobile and (therefore) have not accessed the files, the ToC and description of the OCR process leads me to understand that the original print is in Irish, not English.

donohoe• 5 months ago

Yes, which imho makes it more remarkable. I do not doubt an English translation is coming once they can convert it into modern Irish.

jonas21• 5 months ago

Here's Claude's translation of the PDF in the repo:

https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/0c40c3f8-16de-4947-93c1-3...

I couldn't verify it, and a human translation would be preferable -- but it's probably good enough to get an idea of the story if you want to read some right now.

dmurray2• 5 months ago

It looks extremely accessible. I can puzzle through the pages I looked at with school-level Irish.

The script can be mechanically translated to the modern characters, no ambiguity there. The spelling and grammar isn't the perfectly standardized Irish introduced in the 1940s and 50s - which isn't representative of how anyone ever spoke the language - but its differences are those a good to mediocre student might make anyway while trying to write the official standard.

It helps that this is clearly written for a YA audience. Literary Irish has lots of complicated constructions and idioms which are difficult to translate, but this does not.

talideon4• 5 months ago

I mean, it _is_ in modern Irish! It just needs to be transcribed.

Tsiklon• 5 months ago

Beautiful, it's typeset in classic cló Gaelach.

pavel_lishin3• 5 months ago

Oh man, you weren't kidding. Part of me wants to print out some of these pages to use in my D&D game, somehow.

(Although, part of me is also uneasy with that idea - using someone's culture & heritage as set dressing, without paying it any of the actual respect it deserves. It would be just as easy to copy a few paragraphs from Wikipedia, & use a Star Trek font to make something look fantastical, which is something I've done in the past.)

foxglacier2• 5 months ago

Stop worrying. It truly doesn't matter. No culture deserves respect. You might respect one culture or another for some reason but if you don't, as in this case, then there's nothing to worry about.

leoc• 5 months ago

No-one's going to mind in the slightest if you lift Gaelic type or script for a D&D setting. (If you start larding in corny or inaccurate Irish stereotypes as well then people might start to be offended and/or amused.) If it matters, the writing style is basically just a long-surviving regional variation of what was once a mainstream form of Latin script, anyway: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolingian_minuscule#/media/F... . So its story is quite similar to the story of how blackletter hung on as the primary script family for German until roughly the same time in the 20th century.

piltdownman• 5 months ago

I wouldn't worry in the slightest - any cultural appropriation offense has long since been hammered out at the altar of American Television.

The Punch Magazine-esque depiction of bucolic ignorance in ST:TNG {1} is probably the worst representation I can think of, but you still have recent romcoms {2} which the Irish Times film review section best describe as "...stunningly regressive stuff."

That said, even the most cutting satire is fully appreciated when done well. Steve Coogan's fantastic double-billing as his own look-a-like from Ireland was very well received here, negative connotations nonwithstanding.

{1} https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Bringloidi {2} https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Mountain_Thyme_(film) {3} https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEjEGbAFzJU

colmmacc3• 5 months ago

Native Irish Speaker and Sci-Fi fan here. What an unexpected delight. For those who might not pick it up , the author name "Máiréad Ní Ghráda" is that of an unmarried (that's the "Ní") woman ("Máiréad" which is like a variation of Mary).

Here's my Translations of the Chapter titles. I'm pretty sure many of these have old-Irish style séimhiú (a dot above a consonant denotes what would now be a h after the consonant) in the originals that have not been translated by the OCR, so there are several missing h letters. If I weren't on a plane over Afghanistan, I'd download the PDF to check. Will update the repo when I can!

   Pláinéid na feaca Súil Duine riamh = A planet no person's eyes have ever seen
   An Radarc, tríd an gCiandracán = the view throughout the [Ciandracan] (this is a compound proper noun, "Cian" is "head" or "brain" and "racán" could be visor or rocket)
   An Turas go Manannán = the Trip to Manannán
   Manannán = Manannán (it's a noun, which is very similar to the Irish term for the Manx and the Isle of Mann). 
   Muintear Manannáin = the people of Manannán
   na 'Cráidmí' = the Craidmi (I think it's just a plural noun)
   An tÁrd-Máigistir = the high Magistrate, or possibly the supreme magistry
   An Priorún = the Priory
   Oidce sa Coill = The class/lesson/teaching in the woods/forest
   An tinneall = the fire
   Oidce tar Oidceanta = Lesson upon lesson
   Lug Lám-fada = the long-armed lug
   An Tróid leis na 'Cráidmí' = The war with the Craidmi
   Diogaltas = Revenge
   An téalod = not sure about this one

messe3• 5 months ago

Oidce sa Coill = The class/lesson/teaching in the woods/forest
Oidce tar Oidceanta = Lesson upon lesson

I suspect these are actually mistranscribed by the project. That looks more like it should be "Oiḋċe sa Coill" or "Oidhche sa Choill" without the ponc séimhithe, and in modern spelling "Oíche sa Choill" - "A Night in the Forest". Comparing the transcription of the first chapter with the source in the PDF they're missing a fada (an acute accent for non-Irish speakers) in "ná".

Similarly, I'd probably render the second one as "Night upon Nights".

colmmacc3• 5 months ago

That does make more sense.

arkensaw• 5 months ago

"An t-Éalod" I think would be "the escape"?

colmmacc3• 5 months ago

That's almost certainly right. I couldn't see that as anything other than "Teal" but Éalú makes perfect sense especially thematically.

CyreneOfCyrene• 5 months ago

Not an Irish speaker, but I've seen some of the names and terms while reading folklore. Is it possible that Lug Lám-fada is a proper name/epithet for "Long-armed Lug" (alluding to the god Lug) instead of a descriptor of a "long-armed lug" object?

talideon4• 5 months ago

Yes, she's making a lot of allusions of Irish mythology, and that's definitely a reference to the god Lug Lámhfhada. Also, the word 'lámh' in Irish isn't quite arm. It's your arm below the elbow, including your hand. He has that epithet because for a bunch of reason, not least because of how skilled he is in all things.

The line between folklore and mythology is fuzzy, but this definitely falls on the mythology side of the line.

ekaryotic• 5 months ago

An Tróid leis na 'Cráidmí' = The war with the Craidmi

The battle/fight with the Craidmi. troid is singular whereas war is plural.

talideon4• 5 months ago

And she's not just any Máiréad Ní Ghráda; this is the same Máiréad Ní Ghráda who wrote An Triail and Progress in Irish!

Y_Y2• 5 months ago

Maith thú

serf• 5 months ago

It may contain the furst use of a Mecha outside of Japan.

there are earlier north american examples; steam man of the prairies (1860s) being one.

(i'm big into mecha, sorry for the nitpick.)

antonyh• 5 months ago

This is fantastic. As an absolute beginner in the language I've added to my list of learning resources for Gaeilge. I've tried to find a better scan of the book online, but it's not anywhere - there's some Máiréad Ní Ghráda on archive.org but this one is missing.

It also looks like the PDF in the repo is just the first 20 pages, it would be worthwhile scanning the whole thing cleanly and uploading to preserve this important work.

ZeroGravitas• 5 months ago

Tangentially related via the Irish Language but on YouTube, "Channel 5" who previously focused on street protest gonzo journalism have branched out into explorations of endangered languages and started with an episode on Irish:

https://youtu.be/oJRMfInSjRo

1940s Irish sci-fi novel features early mecha and gravity assists

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