Over the past century there have been numerous Irish translations of literature from central and eastern European countries that are reworkings of existing English versions. This chapter focuses on examples of this phenomenon produced by three notable writers: Seamus Heaney’s work on Leoš Janáček’s song cycle, Diary of One Who Vanished (1999), Flann O’Brien’s Rhapsody in Stephen’s Green (a 1943 rendering of Karel and Josif Čapek’s Ze života hmyzu/The Insect Play), and Brian Friel’s versions of Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters (1981/2008). The original texts have very little in common with each other, thematically or stylistically, and these translations reflect this diversity. However, they are all characterized by acts of domestication as, in a variety of ways, the three translators infused their renderings with Irish notes in order to distinguish them from the standard and British English versions that informed their creation. In this light, these translations operate almost entirely in English language and cultural terms, and speak more to the position of Irish literature in the Anglosphere than to its relationship with central and eastern European cultural worlds.

The second chapter of Dublin: A Writer’s City explores what, for many people, is the lasting image of Dublin literary culture: the world of the Dublin literary pubs in the middle decades of the twentieth century. This was a very public literary culture, in which novelists, poets, and playwrights were familiar figures on Dublin streets, and engaged in lively newspaper debates. The principal players here are Brendan Behan, Patrick Kavanagh, and Flann O’Brien, who were regulars in pubs such as McDaid’s. Many of the writers of this era also lived in what has subsequently become known as ‘Baggotonia’, an area around Baggot Street Bridge in which Georgian and Victorian houses had been broken up into affordable flats. Writers living in this area included Thomas Kinsella, Leland Bardwell, John Banville, and John Montague; it also was home to the Pike Theatre, where Beckett’s Waiting for Godot had its Irish premiere. The chapter ends with a reflection on the impact of changing property values in this area, today one of the most expensive parts of the city, and hence one in which few writers now live.

The Irish 1950s lend themselves all too well to examination through the absurdist prism. Perhaps the most significant figure in the multilayered evolution of Irish literature in this period, Samuel Beckett offers a platform for constructions of Ireland’s ‘Continental’ affiliations, a testing-ground for theories of an Irish avant-garde and a point of resistance to categorisations of Ireland as committed to traditions of conservative domestic realism. This chapter initially reviews Beckett’s engagements with the absurd, discussing his novel Molloy and radio play All That Fall, and outlining how the absurdist paradigm became an early and influential critical response to the representation of language. Drawing connections between Beckett and his younger contemporary Flann O’Brien, particularly on the level of religion, this chapter also considers the extent to which a parallel response played out on the domestic front in the distinctive career of O’Brien. It asks to what extent an absurdist counter-ideology was played out in O’Brien’s fictional narratives and in the work of his journalistic alter ego, Myles na gCopaleen, whose column ran uninterrupted from 1940 to 1966.