Suspecting it was more widely known for its sporting prowess than its culture, Australia decided to stage four arts festivals prior to hosting the 2000 Olympics. The first, held in 1997, celebrated the indigenous cultures of the world, with prominence given to Aboriginal Australia. Conceived as the “Festival of the Dreaming,” it featured, in addition to dance, storytelling, and art, performances of Waiting for Godot in Bundjalung. It was hoped parallels between the play’s universal themes and historical Aboriginal experience – a politics of waiting and existential despair – would reveal indigenous culture. In the event, this was not realized. This chapter explores some of the reasons why. Audiences heard Bundjalung spoken but it proved so mellifluous that the expected interplay of antagonism and resignation voiced in English did not take place. Audiences could follow the English text cued as sur-titles but given ignorance of Bundjalung they could not appreciate they were hearing a transliteration. Audiences could see the cast interacting, but they were not aware that the protocols of Aboriginal conversation had been set aside. While the Bundjalung Waiting for Godot was years ahead of its time, it continues to raise issues for the notion of global Irish studies.

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.

This chapter traces the ways familiar depictions of Ireland are interrupted when we consider some of the rare co-imaginings of Irish and Pacific islands. When watched alone, Robert Flaherty’s Man of Aran (1934) presents the non-modern in modern Ireland. But when watched alongside Moana (1926, Robert and Frances Flaherty), Man of Aran reveals the traveling nature of non-modern tropes, as the Pacific non-modern and the Irish non-modern coalesce. The transoceanic movement of the “novel savage” is emphasized, and the quintessentially Irish becomes recognizably interislander. By tracing the connections between Ireland and the Cook Islands in Kenneth Sheils Reddin’s Another Shore (1945), as well as Charles Crichton’s 1948 adaptation, we see that Reddin draws on the seeming incontrovertibility of the Pacific’s arcadia to establish, first, Dublin’s modernity, then Dublin’s non-modernity, then the erroneous, nebulous nature of such categories. By tracing the transnational movement of tropes and stereotypes across Ireland and the Pacific, area studies divisions collapse and we recognize Ireland as part of a global archipelago of islands of discounted, nascent, imbricated modernity.

This chapter examines the growth of small-press publishing in Ireland during the 2010s and early 2020s. It contextualizes the Irish small-press industry within three broad trends: 1) the global expansion of nonprofit small-press publishing from the 1980s to the present; 2) the Irish state’s financing of literary infrastructure (mostly in the form of strategic funding grants disbursed by the Arts Council of Ireland/An Chomhairle Ealaíon); and 3) the development of rights-sharing agreements between small-press publishers, such that several different small presses will release the same title simultaneously (or in near succession) in different countries. In mapping this global publishing system, the chapter shows how the much-lauded “golden age” of post-crash Irish fiction can be traced to market and institutional dynamics. Specifically, it describes how the consolidation of the international small-press industry has exerted a discernable influence on the aesthetics of contemporary Irish literature, with Irish literature evolving into a field in which certain international styles popular with Anglo-American small presses are cited, borrowed from, reworked, and made into something new.