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 suggests that the cosmopolitanism of convicts, ex-convict settlers, and their descendants rendered penal colonies ideal places for investigations into the human sciences, and for the development of social science research methods. Administrators and visitors carried out innovative statistical and ethnographic studies in punitive locations, triangulating medical records, and anthropometric measurement with surveys, questionnaires, and interviews. The focus of attention of such research included the pathology of criminal behaviour, the social, cultural, and biological impacts of transportation, and sexuality. In some cases, it emerged out of a concern with the merits or otherwise of penal colonization. In others, it contributed to and shaped contemporary debates on race and, in the Indian context, caste. This can be seen in the analysis of the work of French naval surgeon Joseph Orgéas, in French Guiana; Anton Chekhov’s famous study of Sakhalin Island in the Russian Far East; and censuses in the Andaman Islands. Finally, the chapter examines Franck Cazanove’s study of sexuality in the relégué(e) (repeat offender) settlement of Saint-Jean-du-Maroni in French Guiana. Inadvertently, though focused on ‘depravity’, it reveals much about same-sex cohabitation, marriage, and love.