Remrád This lovely book is a competent translation by Francesco Felici of a popular early-twentiethcentury primer of English into Old Irish, the language spoken in Ireland, the Isle of Man and parts of Scotland in the 8th and 9th centuries. It joins the ranks of a continuously growing number of renderings of modern classics into historical languages spoken in ancient and medieval times. Some texts are particularly popular among activists of historical languages: the number of translations of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince almost surpasses counting; comic books from René Goscinny’s and Albert Uderzo’s Astérix series are evergreens, and, in the German-speaking world, Wilhelm Busch’s Max und Moritz must not go unmentioned. Among long texts, the attention of translators into the classical languages has been directed particularily towards J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and the early volumes of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. Even a translation of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings into Old English is currently underway. This list is not meant as a hit parade, but just as a more or less random selection of what has been done, and more can be found in the references at the end of the foreword. Auraicept na nÉicsíne ‘Primer of the Young Scholars’ adds to this body of texts a medieval language, Early Irish, that has not been served very well with modern translations so far. Only the Middle Irish version of the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, made by Liam Breatnach and Elizabeth Boyle, springs to mind. This flurry of historical translations may prompt ostensibly critical contemporaries to ask the question what is the point of creating new texts in historical languages in the first place and who are these publications aimed at. I hardly need to preach to the choir about the intrinsic value of such an undertaking, but let me direct a few words to the sceptical or seemingly practically-minded crowd outside the Church of Historical Languages. I will not speak about the economic viability of these books. There is evidently a market for them, otherwise independent publishers would not publish them. I will rather concentrate on their practical benefits. For beginners, the appeal of modern texts translated into historical languages lies in the fact that through them they can engage with topics and story-lines that they already know and in world settings that they are familiar with. No foreign environment or exotic world-view of an ancient or medieval text distracts the learners. Being able to anticipate the twists and turns of the plot, they can rather concentrate on the fundamental structures of the language. This makes it easier to pick up the core vocabulary of the target language along the way and it reduces the tediousness of drilling morphological and syntactical structures. A particular strength of comic books is that their illustrations offer a guiding hand in interpreting the context and the progress of the narrative and that through their dialogic structure they provide a better introduction to spoken language and to first and second person forms. For readers with an advanced knowledge of the target language, the more subtle appeal of translations may lie in the way how the translator expressed modern concepts, or how wellknown phrases and tropes from classical texts in the target language have been skillfully woven into the translation. But, a critical outsider may object, is there any academic value to this activity? The answer to such a question can, of course, only be a resounding yes, forcefully brought home by Francesco Felici’s version of this book and by how it grew and evolved. In fact, answers to this question respond to issues of ‘academic value’ on a whole range of levels. What most historical languages have in common, especially those before the global spread of printing technology in the 15th and 16th centuries, is that they are underdocumented. Their corpus is limited and there are unfillable, sometimes semantically systematic gaps in their vocabulary, as well as in their morphology, syntax, and idiomatics. A translator into a historical language with so immensely complex a morphology like Old Irish will inevitably be faced with several related, difficult challenges. Through the accidents of transmission, an adequate word or form may not be attested in the extant corpus for comparatively common concepts, and even for concepts where we can be certain that a word must have existed. The situation arises commonly that the translator’s academically creative imagination is required to fill a lexical gap; either by replacing a word with something similar (e.g., lethscrepull ‘half a scruple’ for tuppence), or by substituting a pragmatically equivalent concept, or, if needs be, by creating a word (e.g., sordaid and strídaid as onomatopoetic verbs). If the translator is fortunate, the word, even though absent from the historical target language, is continued in a younger descendant, or in a sister or cousin idiom, which allows the reconstruction of how the word would or could have looked like (e.g., ettelachán for ‘butterfly’). There are useful side effects to looking at the lexicon from that angle. It forces us to focus on what is not there, whereas in the academic study of historical languages we are usually preoccupied with the words that are found in the extant texts. And it stimulates the creation of mental maps of the semantic fields of the target language and its relatives. On the other hand, digging into the old language in order to find a good translation will occasionally produce unexpected treasures: céimm in the meaning ‘stile’ was unknown to me until Francesco Felici unearthed it in the dictionary, where it is cited from an Old Irish text about the legal stipulations relating to fences. Mutatis mutandis the same applies to word forms that are missing from the surviving corpus. The logic of the morphological system of the language is usually a reliable guide to construct the desired form. For instance, ‘I am flying’ is not found in Old Irish, but there is little doubt that the first person singular of the attested verb luïthir, which designates the ‘flying’ of birds, would have been luür. A more complex challenge is the expression of objects or concepts that were unknown when the historical language was spoken, either because they had not been discovered or invented yet or because people had not yet defined or isolated a specific phenomenon. In the present book, Francesco Felici introduces pseudo-Old Irish sinnsér, following the phonology of Modern Irish sinséar, even though the plant ‘ginger’ was unknown in early medieval Ireland. I want to illustrate the issue with further examples from my own regular endeavours to translate the lyrics of Joy Division songs into Old Irish. This has taught me time and again that notions that are so trivial to us that they have filtered through into the most casual everyday parlance, often find no adequate counterpart in Old Irish at all, or that the medieval Irish were not even aware of the concept. For instance, there are no equivalent words for ‘illusion’, ‘ambition’ or ‘hypnotic’, but some sort of paraphrase is needed to get close to the intended meaning. I picked condalbae ‘affection for kindred’ as the closest equivalent to ‘sympathy’; for a medieval Irish person, kind feelings were primarily reserved for the family (but note that even the English word kind is etymologically connected with kin). While this may not be so unexpected for culture-specific abstractions (note that a concept like ‘ambition’ with all its concomitant notions is specific to our own culture), it may come as more of a surprise that ‘mask’ or ‘play’ (in the performative theatrical sense) or even so innocuous a term as ‘picture’ do not have a straightforward equivalent in Old Irish. Either these were not items of their world, or, for instance in the case of ‘picture’, we cannot say with certainty if they had any more specific designator for it than delb ‘shape, likeness’. From a rigorous academic point of view, is it legitimate to invent new words for dead languages at all? This straw-man question involves a rhetorical trick. I have silently introduced the premise that a language such as Old Irish is dead. But this a popular misconception. Like many other historically attested languages, Irish is still very vibrant, but what was once Old Irish has organically transformed into another shape, that of the modern Gaelic languages. Irish has been passed on in an unbroken sequence from one generation to the next since the early middle ages, continuously undergoing small changes along the way so that Modern Irish not only looks different from its sister Scottish Gaelic, but both have structurally far evolved from Old Irish. But along that way down the centuries, Irish never became ‘dead’. What is true, though, is that Old Irish as we know it from texts of the 8th century is no longer actively used as a community language. However, it is still learned, studied and read all around the world. Neither is Latin dead, but dialectally diversified Late Modern Latin is spoken all across South and Central America, large swathes of Africa, and even on the southern and western rim of Continental Europe descendants of Latin have been able to hold out against the expansion of Germanic and Slavic. In fact, one of those local idioms is the native tongue of Francesco Felici. Only when the intergenerational transmission of a language from the parents to the children has been severed, does a language cease to live. But even then, its fate is not sealed. With an effort, a language can be brought back to the community, as has happened in the case of Cornish. Or it can at least be brought back to the attention and interest of people, even when the very fact of its existence had been unknown for centuries or even millennia, as is the case with languages such as Hittite, Tocharian or Tangut. Languages are only ever truly extinct when they pass into oblivion and when the books about them have been closed for the last time, never to be opened again, and when all passion for them has vanished. It is therefore a sign of a very healthy enthusiasm for a historical language when new texts in it, original or translated, are being produced. If, now and then, a word has to be created in order to convey a concept that had not occurred to its native speakers more than a thousand years ago, this just goes to show that Old Irish is not a dead language. I don’t want to be misunderstood: actively used Old Irish of the 21st century is a different language from the historically attested early-medieval one. It is based on the latter, but it also draws its inspiration and life from other sources, not least from the living environment of contemporary students. In order to immerse onself in the historical minds, cultures and worlds, modern translations are no substitutes for engaging with the authentic thing, and it is vital to study original texts. But modern translations into historical languages can be a first step in the right direction. The benefits of this book for the readers are manifold. Harriette Taylor Treadwell’s and Margaret Free’s English ‘First Reader’ from the beginning of the 20th century has many qualities that make it equally suitable for beginners in Old Irish in the 21st century. The vocabulary is very limited, the syntax is basic, and the conspicuous style of the tales, which marries variation with repetition, means that the same words, for example verbs, occur in a variety of persons, tenses and diatheses. This helps learners to familiarise themselves with the regular morphological alternations of the language. It hardly needs to be stressed how important this is for a morphologically so exacting language like Old Irish. Francesco Felici is an accomplished translator with years of experience in making literature in smaller languages available to audiences in other languages. He has here succeeded not only in creating a spirited translation of the tales, but it is also a hopeful sign of more to come, and, perhaps, of Old Irish coming into a new bloom. In the 8th century, an Irish scholar sat down and wrote a programmatic handbook about his native language Old Irish with the title Auraicept na nÉces ‘Primer of the Scholars’. In the 21st century, students learning this very Old Irish language, may take up Auraicept na nÉicsíne ‘Primer of the Young Scholars’ to take a little bit of weight from their shoulders on their arduous road to mastery. David Stifter Further reading: Peter S. Baker, ‘On Writing Old English’, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching 22/2 (2015), 31–40. Elizabeth Boyle, ‘Feis Mire – A Feast of Madness: The Mad Hatter’s Ale-Feast in Medieval Irish’, in: Alice. In a World of Wonderlands. The Translation of Lewis Caroll’s Masterpiece. Volume One. The Essays. Editors Jon A. Lindseth, Alan Tannenbaum, New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press 2015, 384–386. Manfred Görlach, ‘Diachronic Translation, or: Old and Middle English Revisited’, Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 18 (1986), 15–35. Fritz Kemmler, ‘Ge wordful, ge wordig: Translating Modern Texts into Old English’, in: Old English Medievalism. Reception and Recreation in the 20th and 21st Centuries. Edited by Rachel A. Fletcher, Thijs Porck, Oliver M. Traxel, Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer 2022, 173– 190. Robin Meyer, ‘Curtain call for Latin’, The Linguist 59/1 (2020), 22–23. Iwona Piechnik, ‘Noms modernes dans les langues anciennes: Le Petit Prince dans trois versions latines et en ancien français’, in: Renata Krupa & Iwona Piechnik (eds.), SaintExupéry relu et traduit, Kraków: Biblioteka Jagiellońska 2018, 81–56. Dominika Ruszkiewicz, ‘‘Chaque jour j’apprenais quelque chose’: using Le Petit Prince and its translations to teach old and modern languages’, in: Renata Krupa & Iwona Piechnik (eds.), Saint-Exupéry relu et traduit, Kraków: Biblioteka Jagiellońska 2018, 157–169. Oliver M. Traxel, review of translations of Le Petit Prince, in: Perspicuitas 2011. A selection of relevant links: https://petit-prince-collection.com/lang/traducteurs.php?lang=fr https://editiontintenfass.de/en/catalog#Sprachgruppe=Historische+Sprachen https://www.evertype.com/carrolliana.html