My Mule Drinks From the Ganges

As with its European neighbours, Ireland is home to a number of festivals which celebrate the art of travel writing, the annual Lismore Festival of Travel Writing in County Waterford for example. The modern genre of travel writing as practiced by Irish writers is very different to much of what passed for travel writing in Ireland, until very recently. In the colonial context that defined Irish history and culture prior to the last century, travel writing was frequently viewed an adjunct to the all-knowing imperial gaze. It was an element in that tradition which sought to know, to define and to categorise peoples and their places. It was part of the ordering process that was the colonial project. It was a celebration of knowing which we now realise was frequently a charade. In many cases, as with the travel accounts produced by members of the colonial class in Eastern Europe or Asia, these descriptions of other peoples and cultures were produced in accordance with an inherited and (sometimes-exoticised) tradition or episteme as littered with cliché and stereotype. In many cases the writers or hobbyists in question knew next to nothing about the people they were describing; they frequently had only the vaguest knowledge concerning the cultures or languages that they were classifying . This book usurps this tradition. While the vast majority of Irish travelogues as written in the past two centuries were written in English, this travelogue was written (and published originally) in Irish before later being translated and re-shaped in English .