I would also love to know the answer to the question that Stewart asked in the initial posting on this thread: who writes
literature in Irish Gaelic?
I often ask the following question, unanswered as yet:
Why is it that the Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians, who have suffered five or six hundred years of occupation and subjugation by Russians, Germans, Swedes, Danes and Poles, have not only rescued their respective languages, but actually do everyday business and social things in them (e.g. banking, parliament, quarrels, trade, literature, university education)? While the Irish have all but given up their original language, except for in the Gaeltacht. The Balts are making a remarkable recovery since 1991, and have never let their languages dwindle. While in Ireland, where there is also an economic upturn, there can be no more than about 40,000 people who have Irish Gaelic as their mother tongue and are, for the most, bilingual. Nowadays, there are probably more people with
Polish as their native tongue in Ireland than Irish Gaelic.
Why has British language imperialism been more successful than Russian language imperialism? India and many African countries still retain English as a
lingua franca, while the Balts (though not the CIS countries, as discussed elsewhere) have more or less dumped Russian as soon as they could.
I have met one author that writes poetry in Irish Gaelic. This is Nuala N? Dhomhnail, whom I met over a decade ago at a poetry festival in Leuven, Belgium. We both supped beer out of plastic mugs. She was born in England, is married to a Turk, and is still one of the leading Irish Gaelic poets. See:
http://www.wfu.edu/~wfupress/qc/?p=productsList&sWord=Dhomhnail
Actually, Estonian and Irish Gaelic poets have had meetings and workshops, to translate one another's poetry, via English.
Notice one important fact about translation, when you look at Nuala N? Dhomhnail's books in English: bilingual poets don't automatically translate their own works into the more "dominant" language, English in this case. They let other bilinguals do it. This situation occurs in, for instance, Finland, Belgium, South Africa, Spain and other countries where several languages are used.