The Music Inside the Language

Why Irish Words Live Inside the Trilogy — and Why They’re Not Translated

19 April 2026 ~ 3 min read

There are Irish words in the Cosmic Janitor Trilogy that I don’t translate. This is deliberate.

When Seán walks into Tigh Ceoil, I don’t write “House of Music” in parentheses afterward. When Síofra tells her story, I don’t footnote her name. When the Morrígan speaks, the Irish that threads through her speech isn’t there for decoration or atmosphere—it’s there because some things sound different in Irish than in English, and the difference matters.

A composer understands this instinctively. A melody played on a clarinet is not the same melody played on an oboe, even if the notes are identical. The timbre changes the meaning. Irish does something to the air of a sentence that English alone can’t do. Bean sí is not “banshee.” The English word has been dragged through two centuries of horror films until it means a screaming monster. The Irish means “woman of the fairy mound”—a mourner, not a monster. Síofra is introduced as a bean sí in the novel, and the sound of the Irish carries her dignity in a way the English borrowing never could.

I chose the Cork and Kerry pronunciation tradition—because the Trilogy is set in Cork and because this Irish sounds different from the Irish you’ll hear in Galway or Donegal. The vowels sit differently. The rhythm of the sentences leans in a particular direction. When I give a phonetic guide for Tigh Ceoil as “Tee Kyohl,” I’m not just helping the reader pronounce it. I’m asking them to hear the music of the dialect—the way a person from Cork shapes the word is part of the word’s meaning. A Connacht speaker would say it differently. A Belfast speaker differently still. The Trilogy is rooted in one specific sound, and that sound is Cork.

This was a practical decision as much as an artistic one. Early in the writing, I had to choose: do I anglicize everything and make it easy, or do I let the Irish breathe and trust the reader to meet me halfway? I chose the second path, but I didn’t leave the reader stranded. The Irish appears in context—always—so that even if you’ve never seen the word before, the sentence carries you. When Seán’s mother tells him an ceol a sheinneann an croí—“the music the heart plays”—the English is there, but the Irish comes first, because the sound of the Irish is the point. The rhythm of the phrase is the lesson. English is the translation. Irish is the music.

In Book Two of the Trilogy, I created a legendary Book of Ravens—Leabhar na nFiach—pushes this further. The entire text is presented as a translation from Ogham, which means the reader is always aware that what they’re reading in English existed first in something older. Irish words surface throughout like stones in a river—you can step on them or let the current carry you past, but either way you know the river is deeper than what’s visible. That was the texture I wanted: a novel written in English that remembers it was once in Irish, the way a person raised bilingual sometimes finds that the truest version of a feeling lives in the other language.

I’m not a native Irish speaker. I want to be honest about that. But I’ve spent years listening to the sean-nós singing tradition, to the cadences of West Cork speech, to the way Irish words change shape when they cross into English and what gets lost in the crossing. The Trilogy is my attempt to put some of that back—not as translation but as orchestration. Two languages in the same sentence, each carrying what the other can’t.

If you read the Trilogy aloud—and I hope you do, even just a passage or two—listen for the moments where the Irish words slow you down. That’s not a flaw. That’s the music asking you to pay attention. The language beneath the English has been there for a thousand years. It’s in no hurry. Neither is the story.

~ Liam