“To Pick Up the Unsaid, and Perhaps Unknown, Wishes”: Reimagining the “True Stories” of the Past in Evelyn Conlon’s Not the Same Sky

Abstract

This chapter approaches Evelyn Conlon’s Not the Same Sky as an imaginative retrieval of a silenced and untold episode of the Irish Famine and looks at the novel as a text that not only translates the past into the present (since it bestows visibility on an unspoken historical event) but also perceptively foregrounds connections between translation, mobility and memory. The chapter suggests that Not the Same Sky functions itself as a “memory site” and, thus, becomes an astute reflection on the complexities attached to events and discourses concerned with the cultural reconstruction of knowledge. In this respect, the chapter argues that Conlon’s novel lends itself to be analysed as an inquiry into the concept of translation and the unsolved ethical dilemmas attached to the debate on voice and voicing which often accompany translational acts.