In part because early Celtic forms and genres are so different from those of modern European literatures, the translation of Celtic literature has generated some of the most intense controversies about translation in European letters. A series of generic codes for the representation of early Irish heroic narrative is examined (including epic, folktale, and a post-Joycean poetics), illustrating that reception of a text from a colonized culture involves a dialectic between assimilation to and alteration of the standards of the receiving culture. Epigonic representations of Irish form in the translations of early Irish literature complement the subversive ideological manipulations of the texts discussed in the previous chapter of this book. The epistemology of translation is set in high relief by the Irish examples, and translation emerges as a mode of discovery, parallel rather than subordinate to learned investigations.