This article investigates the connection between migration and translation in contemporary Irish writing, drawing on translation and literary theories that prompt a reexamination of the nexus between migration and translation in terms of contiguity, connection and slow transformations, and against the resilient tropes of loss, disruption and the divided self, often associated with the literature of migration. It analyses Yan Ge’s interconnected short stories as examples that illustrate this dynamic, shedding light on the contradictory, yet productive view of translation and self-translation as spaces of conflict, friction and resistance on one hand, and freedom and creativity and on the other. Moving beyond both the adopted language and the mother tongue, as well as the binary dichotomies of original/translation, authenticity/inauthenticity and East/West, Yan Ge’s experimental short stories represent the imaginative and linguistic complexity of the migrant experience, not as something that occurs between Irish culture and something outside it, but as a phenomenon happening within the Irish context, bridging the Irish past and present, while staging various and conflicted processes of transformation and translation.