To impose another language on such a people is to send their history adrift among the accidents of translation.

Thomas Davis (1843)[1]

My friend, confusion is not an ignoble condition.

Brian Friel (1980)[2]

I

One of the most distinctive characteristics of Irish writing, at least since the end of the nineteenth century, has been its tendency to confuse politics and art. The intention of this paper is to argue, by a very circuitous route, that such confusion is not an ignoble condition. 

Critics who take the view that art and politics are better not mixed, generally take one of two options: either they argue that art just happens to be incapable of affecting politics; or they suggest that while art may influence politics, and politics may influence art, the effect is almost always deleterious ­ in both spheres. In a poem written on the death of W.B. Yeats in 1939, W.H. Auden chose the former course, praising Yeats’ poetry, but doubting its political efficacy: ‘Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still/ For poetry makes nothing happen’.[3] In Auden’s judgement, despite Yeats’ persistent artistic attempts to mould the public life of his time, he had left Ireland the way he had found it: an island of foul weather and mad politics. Almost fifty years later, writing in the context of this continuing madness, one of Northern Ireland’s leading critics, Edna Longley, made a plea for the separation of poetry and politics that appealed to the second of these options. ‘Poetry and politics…should be separated’, she argued, for the same reason that church and state should be: because ‘mysteries distort the rational processes which ideally prevail in social relations; while ideologies confiscate the poet’s special passport to terra incognita’.[4] The ‘unhealthy intersection’ between these two spheres, in Longley’s view, breeds both bad poetry and bad politics and it is this ‘literary streak’ which has tended to make Irish nationalism ‘more a theology than an ideology’.[5]

These critical responses, which either reject an art/politics intersection as impossible, or condemn it as unhealthy or un-Enlightened, have not however been shared by all Irish writers. And if Auden was referring primarily to Yeats’ work in the Irish Literary Theatre, which became the Abbey Theatre at the beginning of the twentieth century, then Longley is referring primarily to the work of the Field Day Theatre Company which began in 1980 with the production of Brian Friel’s play Translations (1980). Field Day was founded in Derry by Friel and the actor Stephen Rea, initially to produce this play in a series of performances around Northern Ireland. However, it quickly expanded both its board of directors ­ to include poets, writers and critics such as Seamus Heaney, Tom Paulin and Seamus Deane ­ and its agenda ­ to encompass nothing less than the re-imagination of the cultural and political landscape of Northern Ireland. In an indication of the close parallels which, despite a century’s distance, exist between these two literary movements, Seamus Deane has written of Friel: ‘no Irish writer since the early days of this century has so sternly and courageously asserted the role of art in the public world’.[6] Reading between the lines we could say that not only is Field Day the successor to the Irish Literary Theatre, but that Friel, its founder, is the inheritor of Yeats’ particular attempts to make the world of art have some impact upon the world of politics. 

Both the Irish Literary Theatre and Field Day were based on the premise that art neither could nor should be insulated from the political contexts in which it was produced and received. Further, both were based on the conviction that since many of the features of those contexts were determined by the political imagination, then the arts of poetry and drama were ideally suited to the task of political transformation. Motivated by this belief in the possibility of political change, both also exhibited a strong capacity to inspire committed followers. An actor in the early days of the Abbey Theatre, for example, recalled that ‘we talked in terms of “the movement”…and walked home with shining eyes and heightened colour to dream dreams of great plays’.[7] In a similar vein, Seamus Deane employs an almost military metaphor when he introduces a collection of Field Day ‘pamphlets’ with an account of the threefold enterprise of the Company which would shortly complete ‘the first phase of its operations’.[8] Despite the many differences between these two movements, then, they share a common conviction that a significant part of the task of politics can be carried out through the medium of drama, poetry and criticism. But what exactly is the task of politics, or ­ to be more precise ­ how did these two movements conceive of this task?

In the most general terms, we could say that both movements placed the colonial relation between Ireland and Britain at the core of their political analysis. For Yeats, Lady Gregory and the other founders of the Irish Literary Theatre, the task to be accomplished was the re-assertion of Ireland’s cultural independence from the imperial centre, as a prelude to its political independence. For Friel and Field Day, the task was to come to terms with the bitter sectarian aftermath of colonisation in Northern Ireland. For Field Day, the political task was neither independence nor union, but the working out of new ways of accommodating the Catholic nationalist and Protestant unionist traditions. If the period from the 1890s to the War of Independence in 1922 could be seen as a period of intense anti-colonial struggle, then the period from 1980 to the present can be seen as a period of intense post-colonial labour. That is, the objective is no longer to achieve independence from colonial rule, but to achieve some sort of freedom from the pernicious effects of its legacy.

For Auden and Longley, and for a whole tradition of western philosophy, while such an objective may be laudatory, it is by no means a suitable task for literature. Surely, they would say, drama cannot ‘act’ in this way; and surely any drama that tries risks becoming mere propaganda, a contemporary version of Soviet agitprop. Taking Brian Friel’s play Translations as my focus, I will argue (to return to my title) that dramatic speech can indeed act, and that not only has Friel not sacrificed his passport to ‘terra incognita’, but that his play actually provides us with a theory of culture which shows precisely how dramatic speech is capable of acting even in the most stubborn of political landsacapes. Translations is a play that draws its dramatic force from the clash between two cultures, from a clash in which one culture seems doomed to lose its distinctive world-view in the face of a violent aggressor. Even though the play evokes the tragedy of the erasure of one culture by another, however, it refuses to fall back on the simple oppositions which, in Ireland, have mediated this tragedy. If the legacy of colonisation in Northern Ireland has been a mutually opposed entrenchment behind mutually opposed cultural essentialisms, then Friel’s play attempts to open up a space for cultural re-imagination which might lead to a less divided state of postcolonialism. It does so by dramatically presenting a theory of culture-as-translation: a theory which Friel found in George Steiner’s book After Babel; but which, for the purposes of this paper at least, can also be found in Nietzsche’s early essay ‘On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense’.[9]

Steiner’s central thesis is that translation is not just something which happens between languages: it is also, at a more fundamental level, the central feature of human communication and culture. At the level of individuals, language translates­ or tries to translate ­ between privacies. At the level of culture and tradition, it is the human capacity to ‘translate out of time’ which, in Steiner’s view, makes ‘civilization’ possible; culture, he suggests, is the ‘translation and rewording of previous meaning’.[10] For a language, a culture, or a tradition to survive, then, this process of translation and ‘rewording’ must never cease. This process of translation is, however, also a process of transformation; the thing which is carried over, translated, is always a renewed version of the original. As Walter Benjamin, in his discussion of translation, points out, ‘…in its afterlife ­ which could not be called that if it were not a transformation and a renewal of something living ­ the original undergoes a change’.[11] The translation, therefore, is never ­ and should never try to be ­ identical to the original. For Benjamin this is so because the point of translation is to raise the original into ‘a higher and purer linguistic air’. The translation points the way to this region, to ‘the predestined, hitherto inaccessible realm of reconciliation and fulfillment of languages’.[12] While Benjamin here seems to be alluding to the possibility of a return to a pre-Babel unified language, Friel’s insistence on translation/transformation is based on the opposite assumption. Indeed, for Friel and Steiner the whole problematic of the translation’s relation to the original is undermined by the assumption that since the process is un-ending there is, strictly speaking no original with which one could have a relation. 

If, for Steiner, the driving force behind human culture is endless translation, then for Nietzsche the ‘fundamental human drive’ is ‘the drive toward the formation of metaphors’.[13] It is this continuous drive to form new metaphors which, for Nietzsche, ensures that the conceptual freezing of old metaphors is always under attack. This drive ‘continually confuses the conceptual categories and cells by bringing forward new transferences, metaphors and metonymies’.[14] If we follow the etymological connection between ‘translation’ (Latin: carry over/across) and ‘metaphor’ (Greek: carry over/across) then it would seem that both Steiner and Nietzsche are identifying the same drive as being fundamental to human reality. And both also identify this drive as the drive towards the transformation of the world we live in ­ as a drive which is fundamentally creative. For Nietzsche, it is a drive which ‘continuously manifests an ardent desire to refashion the world which presents itself to waking man…in the colours of the world of dreams.’[15] While, for Steiner, this drive towards ‘fiction’ and ‘counterfactuality’ marks the relation between human consciousness and reality as a creative one.[16] And if an Auden, or a Longley, were to object that these fictions, these metaphors, cannot do anything, then both Steiner and Nietzsche could reply that they can indeed do something, since the ‘original’ reality with which they are dealing is itself a metaphor, a translation, a fiction. And what better way is there of modifying a metaphor, of shifting a translation, if not by replacing it with a new one? In Translations, I will argue in this paper, Friel attempts to bring the audience to an acknowledgement that such a transference is possible, by demonstrating on stage the endlessly translated nature of cultural reality. Contra Auden, then, I will argue that Friel shows how it might be possible, through drama, for Ireland to escape both its own madness and that of its neighbouring island.

II

Set in 1833, in Baile Beag (or Ballybeg) the fictitous Donegal town which is the scene of many of Friel’s plays, Translations dramatises the moment when traditional rural Irish culture finally succumbed to the twin forces of imperialism and modernity. These forces are represented, firstly, by the presence in the community of a detachment of Royal Engineers who are making the first Ordnance Survey map, and who, in the process, are standardising and anglicising all the local place-names; and, secondly, by the news that a new National School system is to be introduced in which the language of instruction will be English rather than Irish. The setting for most of the play is the hay-barn in which Hugh O’Donnell holds his hedge-school, helped by his eldest son Manus. The students in the school are all adults, and range from Sarah, who suffers from a chronic speech impediment, to Jimmy the sixty year-old ‘Infant Prodigy’ who sits in a corner reading Homer in Greek and falling in love with Pallas Athene, ‘the flashing-eyed goddess’. The students pay Hugh and Manus partly in milk and turf and Hugh enjoys the high status of village scribe ­ since even the priest seems to be illiterate. However, when Hugh’s younger son Owen returns from Dublin in the role of translator to the Ordnance Survey team, whatever stability this community had initially is quickly lost.

Owen is cast in the role of an outsider who is thoughtlessly betraying the community from which he has come. He consistently refuses to recognise the significance of the map-making exercise ­ even when his brother in exasperation calls it ‘a bloody military operation’ (408) ­ and he delays telling his employers that his name is not in fact Roland (as they have mistakenly interpreted Owen), saying to his brother ‘Owen­Roland­what the hell. It’s only a name. It’s the same me, isn’t it?’ (408). As Owen blindly insists that names don’t matter, however, it is his colleague Lieutenant Yolland who slowly becomes convinced that there is something sinister in the Ordnance Survey project. As the two work methodically translating place-names for the new maps ­ Lis na Muc becomes Swinefort, Druim Dubh becomes Dromduff, Machaire Ban becomes Whiteplains ­ Yolland begins to realise that this is ‘an eviction of sorts’, that ‘something is being eroded’ (420). He also begins to follow the well-worn path of the accidental soldier, falling in love with the landscape, the people and the language of the colony. He begins to imagine that if he can learn the language he will be able to unlock the secrets of the natives, but then realises that even his pronunciation of the word ‘poteen’ ­ of which he drinks a great deal ­ immediately marks him as outside the tribe. Ultimately it is the importance of these tribal boundaries that unleashes the tragic consequence of the play. Yolland falls in love with Máire, who had been the rather unwilling ‘intended’ of Manus, and the two have a brief love-scene which is observed by the almost mute Sarah. The next morning Yolland has mysteriously disappeared, presumed dead at the hands of the shadowy Donnelly Twins and the commanding officer, Lancey, orders mass evictions and the destruction of livestock if information is not forthcoming. Finally, Manus flees under suspicion; Owen leaves to join the nationalist resistance; Hugh learns that he is not to be given the job of master at the new National School; and Máire, who has lost both Yolland and Manus, prepares to emigrate to America. 

While it would be easy to tell this story as one of Paradise Lost, with ‘perfidious Albion’ in the role of Lucifer, Friel is careful to avoid the over-simplifying categories of Irish nationalism. In addressing, in a complex and nuanced way, the question of the loss of the Irish language, he undermines the assumption which is so often made that an authentic nation requires a unique linguistic character. Cultural and political nationalism in Ireland has always been closely related to efforts to preserve the native tongue. The fact that these efforts, at least at the level of the living language, have all but failed has not broken the pious belief that something essential has been lost, that Irish people today are still speaking an alien language. However, even in 1843 one of the great champions of the Irish language, Thomas Davis, could not himself speak it ­ coming as he did from an Anglo-Irish family. So when he used the English language to promote his own version of non-sectarian nationalism he was already ‘adrift among the accidents of translation’. More than sixty years later, one of the managers of the Abbey Theatre, Frank Fay, argued that ‘an Irish Theatre must, of course, express itself solely in the Irish language: otherwise it would have no raison d’être’:[17]voilà ­ a curiously hybrid appeal to Irish linguistic purity expressed in English using a French idiom! And when Northern Irish Republicans in the 1970s spray-painted ‘Tiocfaidh ár Lá’ (Our Day Will Come) on neighbourhood walls, they too had more than likely learnt their maternal language at night classes in the local Catholic school. Writing in a context in which the language question is so politically charged, and so riven with paradoxes, then, one of Friel’s central objectives is to repose that question in the light of a more adequate appreciation of the complex connections between language, culture and identity. 

This effort, however, hasn’t always been appreciated by the play’s critics, and many have read it as a simple re-peddling of the old myths of Irish nationalism.[18] In the juxtaposition, for example, of classically educated peasants and philistine soldiers (who are curiously unable to tell the difference between Irish and Latin), and in historically inaccurate details such as the arming of the surveyors with bayonets, Friel has been accused of uncritically reproducing nationalist pieties of the past. One of the key assumptions of this charge ­ and it is an assumption that is frequently made ­ is that the opening scenes of the play present a pre-colonisation Eden which is quickly and deliberately destroyed by the English invaders. The debate about the supposedly Edenic quality of the opening scenes of the play is significant from the point of view of the impact of the play on the cultural politics of Ireland in the 1980s. If a simple opposition is made between idyllic, Classically educated peasants and their philistine oppressors, then it becomes easy to conclude that the political task in the present is to evict the oppressor and re-instate the pre-lapsarian community. While such a politics may (and even this is questionable) have been an adequate response to the conditions of the early twentieth century, for Friel and Field Day it is not an adequate response in the 1980s. It is, therefore, essential to Friel’s project that he complicate the simple oppositions of Irish nationalism, and one of the ways he does this is by addressing the myth of the rural idyll.

In Friel’s play there is no Edenic past from which the hapless peasants are expelled; there is rather, as we will see, an ironic toying with the mutual prejudices of the colonial relation. In addition, it is crucial that the attack on traditional culture in Friel’s play does not come exclusively from the English. The play carries allusions to impending events such as the Famine (1846-49) which was to play a significant role in reducing the use of the Irish language, and to indigenous champions of modernisation such as Daniel O’Connell (the ‘Liberator’) who is reported in the play as saying ‘the old language is a barrier to modern progress’.[19] Again, through the character of Máire, who wants to learn English to prepare for her emigration to America, the play foreshadows economic migration as one of the central causes of rural decline in nineteenth and twentieth century Ireland. There are in fact two very good reasons why the community of Baile Beag in 1833 is not a pre-colonisation Eden. The first, most obvious one, which is curiously overlooked by many critics, is that 1833 did not see the beginning of the colonisation of Ireland. In fact that had already been taking place for several centuries and indeed by 1833 the ancestors of today’s Unionist population of Northern Ireland had already been living there for up to two hundred years. Anyone who imagines that Friel’s presentation of the rural hedge-school is Edenic should also recall that hedge-schools were only present in eighteenth and nineteenth century Ireland as a result of the colonial destruction of traditional social structures and the concerted attempts to suppress Catholicism. So, while it is possible to take a romanticising view of the hedge-schools, insofar as they are an indication of a culture’s will to survive, there is no basis for seeing them as a pre-colonisation paradise. 

The second, and much more significant reason why Baile Beag should not be read as an Eden is because, in Friel’s vision, humanity has always already fallen. If, before Babel, humanity was one and spoke the same language, then Friel’s play is concerned with the implications of the post-Babel confusion of tongues. In Genesis, when God says, ‘let us go down and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech’ (Genesis, 11:7), the groundwork for the ubiquity of translation is laid: and it is this ubiquity which preoccupies Friel. At the centre of the play’s concerns, then, is a question about language. How, the play asks, can a culture survive the imposition of an alien tongue ­ even if many of its members rush to embrace it? What happens to a community which loses not only its traditional way of life, but also its traditional way of being in the world through language? These questions are asked, however, in the full recognition that the relations between language, culture and identity are always fraught with difficulties: this is not just a result of colonisation, it is a part of the human condition. It is in recognition of this fact that, for example, Friel’s Programme Notes for the original production quote Heidegger’s statement that ‘Man acts as if he were the master of language, while it is language which remains master of man’.[20] And it is also for this reason that the play, as we will see, is littered with allusions to, and sometimes direct quotes from, George Steiner’s book After Babel. 

The theme of language and identity is introduced from the very opening lines of the play, when we see the master’s son Manus trying to teach Sarah how to say her own name. According to the stage directions, Sarah has a speech defect which is so bad that she has always been thought, both by herself and others, to be dumb (383). In coaxing her into speech, to say the simple phrase ‘My name is Sarah’, it is significant that Manus reassures her with the words ‘This is our secret…Nobody hears you’ (384). The communicative power of the apparently simple speech act of naming oneself is from the beginning brought into question: Sarah can only give herself a name on the condition that nobody is listening. This anxiety about naming is again underlined when Bridget announces to the class that the unmarried Nellie Ruadh’s baby is to be christened that day ­ and that she is threatening to give it its fathers name: ‘So there’s a lot of uneasy buck’s about Baile Beag this day’ (391). At a more fundamnetal level the audience is made to focus on language by the realisation ­ about five minutes into the play ­ that the characters have ‘actually’ been speaking Irish, not English. In the course of a discussion of the relative merits of learning Latin, Greek and English (and Hugh’s school teaches only Latin and Greek), Máire proudly recites her only English phrase, which she learnt from her Aunt: ‘In Norfolk we besport oursleves around the maypoll’ (388). Throughout the play, then, the actors speak only English (with occasional Greek and Latin phrases) while Irish, the native tongue, is never heard ­ except in place-names. Apart from the obvious fact that, had it been written in Irish, the play would not have reached a significant audience, even in Ireland, this device allows Friel to play with the idea that below the English words of the Irish characters on stage lies a hidden other language which remains largely silent. The device also suggests that this community is very far from resembling the one people/one language which existed before Babel: in fact, this people speak three languages and are performed on stage by a fourth.

For those who cherish cultural and linguistic purity this condition is no doubt to be regreted. However Friel’s play avoids such easy conclusions by staging multiple responses to the dilemma of colonisation. Manus, for example, refuses to speak the language of the coloniser, even though he is one of the few people in the community who can; and rather than compete against his father for the position of master of the new National School, he accepts a position as hedge-school teacher on a remote western island ­ thus underlining his own retreat in the face of change. Owen, on the other hand, initially argues the case for a commonsense, rational approach to the problems of cultural translation. He assures Yolland that entry to the tribe is possible and becomes impatient with his doubts about the cultural impact of their work. When Yolland insists on the retention of the name Tobair Vree for an obscure crossroads, Owen explodes:

…why do we call it Tobair Vree? I’ll tell you why. Tobair means a well. But what does Vree mean? It’s a corruption of Brian ­ (Gaelic pronunciation) Brian ­ Tobair Bhriain. Because a hundred-and-fifty years ago there used to be a well there, not at the crossroads, mind you ­ that would be too simple ­ but in a field close to the crossroads. And the old man called Brian, whose face was disfigured by an enormous growth, got it into his head that the water in the well was blessed; and every day for seven months he went there and bathed his face in it. But the growth didn’t go away; and one morning Brian was found drowned in that well. And ever since that crossroads is known as Tobair Vree ­ even though that well has long since dried up. I know the story because my grandfather told it to me. But ask Doalty ­ or Máire ­ or Bridget ­ even my father ­ even Manus ­ why it’s called Tobair Vree; and do you think they’ll know? I know they don’t know. So the question I put to you Lieutenant, is this: what do we do with a name like that? Do we scrap Tobair Vree altogether and call it ­ what? ­ The Cross? Crossroads? Or do we keep piety with a man long dead, long forgotten, his name ‘eroded’ beyond recognition, whose trivial little story nobody in the parish remembers? (420)

Owen’s initial position is to reject such piety as confused and irrational and to replace the cultural richness of Tobair Vree with the totally unevocative Crossroads. However, having witnessed the effects of his own work, he finally answers his question in the affirmative and sets out on the path of national piety and anti-colonial resistance. Meanwhile Yolland, the unwilling coloniser, is one of the few characters who seems to fully appreciate the cultural significance of the act of mapping and re-naming the country, eventually defending the Irish names against Owen’s sometimes arbitrary imposition of English ­ Bun na hAbhann, for example, which literally means ‘mouth of the river’, inexplicably becomes Burnfoot (410). 

At the centre of the play, both dramatically and conceptually, is the brief love-scene which takes place between Yolland and Máire. A familiar response to the trauma of colonisation is to believe in the power of individuals to overcome the pernicious effects of cultural misunderstanding and hostility. Yolland wants to believe that cross-cultural understanding and communication is possible. He wants to gain access to the secrets of the tribe, and this drive is intensified by his growing interest in Máire. Máire, too, tends to underplay the differences between the two cultures. Early on she reports that the sappers have offered to help with the hay-making and that even though she doesn’t know a word they’re saying, ‘that doesn’t matter, does it?’ (389). This belief, in the capacity of the private realm to provide an alternative to the public realm, is however, one which ­ according to Seamus Deane ­ has always been opposed by Field Day.[21] And Friel’s portrayal of Yolland and Máire’s attempt to take refuge in such a space allows them no sanctuary from the forces of history. 

When the two are finally alone together, after a dance at Tobair Vree, their attempts to communicate range from the comic to the poetic. Yolland speaks to her in English, while Máire first tries Latin (‘tu es centurio in exercitu Britannico…’ 427) and then tries her one English phrase: ‘In Norfolk we besport ourselves around the maypoll’ (428). To which Yolland replies, like an eager puppy: ‘Good God, do you? That’s where my mother comes from ­ Norfolk. Norwich actually. Not exactly Norwich town but a small village called Little Walsingham close beside it. But in our own village of Winfarthing we have a maypole too and every year on the first of May…‘ (428) ­ and then he realises. The lovers are not, however, dismayed by this difficulty and they eventually communicate using their shared knowledge of the local place-names. Tentatively at first, Yolland begins to recite the Irish names that his survey has been erasing: ‘Bun na hAbhann…Druim Dubh…Poll na gCaorach…Lis Maol’. Máire responds ‘Lis na nGradh…Carraig an Phoill’. And finally the two exchange place-names in a poetic enactment of their love: 

Yolland:Carraig na Ri. Loch na nEan.

Máire: Loch an Iubhair. Machaire Buidhe.

Yolland: Machaire Mor. Cnoc na Mona

Máire: Cnoc na nGabhar.

Yolland: Mullach.

Máire: Port.

Yolland: Tor.

Máire: Lag. (429)

This dramatisation of the powerful effect of language at a pre-semantic level is, however, quickly undermined by the chance arrival of Sarah ­ the one-time mute. Sarah now uses her newly found powers of speech to tell Manus what she has seen, and by the next morning any chance of mutual understanding through newly invented languages is submerged in the reprisal threats of Captain Lancey.

In this post-Babel concatenation of voices, it is Hugh ­ the old master ­ who has the task of formulating his community’s response to the loss that colonisation brings with it. Hugh’s attitude to the language question can best be summed up in the title of the book which he claims to be writing: ‘The Pentaglot Preceptor or Elementary Institute of the English, Greek, Hebrew, Latin and Irish Languages; Particularly calculated for the Instruction of Such Ladies and Gentlemen as may Wish to Learn without the Help of a Master’ (419). This title conveys not only Hugh’s predilection for pomposity, but also the fact that even though he admits to having no knowledge of Hebrew, he seems to move easily between Irish, Greek, Latin and English. Both characteristics are displayed, for example, when Hugh first arrives home from the pub having spent all day celebrating the baby’s christening. Doalty, one of the less bright students, had just said ‘The bugger’s not coming at all. Sure the bugger’s hardly fit to walk’ (397), when in he walks:

Hugh:Adsum, Doalty, adsum. Perhaps not in sobrietate perfecta but adequately sobrius to overhear your quip. Vesperal salutations to you all.…

Apologies for my late arrival: we were celebrating the baptism of Nellie Ruadh’s baby.…

And after the caerimonia nominationis ­ Máire?

Máire:The ritual of naming.

Hugh:Indeed ­ we then had a few libations to mark the occasion. Altogether very pleasant. The derivation of the word ‘baptize’?­where are my Greek scholars? Doalty?

Doalty: Would it be­ah­ah­

Hugh: Too slow. James?

Jimmy:‘Baptizein’ ­ to dip or immerse.

Hugh: Indeed­our friend Pliny Minor speaks of the ‘baptisterium’­the cold bath.

Doalty: Master.

Hugh:Doalty?

Doalty: I suppose you could talk then about baptizing a sheep at sheep-dipping, could you? (397)

Despite Hugh’s apparently antiquated pomposity, however, he is the one character who insists that in order to survive the community needs to adapt to the changes that the English are enforcing. Even though he enjoys having fun at the expense of the English surveyors by appealing to the cultural stereotypes of the colonial relation ­ English, he says, is suited only to commerce (399), while Irish is a rich, spiritual language (418) ­ he is also well aware of the constant mutability of language and culture. In other words, he never actually believes in these myths of cultural identity. In echoing Steiner’s view that, to quote Hugh, ‘a civilization can be imprisoned in a linguistic contour which no longer matches the landscape of fact’ (419) he seems to appreciate that ‘fact’ ­ the fact of modernity as well as of colonisation ­ dictates a radical change in the traditional life of Baile Beag. This assessment is underlined again at the close of the play when, having reluctantly agreed to teach Máire English, Hugh recites one of the opening passages of Virgil’s Aeneid, in which the destruction of Carthage­ the city Juno ‘loved above all the lands’ ­ is predicted (446). If the goddess Juno could not prevent the annihilation of Carthage at the hands of Rome, the words seem to suggest, then what hope do the mere mortals of Baile Beag have to defend their language and traditions? Nellie Ruadh’s baby, whose christening opened the play is now dead and Sarah has been returned to silence by the threats of Captain Lancey, the whole community is facing eviction, and yet Hugh picks up the Name-Book that Owen has discarded and says, ‘We must learn those new names…We must learn where we live…We must make them our new home’ (444).

III

The play closes with a reading from Virgil’s Aeneid, just as it had opened with a reading from Homer’s Odyssey. The opening passages, which Jimmy had read aloud in Greek, tell how Athene transformed Odysseus into a beggar on his return home, so that he could pass unnoticed into his own house; the closing passages tell how a son of the defeated Troy was destined to become the founder of a great Empire ­ an Empire which would one day defeat the Greeks as well as the Carthaginians. On the surface this juxtaposition seems to suggest a cyclical view of the impersonal forces of history: just as Troy fell to the Greeks and Carthage fell to the Romans, so Ireland must fall to the English and there is nothing that any individual can do to prevent it. However, tying the play together between these two texts ­ Homer’s and Virgil’s ­ is not just about giving us a history lesson; it is also a way of showing that translation is a fundamental feature of culture. Just as Aeneas’ journey of exile across the Mediterranean is a translation of Odysseus’ journey of home-coming across the Aegean, so Virgil’s text is a translation of Homer’s. Virgil transfers Odysseus from Greece to Rome, just as Joyce transfers him from Troy to Dublin. When Hugh, paraphrasing Steiner, suggests that ‘it is not the literal past, the ‘facts’ of history, that shape us, but images of the past embodied in language’ (445), he opens up the possibility that if these ‘images’ are re-made, if these translations are re-worked, then we might be re-shaped. 

The dilemma that faces Hugh and his community, is how to continue living in a culture and a place which is being ‘translated’ out of all recognition. If the translation of mere place-names from Irish into English is so destructive, if even the translation of exogamy is so impossible, then how can a culture survive the ordinary, everyday ubiquity of translation? Whether the force of this change comes through colonisation or modernisation, or both, its paradox is that it represents both the life-blood and the death-knell of a culture. The Donegal of Carraig na Ri, Machaire Buidhe and Cnoc na Mona, doesn’t exist today any more than the Norfolk of Winfarthing, Barton Bendish and Saxingham Nethergate. When Máire recites these names in memory of her lover she grants them the same power and significance as the names of her own place. And, in doing so, Friel seems to be suggesting that it is this recognition, of the parity of loss, that might provide the basis for future transformation.

If the task of a postcolonial politics is to overcome the legacy of colonisation, and if that legacy ­ at least in Northern Ireland ­ manifests in an entrenched cultural essentialism that focuses on language (and frequently the language of place-names: eg. Londonderry vs Derry), then an enterprise such as Friel’s and Field Day’s can be effectively political to the extent that, to use Nietzsche’s phrase, it ‘confuses these conceptual categories’. And it does this, in a play such as Translations, by showing ­ against Thomas Davis ­ that we are all, already ‘adrift among the accidents of translation’; and that it is only by accepting this confusion that we can hope to create new linguistic, cultural and political formations.

Timothy O’Leary

Philosophy Program

University of Wollongong

Wollongong NSW 2522