Discussion Prompt by Bryan White

A Brief Overview of Irish History:

• 420 AD – St. Patrick, 1200s – English Conquer, 1541 – Henry VIII King of Ireland
•  1540s-1651 – Plantation System, 1600s – Penal Laws (outlawed Catholic clergy)
•  1798 – Wolfe Tone’s Rebellion, 1800 – United Kingdom formed
• 1830s – Ordnance Survey and Tithe War, 1845-51 – Great Famine
• 1916 – Easter Rising, 1919-21 – War of Independence and Free State, 1921-23 – Civil War
• 1937 – Constitution and the Creation of Éire (the Republic of Ireland)
•  1969 – Start of The Troubles, 1998 – Good Friday/Belfast Agreement

Just as there myriad differences that make it difficult to pinpoint who and what Ireland is (Catholic vs Protestant, Republican vs Unionist, the agrarian West vs the cosmopolitan East, Éire vs the North), there are many ways in which we might think of play Translations. As a jumping off point, I will briefly discuss two: the linguistic and the post-colonial.

Looking to linguistics, we might pay particular attention to the title itself. The word translation comes from two Latin words which mean “to carry” and “over” or “across.” So what exactly is being carried over? Our play starts with Manus attempting to carry over the unable or unwilling to speak Sarah into the world of being able to say her name. We see Hugh doing his drunken best to carry over his students into the knowledge of the hedge school. We see Owen and the two officers attempting to carry over the little village of Baile Beag (which means “little town”) into name and place standardization; it is this lattermost carrying that sets the events in motion. 

Why should be care about this bureaucratic issue of naming? As Shakespeare has Juliet say, “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” If signifiers are necessarily imprecise representations of the things signified, then the word itself shouldn’t matter, should it? And yet, as we sit here looking out on the ocean, take a moment to think what is wrapped up in your own mind in a word as innocuous as ocean—what aspects are unique to your understanding of it? Or how many disagreements with your spouse have come from the two of you each understanding the same word differently? So part of understanding a word comes not just in what the thing is but also in how it is received. As we hear Owen wrestling with the histories of the places he is working to re-name that will necessarily be lost in translation, we understand that something deeper is at stake.

For those unfamiliar, Post-colonialism is, in a nutshell, the question of what happens to nation once a colonizing force leaves. As I argued in my dissertation (hair flip), so much of the drama and theatre which was written in Ireland in the last century is about Irish playwrights dealing with various national traumas and trying to come to terms with what it meant at the time of writing to be Irish, or about what it meant to not be British. Some of Brian Friel’s plays are agitprop in their revulsion at the British (see Freedom of the City), but it is worth noting that Friel took a much more even hand in Translations. Although we ultimately come to loathe Captain Lancey for his threats to murder livestock and raze the village, it is difficult not to be moved by the youthful exploits of Yolland as he finds himself intoxicated not just with the poteen, but with the landscapes and people, as is so beautifully shown in Act 2 Scene 2 between him and Maire. Although we might be drawn positively to Hugh and Manus and the hedge school, that school is run fairly shoddily from what we see by a drunk who more or less teaches when he feels like it. That it’s hard to even pinpoint who the protagonist is in this play underlines the fact, it seems, that Friel is trying to suggest there are multiple versions or, dare I say, translations of the ways in which Irish history and even the then-current crisis of The Troubles might be viewed. 

To briefly conclude, I leave us with this: the work we have read is necessarily incomplete. Unlike novels which are self-contained and finite or movies which become permanent records once filmed, plays must be performed and seen in order to fully transmit their meaning. There is no official production. Each new production means something different in its liveness as it is translated to living people. So as we come together, each of us not yet complete, each of us still learning what it means to be, let us be carried across into greater knowledge and fellowship with one another through our discussion. Sláinte!