The Books: “Translations” (Brian Friel)

Next in my Daily Book Excerpt:

Next play on the script shelf:

Brian Friel’s Translations.

Translations takes place in 1833, in Ireland. An important thing to know, because you know what HASN’T happened yet and what is ABOUT to befall the country. The famine hangs over this entire play like a spectre, even though it’s in the future, and nobody can know that it is coming. You can’t help but be aware of it, and you want to yell at the characters to prepare, to warn them. Translations isn’t about potatoes though. No. It is about the death of the Irish language, and Friel “locates the moment of its final decline in the Donegal of the 1830s, the years in which the British Army Engineer Corps carried out its famous ordnance srvey of Ireland, mapping and renaming the whole country to accord with its recent (1800) integration into the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland”. (That comes from the introduction to the collection of plays I have. I couldn’t really write it any clearer.) The play takes place in one of the hedge schools, and at first the people aren’t aware of what is REALLY going on – they think that the British just want to make better maps, or re-do their old maps – but eventually it becomes clear that this “ordnance survey” is really about Anglicizing every place-name in Ireland, systematically wiping out the Gaelic terms for everything. It’s a crisis for the hedge-school, of course – for the people who live in that particular town – the people we get to know through the course of the play … but why the play is so effective for the audience is that we know so much more than the characters, since we are from the present-day, and we know what ended up happening. The Irish language was wiped out. It’s also tragic because, like I said earlier, the potato famine is still to come. This is the decimation of an entire civilization.

One of the other reasons why this play is so successful is what it has to say about the relationship between Britain and Ireland. The way Friel does this is very clever: Many of the Irish characters in the play can’t speak a word of English and do not understand what is happening when British soldiers arrive in their town for this “survey”. They need translators. But of course – we watch the translations get confused. All the characters in the play speak in English – but eventually we realize that the Irish characters are really speaking in Gaelic … So we get to hear both sides. It’s a wonderful device, and works really well on stage.

Oh yeah, and the other thing that happens during this “ordinance survey” is that all hedge-schools will close, and new ‘national schools’ will open up – where it will all be in English. The Irish language will be lost in the timespan of a generation. Now even amongst the Irish characters there is disagreement here. One of them is very pro-English language, even though she only speaks Gaelic herself. She wants to learn English, she is sick of being isolated on her small island.

And now for the excerpt. Yolland is one of the British soliders (described by Friel as ‘a soldier by accident’.) He is young, barely out of boyhood, and struggles to understand the Irish culture around him. He feels left out … and yet at the same time, he doesn’t really understand his own job at first. He follows orders. But gradually, he realizes what is going on. Yolland is a wonderful character – he’s kind of our way in (the audience’s way in, I mean). We are him. We are outsiders, we look on, we try to understand, we have to play catch up … Hugh is the headmaster of the hedge-school. And Owen is Hugh’s son, a local boy, back in town after being away for 6 years. He is bi-lingual, he’s seen a bit more of the world. He signs up to help the British soldiers in their ordnance survey – he can help them with translating the plans to the Irish people, who don’t understand the language.

EXCERPT FROM Translations: A Play, by Brian Friel:

YOLLAND. (Embarrassed) Where’s the pot-een?

OWEN. Poteen.

YOLLAND. Poteen — poteen — poteen. Even if I did speak Irish I’d always be an outsider here, wouldn’t I? I may learn the password but the language of the tribe will always elude me, won’t it? The private core will always be … hermetic, won’t it?

OWEN. You can learn to decode us.

(Hugh emerges from upstairs and descends. He is dressed for the road. Today he is physically and mentally jaunty and alert — almost self-consciously jaunty and alert. Indeed, as the scene progresses, one has the sense that he is deliberately parodying himself. The moment Hugh gets to the bottom of the steps, Yolland leaps respectfully to his feet.)

HUGH. (as he descends)
Quantumvis cursum longum fessumque moratur
Sol, sacro tandem carmine vesper adest.
I dabble in verse, Lieutenant, after the style of Ovid. (to Owen) A drop of that to fortify me.

YOLLAND. You’ll have to translate it for me.

HUGH. Let’s see —
No matter how long the sun may linger on his long and weary journey
At length evening comes with its sacred song.

YOLLAND. Very nice, sir.

HUGH. English succeeds in making it sound … plebian.

OWEN. Where are you off to, Father?

HUGH. An expeditio with three purposes. Purpose A: to acquire a testimonial from our parish priest — (to Yolland) a worthy man but barely literate; and since he’ll ask me to write it myself, how in all modesty can I do myself justice? (to Owen) Where did this (drink) come from?

OWEN. Anna na mBreag’s.

HUGH. (to Yolland) In that case address yourself to it with circumspection. (And Hugh instantly tosses the drink back in one gulp and grimaces) Aaaaagh! (Holds out his glass for a refill) Anna na mBreag means Anna of the Lies. And Purpose B: to talk to the builders of the new school about the kind of living accommodation I will require there. I have lived too long like a journeyman tailor.

YOLLAND. Some years ago we lived fairly close to a poet — well, about three miles away.

HUGH. His name?

YOLLAND. Wordsworth — William Wordsworth.

HUGH. Did he speak of me to you?

YOLLAND. Actually I never talked to him. I just saw him out walking — in the distance.

HUGH. Wordsworth? … No, I’m afraid we’re not familiar with your literature, Lieutenant. We feel closer to the warm Mediterranean. We tend to overlook your island.

YOLLAND. I’m learning to speak Irish, sir.

HUGH. Good.

YOLLAND. Roland’s teaching me.

HUGH. Splendid.

YOLLAND. I mean — I feel so cut off from the people here. And I was trying to explain a few minutes ago how remarkable a community this is. To meet people like yourself and Jimmy Jack who actually converse in Greek and Latin. And your place names — what was the one we came across this morning? — Termon, from Terminus, the god of boundaries. It — it — it’s really astonishing.

HUGH. We like to think we endure around truths immemorially posited.

YOLLAND. And your Gaelic literature — you’re a poet yourself —

HUGH. Only in Latin, I’m afraid.

YOLLAND. I understand it’s enormously rich and ornate.

HUGH. Indeed, Lieutenant. A rich language. A rich literature. You’ll find, sir, that certain cultures expend on their vocabularies and syntax acquisitive energies and ostentations entirely lacking in their material lives. I suppose you could call us a spiritual people.

OWEN. (not unkindly; more out of embarrassment before Yolland) Will you stop that nonsense, Father?

HUGH. Nonsense? What nonsense?

OWEN. Do you know where the priest lives?

HUGH. At Lis na Muc, over near …

OWEN. No, he doesn’t. Lis na Muc, the Fort of the Pigs, has become Swinefort. (Now turning the pages of the Name Book — a page per name.) And to get to Swinefort you pass through Greencastle and Fair Head and Strandhill and Gort and Whiteplains. And the new school isn’t at Poll na gCaorach — it’s at Sheepsrock. Will you be able to find your way?

(Hugh pours himself another drink. Then: —)

HUGH. Yes, it is a rich language, Lieutenant, full of the mythologies of fantasy and hope and self-deception — a syntax opulent with tomorrows. It is our response to mud cabins and a diet of potatoes; our only method of replying to … inevitabilities. (to Owen) Can you give me the loan of half-a-crown? I’ll repay you out of the subscriptions I’m collecting for the publication of my new book. (to Yolland) It is entitled: ‘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’.

YOLLAND. (laughs) That’s a wonderful title.

HUGH. Between ourselves — the best part of the enterprise. Nor do I, in fact, speak Hebrew. And that last phrase — ‘without the Help of a Master’ — that was written before the new national school was thrust upon me — do you think I ought to drop it now? After all you don’t dispose of the cow just because it has produced a magnificent calf, do you?

YOLLAND. You certainly do not.

HUGH. The phrase goes. And I’m interrupting work of moment. (He goes to the door and stops there) To return briefly to that other matter, Lieutenant. I understand your sense of exclusion, of being cut off from a life here; and I trust you will find access to us with my son’s help. But remember that words are signals, counters. They are not immortal. And it can happen — to use an image you’ll understand — it can happen that a civilization can be imprisoned in a linguistic contour which no longer matches the landscape of … fact. Gentlemen. (He leaves)

OWEN. ‘An expeditio with three purposes’: the children laugh at him: he always promises three points and he never gets beyond A and B.

MANUS. He’s an astute man.

OWEN. He’s bloody pompous.

YOLLAND. But so astute.

OWEN. And he drinks too much. Is it astute not to be able to adjust for survival? Enduring around truths immemorially posited — hah!

YOLLAND. He knows what’s happening.

OWEN. What is happening?

YOLLAND. I’m not sure. But I’m concerned about my part in it. It’s an eviction of sorts.

OWEN. We’re making a six-inch map of the country. Is there something sinister in that?

YOLLAND. Not in —

OWEN. And we’re taking place-names that are riddled with confusion and —

YOLLAND. Who’s confused? Are the people confused?

OWEN. — and we’re standardizing those names as accurately and as sensitively as we can.

YOLLAND. Something is being eroded.