During the play Bridget mentions that she could smell a sweet smell and each time she said this with a certain sense of fear in her voice. This is significant because Friel is reminding us that disaster awaits this society in the future, the disaster being the Great Famine. As a result of this Great Famine thousands emigrated to different countries such as America and other English speaking countries. These people emigrated on ships called “Coffin ships”. Hundreds got on these ships at a time and only a third of them got off at their destined port as the other two thirds of them died from disease or hunger. Ireland’s population before the famine was around 8 million and it decreased to 5 million after the famine. The problem was that in Ireland at this time there was enough food but the food that was in Ireland was being shipped to England to feed the English there. So rather than address the problem in Ireland by giving the Irish people food the English authorities made the situation worse by giving the food away. This is one of the reasons why the Irish people feel that “the British are bad news to the Irish”.
“Translations” is set in a hedge school in Co. Donegal where most people in the region only speak Irish. Around 1833 the Education Act of 1831 was coming into place. The English authorities were going to create National schools; the authorities and the Catholic Churches were in favour of these new schools, these National Schools were in response to the fact that there was no schooling for Catholics. The National schools were bad news as they were going to add to the loss of the native Irish language. They would do this by encouraging the pupils to use English language all the time and with in time the only language spoken would be English. Also around this time the English Authorities had called Ireland’s first ordnance survey, as they wanted to know what Ireland contained and how many people were living in it.
The play has 3 acts and each act centres around the local hedge school. Friel’s passion for hedge schools could be because his great-great-grandfather was once a teacher in a hedge school. Friel has mature students attending the hedge school ranging from anyone in their late teens to pupils like Jimmy who was an old man. Pupils who attended the hedge school would go to learn arithmetic, how to read, write and some
would go to learn English. They would pay the schoolmaster in any way they can as we see Maire in the play giving Hugh milk in return for him teaching her.
The commanding officer Lancey is maddened talks to the pupils at the hedge school as though they were unintelligent. Lancey gives his orders for the pupils to Owen who is an Irish man who speaks both Irish and English. Owen translates Lancey’s orders to the pupils. Owen went to Dublin and he has returned working for the English. Owen is employed by the English to translate for them. From the first time we meet Lancey we see that he finds it hard to communicate to the Irish like they are equals to the English. On Lancey’s first meeting with the pupils in the hedge school we can see that through his attitude toward the pupils he doesn’t care about them.
“Lancey I will say what I have to say, if I may, and as briefly as possible. Do they speak any English, Roland?”
We get the picture that he isn’t there for a friendly chat with these people, to him he is there for a job and that’s all. His words are extremely abrupt and we can see he has no respect for the pupils by calling them “they”.
When Owen is translating Lancey’s words he leaves bits of it out and adds bits in to suit what he thinks the pupils will like.
“Lancey His majesty’s government has ordered the first ever comprehensive survey of this entire country of this entire country
Owen “A new map is being made of the whole country”
Owen never mentioned Lancey’s words Majesty’s government this is because he thinks that if he tells the hedge school pupils they will be worried and if he said this it sounds more formal than what he said to the pupils. Lancey tells the pupils that there is going to be a rise in the amount of tax that people are going to pay and Owen says the opposite to them.
“Lancey The present survey has for its object the relief which can be afforded to the proprietors and occupiers of the land from unequal taxation.
Owen …………the new map will mean that taxes are reduced.”
This happens in Act one and in my opinion Owen sunk low as he was making what the English were going to do seem simpler than what it was. Lancey was saying that the taxes were going to rise and Owen was saying that the taxes would be lowered keeping the hedge school pupils happy.
The only three in the hedge school that could speak English and Irish were Manus, Owen and Hugh. Manus, Owen’s brother confronts him only after Lancey has finished speaking. Manus is not happy with his brother Owen for cheating the fellow villagers like he did.
“Manus What sort of translating was that Owen?
Owen Did I make a mess of it?
Manus You weren’t saying what Lancey was saying!”
When Lancey bursts into the hedge school in act 3 page 79 do we see what the English resort to if there’s any form of resistance. The British are going to evict people off their land and homes, destroy fences, ditches, crops, haystacks everything insight and they are going to persist in this until they find their missing trooper. The
specific name for these actions is called scorched earth policy, which means they are going to destroy everything they can find.
In act two we see Owen the Irish translator and Yolland the British trooper starting to translate the place names of the places around Baile Beag. They are doing this
because the English need to know every inch of Ireland so they can see what they are taking over and it would be impossible for them to do this if all of the maps they have are in Irish. Lancey stated in Act 1 that one reason for the mapping is so that,
“the military authorities will be well equipped with the up-to-date and accurate information on every corner of this part of the Empire.”
So Owen’s job is to translate the place names into English and to translate for the people in Baile beag to make the British soldiers job easier. One of Owen’s tasks is to take all the local place names and change them into English. The names he changes them to are the ones that are going to be used in the maps and the Irish names will not be used again. The English made a thorough job of translating we see this because when Yolland and Owen are translating the place names in Act Two they spend a while deciding what to call “Bun na hAbhann”. We then learn that this place is,
“a tiny area of soggy, rocky, sandy ground where that little stream enters the sea,”
The maps translation is a clever way by the English to ensure that their influence is complete as they even name such an insignificant place as Bun na hAbhann. People today are still suffering because of the colonisation of the English. We live in Ireland and we speak fluent English and I am sure if asked plenty of people wouldn’t know a sentence in Irish. The fact that the English changed the language of the Irish is bad enough but the fact that the Irish were not asked how they felt shows the attitude of the coloniser to the captured country. We can only imagine the feelings of the people at this time. The critic Kevin Barry was one of the many critics that reviewed “Translations” by Brian Friel. He argues that historians quote from registers and other authorized documents, which everyone observes as being truthful. Barry argues that Friel presents a kind of emotional history of what people feel in their hearts about issues like emigration, famine and the loss of the Irish language.
“By imagining an unwritten past Friel translates a defeated community into the narrative of history.”
This quote was taken from “A Paper Landscape: Between Fiction and History,” by Brian Friel, John Andrews and Kevin Barry, The Crane Bag Vol Vll, 2 1983.
They must have felt powerless that their life was about to be changed and they could do nothing about it. In Friel’s play, the majority of the characters don’t even understand the impact of this Ordnance Survey on their lives it is left to the British Officer Yolland to explain.
“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.”
Yolland is remorseful and says,
“Yolland Something is being eroded.”
Friel thinks that the important facet of British colonization is to discover how to deal with one of its main legacies, which would be the English language. We can see that that will always be a problem even when Britain depart Ulster. A culture rarely gets
over the fact that they have been colonised for there is always the trace of the coloniser.
In a review of “Translations” in the Irish Times Friel said, “I don’t want to write a play about Irish speaking peasants being suppressed by the English sapper. I don’t want to write a threnody on the death of Irish language. I don’t want to write a play
about land-surveying, I didn’t want to write a play about naming places.” This articles headline featured “Distorting the Past, true to the Present”. The quote meaning that Friel was changing the history of Ireland to suit his views and reflect on the political situation at the time he wrote it.
If people watch the play carefully they’d see that Friel did in fact write about all these things. Friel mentioned that years before the play he had an assortment of unformulated ideas that kept approaching into his thoughts, he was still deciding on what his next play was to be about. Friel was considering writing, a play set in the nineteenth century, somewhere between the “Act of Union and the Great Famine, a play about Daniel O’ Connell and Catholic emancipation, a play about colonialism and a play about the death if the Irish language and the attainment of English and the intense effects that that conversion would have on the Irish people.” This quote was taken from “A Paper Landscape; Between Fiction and History,” by Brian Friel, John Andrews and Kevin Barry, The Crane Bag Vol VII, 2 1983.
Friel mentions that when he accidentally found out about his great-great-grandfather he started to do some research on hedge-schools and soon found out that across from the river Foyle there had been an ordnance survey done and so Friel read up about this as well.
Friel along with the actor Stephen Rae set up their own company Field Day and “Translations” was the first play they staged. He felt that in order to stage the show exactly how he wanted without offending any one he needed to create his own production company. A company where during the troubled times anyone could say what they thought and that they could talk about difficult issues that were going on around them.
Kiberd in his article “Inventing Ireland”, "Friel Translating” stated,
“Irish declined only when the Irish people allowed to decline”
After “Translations” was first preformed and getting a phenomenal amount of reviews Friel was quoted as saying,
“The only merit in looking back is to understand how you are and where you are at this moment.”
Declan Kiberd in a chapter entitled “Friel Translating” from his book “Inventing Ireland” thinks that Friel’s purpose when writing the play was to get people to watch the play and think about how the society in 1833 and our society now relates to each other through the political issues in the society then and now.
Kiberd’s personal view on what “Translations” was about is that,
“Translations is a tough-minded play about the brutal actualities of cultural power.”
Kiberd meant in this quote that the play is about making Irish people aware that they lost their language and that that’s what Friel was trying to say when he wrote the play.
It has been said that one of Friel’s sources was taken from the poet John Montague who recognised his own disinheritance. Montague wrote a poem “The Rough Field”,
“The whole Landscape a manuscript
We had lost the skill to read,
A part of our past disinherited;”
This reminds me of a scene in the play where Hugh tells Owen that he’s going to the priest’s house and Owen ask Hugh does he know where it is. Of course Hugh knows where the priest lives in the Irish language but obviously not in English.
“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 pigs, has become Swinefort.”
After reading “Translations” I found out things I hadn’t thought of before things like how the English influenced Irish people into speaking fluent English and speaking no Irish and how England influenced the Irish population to drop their native Irish culture to lead full English lives. I feel that reading Friel’s interpretation on life in the 1833s I have more knowledge on why today we live in Ireland and we say we are Irish, but we speak fluent English. I think that the circumstances in which we lost our native language and background is quite sad and infuriating. I think Friel produced this play not for people to sit down and enjoy it but for people to be walking away from it confused. I am sure many of the audiences tried to push the aspects that were raised throughout the play to the back of their minds. I feel that the British are definitely bad news to the Irish. Our country can’t be the same after our culture and language was so quickly given away. The affects of the English will never leave this country as they have imprinted their presence in a way that can’t be erased easily. After reading “Translations” I was full of emotion for the Irish people at the time the play was set and their innocent acceptance of English. I felt pity towards them in the sense that they were losing their language. They had no idea 170 years after the play was set we are still talking English as our first language and Irish isn’t spoken fluently in many parts of Ireland. With England colonising Ireland, which lead to the loss of the Irish language, still has an effect on Irish people today. It’s hard for some people to say that their nationality is Irish and the language they speak is English. I think that in order to address the problems faced due to English being our first language, the Irish language should be offered more to people in Ireland. No matter what happens the English language will be more in use in Ireland than the Irish language.
Bibliography
- Translations and a Paper Landscape: Between Fiction and History Brian Friel, John Andrews and Kevin Barry.
- Historical and Literary Background.
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“Friel play makes it great night in Derry” by The Belfast Telegraph 24th September 1980.
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“New Friel play set in a hedge school” by Sunday Independent June 6th 1980.
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“Question of Metaphor” by The Daily Telegraph August 7th 1981 by Eric Shorter.
- “Distorting the Past, true to the Present” by The Irish Times.
- Inventing Ireland “Friel Translating” Declan Kiberd.
- Brian Friel: A Study of Dantanus.
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“Finding voice in a language not our own” The Sunday Independent October 6th 1980 by Ciaran Carty.
- “Talking to ourselves” Magill December 1980 by Paddy Agnew and Brian Friel.
