Translations: The Play

Translating Translations

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Happy Birthday, Mr Friel!

Brian Friel's Translations, first performed at the Guildhall in Derry on 23 September 1980, is set in a hedge-school in the rural Ireland of north-western Donegal in the summer of 1833.

After the Battle of the Boyne (1690), the Protestant Anglo-Irish Ascendancy was firmly established as the ruling class of Ireland. To secure this position, a set of anti-Catholic laws were enacted: the Penal Laws (1695) prohibited Catholics, among other denials, to send their children abroad to receive a Catholic education, and excluded Catholics from teaching in Ireland. Hedge-schools were the Irish answer - illegal, fee-paying educational institutions for the Irish peasants. First held behind hedges, with lookouts posted, many hedge-schools later, as the law enforcement relaxed in the eighteenth century, moved to barns or cottages. Initially, most of the tuition was through Gaelic. Indeed, hedge schoolmasters were often local Gaelic poets whose aristocratic patronage had been destroyed in the Williamite War and the anti-Catholic legislation in its aftermath. The writer William Carleton (1794-1869), himself educated at various hedge-schools, describes one such hedge schoolmaster as a curious combination of genuine learning and pedantic pomposity, yet with a great command of authority among his pupils - the spitting image of Friel's 'alcoholically challenged' Hugh O'Donnell.

Just before the National School system was introduced in Ireland (1831), it has been estimated that some half-million Irish children received their education in hedge-schools. Some of these schools had continued teaching entirely through Gaelic, and were excellent at teaching the classics. Yet, most of them reflected the growing awareness among the Irish of English as the language of opportunity. The language of the Grattan Parliament (1782-1800) was English; the language used in the United Irishmen's 1798 revolution was English; and, after the Act of Union (1800), English became the dominant language of politics, trade, commerce and law. It was, of course, also the language of emigration! Irish, by contrast, became associated with backwardness, was widely perceived as the language of the dispossessed. Daniel O'Connell, the Irish leader of the Repeal (of Union) and Catholic Emancipation movements, although himself an Irish-speaker, was fiercely opposed to the preservation of Irish:

... although the Irish language is connected with many recollections which twine round the hearts of Irishmen, yet the superior utility of the English tongue as a medium of all modern communication is so great that I can witness without a sigh the gradual disuse of Irish.

"The old language," he is quoted in Translations, "is a barrier to modern progress."

The collapse of the Irish language is emblematic of an Ireland undergoing a fundamental transformation. At the beginning of the 19th century, more than half of Ireland's population was Irish-speaking or bilingual. By the time of the 1851 Census the figure had fallen to 30 per cent; by 1871 to a mere 13 to 14 per cent. The introduction of the National School system to Ireland, enforcing English as the exclusive medium for teaching, was an important factor, even if it was not what Padraic Pearse retrospectively termed the "murder machine".

Recurring famines, indicated by repeated references to the ominous "sweet smell" of potato blight in Translations, and culminating in the Great Famine (1845-1851), played a decisive role in the decline of the language, as it hit the poorer, Irish-speaking rural areas of the West and South-West of Ireland hardest. Between 1845 and 1851, over a million people died, either from starvation, or from cholera and other famine-induced diseases; over 1.5 million people emigrated. Before the Famine, more than 8 million people had lived in Ireland; Famine death and continuous emigration were seen by landlords and by the British government as at least partly beneficial as they helped reduce the population of Ireland. By the end of the century, the population had fallen to 4.5 million, roughly the level of today.

The various strands of this 'translation' of Ireland in the nineteenth century meet in Friel's Ballybeg in the early 1830s. The newly-introduced national schools reinforce the attack on the Irish language, and Army cartographers are undertaking a massive operation, mapping Ireland and, in the process, renaming - translating - the Irish place names they encounter. Signs of famine are in the air; emigration and the need to speak English put pressure on Hugh's Gaelic-speaking hedge-school.

Friel's play has been attacked for its historical inaccuracies. But Translations is not a history lesson, it is a history play. Still sometimes misunderstood as a nostalgic threnody for the decline of Irish culture and language, it is a dissection of British colonialism, focusing on "the final linguistic and cultural take-over of Ireland by the British Empire" (Dantanus). In the British Army Ordnance Survey operation, Brian Friel found a dramatic metaphor for the process of Anglicisation and British cultural imperialism. The incomprehension of the British about Ireland, an Army ill-equipped to deal with the situation, the incompatibility of two cultures, the problems of communication deriving from a completely different set of references are all, furthermore, pointers to the contemporary situation. "Friel has found," in the words of Professor Seamus Deane, "a sequence of events in history which are transformed by his writing into a parable of events in the present day."

But, in its central theme of language, communication and the shaping of reality, Translations can also be seen as Friel's lament for a failed 'translation': the failed attempt to modernise Ireland from within, without imperial interference and enforcement, embodied in the hedge schoolmaster Hugh being ultimately denied his own 'translation' of his hedge school into the new national school.