By the time the play was written, P. J. Dowling had proved in The Hedge-Schools of Ireland that English rather than Irish was the main subject of study, as well as the major language of instruction,3 in classes which were hardly the bulwark of Gaelic or indeed Greek civilization portrayed by pious nationalist historians. The school evoked in Translations was not typical, but there were establishments of its kind in existence. What proved controversial, however, was Friel's stylized dramatization of adults as pupils in the school. Some literalists, missing the authors irony, complained that the device recalled the imperial theories of the 'childlike' Celts.
Nevertheless, Friel can be defended on the very grounds on which he was attacked. For one thing, his play ends when the hedge-schoolmaster Hugh promises to teach Máire Chatach the English which she needs – as if to demonstrate by dramatic means how the situation described by Dowling came about. Moreover, in locating the debate at the level of language, Friel was not shirking the realities of politics so much as demonstrating the truth of Foucault's thesis that "discourse is the power which is to be seized".4 The struggle for the power to name oneself and one's state is enacted fundamentally within words, most especially in colonial situations.
So a concern with language, far from indicating a retreat, may be an investigation into the depths of the political unconscious. After all, one of the first policies formulated by the Norman occupiers was to erase Gaelic culture. It was, however, only in the mid-nineteenth century that the native language declined, not as an outcome of British policy so much as because an entire generation of the Irish themselves decided no longer to speak it. O'Connell said that the superior utility of English was such that even a native speaker like himself could witness without a sigh the gradual disuse of Irish, a remark cited by Máire Chatach in Translations. To put the matter starkly, Irish declined only when the Irish people allowed it to decline. Brit-bashing mythology which cites the tally-stick, National Schools and Famine as the real causes was designed by politicians to occlude this painful truth, lest it cast a probing light on the contemporary situation, which is that Irish is still dying, still recoverable, but popular will to complete that recovery seems lacking.5
The government survey of 1975 reported that, despite a widespread love of Irish, few persons believed that it would survive as a community language into the next century.6 The statistics were a focus of intense debate in the years that followed, the years in which Translations gestated. Far from being an evasion of current debates, the play is an uncompromising reminder that it is Irish, and not English people, who have the power to decide which language is spoken in Ireland. The very fact that audiences are to imagine the play being enacted in Irish is not just a clever double-take, but a conceit which is savagely satiric of those modern audiences which lack proficiency in their own language. If they laugh at the Englishman's halting attempts to express himself to the villagers, they are also in effect laughing at themselves.
Friel, therefore, is no nostalgic revivalist, no exponent of the dreamy backward look. During the controversy which followed Translations he said: "the only merit in looking back is to understand how you are and where you are at this moment".7 He believes that culture can be causative, can have political consequences: so, when he discusses language, he sees it as a specific basis for all the politics which may ensue. Northern Irish writers are more conscious than southern counterparts of this fact, because they grew up in a state where the speaking of Irish was a political act, and where a person who gave a Gaelic version of a name to a policeman might expect a cuff on the ear or worse. The language did not enjoy the levels of support in schools or government which it had in the south. Writers, accordingly, were aware of a cultural deprivation from birth and sought to repair it as best they could.
For them a few token phrases – the cúpla focal – were not a perfunctory performance but a glamorous conspiratorial act. Hence me trouble taken by Heaney to provide a version of Buile Shuibhne. Like Friel, Heaney finds a poetry in the Gaelic echoes that survive in placenames like Anahorish (Anach Fhíor Uisce), their musicality being connected with their poetic refusal to disclose at once all recoverable meanings. He can therefore describe himself as a tourist in Jutland as if he were recounting a motor-drive through the Donegal Gaeltacht:
Something of his sad freedom
As he rode the tumbril
Should come to me, driving,
Saying the names
Tollund, Grabaulle, Nebelgard,
Watching the pointing hands
Of country people,
Not knowing their tongue.8
Friel's love-scene between Yolland and Máire Chatach is based on the same kind of incantatory ecstasy, as if the two lovers can be invested with a special radiance simply by intoning favoured placenames to one another:
Bun na hAbhann . . . Druim Dubh ... Lis na nGall . . . Liss na nGrá . . . Carraig an Phoill . . . Carraig na Rí. . . Loch na nÉan . . .9
To a northern writer with little Irish, however, the melody of local placenames can seem more a rebuke than a ratification. In "A Lost Tradition", a key poem in The Rough Field, John Montague treats of his ancestral homeland in County Tyrone. The map of his native townland is studded with placenames derived from an Irish which has been dead in that area for generations. In an ancient Gaelic manuscript, which no contemporary reader can understand, Montague finds an image of his own geography of disinheritance:
All around, shards of a lost tradition, . . .
The whole landscape a manuscript
We had lost the skill to read,
A part of our past disinherited;
But fumbled, like a blind man,
Along the finger-tips of instinct.10
Those lines, published in the mid-1970s, may have been another source for Friel:
OWEN: Do you know where the priest (now) 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 Fairhead 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?11
By the play's end, that geography of disinheritance will be complete when Máire Chatach, the person onstage who wants most of all to learn English, will stumble back into the hedge-school with the words:
I'm back again. I set out for somewhere, but I couldn't remember where. So I came back here.12
With cruel irony the master's response to her alienation is not to cure it but to complete it, by teaching her the English which will make her feel at home in the face of these strange roadsigns.
All of these echoes from Heaney and Montague as well as from Joyce and Carleton indicate Friel as exponent of a knowing inter-textuality, and as someone who wishes to inscribe his texts into the contours of a developing national debate. Though Translations gathers many threads of that debate together, it also gives rise to many others. Quite late in the play, the hedge-schoolmaster Hugh has decided that every culture must be renewed and that he will learn the new names so as to know his new home. At just that point his son, Owen, who has done most to collaborate with the map-makers, suddenly shouts in a burst of ancestral piety: "I know where I live". His father's response is: "Take care, Owen, to remember everything is a form of madness".13 Four years after the play's performance, in the poem called Station Island which he dedicated to Brian Friel, Seamus Heaney causes Carleton to say: "remember everything and keep your head",14 i.e. it may be possible to avoid madness and yet recall all. This debate between the members of Field Day often proved far more challenging and even abrasive than the critiques of the movement mounted from without.
That it is the backward-looking hedge-schoolmaster who finally opts for English, modernity and the world of facts suggests how little an exercise in nostalgia Friel's play actually is. Hugh refuses to fossilize past images whi
ch had no roots in reality. Translations is a tough-minded play about the brutal actualities of cultural power. Some of its peasants may be cunning, others dreamers, but the pragmatists outnumber the dreamers when the chips are down. The sentimental English officer Yolland confesses a sense of guilt for his part in the Ordnance Survey: "it's an eviction of sorts". His Donegal collaborator Owen tersely translates that misty-eyed nostalgia into real words: "We're making a six-inch map of the country. Is there something sinister in that?"15
Owen is reminiscent of Shaw's Larry Doyle, a pragmatic fact-facing Irishman who works best with a rather emotional English Celticist, but one who has enough of the rebel in him to sense that, if the Irish are to fight successfully, they had better master the language of their colonizers. By far the most complex character onstage, Owen sees the positive potential in the mapping: for example, placenames lost by natural attrition within the Gaelic culture might be restored. Owen in this play is only seen as abject when he wilfully mistranslates a sentence or a name, or when he wilfully endures such a mistranslation (for instance, submitting to the name Roland). However, a true translation, true to the genius of both traditions, appears to Friel as the least of all evils in the negotiation between tradition and modernity. The problem is that a translator is often a traducer, especially when working out of a minor and into a major imperial language.
Thus Owen becomes Roland and Bun na hAbhann, equally inexplicably, Burnfoot, as an English grid is remorselessly imposed on all Irish complexities. This is a noted feature of imperialism: its desire not so much to translate Irish values into English words as to translate English values into Irish terms.16 In this fashion they are imposed, much as the citizens of California have, by the assiduous use of water-sprinklers, converted the brown grass of the southern parts of that state into a facsimile of the English lawn: a reminder that imperialism can be ecological as well as linguistic. John Dryden's hopeful aphorism – that landmarks are more sacred than words and never to be removed17 – is well and truly rebutted in Friel's play, at the end even the physical appearance of the landscape is to be changed by a scorched-earth policy.
The iterative image of such imperial designs in this play is Lieutenant Yolland's attempt to draw a map of his native Norfolk for his Irish lover on the wet sands of Baile Beag. The hopeless stupidity of the attempt to impose a foreign grid on Irish reality is manifest in the fact that Yolland's model is etched in shifting sands. His attempt to draw Norfolk on the Donegal seashore is a fair image of what his own government is trying to do in the Ordnance Survey. Such a map, however romantic in this particular context, is the usual occupier's response to what he perceives as uncharted wilderness. And the attempt to write all the new names into a book represents the colonizer's benign assumption mat to name a thing is to assert one's power over it and that the written tradition of the occupier will henceforth enjoy primacy over the oral memory of the natives. A map, in short, will have much the same relation to a landscape as the written word has to speech. Each is a form of translation.
Such a translation has always been an aspect of imperialism, for as Edward Said has written:
. . . cultures have always been inclined to impose concrete transformations on other cultures, receiving these other cultures not as they are but as, for the benefit of the receiver, they ought to be. To the Westerner, however, the Oriental was always like some aspect of the West ... for the Orientalist makes it his work to be always converting the Orient from something into something else . . .18
For "Orientalist" read "Celticist". Said adds, in what might be a bleak reference to the name book, that "it seems a common human failing to prefer the authority of a text to the disorientations of direct encounters with the human ..." The next stage, he says, occurs when all that is in the books is preposterously put into practice, reducing the complexities of a culture to a kind of flatness, in much the same way that Captain Lancey decides to level Baile Beag. No Orientalist text, Said adds, was complete without a ritual infatuation on the part of the narrator with some mysterious woman of the native tribe, much along the lines of Yolland's assignations with Máire Chatach, an infatuation often experienced by the wayward son who is sent to an outpost because he can find no suitable job or partner at home. The woman, like the colony, is a mystery to be penetrated; and the real issue in all this, says Said, is
whether there can indeed be a true representation, or whether any and all representations, because they are representations, are embedded first in the language and men in the culture, institutions and political ambience of the representer.19
Of nothing are these observations more true than of an insurgent nationalism, which is perpetually doomed to define itself in the loaded language and hegemonic terms set by the colonizer. So, because England's was an aristocratic, class-ridden culture, the Irish – in order to feel as nobly born – had to claim an aristocratic lineage. One of the peculiarities of the aristocratic English was their growing interest in Ireland, or indeed any colony, where things seemed to have petrified and time to have stood still, even as the home country slowly industrialized. The anti-modern, anti-democratic component of Irish revivalism greatly appealed to, because it was a creation of, the English upper-class mind. Echoes of this aristocratic fetishism may be heard in the revivalist association of England with levelling vulgarity. . . and in Yolland's comment that the English-language version makes the classical Latin of the hedge-school sound only plebeian.
Yolland is in open revolt against this modernization, and against the father who equates the new imperial mission with such modernization. That father was born in 1789, on the very day that the Bastille fell: so he inherited a new world of restless experiment, innovative rationalization, the bustle of an order which placed more emphasis on money than on land, on profit rather than on leisured elegance. Yolland, however, on setting foot in Ireland feels that he has recovered the ease of the ancien régime, "a consciousness that wasn't striving nor agitated, but at its ease and with its own conviction and assurance".20 The account, late in the play, of how Hugh and his friend walked towards the French-inspired rebellion of 1798 only to turn back suggests not so much a fear of the English enemy as a timidity in the face of revolutionary French modernity, a collective decision by the Irish to keep the modern world at bay. Now modernity has caught up with them in the shape of the survey, implemented by a Yolland who scarcely believes in it and by a collaborator who has strong reservations.
The hedge-schoolmaster Hugh seeks to resolve the consequent dilemmas. Having lost his nerve back in 1798, he found that he had opted instead for a world of regressive nostalgias – the kind of foolish dreams epitomized at the end by his star pupil Jimmy Jack as he mumbles through an alcoholic haze about his recent engagement to the goddess Athene. Hugh has learned enough by now to know that a culture which refuses to make some adjustments will eventually find itself mummified. Hence his willingness to take over the post in the new national school – though there is something negative in this gesture, since it will deny the aspirations of his loyal son to a steady job and to marriage with Máire Chatach.
Apart from failing to grow and adapt, the other way in which a culture dies is when it is suffocated and overlain with that of a foreign power. It is surely deliberate that either possible meaning could be inferred from Hugh's statement 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.21.
Facts were, of course, the tyranny with which the Celt was held unable to cope: but the fact that these most famous lines in the play – culled from George Steiner's After Babel: Aspects of Language in Translation – are so ambivalent nicely illustrates Friel's underlying theme: that once Anglicization is achieved the Irish and English, instead of speaking a truly identical tongue, will be divided most treacherously by a common language. This division is literally enac
ted onstage whenever Owen has to translate Captain Lancey's circumlocutions into homely words.
So, in the final moments it is, most surprisingly, Hugh who voices the pragmatist's willingness to embrace English and the new order, even as Owen indicates that he may join the rebels for one last stand. Holding the name book in his hand, Hugh says
We must learn where we live. We must learn to make them our own. We must make them our new home.22
A shrewd reading of the play would reveal that this realistic tone had been implicit in Hugh's utterances all along. In that earlier scene, wherein he had offered just the kind of Arnoldian explanations of Irish eloquence that Yolland wanted to hear, he had not in fact been speaking literally so much as parodying himself (the stage direction is explicit on this). In saying "we like to think we endure around truths immemorially posited",23 he was being sarcastic less about Irish self-images than about English self-deception. Nowhere is that thrust more deadly than in his mimicry of the liberal imperialist notion that culture thrives in direct proportion to poverty and sacred simplicity, that those who lose the material wars are consoled by having all the best songs:
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.24
This isn't just savage anti-pastoralism of the kind practised by Myles na gCopaleen in An Béal Bocht; it is also a critique of that Irish revivalism which saw culture as a compensation for squalor. As a hedge-schoolmaster Hugh knows the costs of such eloquence. His circumlocutions – "vesperal salutations" for "good evening" – are in the familiar mode of long-winded but diplomaless hedge-schoolteachers. The fabled jawbreakers of Hiberno-English are rooted less in native Irish exuberance than in a tragic defensiveness in the face of a more powerful language.
Inventing Ireland Page 76
