Seen in that light, Friel's play is a brilliant reconciliation within a single work of two apparently disparate Irish dramatic traditions: the Abbey revivalist and the Shavian socialist. The desire of all early Abbey playwrights was, Lady Gregory said, a theatre with a base of realism and an apex of beauty. That combination eventually came under baleful scrutiny from radical critics who saw in it evidence of the Abbey's neo-colonial position, Lady Gregory's view of poetry as a compensation for poverty being taken as a tell-tale instance. To the radical mind it would never be enough simply to juxtapose the mythical and mundane, unless each was also made to form part of a critique of the other. This is what happens in Friel's play: the pragmatic warnings of Shaw against dreaming as a function of repression are placed alongside the lethal fantasies of Jimmy Jack and those English Yollands who would sentimentalize them. If Friel has in the play been massively influenced by the creative art of Heaney and Montague, as well as by Shaw and Synge, he is perhaps most indebted to the ideas of critics such as George Steiner and Seamus Deane, and particularly to the suspicion which dominates the writings of the younger Deane25 of all attempts to present high eloquence and rich culture as an adequate consolation for suffering and loss.
Thirty-Four
Translating Tradition
The Irish Renaissance had been essentially an exercise in translation, in carrying over aspects of Gaelic culture into English, a language often thought alien to that culture. Oscar Wilde had predicted as much when he averred that a national literature can only emerge as a result of contact with a foreign literature: what he said, in effect, was that the concept of the "original" comes into existence only after it has been translated. Taken further, this meant that the translator was as often inventing as reflecting an original Ireland: when writers dubbed Standish O'Grady the father of modern Irish literature, they were recognizing that to translate Ireland was but another way of bringing it into being. This has been true of most of the great creative phases of cultural history: in the words of Octavio Paz, they "have been preceded or accompanied by inter-crossings between different poetic traditions".1
Standish O'Grady's versions of the Cuchulain legends were intended for readers who could not understand the Irish-language texts. What is different about Friel's Translations is that, although it is to be imagined as enacted in Irish, in fact there is no original. This has not prevented enthusiasts from translating it back with much success into the native language in which it was never written. Perhaps intentionally, it mimics the Irish Constitution of 1937 which, while written in English, asserts Irish as the first official language, whose version should therefore prevail over the English version in the event of a mistranslation. Not for nothing did the philosopher Jacques Derrida warn that "one should never pass over in silence the question of the tongue in which the question of the tongue is raised".2 Friel is well aware that his play is a post-colonial text to precisely the extent that its powerful diagnosis of a traumatized Irish consciousness nonetheless adds to the glories of the English language.
A root-meaning of "translate" was "conquer": the Romans conquered not only Greece but the Greek past, which they refitted for their present purposes. Yet coded into even this imperial gesture was the recognition that the plundered culture possessed many a quality worth stealing. By a somewhat similar logic, the former greatness of the Celts was established in the first instance by British public servants and translators, who set out to reform and improve the debased contemporary realities of Irish culture. Since the ancient Celtic past was a thinly-disguised version of the British imperial present, acceptance of that present (albeit in the English language) could presage a restoration of former Irish glories. The work of nineteenth-century antiquarians, of defenders of the Anglo-Irish gentry such as O'Grady, provided native readers with a curtailed if potent set of images, available in translation. Yet that golden age was a myth, and a myth moreover which at least some of its sponsors privately saw as such. A Trinity College professor, Robert Atkinson, secretly despised the Celtic literature whose study had made his academic name. His strictures against it in 1899 recalled all too aptly Lord Macaulay's claim that "a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia".3 (That European library was, of course, non-Celtic.)
It was the communication of this idea to the natives which led generations of boys, like those who boarded Charles Trevelyan's steamer at Comercally, to say "Give me any book, all I want is a book".4 The Irish shared this longing for learning, but with one major difference. In India only a native élite was destined to be improved by the study of English; in Ireland the whole population was not only taught English at school, but even the poor themselves decided to speak English on all possible occasions. Accordingly, rather than learn that language from its native speakers, most of them learned it from one another with the effects of "brogue" and mispronunciation that became a source of easy laughter on the British stage. In short, they opted to become their own translators. This was a violation of one of the tenets of imperialism, which declared it "highly dangerous to employ the natives as interpreters, upon whose fidelity they could not depend".5 No wonder that Owen in Friel's play is a figure of much ambivalence for the English as well as the Irish; and Translations in its conclusion shows that those official doubts were well-grounded.
The cultural violence which underlay this change of languages remained largely invisible, since it presupposed the consent of the Irish to that change. Yet Translations shows that Owen is finally more committed to "translating back" into his native language all that has been translated out of it. Seen in this light, his agenda has its roots in Seathrún Céitinn's retranslation of Spenser and Stanyhurst back into "truer" Gaelic terms; and its corollary in the writings of Nuala ní Dhomhnaill, Seán Ó Ríordáin and Máire Mhac an tSaoi. This process – which allows for an Irish translation of the Irish past – is something very different from, and far more positive than, the mechanism of imperialist translation. It involves what Nietzsche pithily called "a reversal of the theft".6 Denying that the colonizer alone has the power to represent the native, it permits the colonized to represent themselves, not alone to the world but also to one another. Instead of the Irish past being pressed into service of a British imperial present, what is discovered by an artist like Synge is the power of the past to disrupt the revivalist present. This is evident in the dynamic uses of Gaelic tradition in The Playboy, and more generally in the fact that Synge's oeuvre was a sustained act of translation.
Synge's literary sensibility found its fullest expression in the manoeuvre between Irish and English. His own poetry, composed in English, seems all too often a stilted pastiche of second-rate contemporary styles, whereas the brilliant translations from continental languages into Hiberno-English dialect give us a sense of the man himself. The dialect in which he finally found his desired medium was the bilingual weave, the language of his innermost being, what George Steiner has called "the poet's dream of an absolute idiolect".7 In the years of dramatic success from 1903 to 1909, Synge's interest in translation was compounded by his desire to test the resources of Hiberno-English. Even towards the end of his life he translated the works of Petrarch, Walter Von der Vogelweide and other continental artists into his dialect. These exercises were far more successful than many standard English versions of the work of these poets. This genius went far deeper than a conventional flair for turning a piece of Irish poetry or prose into English. It involved a capacity to project a whole Gaelic culture in English. Each of Synge's works is an act of supreme translation: the language of his plays is based less on the English spoken in rural Ireland than on the peculiar brand of English spoken in Gaeltacht areas. This English is an instantaneous and literal translation from Irish.8
Renato Poggioli has argued in an inspired paraphrase that the translator is "a character in search of an author" in whom he can identify a part of himself. His translation of such an author's work is no masquerade in which he deceives his aud
ience by mimicking the original writer; rather "... he is a character who, in finding the author without, finds also the author within himself. . . Nor must we forget that such a quest or pursuit may intermittently attract the original writer also, when he too must search for the author in himself".9 In the example of Searhrún Céitinn, Synge found a reflection of himself and his own concerns. In the native literature and lore, he found all those characteristics for which his artistic soul had longed – intensity, homeliness, wry irony, sad resignation, sensuality and the love of place. His years of writing in Paris had yielded nothing but morbid and introspective works; but the discovery of Aran, and the challenge to project its life to the world in English, signalled his discovery of himself as a writer. The English in which he had tried and failed to express himself in those Paris writings had been mannered, weary and effete; only when that language was vitalized by contact with a "backward" oral culture did it offer him the chance of real self-expression.
That Synge's plays should, after his death, have been triumphantly "translated back" into Irish, in the attempt to get even closer to the psychic state of his chosen localities, is but a further confirmation of their authenticity. The lesson seems clear: the more "translated" a work is, the more fully does it seem to perfect its inherent form. It was doubtless a similar kind of thinking which inspired George Moore to suggest to Yeats and Lady Gregory in 1901 that the right way to create a version of the story of Diarmuid and Gráinne was for Moore to compose it in French, for Lady Gregory to translate it into Kiltartanese, for Tadhg Ó Donnchadha to convert that into Irish, and then for Lady Gregory to retranslate it into English.10 Presumably, his point was an aesthetic one: that Bohemia, more than this or that country, is the artists true dwelling-place, and that the ceaseless activity of translation expresses the solidarity of the supranational artistic community.
All great works of literature are so because in some way or another they surpass the usual potentials of their own tongue, reaching out to a universal language. At certain moments of high intensity, that surplus potential may entirely escape the entrapments of language, being contained between the lines rather than in them. Such a moment is the dumbshow of wordless love between Máire Chatach and Lieutenant Yolland in Friel's Translations: in a strict sense it embodies the achievement of the higher ideal underlying every act of translation, for in a language of silence which has no need of recasting is the hope of a privileged space in which resistance to all degrading systems may be possible.
Translation is in the most literal sense a reminder of that high aspiration, for the earliest translators hoped to exceed their originals, to use them as pre-texts for greater inspirations in their own languages. The energies unleashed when one element bonds with another are often volatile, but potent for all that. A translation, therefore, may release qualities which were latent but unexpressed in either the source or the target language. By redeploying ideas, images and structures from English literature in Irish, for instance, Seán Ó Ríordain massively extended its limits, using the lyrics of Wordsworth or Hopkins as a point of release for his own. Similarly, Synge, by allowing his English to be powerfully remodelled by Gaelic syntax, liberated in it yet-unsuspected meanings. This process enacted on a linguistic level the desire of many that in renovating Ireland they should also "save England". For such reasons, Walter Benjamin in a somewhat different context wrote of the translator as one who watches over the maturing process of the original language and the birth-pangs of his own. He saw every translation as an intrepid attempt to reach a little closer toward that lost, prebabelian universal idiom:
It is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language which is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his recreation of that work. For the sake of pure language, he breaks through decayed barriers of his own language.11
The new version glances off the original, as a tangent touches a circle, before pursuing its own primary course: yet that course is forever determined by the point of impact.
For Walter Benjamin the great flaw of most nineteenth-century translations was their excessive respect for the conventions of the target language (usually an imperial one), and their refusal to allow its usages to be creatively disrupted by the syntax of the source. This was Synge's theme-song in his critique of most previous translators: they kept turning Irish into English, rather than remodel English as Irish. His alternative programme to release hidden potentials of English was analogous to Wilde's desire to make England a pastoral republic. In effect, both men wished to reverse the trajectory of Spenser and Stanyhurst: instead of a new England called Ireland, they hoped to make a new Ireland called England.
Ultimately, however, only the English could save themselves, by following the examples mapped out for them in the writings of the Irish. "In translating", said Godfrey Iienhardt, "it is not finally some mysterious 'primitive philosophy' that we are exploring, but the further potentialities of our own thought and language".12 Every society, every culture can only be reformed from within: and the lesson of imperialism is that one's own society is the only society which one can reform without destroying. The aim of the Irish Renaissance was such renovation: saving England turned out to be a mere rehearsal for the work of inventing Ireland. How were the Irish to do this? By performing their own acts of translation and retranslation ... by writing their own history and then rewriting it. This would be a literal re-membering – not a making whole of what was never whole to begin with, but a gluing together of fragments in a dynamic recasting.13
If the past were to be exactly repeated in detail, it would smother the present: this is why Friel's sage says that it is a form of madness to remember everything. Indeed, to remember anything at all one must first learn how to forget it; for it is that temporary forgetfulness which gives memory the excitement of surprise, the force of revelation. Marcel Proust knew better than most the vividness of a past recalled after a period of denial. He called it "involuntary memory" which he saw as triggered by associative mechanisms; and he said that it offered "an air which is new precisely because we have breathed it in the past ... since the true paradises are the paradises that we have lost".14 Others went further, arguing that in order to act at all – and memory is but another action – one must forget a great deal.15 Since absolute forgetting is as impossible as total recall, the need is to bring elements of the past into contact with the present in a dynamic constellation. Benjamin called this citation, but it could as validly be termed translation, for what is suggested is neither a break with the past nor an abject repetition of it, but a rewriting.
"To articulate the past historically", says Benjamin, "does not mean to recognize it as it really was ... It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger".16 This memory might be of a legend such as Deirdre and the Sons of Uisneach, or of a major event such as the Easter Rising. The greatest sin one could commit against such past moments, said Yeats, would be to bring the work of the dead to nothing. The other great sin would be to repeat that work exactly. Between these two extremes, it is nevertheless possible to form constellations, to perform translations. That was what Patrick Pearse did in linking the work of his generation to that of 1798, 1848 and 1867. Equally, it is what Friel means in connecting the Ireland of the 1830s with that of the 1970s. His plays show the audience how it must somehow grasp the meaning of the prior moment and learn how to make it also contemporary. No activity is ever more pressing or necessary than self-translation: by recasting its own words a people makes them its own all over again. Owen's reduction in Translations of circumlocution to terseness is one version of that need; another is Friel's imaginative linkage of the 1830s and 1970s. This is why the critique of Friel's "escape" into language or into the nineteenth century is so banal. The playwright is ultimately less interested in the surface details of either past or present moments than in the new constellation between them which he has made. He is the angel of history17 caught in the s
torm that blows from paradise and propelled into that future to which his back must always be turned, while the mound of debris strewn behind him grows to the sky.
The collapse of the native language, like the great famine which followed it, is an event which remains remarkably unstudied by Irish historians: little research was done on either event for decades and even today there is no classic study by an Irish scholar. Much the same might be said of the Easter Rising and its aftermath: these also lack an adequate narrative history. Large elements of the Irish story need to be written before they can be rewritten. Just as great texts exercise a claim and cry out for translation, so also do great events. A serious translation is usually an indication of fame, of enduring value: such translations owe their existence to the prior work, much as modern Ireland (whether it admits it or not) owes its character to great events, including those neglected by its historians. Of such traumas, as much as of his own immediate fate – he killed himself in flight from the Nazis in 1940 – must Benjamin have been thinking when he wrote:
. . . One might, for example, speak of an unforgettable life or moment, even if all men had forgotten it. If the nature of such a life or moment required that it be unforgotten, that predicate would not imply a falsehood but merely a claim not fulfilled by men, and probably also a reference to a realm in which it is fulfilled: God's remembrance.18
Even if texts and events go untranslated, it is their translatability which is significant. Just as in the gospels which show the moment of Jesus in the New Testament as forming a constellation with the moment of ancient prophecies in the Old Testament, there is in this analysis a link between remembrance and redemption: but part of the point, as Patrick Pearse understood very well, is that many people will not notice it. This type of quotation without quotation marks is most exacting, for it rejects the notion of history as continuum, and prefers to unfreeze moments by placing them in suggestive alignments. Central to it is a need, often felt by the Irish, to translate the past, in the sense of displacing it, and to put it into a disturbing relationship with the present. Irish memory has often been derisively likened to those historical paintings in which Virgil and Dante converse in a single frame:19 but for Friel, it is the only method, and so the denizens of his hedge-school quote not only Virgil and Dante but also George Steiner.
Inventing Ireland Page 77