Brian Friel's Translations Brian Friel’s play Translations was the first production of the Field Day Theatre Company in Derry in 1980, which Friel co-founded with Stephen Rea. It describes the beginning of the process of Anglicization in a relatively remote Gaelic-speaking area during the 1833 Survey of Ireland, in which the English mapped Ireland, both culturally and geographically. Years of concerted anglicizing of the Irish by the British early in the 19th century led to the widespread fall into disuse of the native Gaelic tongue. National schools teaching exclusively in English began to open during the Survey of Ireland, and English culture encroached rapidly into Ireland. William Butler Yeats and Douglas Hyde write from the end of this period; a time in which daily Gaelic use was restricted to remote areas of the nation, and both are Irish nationalists. While they agree that Ireland should be de-anglicized, the notable difference between their views centers on their opinions of the role Gaelic should play in such a process. As Hugh says in Translations, “it can happen that a civilization can be imprisoned in a linguistic contour which no longer matches the landscape of…fact.”1 (900, 1132-1135) Though he is referring to the Irish being trapped by the Gaelic language in the steady progression of Anglicization, the quote is just as applicable to the possible process of returning gradually to a widespread use of Gaelic. Because it has largely fallen into disuse does not mean that the Irish should be trapped by English. Hyde delivered a speech before the Irish National Literary Society on the 25th of November, 1892 entitled “The Necessity for De-Anglicizing Ireland.” W.B. Yeats responded to this speech la... ... middle of paper ... ...izing_ireland.html 3 ibid. 4 ibid. 5 ibid. 6 ibid. 7 ibid. 8 ibid. 9 ibid. 10 ibid. 11 ibid. 12 ibid. 13 ibid. 14 ibid. 15 ibid. 16 ibid. 17 ibid. 18 ibid. 19 ibid. 20 ibid. 21 Yeats, pg. 261 22 ibid., pg. 261 23 ibid., pg. 261-262 24 ibid., pg. 262 25 ibid., pg. 262 26 ibid., pg. 262 27 ibid., pg 262 28 Friel, pg. 894 lines 474-475 29 ibid., pg. 894 lines 505-506 30 ibid., pg. 908 lines 1849-50 & 1853-4 Bibliography Hyde, Douglas. “The Necessity for De- Anglicizing Ireland,” 1892. http://ciarraide.org/articles/deanglicizing_ireland.html Yeats, William Butler. The De-Anglicizing of Ireland” in Yeats’s Poetry, Drama, and Prose. ed. Pethica, James. W.W. Norton & Company, USA, 2000. Friel, Brian. Translations in Modern Drama. Ed. Worthen, W.B. Heinle & Heinle Publishing Company, USA, 2002.
Zwillenberg, Myrna Kogan. "Dramatic Justice in Tartuffe." Modern Language Notes 90.4 (Apr. 1975): 583-590. Rpt. in Drama Criticism. Ed. Linda Pavlovski. Vol. 13. Detroit: Gale Group, 2001. Literature Resource Center. Web. 25 Jan. 2014.
Dunne’s work, Tom Dunne, `The Gaelic Response to Conquest and Colonisation: the Evidence of the Poetry’ in Studia Hibernica 1980, does a good job of explaining the inherent problems in attempting to ascribe cause to the Gaelic reaction. As he aptly points out, the conquered rarely write their own history. The Gaelic, as victims of colonization had very little voice. Dunne attempts to give the Gaelic a voice by analyzing poetry from the later decadedsof the seventeenth century, through to 1729. He attempts to discuss the effects of conquest and colonization on the Gaelic population. I response to Branden Bradshaw’s argument that the Leabhar Branuch shows the development of Irish Nationalism, Dunne, rebuts this stating “ Neither the evidence of the Leabhar Branuch itself, or of gaelic poetry as a whole, in this time or later periods, allows this interpretation”.
The tales were rediscovered around 1880 inspiring the Irish literary revival in romantic fiction by writers such as Lady Augusta Gregory and the poetry and dramatic works of W.B. Yeats. These works wer...
Up to act one, Friel presents us with a tight knit and well-bonded community of people. People bonded by their nationality, culture and language. This of course is extremely ironic (Friel uses irony quite heavily in this play, for example the fact that Jimmy-Jack is called the "infant prodigy", he is in-fact in his late sixties. His name indicates that he has always been at the same precocious level of ability and he is unlikely to advance any further), the fact that the whole play is about the English renaming most of Ireland for conveniences sake. Also the English are teaching most of Ireland how to speak English, moving them away from their traditional Gaelic tongue. The English settlers are breaking up the community.
“William Butler Yeats.” Encyclopaedia Britannica Online Academic Edition. Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc., 2014. Web. 09 May 2014.
In 1896 Yeats met Lady Gregory, an aristocrat and playwright who shared his interest in Ireland's past, especially in its folklore. In 1899 they formed a literary society that was the predecessor of the Abbey Theatre. Among his plays were 'The Countess Cathleen' (1892) and 'Cathleen ni Houlihan' (1902), with Maud Gonne in the title role. In 1899 he proposed to her, but she refused to marry him. As a means of getting closer to Maud, Yeats later...
"John Keats." British Literature 1780-1830. Comp. Anne K. Mellor and Richard E. Matlak. Boston: Heinle & Heinle, 1996. 1254-56. Print.
Keats, John. “The Eve of St. Agnes”. The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Romantic
Not a unified and separate country until 1921, Northern Ireland has had cultural, financial, and economic that makes it stand affront from the rest of the Emerald Isles. With its close proximity to England and the immigration all through the 1600s of English and Scottish, Northern Ireland has become more anglicized th...
William Yeats is deliberated to be among the best bards in the 20th era. He was an Anglo-Irish protestant, the group that had control over the every life aspect of Ireland for almost the whole of the seventeenth era. Associates of this group deliberated themselves to be the English menfolk but sired in Ireland. However, Yeats was a loyal affirmer of his Irish ethnicity, and in all his deeds, he had to respect it. Even after living in America for almost fourteen years, he still had a home back in Ireland, and most of his poems maintained an Irish culture, legends and heroes. Therefore, Yeats gained a significant praise for writing some of the most exemplary poetry in modern history
Gerald of Wales’ was most likely never in Ireland, and his writing is not an accurate portrayal of the Irish, but a chance to discuss hybridity and turn his readers against it while also the Irish.
Yeats, William, Butler. "The Second Coming." The Longman Anthology British Literature. Ed. David Damrosch. Longman. New York. 2000. 2329.
Gainor, J. Ellen., Stanton B. Garner, and Martin Puchner. The Norton Anthology of Drama, Shorter Edition. New York: W. W. Norton &, 2010. Print.
This refrain enforces his disgust at the type of money hungry people that the Irish have become. In the third and fourth stanza, however, Yeats completely changes the tone of his poetry. He praises the romantics of Irish history, such as Rob...
This paper will investigate the culture of Ireland by taking a look at the five characteristics. Each characteristic will be allotted its own subsections. The first section will encompass the history to illuminate the connection of a country’s struggle and their learned culture. I will communicate the key aspects that connect an individual culture to the region of the world it inhabits in the second section. In the third section, the language and art of the land are discussed to draw lines to the symbols a culture is founded upon. The fourth section of the essay is dedicated to the characteristic of culture being made up of many components. This is illustrated by the ethnicity/racial, weather, terrain, and military breakdown of the island. The final section is commentary on the dynamic characteristic that interacting cultures learn, develop, and transform due to their shared contact and friction.