Brian Friel's Translations

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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...

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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.

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