Brian Friels Translations Essay -- Friel Translations Essays

Brian Friel's "Translations" 'Translations', by Brian Friel, presents us with an idyllic rural community turned on its head as the result of the recording and translation of place names into English; an action which is at first sight purely administrative. In Act 1 of the play, Friel brings together the inhabitants of this quaint Irish village in what can only be described as a gathering of minds - minds which study the classics, yet minds which study dead languages. In the same way, while this community is rich in culture and togetherness, it is also trapped in what is later described as a "contour which no longer matches the landscape ofà ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¦fact". Thus, in expressing his ambivalence, Friel presents the reader with a question - is Baile Beag an intellectual Irish Arcadia? There is no denying that Baile Beag is an intellectual community. At the beginning of the play, Jimmy Jack Cassie, one of the central characters, is in the process of reading Joyce's 'Ulysses'. He is capable of reading the text fluently and understands it, despite it being in another language (although he later reveals that, while he is fluent in Latin and Greek, he knows only one word of English). He even relates his own life to that of characters in the book, posing the question, "if you had the picking between them [Athene, Artemis & Helen of Troy], which would you take?". Furthermore, he even goes so far as to associate the smoke described within the pages of the text to the turf smoke which he believes has turned his hair flaxen. Hugh, the teacher in charge of the running of the hedge-school, is also an intellectual. While one could argue that he displays pomposity (his long, drawn out sentences result in him never rememberi... ...g is not what one would describe as a predominantly intellectual community. Furthermore, while Baile Beag is a place rich in community and in culture, a sense of threat and danger undercuts this. For, you see, Friel presents us with a society that teeters on a knife-edge; a people that live in constant fear of rural collapse and the horrendous poverty which would inevitably follow. Exacerbating the relentless grip which this fear has on people's lives is the prospect of the collapse of the Irish language at the hands of the national school, and the potential cultural and linguistic erosion as the result of the remapping of Ireland by imperial forces (although it is unlikely that the people of Baile Beag were aware of this erosion until it occurred). Therefore, while Baile Beag may be a relatively intellectual community, it is in no way an idyllic Arcadia.