Brian Friels Translations Essay -- Friel Translations Essays

Brian Friels TranslationsTranslations, by Brian Friel, presents us with an idyllic ruralcommunity turned on its head as the proceeds of the recording andtranslation of place names into English an action which is at firstsight purely administrative. In Act 1 of the play, Friel brings unitedly the inhabitants of this quaint Irish village in what can onlybe exposit as a gathering of minds - minds which study the classics,yet minds which study loose languages. In the same right smart, trance thiscommunity is rich in culture and togetherness, it is also trapped inwhat is later described as a word form which no longer matches thelandscape offact. Thus, in expressing his ambivalence, Frielpresents the reader with a question - is Baile Beag an intellectualIrish Arcadia?There is no denying that Baile Beag is an intellectual community. Atthe ancestor of the play, Jimmy Jack Cassie, one of the centralcharacters, is in the process of reading Joyces Ulysses. He iscapable of reading the tex t fluently and understands it, despite itbeing in another language (although he later reveals that, while he isfluent in Latin and Greek, he knows only one word of English). He level offrelates his own life to that of characters in the book, posing thequestion, if you had the picking between them Athene, Artemis &Helen of Troy, which would you take?. Furthermore, he even goes sofar as to associate the smoke described within the pages of the textto the turf smoke which he believes has turned his hair flaxen.Hugh, the teacher in charge of the running of the hedge-school, isalso an intellectual. While one could make out that he displays pomposity(his long, drawn out sentences result in him never rememberi... ...g is notwhat one would describe as a predominantly intellectual community.Furthermore, while Baile Beag is a place rich in community and inculture, a sense of threat and danger undercuts this. For, you see,Friel presents us with a society that teeters on a knife-edge apeople that live in constant fear of rural collapse and the horrendouspoverty which would inevitably follow. Exacerbating the relentless handgrip which this fear has on peoples lives is the prospect of thecollapse of the Irish language at the hands of the national school,and the potential cultural and linguistic erosion as the result of theremapping of Ireland by imperial forces (although it is unlikely thatthe people of Baile Beag were aware of this erosion until itoccurred). Therefore, while Baile Beag may be a relativelyintellectual community, it is in no way an idyllic Arcadia.