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 result of the recording andtranslation of place names into English an action which is at firstsight purely administrative. In subroutine 1 of the play, Friel bringstogether the inhabitants of this quaint Irish village in what can onlybe described as a gathering of minds - minds which study the classics, all the same minds which study dead languages. In the same way, while thiscommunity is rich in culture and togetherness, it is also trapped inwhat is later described as a contour which no longer matches thelandscape offact. Thus, in expressing his ambivalence, Frielpresents the reader with a question - is Baile Beag an expertIrish Arcadia?There is no denying that Baile Beag is an intellectual community. Atthe beginning of the play, Jimmy Jack Cassie, one of the centralcharacters, is in the process of reading Joyces Ulysses. He iscapable of reading the text flue ntly and understands it, contempt itbeing in another language (although he later reveals that, while he isfluent in Latin and Greek, he knows only one ledger of English). He evenrelates 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 brother 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. enchantment one could argue that he displays pomposity(his long, drawn out sentences result in him never rememberi... ...g is notwhat one would describe as a preponderantly 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 union that teeters on a knife-edge apeople that live in constant fear of rural collapse and the horrendouspoverty which would inevitably follow. exacerbate the relentlessgrip 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 corroding 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.