Borders in Brian Friel’s Translations

Abstract

Brian Friel’s most discussed play Translations was published and firstperformed in 1981 at the height of the Northern Irish Troubles. Inevitably its critical reception centered on political meanings—forexample, whether the play was primarily concerned with the colonialactivity involved in the English renaming of Irish place names in theearly nineteenth century. If the play was primarily concerned with thisact of linguistic appropriation, then the question of absolute historicalaccuracy is crucial, so interpretations hostile to the play accused it ofinaccuracies (for example such minutiae as whether rifles were armedwith bayonets or not). In fact, the play is not about this kind of politicalappropriation at all, but about mutual misapprehension and lack ofunderstanding. This essay analyzes several scenes of the play to showhow nobody wholly understands anyone else—a social circumstancewhich is represented in linguistic terms, through Irish, English, Greekand Latin. The critical failure to understand the play in its own dramaticterms is ironically a modern instance of the same failure of mutual comprehension. This paper has been showing the particular ways in whichIrish cultural history is heteroglossic. My intention is to focus on a particularway of how the condition of Ireland is distinctive in dealing withits linguistic amalgam and to suggest the irony that a play which hasbeen so concerned with the complexities and confusions of borders andpartitions should be suspected of having a simple or monolithic solutionto such issues.