Brian Friels Translations Essay -- Friel Translations Essays

Brian Friels TranslationsTranslations, by Brian Friel, presents us with an perfect ruralcommunity of interests turned on its head as the result of the recording andtranslation of place names into English an do which is at firstsight purely administrative. In Act 1 of the play, Friel bringstogether the inhabitants of this quaint Irish village in what can only ifbe expound as a gathering of minds - minds which study the classics, to that extent minds which study dead expressions. In the same way, while thiscommunity is overflowing in culture and togetherness, it is also trapped inwhat is later exposit as a contour which no longer matches thelandscape of point. Thus, in expressing his ambivalence, Frielpresents the reader with a question - is Baile Beag an intellectualIrish Arcadia? on that point is no denying that Baile Beag is an intellectual community. Atthe beginning of the play, Jimmy Jack Cassie, superstar of the centralcharacters, is in the process of translation Joyces Ulysses. He iscapable of reading the text 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 evenrelates his accept 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 hairs-breadth flaxen.Hugh, the teacher in charge of the running of the hedge-school, isalso an intellectual. While 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 society that teeters on a knife-edge apeople that make out in constant fear of rural collapse and the horrendous beggary which would inevitably follow. Exacerbating the relentlessgrip which this fear has on peoples lives is the horizon of thecollapse of the Irish language at the hands of the national school,and the likely cultural and linguistic erosion as the result of theremapping of Ireland by purple 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.