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Notes
This essay was written after seeing Translations at the National Theatre in London in July 2018. I thank the director, cast and crew of that outstanding production, as well as my colleague Joanna Trzeciak-Huss for reading a draft version and the anonymous reviewers of IJCT for their helpful suggestions.
For a thorough overview of the play and its immediate reception, see M. J. Richtarik, Acting Between the Lines: The Field Day Theatre Company and Irish Cultural Politics, 1980–1984, Oxford, 1994, pp. 28–64. On the hedge schools, see P. J. Dowling, The Hedge Schools of Ireland, Dublin, 1968; W. B. Stanford, Ireland and the Classical Tradition, Dublin, 1976, pp. 25–33. For contemporary descriptions of hedge schools, see The Life of William Carleton, Being His Autobiography and Letters, Vol. 1, London, 1896, pp. 11–23, and ‘The Hedge School’, in The Works of William Carleton, Vol III: Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry, New York, 1881, pp. 819–53.
For the role of language, see especially McGrath’s two seminal discussions of Friel’s intertextuality with George Steiner: F. C. McGrath, ‘Irish Babel: Brian Friel’s “Translations” and George Steiner's “After Babel”’, Comparative Drama, 23, no. 1, Spring 1989, pp. 31–49 and ‘Language, myth, and history in the later plays of Brian Friel’, Contemporary Literature, 30, no. 4, 1989, pp. 534–45. For language, politics and imperialism, see (for example) L. Pilkington, ‘Language and Politics in Brian Friel's “Translations”’, Irish University Review, 20, no. 2, 1990, pp. 282–98. On the historical accuracy of the play, see B. Friel, J. Andrews and K. Barry ‘Translations and A Paper Landscape: Between fiction and history’, The Crane Bag, 7, no. 2, 1983, pp. 118–24.
Compare Patrick Kavanagh’s 1960 poem ‘Epic’ (quoted by Friel in his introduction to C. McGlinchey, The Last of the Name, Dublin, 1986, pp. 3–4), which juxtaposes local disputes in Co. Monaghan with Homeric myth.
References to Translations refer to page numbers in Brian Friel: Plays 1, ed. Seamus Deane, London, 1996. Translations from Latin and Greek are mine unless otherwise noted.
E. B. Cullingford, ‘British Romans and Irish Carthaginians: Anticolonial Metaphor in Heaney, Friel, and McGuinness’, Proceedings of the Modern Language Association, 111, no. 2, March 1996, pp. 222–39.
M. S. G. Hawkins, ‘“We Must Learn Where we live”: Language, Identity and the Colonial Condition in Brian Friel’s Translations’, Éire-Ireland 38, nos. 1&2, 2003, pp. 23–36 (28). In fact, Classical and especially Latin learning has been part of ‘Irish experience’ from Late Antiquity to the present: see Stanford, Ireland and the Classical Tradition (above n. 1), esp. 1–89. For Latinity as an expression of ‘detachment from the British imperium,’ see J. Kerrigan, ‘Ulster Ovids’, in The Chosen Ground: Essays on the Contemporary Poetry of Northern Ireland, ed. N. Corrigan, Bridgend, Wales, 1992, pp. 237–69 (237–8).
T. Saunders, ‘Classical Antiquity in Brian Friel's Translations’, Nordic Irish Studies 11, no. 1, 2012, pp. 133–51 (148).
In Brian Friel. Essays, Diaries, Interviews: 1964–1999, ed. C. Murray, London 1999, p. 75.
For Cullingford (‘British Romans’, n. 5 above, p. 231), Hugh’s and Jimmy’s participation in the 1798 rebellion takes place ‘under the sign of Vergilian pietas’ which exemplifies epic heroism and imperialist hegemony. Saunders (‘Classical Antiquity’, n. 7 above, pp. 133–4, 143) sees in the play’s Classical allusions a ‘thoroughgoing analogy’ between British colonization and Rome’s subjugation of Greece, in which pietas drives Aeneas’s teleological progress towards ‘a better future,’ whereas the schoolmaster Hugh misunderstands this ‘triumphant’ virtue.
Home and exile are recurring themes in Irish and especially Northern Irish literature, a fact which has encouraged repeated engagement with the Odyssey as well as Ovid’s Tristia. See Kerrigan, ‘Ulster Ovids’ (n. 6 above).
Friel commented that the play was about ‘language, and only language’: Murray (ed.) Brian Friel: Essays, Diaries, Interviews (n. 8 above), p. 75. Although his assertion does not invalidate political or other readings of Translations, I have chosen to interpret the play primarily in terms of a changing linguistic ‘landscape’ and through the lens of authorial intent.
For ring composition, see K. Stanley, The Shield of Homer: Narrative Structure in the Iliad, Princeton, 1993, pp. 6–13. Friel employs both anaphoric and motivic/antithetical ring styles, as in epic. The following are examples of rings introduced in Act I and closed in Act III: Manus kissing the top of Sarah’s head (Translations, 387, 434); ‘Sure Homer knows it all, boy, Homer knows it all’ (386) and ‘You know it all now, Hugh. You know it all’ (444); Sarah’s miming of rocking a baby (christening, 386 and wake, 434); caerimonia nominationis (397) and domus lugubris (442); Maire’s entry with the milk can (full at 387, empty at 436); Jimmy’s salute to Athena (vigorous at 386, weak at 443); ignari, stulti, rustici (390, 435); the ‘sweet smell’ of potato blight (395, 441); Hugh’s invitation to work at the National School (400) and his rejection (442); Owen’s two translations for Lancey (406, 439–40); Owen’s arrival (400) and Manus’s departure (434).
While writing Translations, Friel noted that he was unable to present an integral linguistic/cultural Gaelic past because ‘I don’t believe in it’: Murray (ed.) Brian Friel: Essays, Diaries, Interviews (n. 8 above), p. 74. On the ambiguities in Vergil’s presentation of Roman imperialism, see (for example) W. R. Johnson, Darkness Visible: A Study of Virgil’s Aeneid. Berkeley, 1976; R. Thomas, Virgil and the Augustan Reception, Cambridge, 2001.
Steiner: Murray (ed.) 1999, p. 74 (‘Extracts from a Sporadic Diary, 1979’).
The Creativity of Falsehood: Steiner 1975, pp. 219–21.
In Murray (ed.), Brian Friel: Essays, Diaries, Interviews (n. 8 above), pp. 39–40. In a 1968 interview (P. Delaney (ed.), Brian Friel in Conversation, Ann Arbor MI, 2000, p. 62) Friel recommended that aspiring dramatists study Greek and Latin.
For the Roman concept of pietas, see J. D. Garrison, Pietas from Vergil to Dryden, University Park, PA, 1992, pp. 9–92. Friel occasionally translated pietas as ‘piety,’ as in the appendix to Translations (450). Cf. the quotation in Delaney (ed.) Brian Friel in Conversation (n. 16 above), p. 130: ‘an act of piety… by saying that, I mean that I have no overriding obligation but it just seemed the right thing to do.’
Dúcas or Pietas [capitalization sic]: quoted in Delaney (ed.) Brian Friel in Conversation, (n. 16 above), p. 128; cf. Friel's statement that he wanted Field Day to be based in Derry because of ‘piety, perhaps’ (ibid. p. 159). For the emic concept of dúcas or dúchas (‘heritage, instinct’), see J. O’Donohue, Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning To Belong, New York, 1999, pp. 253–5, and for a scholarly perspective, P. Basu, Highland Homecomings: Genealogy and Heritage Tourism in the Scottish Diaspora, New York, 2007, pp. 124–5, 221–2.
McGlinchey, The Last of the Name (n. 3 above), pp. 1, 4.
Friel’s positive use of Latin pietas and English ‘piety’ contrasts with the pejorative meaning he attached to the English plural ‘pieties’: simplistic moralizing in support of sentimental ideals. After the success of Translations, he commented that the play ‘was offered pieties I didn’t intend for it’: Delaney (ed.) Brian Friel in Conversation (n. 16 above), p. 169.
On the word nostos and its importance in the Odyssey, see (for example) A. Bonifazi, ‘Inquiring into νόστος and its cognates’, American Journal of Philology, 130, no. 4, 2009, pp. 481–510 and the essays in H. Gardner and S. Murnaghan (eds) Odyssean Identities in Modern Cultures: The Journey Home, Columbus OH, 2014.
Ulysses is mentioned by Jimmy (385, 387) and later by Hugh (445); Jimmy also speaks of ‘the good swineherd’ (387). Helen (together with the Irish heroine Grania) appears in Jimmy’s transformation of the Judgment of Paris (386), while Yolland notes that Jimmy and Hugh swap stories about ‘Apollo and Cuchulainn and Paris and Ferdia’ (416), that is, Greek and Irish epics. Latinized spellings of Greek personal names are not used consistently (Jimmy speaks of both Artemis [386] and Diana [388]). Odysseus, however, is always called Ulysses, but not necessarily as Saunders suggests (‘Classical Antiquity’ [n. 7 above], pp. 139–40), in order to evoke Roman hegemony over the Greeks. Especially given Seamus Heaney’s remark that, thanks to Joyce’s Ulysses, ‘English is by now not so much an imperial humiliation as a native weapon’ (S. Heaney, ‘The interesting case of John Alphonsus Mulrennan,’ Planet 41, Jan. 1978, pp. 34–40 [37–8]), Friel may have wished to echo Joyce’s usage.
E. F. Dehoratius, ‘A Modern “Odyssey”: The Intertextuality of Brian Friel's “Translations” and Its Classical Sources’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition, 7, no. 3, Winter 2001, pp. 366–385.
Hom. Od. 4.111–2: Odysseus is mourned by his father, by Penelope and by ‘Telemachus, whom he left a newborn son in his house.’.
Internal exile: see Friel's comments in Delaney (ed.) Brian Friel in Conversation (n. 16 above), pp. 159, 169, 174.
The Judgment of Paris: Hom. Il. 24.25–30.
B. Arkins (‘The role of Greek and Latin in Friel’s Translations’, Colby Quarterly 27, no. 4, 1991, pp. 202–9 [208]) notes the ‘error’ in the translation of Od. 13.423–4 in the Appendix to Translations. Dehoratius suggests (‘A modern “Odyssey”’ [n. 23 above], p. 377) that the change is deliberate and somehow related to Athena and her ties to the English. Indeed, the substitution is consistent with his reading of Owen as Telemachus, for the line refers to Telemachus abroad, sitting ‘at ease in the halls of the sons of Athens,’ i.e., Owen is enjoying financial prosperity in Dublin with the English. Saunders (‘Classical Antiquity’ (n. 7 above), p. 139) observes that in heading for Athens, Hugh-as-Ulysses ‘has very much lost his bearings,’ but this depends on how one interprets ‘Athens.’ The private usage employed by Jimmy and Hugh is not to be excluded in favour of a fixed political reading.
In describing his work of education, Hugh quotes a Greek proverbial phrase, ἄπληστος πίθος, which means ‘an endless task’ (lit. an unfillable jar). The reference is to the Danaids, who were condemned to fill leaky jars forever in Hades. Friel’s source may have been H. T. Riley’s Dictionary of Latin Quotations, Proverbs, Maxims and Mottos, London, 1891, which contains an appendix of Greek phrases (see p. 531 for the unusual translation of pithos as ‘cask,’ just as in Friel’s appendix to the play, [450]). Either Hugh or Friel misattributes the phrase to Euripides; Friel probably substituted the attribution for dramatic reasons, because Euripides is more recognizable than Lucian, the source mentioned by Riley. The origin of the Greek phrase is discussed by W. Hansen (Ariadne’s Thread: A Guide to International Tales Found in Classical Literature. Ithaca NY, 2002, pp. 70–72).
The Pentaglot Preceptor is a real book, published by schoolmaster Patrick Lynch at Carrick in 1796. Lynch refers in his preface to subscribers, but support apparently did not materialize: only the first of five projected volumes was printed (ironically, the one dealing with English). Although the title is taken by some to demonstrate Hugh’s ‘pomposity’ (S. Deane, ‘Brian Friel: The name of the game’, in The Achievement of Brian Friel, ed. A. Peacock, Gerrards Cross, UK, 1992, pp. 103–12 (108–9), this is to ignore Friel’s stage direction (416–17) that in Act II Hugh is ‘deliberately parodying himself.’ Another of Hugh’s interesting (mis)representations is his claim to be a Latin poet. His lines (417) ‘after the style of Ovid’ indeed form an elegiac couplet using Ovid’s favoured metre, but they are not original. The verses are the Latin source of the much-quoted English proverb ‘Be the day weary or be the day long, at last it ringeth to evensong.’ An English version of this proverb first appeared in Stephen Hawes’s Pastime of Pleasure in 1509 as part of an epitaph, and was quoted in Fox’s Book of Martyrs by a condemned Protestant going to the stake. I have been unable to locate the source of the Latin original (it does not appear in the corpus of literary Latin before 200 CE), but publications which quote the Latin attribute it to ‘an old Latin hymn’ (K. L. Roberts, Hoyt’s cyclopedia of Practical Quotations, New York, 1923, p. 162) or ‘a little-known Latin poet’ (Notes and Queries: A Medium of Communication for Literary Men, General Readers, etc., ninth series, 5, January–June 1900, pp. 249, 407). It is apparently a post-Classical epitaph. I am inclined to think that Friel intended us to understand this as Hugh’s own work, but it is significant that the lines are a memento mori, referring proleptically to the end of a way of life which has been longstanding, and perhaps also to Hugh’s own death.
σχέτλιε, ποικιλομῆτα, δόλων ἆτ᾽, οὐκ ἄρ᾽ ἔμελλες,
οὐδ᾽ ἐν σῇ περ ἐὼν γαίῃ, λήξειν ἀπατάων
μύθων τε κλοπίων, οἵ τοι πεδόθεν φίλοι εἰσίν.
G. Steiner After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, New York, 1975, p. 219.
Translation of Od. 14.3–4 as provided by Friel in the play's Appendix (449).
Friel’s stage directions specify that upon Hugh’s arrival in Act I, he ‘removes his hat and coat and hands them and his stick to Manus, as if to a footman’ (397).
ὣς ἄρα φωνήσας υἱὸν κύσε, κὰδ δὲ παρειῶν
δάκρυον ἧκε χαμᾶζε: ‘So saying he kissed his son, and let fall from his cheeks a tear on the earth.’.
In the local naming system as depicted by Friel, the women of Baile Beag did not take their husbands’ names upon marriage: hence Hugh’s reference to the formal, full name of his deceased wife Caitlin (445). R. Fox (The Tory Islanders: A People of the Celtic Fringe, Cambridge, 1978, pp. 73–81) describes this ancient naming system, characteristic of rural parts of the Donegal Gaeltacht, where surnames are omitted in favour of a string of two, three or more forenames representing the individual’s lineage or characteristics. The same system is mentioned by Synge in his book on the Aran Islands (The Aran Islands and Other Writings by John M. Synge, New York, 1962, p. 100).
Delaney (ed.) Brian Friel in Conversation (n. 16 above), p. 169. Friel habitually emphasized that Ireland is an island, and thus may have been particularly sensitive to the analogy with Odysseus’s Ithaca. See ibid. pp. 146, 159, 164, 171, 176.
Odysseus-as-beggar takes a different name, Aithon (Hom. Od. 19.183). On the threats to identity posed by the Sirens and Kalypso, see J.-P. Vernant Mortals and Immortals: Collected Essays, ed. F. Zeitlin, Princeton NJ, 1991, pp. 104–110.
S. Heaney, The Fire i' the Flint. Reflections on the Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, London, 1974, pp. 11–12. Heaney writes, ‘In the masculine mode, the language functions as a form of address, of assertion or command, and the poetic effort has to do with a conscious quelling and control of the materials, a labour of shaping…Whereas in the feminine mode the language functions more as evocation than address, and the poetic effort is not so much a labour of design as it is an act of divination and revelation.’ The metaphor is both linguistic and political, as in Heaney’s poem ‘Act of Union.’ For discussion, see F. Brearton, ‘Heaney and the feminine’, in The Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney, ed. B. O'Donoghue, Cambridge, 2009, pp. 73–91.
McGrath (‘Brian Friel and the Irish art of lying’, in Brian Friel: A Casebook, ed. W. Kerwin, New York, 1997, pp. 3–12 [8]) emphasizes the positive, Steinerian aspects of Jimmy Jack’s ‘privatization of Homer’ as ‘an exercise of our most ennobling power’ and points to analogies between Jimmy Jack and James Joyce.
The hero’s captivity with Calypso (Od. 1.13–15) is the context for the first appearance of the key concept of nostos in the Odyssey. When forced to release Odysseus, Calypso complains (Od. 116–44) that the gods put an end to love affairs between goddesses and men (typically by killing the men). In Hymn Hom. Ven. 192–255, Aphrodite delivers a speech closely related to Calypso’s complaint. Jimmy’s interest (388) in Diana’s ‘bosom’ hints at the danger to mortals who aspire to have erotic contact with goddesses: after seeing Diana naked at her bath, Actaeon was transformed into a stag and torn apart by his own hunting dogs (Ov. Met. 3.165–252).
The quotation is drawn from one of the epigraphs to Steiner’s After Babel (n. 31 above).
Saunders (n. 7 above, p. 144) likewise notes ‘something Virgilian’ in the way Athena operates as a figure of delusion and confusion in Translations.
For Paris’s lack of interest in war, see Hom. Il. 3.30–75.
Throughout the Iliad, even as she pursues her love affair, Helen expresses self-reproach for her role in the war and concern about the fact that she is reviled by the Trojan women: e.g., 3.406–12, 6.343–6. At 3.156–70, the old Trojan men call Helen ‘a bane for us and our children,’ but kind old Priam refuses to blame her, saying that ‘the gods’ are responsible.
For Daniel O’Connell’s advocacy of English and the scandal of his adultery, see P. Geoghegan, Liberator: The Life and Death of Daniel O'Connell, 1830–1847, Dublin, 2010, pp. 9, 38–9.
Patria potestas ensured that a son did not assume adult independence until his father’s death (OCD 4th ed. s.v. patria potestas). Compare the custom in Western Ireland of the early twentieth century (R. Breen, ‘Naming practices in Western Ireland’, Man 17, no. 4, 1982, pp. 701–13 [704]) whereby men of forty with fathers still living were called ‘boys.’.
Spiritual deprivation, also in reference to Sarah’s muteness: Murray (ed.) Brian Friel: Essays, Diaries, Interviews, [n. 8 above], p. 87. R. Harp (‘Manus and Oedipus the King’, in A Companion to Brian Friel, ed. R. Harp and R. C. Evans, West Cornwall, CT, 2002, pp. 23–30) compares Manus with Oedipus, who also suffered injury to his feet at the hands of his father.
Exarsere ignes animo; subit ira cadentem
ulcisci patriam et sceleratas sumere poenas. (Verg. Aen. 2.575–6).
An echo of Dido and Aeneas in the Translations has been detected by P. Maley (‘Aeneas in Baile Beag: Friel’s Translations, the Aeneid, and the humanism of the Field Day Theatre Company’, New Hibernia Review 15.4, 2011, pp. 111–26). Building on Cullingford’s (‘British Romans’, n. 5 above) identification of Ireland as Carthage, Maley reads Owen as an Aeneas who fails in humanistic empathy, thus bringing disaster on his adopted home. In my reading, Manus begins as Aeneas but ends as Dido. The play is silent on Manus’s fate, but it seems significant that he flees to Inis Meadhon (423), one of the Aran islands, where the Irish language survived. Inis Meadhon was the island visited by Synge, and it is Synge whose achievement in creating a truly Irish form of English Friel most admired: see Murray (ed.) Brian Friel. Essays, Diaries, Interviews (n. 8 above), pp. 85–6. That adherence to the Irish language can be read as both suicidal and a laudable manifestation of pietas is consistent with Friel’s ambivalence on this topic.
Aphrodite/Venus: Hymn Hom. Ven. 202–38; see E. Gutting, ‘Venus’ Maternity and Divinity in the Aeneid’, Materiali e discussioni per l'analisi dei testi classici, 61, 2009, pp. 49–51.
Sermonem Ausonii patrium moresque tenebunt,
utque est nomen erit; commixti corpore tantum
subsident Teucri (Verg. Aen. 12.834–6).
Occidit, occideritque sinas cum nomine Troia (Verg. Aen. 12.828).
In Greco-Roman epic, references to linguistic difference are exceedingly rare. By convention, such differences are elided, and following Homer’s example, Vergil never shows his characters using interpreters to communicate. Therefore, it is plausible that the passage from Aen. 12 would have drawn Friel’s attention, connected as it is with themes of language and dispossession.
Friel on the uses of English: Murray (ed.) Brian Friel. Essays, Diaries, Interviews (n. 8 above), pp. 84–6.
For discussion of the civilized’ and the ‘barbarous’ in Translations, see Saunders ‘Classical Antiquity’ (n. 7 above), esp. pp. 134–7. The issue was of particular interest for Field Day: see S. Deane, Civilians and Barbarians, Field Day Pamphlet no. 3, Derry, 1983, to be read with Richtarik, Acting Between the Lines (n. 1 above), pp. 151–8.
On Synge, see above note 35.
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Larson, J. Urbs Antiqua Fuit: Brian Friel’s Use of Classical Epic in Translations. Int class trad 28, 70–87 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12138-019-00535-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12138-019-00535-1