It's a kind of joke, I suppose,
that most people who lecture in Irish literature
only really need a lecture
on James Joyce's Dubliners and a lecture on Brian Friel's Translations to get by.
Translation itself is a very resonant term
and I suppose it means a movement of things and movement of people
and, of course, a movement of language, of understanding,
from one place to another.
It's addressing how we might understand one another,
what meanings we might make, and also what happens when those meanings
break down — what happens when we get missed translations as well.
How can we take a standard English and adapt it for ourselves
in a way that is authentic and is true?
I think that means that it does have an enduring resonance in Ireland,
but also in other post-colonial situations across the globe.
The play begins set in a hedge school,
which is a sort of school set up in Ireland
to educate relatively impoverished Catholics.
People going to those schools wouldn't pay necessarily in money,
but perhaps in turf or in butter or in milk, those kind of things.
Manus is helping his father at the hedge school,
helping to educate this community.
Meanwhile, his brother turns up in the play,
having decided to help the British Army,
who are trying to standardise the landscape of Ireland
and are trying to produce the first Ordnance Survey maps,
which includes changing lots of the Irish names
to anglicise them to English names.
An area known locally as Bun na hAbhann.
Burnfoot?
JAMES: So you get these two brothers who seem to be on different sides,
seem to be ready for some kind of confrontation.
What's incorrect about the place names that we have here?
The play is written in 1979 and first staged in 1980.
And this is at the end of a very dark, difficult decade
in the Troubles of Northern Ireland.
In the 1970s, you have incidents like the Bloody Sunday events in Derry/Londonderry,
you get the Birmingham pub bombings.
And so Friel's play, in looking at that arrival of the Army
into this hedge school set-up,
is trying to say something about
contemporary Northern Irish politics and the north of Ireland.
He voiced some surprise that we did not speak his language.
English, I suggested...
..couldn't really express us.
The play itself has quite a straightforward story.
It's a love triangle, and it's a cross-cultural love triangle.
One of the English soldiers falls in love with one of the Irish female characters,
who is already attached to the schoolmaster's son.
The theatrical trick, the high-wire act that Friel pulls off here,
of having the Irish characters speaking in English
I think is a masterstroke. So it keeps us engaged.
Thank you for...
I'm very grateful to you for...
Wasting your time. I don't know a word you're saying to me.
Máire is an Irish character who speaks only in the Irish language.
Yolland is a British soldier who doesn't really know what's going on in Ireland.
— George! — (AUDIENCE LAUGHS)
Máire and George.
I...I...I...
Say anything at all.
I love the sound of your speech.
Their ways of viewing the world are very different,
and that becomes clear through their syntax.
And yet by listening to the sound of one another,
by being with one another,
they get a great affinity for one another
and learn to love each other.
And I suppose what Friel might be saying at that point is,
'Look at the conditions in contemporary Ireland.
'Look at the Troubles and the north of Ireland.'
And perhaps Máire and Yolland give us that sense that there might be
just that luminous moment where characters from different traditions
and people from different communities can understand each other.
Words are signals.
Counters.
They are not immortal.
JAMES: Hugh is a very interesting character in this play.
He's the master of a hedge school.
Friel had trained as a teacher, so Friel himself is embedded
in that world of education.
In fact, his great-grandfather used to be a hedge school master.
So he has a real personal link, I think, with the character of Hugh in the play.
By the end, Hugh has to go and teach in a national school,
where education is in English.
And I think that symbolises in the play a passing of an entire order,
that passing of that earlier Gaelic order, with all of its stories and traditions.
I really like the line in the play where Hugh says,
'To remember everything is a form of madness,'
because I think that speaks to the condition of the time
in which the play was produced.
When actually, there is this question of how much should we remember
and how should we remember various things?
And those contested narratives of history
really seem to be at the heart of the conflict in the north of Ireland.
But I think as we go on through history,
the lines like that really resonate today,
when technologically, we almost have the ability never to forget anything.
And I think there is a kind of form of madness
in not letting go to that sort of stuff.
And I think those kind of lines in the play
really do speak to our modern condition
and perhaps indicate why the play has such an enduring appeal.
To remember...
..everything...
..is a form of madness.
There is no good option, almost,
for the characters involved in this play by the end.
Their society is changing, but how do they adapt to that change
is very much up in the air.
How do they navigate through the least worst set of options?
Do they leave, like Manus does, like Máire wants to?
That isn't always a great solution.
Where we are at the end of the play is in quite a dark place.
There are lots of indications that things will not go well in the future.
You have these Donnelly twins who kind of prefigure the Provisional IRA.
There's talk about the famine, the potato famine coming back.
There's this talk about the sweet smell the characters keep imagining,
because they're so traumatised by a memory of famine in the past.
And remember, the play is set in 1833,
so that we know a lot of these horrors are actually in the future.
Obviously, a lot of the sectarian horrors are still ahead of the characters as well,
so it does end in a tragic mode, having had some quite comedic moments earlier on.
It's a rich language, Lieutenant,
full of the mythologies of fantasy and hope and self-deception.
A syntax opulent with tomorrows.
It is our response to mud cabins and a diet of potatoes —
our only method of replying to...inevitabilities.
We're all aware whenever we open our mouths
that the way in which we speak
is central to how we're being judged and evaluated by other people.
We're all aware of
if we speak with a particular regional or class or gender-inflected voice,
then people think things about us.
So we perform and we re-perform all the time in our everyday life.
And I think that is something of what Translations does to us —
it throws the spotlight back onto us in the audience.
I think Translations continues to be relevant
because it does make us mourn the loss of cultures.
It makes us feel sad
for cultures that may be slipping away.
I suppose the point at the end of the play is that Hugh is aware
that some of the things he has treasured might be going away
like the stories, the classical stories that he knows earlier on.