cd on translations

86 FDA: G/D/Friel/4: letter
from Friel to Field Day
directors, dated 26
October 1982.
87 SP, 400.
88 Aidan O’Malley in ‘In
Other Words: Coming
to Terms with Irish
Identities through
Translation: Readings
of the Twelve Plays
Produced by the Field
Day Theatre Company,
1980–1991’, PhD
thesis in history and
civilization, European
University Institute,
Florence, January
2004. From ‘Semiology
and Grammatology:
Interview with Julia
Kristeva’, in Jacques
Derrida, Positions,
trans. Alan Bass
(London, 1981), 15–36
(20). PhD is held in the
FDA.
89 SP, 416.
90 SP, 418.
91 SP, 419.
Betrayal
In the correspondence from Friel to Rea
during the period when Friel was writing
Translations, we read how the character of
Owen grew in stature as the play developed.
Friel had initially caricatured him as a
kind of please-everybody television host.
Indeed, even in the completed play, Owen
is introduced in this manner by the stage
directions: ‘... a handsome, attractive young
man in his twenties. He is dressed smartly
— a city man. His manner is easy and
charming: everything he does is invested
with consideration and enthusiasm.’ 87 Friel
came to realize the importance of Owen as
the character who stood between the two
cultures in the play. It became evident that
Owen had come to represent Field Day’s
position and that Rea, therefore, had to
play him. Owen’s position is characterized
by a combination of submission and selfassertion,
giving and taking; he discards
what is inhibiting in a culture and reclaims
what is reaffirming. Owen is an interpreter.
A good interpreter must be able to give
up a part of his own authorship in order
to give the original author his due. The
self-obliteration in the act of translation
puts into play the relationship between the
signifier and the signified. According to
Jacques Derrida, it ‘practices the difference
between signified and signifier’. 88 In the old
idiom, there is a strain of ‘femininity’ in the
interpreter, meaning a submission to the
creative presence — an interesting point in
respect of Owen’s relationship with Yolland,
and Ireland’s relationship with England:
Irish with English, female with male.
At the outset, Owen occupies the position
of the traitor. He betrays his community by
facilitating its demise. He represents the idea
of translation as a kind of conversion that
is poisonous. Yet his submission contains
the potential to be emancipatory; it starts as
a betrayal and ends as a discovery. Indeed,
all translation involves a betrayal: it implies
both a traducing of something and also
ORIGINS OF A CULTURAL EXPERIMENT
a revelation or discovery of it. The very
idea of translation has betrayal built into
it. There is a clear relationship between
translating, which involves carrying an
idea from one place or polity to another,
and betrayal, which involves transporting
an idea or person(s) from one authority to
another. In the Translations setting, one
polity is imposed upon another, and some
of the natives co-operate. Irish is Englished.
The Irish co-operate to make themselves
English. Then the question arises, is there
some essential Irish or English character
involved, or is that really to accept some
species of racial destiny or character? In the
play, Yolland suspects there is an essential
racial character. He doubts whether he could
ever truly assimilate in Ballybeg, even if he
learned Irish: ‘I may learn the password but
the language of the tribe will always elude
me, won’t it? The private core will always be
... hermetic, won’t it?’ 89
Hugh also raises the question of essential
identity: ‘We like to think we endure around
truths immemorially posited.’ 90 Whether
Hugh includes himself in the ‘we’ is left
intentionally ambiguous. For romantics like
Yolland and Manus, Hugh’s statement is
‘astute’; Owen, on the other hand, rejects the
notion outright: ‘Is it astute not to be able to
adjust for survival? Enduring around truths
immemorially posited — hah!’ 91 Neither
stance proves to be tenable, however. Manus
is (literally) crippled by his convictions, and
this leads to his exile. Yolland’s romanticism
results in his fatal attraction to Máire. A
successful outcome to their love affair is
just as remote as it is for Jimmy Jack and
the goddess Athene. Even Jimmy Jack, who
cannot differentiate between myth and
reality, recognizes this: ‘... exogamein means
to marry outside the tribe. And you don’t
cross those borders casually — both sides
get very angry.’ 92 Owen too is compromised,
but in his case by his conviction that all
tradition can be discarded. It is only when
he steps back from his certainty and allows
‘confusion’ to be an acceptable condition,
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