cd on translations

99 FDA: G/D/Deane/7.
A short essay by
Deane leads to an
announcement of plans
for The Field Day
Anthology of Irish
Writing, dated March
1985.
100 FDA: G/D/Deane/7.
Untitled lecture
transcript, p. 23–24.
Datable to Jan 1985.
101 SP, 420.
102 SP, 420–21.
103 SP, 421.
treachery is one of the few available
forms of freedom left. ... I don’t want to
be a Celt. I don’t want to be an Anglo.
I don’t want to be a Protestant. I don’t
want to be a Catholic. I don’t want to
be a republican. I don’t want to be a
unionist. I don’t want to gravitate to any
one of the magnetic fields in which most
of my compatriots live. But the moment
you gravitate out of one of them ... you
belong, like Derry as a city ... in the
twilight zone. It isn’t freedom, but it’s the
nearest available form of freedom that on
many occasions either Irish literature or
Irish politics has managed to produce. 100
Owen embraces the standardizing logic of
the Ordnance Survey mission; however, he
cannot fully escape the gravitational pull
of his native tradition. He tries hard; he
dismisses the significance of the name of
the crossroads called Tobair Vree (‘Brian’s
Well’), yet he alone knows why the place
is so named. He claims no romantic
attachment to it. He rejects Yolland’s feeling
that by their renaming activities ‘something
is being eroded’: 101
Owen: Do we scrap Tobair Vree
altogether and call it —
what? — The Cross?
Crossroads? Or do we
keep piety with a man
long dead, long forgotten,
his name ‘eroded’ beyond
recognition, whose trivial
little story nobody in the
parish remembers?
Yolland: Except you.
Owen: I’ve left here. 102
Owen’s defiance seems petulant. He knows
that merely declaring that he has left his
home-place does not make it true. This
would be to deny the apparent logic of
the new system he has embraced. Yolland
knows it too, and when he insists that the
name Tobair Vree stands as it is, he says:
‘That’s what you want too, Roland’. 103 It is
ORIGINS OF A CULTURAL EXPERIMENT
at this point Owen angrily demands in turn
that his correct name be used, but in doing
so, he loses the argument with Yolland by
conceding his own true name and identity
are inseparable and that thus, by extension,
the Ordnance Survey’s renaming enterprise
does, in fact, result in an erosion of identity.
And yet, this key scene is ambiguous. The
same place name also reveals that the
notion of things enduring around ‘truths
immemorially posited’ does not hold water.
The tobair, or ‘well’, at the crossroads of
Tobair Vree has long since dried up. There
is no automatic or natural alliance between
name and place in the Gaelic tradition either.
Irish historical myths of liberty and
freedom, from the Siege of Derry 1688–89,
to the United Irishmen rising of 1798 and
Robert Emmet’s subsequent rising of 1803,
to the Easter Rebellion of 1916, all lose
their mythic force without the participation
of the traitor, the go-between, the
ambiguous identity. None of these events
would seem so heroic had it not experienced
betrayal. The theme was relentlessly pursued
by Field Day: in Paulin’s The Riot Act
and Mahon’s High Time, the connection
between authoritarianism and subversive
betrayal is the central issue; elsewhere, the
character caught between two cultures,
the traitor, or the betrayed, occupy centre
stage — as Bracken and Joyce in Kilroy’s
Double Cross, as Oscar Wilde in Terry
Eagleton’s Saint Oscar, as Roger Casement
in David Rudkin’s Cries from Casement
as His Bones are Brought to Dublin, as
Hugh O’Neill in Friel’s Making History, as
Henry Joy McCracken in Stewart Parker’s
Northern Star.
In Parker’s play, McCracken, the United
Irish leader, cannot find a way to work
outside the struggle for power between
dogmas, and he is drawn in and destroyed.
Field Day was engaged in a similar struggle.
It sought to discover a sense of freedom that
is not dependent for its sense of belonging
to a tradition that is, or was, or is about
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