cd on translations

FIELD DAY REVIEW
The informal beginnings of the experiment
have earlier roots. A number of letters from
Friel to Deane indicate that there already
existed a cross-pollination of ideas between
Field Day members long before the company
was formally inaugurated. In the earliest
of these available, dated 13 October 1974,
some five years before the completion of
Translations, and seven years before the
formation of the extended Field Day board,
we can read that Friel was already sending
draft manuscripts to Heaney and Deane for
comment and analysis.
October 13, 1974
Thank you for your report on Volunteers:
I’m most grateful to you for the very
detailed & very painstaking analysis.
There are very few responses to the play
that are important to me & this is one of
them. The only other person I’ve shown
the script to is Seamus H. — I mailed a
Ms off to him 3 days ago. 14
In the same letter, Friel reveals that the germ
of the Field Day idea already existed at this
early stage:
Seamus [Heaney] told me that you and he
and Kilroy had a good night together and
that there was some talk of us all getting
together — a commune of some sort (?).
I like the idea even though I’m not too
sure what it means. But it’s high time the
articles of constitution of literature in
this country were redefined, and I think
we could forge them. We have each an
affinity & an affection & a respect that
would make a working party possible.
Redefining ‘the articles of constitution’
of Irish literature would be the goal that
Field Day set itself years later. 15 In October
1974, Friel is stating his belief that cultural
change should take place in Ireland ahead
of constitutional change, if any form of
settlement is to be reached. It was an idea
he publicly reiterated six years later in an
12
interview with In Dublin magazine: ‘[Field
Day activity] should lead to a cultural state,
not a political state. And I think that out of
that cultural state, a possibility of a political
state follows. That is always the sequence.’ 16
In a follow-up letter to Deane, again on
the topic of Volunteers, we read that long
before Field Day was established, Friel had
identified some of those whom he regarded
to be up to the job of rereading and rewriting
Ireland, and that the proposed ‘commune’
was now scheduled to take place at the home
of Tom Kilroy in Portumna, County Galway.
This letter is worth quoting at length:
November 11, 1974
Part 1* was lucid and articulate and
honest and generous and very welcome
and ultimately disturbing which makes it
all the more valuable ...
The whole question of my failure once
more to dramatize the moment when
repudiation stops and the man turns to
see or glimpse the source of it ...
I’m as sick of the naturalistic style as I’m
sure you are — and I’m talking primarily
about language here. But since my trade
is theatre, when I talk about language I
mean language as one of the elements of
drama. Maybe this is one of the issues we
could examine at the Portumna Think-in,
although it’s a problem that Irish poets
have solved more successfully than Irish
dramatists. The only Irish dramatist
who faced the difficulty and successfully
solved it was Synge ...
It’s a problem I haven’t solved. And I
function with growing impatience in it
... because in theatre it is enormously
difficult for naturalistic language to be
at ease with its metaphors — one of your
strictures. And the dilemma is this. The
use of everyday and recognizable melodies
and harmonies effects a quick and direct
relationship between audience and
14 Letter from Friel
to Deane, dated 13
October 1974. Not part
of the FDA. Reproduced
with permission.
15 Close to ten years later,
Deane announced
it to be Field Day’s
intention in his Field
Day pamphlet Heroic
Styles: The Tradition of
an Idea: ‘[E]verything,
including our politics
and our literature, has
to be rewritten — i.e. reread.’
Heroic Styles: The
Tradition of an Idea,
in Deane, ed., Ireland’s
Field Day, 58.
16 FDA: PC/1982/3. ‘The
Man from God Knows
Where’, interview with
Fintan O’Toole, In
Dublin, 28 October
1982, 23.