cd on translations

17 Letter from Friel
to Deane, dated 11
November 1974. Not
part of FDA. Reproduced
with permission.
*Of Seamus Deane’s
response to the script of
Volunteers. **Friel has
written ‘freudian?’ in the
margin.
18 Friel, ‘Sporadic
Diary’, 1 June 1979, in
Murray, 75.
19 FDA: PC/1982/3. ‘The
Man from God Knows
Where’, interview with
F. O’Toole, In Dublin,
28 October 1982, 23.
20 ‘Talking to Ourselves’,
interview with Paddy
Agnew in Magill,
December 1980, in
Murray, 85–86.
stage — that’s an attraction and can be
valuable. But it’s as soon as you establish
that relationship — and it’s made precisely
because the tunes are familiar — that
an almost instant communion becomes
a trap. Instant recognition — partial
deafness. And you panic: you’re being
taken for what you’re not. There are now
two potions [sic]** open to you: you can
introduce discords or at least unfamiliar
harmonies which will result in a listening
afresh audience but which at the same time
will screw up your carefully composed
and carefully planted statement-themes.
Or you become strident and obvious — as
you suggest I do. Maybe you’re right. Trust
in the metaphor of the play, you say. Of
course I do. But if I lose faith I’m trying to
explain why I do — when I listen to those
‘real’ characters speaking a ‘naturalistic’
language who are my sustenance. 17
In Translations, Friel’s language had become
more ‘strident and obvious’ than in previous
plays, but he had reservations about the play
being read as polemical. During the writing
of the play, he recorded in his ‘Sporadic
Diary’ his fear of being taken for what he
was not: ‘The play has to do with language
and only language. And if it becomes
overwhelmed by that political element, it is
lost.’ 18 Later, in a press interview, speaking
as a Field Day director, Friel put a public
context to these internal struggles with
language, as dealt with in Translations (and
his subsequent Field Day plays, Three Sisters
and The Communication Cord); we can also
read here that he is publicly advocating the
idea of language as an agent of change:
I think that is how the political problem
of this island is going to be solved. It’s
going to be solved by language in some
kind of way. Not only the language of
negotiations across the table. It’s going
to be solved by the recognition of what
language means for us on this island.
... Because we are in fact talking about
accommodation or marrying of two
ORIGINS OF A CULTURAL EXPERIMENT
cultures here, which are ostensibly
speaking the same language but which in
fact aren’t. 19
Friel’s letter to Deane (11 November 1974)
reveals his belief that J. M. Synge was
the only Irish dramatist who ‘faced the
[language] difficulty and successfully solved
it’. It is a notion to which he refers a number
of times. In another interview, he made a
direct connection between Translations and
Synge, and by extension, implied that Field
Day was taking on some of the unfinished
business of the Irish Literary Theatre:
If I can quote from the play, ‘We must
learn where we live. We must make them
[those new names] our own. We must
make them our new home.’ That is, we
must make these English language words
distinctive and unique to us. My first
concern is with theatre and we certainly
have not done this with theatre in Ireland.
The only person who did so in this country
was Synge ... Nobody since him has
pursued this course with any persistence
or distinction ... apart from Synge, all our
dramatists have pitched their voices for
English acceptance and recognition. 20
Friel’s fear was that he would not match
Synge’s achievement and that his play would
be read as political rhetoric. So strong was
this fear that his third Field Day play, The
Communication Cord, would be written
as an antidote to the nationalist pieties that
others read in Translations. Friel’s colleagues
Deane and Rea argued, however, that
his achievement with the earlier play was
comparable to the work of Yeats and Synge,
Deane observing that ‘no Irish writer since
the early days of this century has so sternly
and courageously asserted the role of art in
the public world without either yielding to
that world’s pressures or retreating into art’s
narcissistic alternatives’. 21 More recently, in
a radio interview to mark the twenty-fifth
anniversary of Translations, Rea professed
it to be
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