SOURCE: "Brian Friel's Plays and George Steiner's Linguistics: Translating the Irish," in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 35, No. 1, Spring 1994, pp. 83-99.

[In the following essay, Lojek establishes the concept of "translation" as a central metaphor for Friel's concerns as a playwright.]

The tremendous success of Brian Friel's 1980 play Translations—and the vigorous discussion which it still elicits—is one sign of the deep resonances it struck in a country where, as Seamus Deane has noted, "The assertion of the existence of a cultural (and largely literary) tradition … depended to an extraordinary degree on a successful act of translation". That the play which many at the time saw as a "climax" to Friel's career served instead to usher in a vigorous new period in that career is one sign of the deep resonances it struck within Friel himself, who seems to have discovered in the concept of translation a metaphor for the central impulse of his life's work.

Now that more than a dozen years have passed and The Communication Cord (1982), Making History (1988), and Dancing at Lughnasa (1990) (as well as a number of dramatic "translations") have followed, the centrality of translation to understanding Friel's work is increasingly clear. In fact, the idea of translation, especially given Friel's understanding of it in the context of George Steiner's linguistic study After Bathel, illuminates the entire body of his drama, casting light back on what came before 1980 and forward on what came after.

Translation—a word whose full range of meaning includes transformation, transmutation, interpretation, carrying over, and even removal from earth to heaven—involves the desire to understand, to find meaning, to make meaning if that is necessary. And it is that desire which animates character after character in Friel's plays. Discovering meaning through translation often involves changing statements from one language to another. More often, it involves the process of interpretation which takes place within a single language. Most often, it involves an adaptation of use so that traditional (often outmoded) words and actions may gain new resonance. Underlying all of these kinds of translation is an unstated linkage of word and Word, so that the search for literal meaning often involves a search for spiritual meaning as well. In all of its senses, the term is central to Friel's work. Understanding that centrality begins most logically with Translations, the play which treats the issues most directly, but whose implications radiate outward to the other works.

By now surely every student of contemporary drama is aware of Translations' discussion of the connections between language and national culture. The nineteenth-century British ordinance team which anglicized the place names of Ireland was part of a deliberate effort to wipe out Irish culture (and therefore Irish cohesiveness and power) by wiping out the Irish language, and Friel's play demonstrates the connection between linguistic landscape and geographic landscape.

The absurdities and confusions which accompany the process of renaming local places in Translations are counterpointed by the naming ceremony of an off-stage christening and by confusion about whether the Irishman who helps the English is named Owen or Roland—or Rowen or Oland (a variation which approximates the name of his English colleague Yolland. Noting such absurdities of naming, Hugh (Friel's hedge schoolmaster whose authority is modified by his fondness for a drop) cautions against a simplified view of the consequences. It can happen, he observes, that "a civilization can be imprisoned in a linguistic contour which no longer matches the landscape of … fact. Like the process of translation itself, Hugh's warning about the inevitability of linguistic change and the dangers of linguistic rigidity resonates against the backdrop of the dead classical languages his students recite—and against the audience's awareness that the Gaelic Hugh speaks is now virtually as dead a language as Greek.

Hugh's remark is a direct quotation from George Steiner's 1975 study After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, which Friel has cited as an important text for the play's composition. For Steiner, as for Friel, "translation" involves more than movement from one language to another. The term also refers to interpretation within a single language, and ultimately to communication and the shaping of meaning in general. Even without noting the numerous times Friel puts Steiner's words in his characters' mouths, a reader of After Babel immediately senses connections between the authors.

Exchanges between Friel's lovers, for example, illustrate both Steiner's contention that simple repetition changes meaning and his discussion of the ways in which linguistic logic influences the logic of a culture's world view. Maire (understanding only Irish) and Yolland (understanding only English) are forced to communicate across the barriers of language. At one point, Maire says (in Irish): "The grass must be wet. My feet are soaking." And Yolland responds (in English): "Your feet must be wet. The grass is soaking. In a way, meaning is repeated in this exchange. But in addition to the altered meaning which derives simply from this—or any—repetition, the variation of word order reveals opposing deductive and inductive logics. Love, however, enables Maire and Yolland to communicate despite their inability to understand each other's words.

Or, to choose another example from Translations of what Steiner calls "metamorphic repetitions," at one point Maire (who understands nothing of what Yolland is saying) tells him, "Say anything at all. I love the sound of your speech." And moments later Yolland (who understands nothing of what Maire is saying) tells her, "say anything at all—I love the sound of your speech." The words are the same, but knowledge of the characters reveals the extent to which the meanings vary. Maire loves the sound of Yolland's voice, and the sound of the English which she is eager to learn in order to translate herself out of Ireland. Yolland loves the sound of Maire's voice, and the rhythms of her Irish language, which enchants him as much as the Irish landscape where he would like to be more at home. Nevertheless, this direct repetition suggests that the heart communicates without language and with a logic all its own, so that the lovers do indeed understand, despite the barrier of language. Here, as in the case of Sarah's learning to speak, it is clearly love which encourages communication and communion.

It is part of Steiner's thesis in After Babel that language exists not just to communicate, however, but also to conceal. The thousands of tongues in the world resulted, Steiner suggests, not from some cosmic or divine accident or punishment, but from a deep human instinct for privacy and territory. Language serves not just to tell things, but to hide them from outsiders, to disguise them, even to change them. Such tactical linguistic concealments certainly occur in Friel's play. Hugh deliberately speaks Irish in order to flout English authority. And Owen deliberately mistranslates in order to obscure the military and tax purposes of the English. Both Steiner and Friel, however, recognize that the "saying of things which are not" need not be a social evil or even undesirable. In fact, Steiner argues, "planned counter-factuality" and the creation of alternative realities are "overwhelmingly positive and creative," allowing visions which motivate humans to continue in the face of despair and to work to improve reality. Steiner repeatedly cites Odysseus, the wily deceiver so admired by Athena for his creative fictions, and Friel's Jimmy also refers regularly to the Greek whose words transform reality and whose physical appearance is transformed by Athena—in both instances, with the goal of Odysseus's preservation from his enemies.

Friel's first major stage success, Philadelphia, Here I Come! (which opened in 1964 and thus predates After Babel), suggests similarly varied possibilities in the creation of alternative realities. On the one hand, Gar Private mockingly points out that once he moves to America his memory of Ireland will be "distilled of all its coarseness; and what's left is going to be precious, precious gold." Gar has good reason to suspect his (future) memory. He has heard Con and Lizzie remember different pasts, and he knows that he and his father—though they remember the same (or at least similar) fishing trips—somehow remember different trips. In these instances, memory's alternative reality seems somehow false and limiting. On the other hand, Gar's "planned counter-factuality" is also what enables him to move toward the future with hope. With Kate he plans a future with fourteen children. He will "'develop' the hardware lines" in his father's store, and she will "take charge of the 'drapery.'" Their seven girls will "all be gentle and frail and silly" like Kate, and their seven sons will be "thick bloody louts, sexy goats" like Gar. When Kate's marriage to another eliminates that alternative reality, Gar plans one in America: "I'll come home when I make my first million, driving a Cadillac and smoking cigars and taking movie-films." Neither planned counterfiction has much to do with reality, and the America scheme seems no more likely to succeed than did the Kate scheme. Nevertheless, such counterfictions are what make life bearable, and they help Gar move forward out of his present despair.

Counterfictions which are used not positively (to create hope) but negatively (to conceal), of course, frequently result from fear. People are afraid and seek a way of resisting translations which are too threatening. The ultimate protection of privacy, as Steiner has pointed out, is the lapsing into total silence. That is the course Sarah follows in Translations. The play opens with Manus teaching Sarah (whose speech defect is so serious that it has thus far rendered her dumb) to speak. Sarah, who is clearly in love with Manus, does learn to say her name, and then the name of her town. Later, however, it is Sarah's words which reveal to Manus a painful reality, and Sarah, her personal life in chaos and her town renamed by the English, lapses into the protection of total silence.

Sarah's choice of protective silence is reflected in choices made by other Friel characters: the extreme taciturnity of S. B. O'Donnell in Philadelphia, Here I Come!; the silence of Aristocrats' Uncle George, who speaks only at the very end; the stuttering, incomplete speech of Ben in Living Quarters and Eamon in Aristocrats; the deafness of Gran McGuire in The Loves of Cass McGuire and Papa in Crystal and Fox, which reduces other characters to effective silence. Characters in Lovers, The Loves of Cass McGuire, and Faith Healer deliver monologues which—however much they indicate an awareness of a listening theater audience—make no attempt to communicate with other individuals in their worlds. But if silence (in either its positive or its negative guises) is often protective or a bar to full communication, it is also often the reverse—an opportunity for fuller, deeper transfer of meaning. In Translations Maire and Yolland, who do not share a language, communicate beyond words. And in Dancing at Lughnasa, Michael's memory of his family's wordless dancing (reminiscent of the unity embodied by Yeats's dancer) provides one of Friel's most positive images of full communication and communion—expressed here, as so often in Friel, in the vocabulary of the sacred:

Dancing with eyes half closed because to open them would break the spell. Dancing as if language had surrendered to movement—as if this ritual, this wordless ceremony, was now the way to speak, to whisper private and sacred things, to be in touch with some otherness…. Dancing as if language no longer existed because words were no longer necessary.

Richard Kearney discusses the silence of Friel's The Communication Cord in relation to Heidegger's "notion of a mystical 'tolling of silence' at the heart of language." Kearney notes Friel's quotation of Heidegger in the prefatory program notes for Translations, but as both F. C. McGrath and Richard Pine have pointed out, Steiner prefaces After Babel with this same Heidegger passage. [In a 1972 BBC self-interview Friel mocked the sententious tendancy of critics (and himself?) to link Heidegger to trends in contemporary drama.] Friel, who may not even be quoting Heidegger from the original, is probably more directly influenced by Steiner's powerful argument about the "true understanding" of silence. The Tower of Babel, Steiner postulates,

did not mark the end of a blessed monism, of a universal-language situation. The bewildering prodigality of tongues had long existed, and had materially complicated the enterprise of men. In trying to build the tower, the nations stumbled on the great secret: that true understanding is possible only when there is silence. They built silently, and there lay the danger to God.

In Friel's Dancing at Lughnasa, dance is a repeated metaphor for the true understanding which is linked to silent communication. Dance is central to the ancient pagan Irish harvest festival at Lughnasa, to the Ugandan harvest festival Father Jack describes, to village courtship in general, and to the particular courtship of Michael's parents, Gerry and Chris. The word "ceremony" is applied to all of these dances, and their sacred, religious dimension is clearly felt—as is the depth of their wordless communication.

GERRY: Do you know the words [of the song to which they are dancing]?

CHRIS: I never know any words.

GERRY: Neither do I. Doesn't matter. This is more important….

CHRIS: Don't talk any more; no more words.

The wordless communication of love here is obviously close to that between Maire and Yolland in Translations. Friel's awareness of the power of wordless communication is interestingly highlighted by his willingness to mock such communication in his farce The Communication Cord. In a section full of comic references to translation, understanding, and lies, the lascivious Senator Donovan ogles a beautiful house guest and observes: "When you're as young and beautiful as Madame Giroux, language doesn't matter does it? Words are superfluous, aren't they?"

In Dancing at Lughnasa, Father Jack's return after twenty-five years working in a leper colony in Uganda further illustrates the complex relation of language and meaning. Father Jack's years of speaking Swahili have left him uncertain in his English and a direct illustration of Steiner's observation that "neglect, the lying fallow, even of one's first language,… will cause a certain dimming, a recession of vocabulary and of grammatical nuance from immediate recall." What has happened to Father Jack's language has also happened to his religion. His Catholicism has undergone a "certain dimming" and is now inextricably intertwined with African pagan ritual. The mixed ceremonies over which Father Jack presided in Uganda indicate that "interference effects" exist on ceremonial as well as on linguistic levels. Kate's conclusion that her brother is engaged in "his own distinctive spiritual search" is a comforting rationalization, but also a hint to us that perhaps the form of the ritual and its words are not so important as the quest it embodies.

Michael's description of his aunts' dance as "this ritual, this wordless ceremony" is a powerful conclusion for Friel's play. It encapsulates what we have heard in previous references to dance. It reiterates what we have seen in earlier dances by Gerry and Chris, by Father Jack, and by the aunts. It embodies Friel's central point about the true understanding of silent communication. And it clarifies the link between individual love (Chris and Gerry), family love (the aunts), communal love (Ireland, Uganda), and the sacred love which links all humans. One of the recurring painful ironies in Friers work is that we often come closest to the Word when we abandon words.

Once language is no longer necessary, of course, all problems of translation and interpretation disappear—including the problem Hugh (echoing Steiner) wrestles with in Translations, the problem of how to "interpret between privacies."

If Steiner's linguistic model has clearly influenced Friel, then, it is his broader notion of translation as interpretation and the making of meaning which provides the most general and useful way of approaching not just one Friel play, but the whole body of Friel's works. Thinking about the range of meanings in the term "translations," for example, reveals important aspects of meaning in the play Translations. What happens when an Irish laborer translates the classics? When Athena translates Ulysses into an uncouth peasant? When Hnglish culture is translated across the Irish Sea? But the term "translations" also provides a useful metaphor for other Friel plays, and since some of Friel's plays predate After Babel, it seems likely that Steiner's work caught Friel's imagination in large part because it explored aspects of language and meaning that had concerned the playwright for some time.

A brief recapitulation of key aspects of other Friel plays indicates the extent to which the translation metaphor can lead us to develop fuller understandings. In Philadelphia, Here I Come! (1964), for example, Gar Private pleads with the Canon, "you could translate all this loneliness, this groping, this dreadful bloody buffoonery into Christian terms that will make life bearable for us all" (emphasis added). In The Loves of Cass McGuire (1966), Cass gives her life of spinsterish drudgery in New York shape and meaning by translating herself into "Catherine," whose late husband "General Cornelius Olsen … made quite a name for himself in the last war."

In Aristocrats (1979) the O'Donnells translate Yeats and G. K. Chesterton into old family friends. In Faith Healer (1979) characters offer varying explanations of how crooked fingers may be made straight. In The Communication Cord (1982), a sort of companion piece to Translations, an Irish peasant cottage is translated into a vacation cottage for the upper middle class, just as Gaelic is translated from a folk language into an amusement for the educated middle class.

In The Freedom of the City (1973), the death of three unarmed citizens during a Derry civil rights march results in a variety of "authoritative" interpretations or translations. British judicial hearings "prove" that these hapless citizens were armed and dangerous, killed only when a restrained British army found it had no choice. An American sociologist turns events into a depersonalized examination of the culture of poverty. An Irish balladeer simultaneously trivializes and celebrates the three dead citizens by transforming them into one hundred Irish patriots who died trying to free their country from British domination. An Irish priest begins by praising their willingness to die for their beliefs and ends by condemning them as part of an excessive fringe element. An Irish telecaster surrounds their funeral with the sticky sweetness of popular sentimentality. Each jargon-studded official voice attempts to confine individual experience within an accepted dogma—to translate these lives into meaningful experience—but Friel's play suggests that the truth, if there is a truth, hovers somewhere as far beyond the formulations of a playwright as it is beyond the formulations of priest, judge, or newsperson.

In Volunteers (1975), Irish political prisoners excavate a historical site to discover the past even as they make way for the future (in the form of a luxury hotel to be built there). Finding a skeleton with a hole in the skull and a noose around its neck, the prisoners christen it Leif and create explanatory stories. These stories explain the prisoners' experiences as well as Leif's. Each offers a specific, convincing reason for the hole in the skull and the noose around the neck. It hardly matters that the stories cannot all be true, since their major function is not to reveal reality, but to create explanations—to "translate" reality and make it bearable for us all. So great is the human need for such translations that even when people conceive a "final adjudicator" whose exact knowledge should clarify their past actions (Sir in Living Quarters [1977]), they cannot resist attempting to circumvent him, to translate "facts" into more acceptable visions.

Often, as in both Volunteers and Living Quarters, the concern with translation is directly linked to concern with discovering and recovering the past—a concern which in Ireland includes translation both in its narrow sense (translating Irish into English to make available the texts of the past) and in its broad sense (transmogrifying the past so that it is connected to and usable in the present). This translation of the past is the central focus of Making History (1988). In that play Hugh O'Neill, seeking to consolidate Irish forces and lead them against the English armies, is a skilled practicer of tactical linguistics, readily swearing and forswearing allegiance to Elizabeth I, using language itself to dupe the oppressor who seeks to rob him of language, power, and independence. When his English sister-in-law protests at this breaking of a "solemn oath" O'Neill asserts: "Nothing more than a token gesture is asked for—the English, unlike us, never drive principles to embarrassing conclusions … it means nothing, nothing…. I'm loyal today—disloyal tomorrow—you know how capricious we Gaels are."

Ironically, it is the oft-forsworn O'Neill who objects to the falsities of the biography of him being prepared by Archbishop Lombard. O'Neill insists over and over that Lombard tell the "truth," something which Lombard says can't be done: "I don't believe that a period of history … contains within it one 'true' interpretation … it may contain within it several possible narratives." At the end of the play, O'Neill protests the biography's description of him as "A dove in meekness." That, says O'Neill, is "a bloody lie." "Not a lie," replies Lombard. "Merely a convention." The difference between O'Neill's "token gesture" of a false oath and Lombard's "convention" of biographical distortion is at best blurry. Even the motives for the falsities (if that is what they are) are similar. O'Neill seeks to protect his position and buy time in which to unify the Irish, and Lombard argues that his falsehoods protect the Irish. This argument that lies are protective, of course, parallels one motivation for use of alternative realities pointed out by Steiner and epitomized by Athena and Odysseus.

In Making History Friel also allows his characters' language once again to reflect the religious dimension of the word/Word: "Now is the time for a hero…. And I'm offering them Hugh O'Neill as a national hero … there are times when a hero can be as important to a people as a God." O'Neill's and Lombard's untruths are what Steiner would call "alternative realities," and he recognizes that such alternatives are often creative and beneficent. They are also examples of the extent to which all speech requires translation.

History, of course, may be the greatest translation of all, for it seeks to translate deed into word. In After Babel, Steiner argues that translation is necessary not just horizontally (between languages, between cultures, between individuals), but also vertically {between time periods) and that all history is translation:

By far the greatest mass of the past as we experience it is a verbal construct. History is a speech-act, a selective use of the past tense…. We have no total history, no history which could be defined as objectively real because it contained the literal sum of past life. To remember everything is a condition of madness. We remember culturally, as we do individually, by conventions of emphasis, foreshortening, and omission … the reality of felt history in a community depend[s] on a never-ending, though very often unconscious, act of internal translation.

All descriptions are partial. We speak less than the truth, we fragment in order to reconstruct desired alternatives, we select and elide. It is not 'the things which are' that we say, but those which might be, which we would bring about, which the eye and remembrance compose.

In Translations Hugh echoes Steiner: "it is not the literal past, the 'facts' of history, that shape us, but images of the past embodied in language." And in Making History Lombard echoes them both: history is "imposing a pattern on events that were mostly casual and haphazard and shaping them into a narrative that is logical and interesting…. I'm not sure that 'truth' is a primary ingredient…. Maybe when the time comes, imagination will be as important as information."

In a passage which may well have suggested the punning title of Friel's play, Steiner says:

When we use past tenses, when we remember, when the historian "makes history" (for that is what he is actually doing), we rely on … axiomatic fictions.

These may well be indispensable to the exercise of rational thought, of speech, of shared remembrance, without which there can be no culture. But their justification is comparable to that of the foundations of Euclidean geometry whereby we operate, with habitual comfort, in … mildly idealized space. (first emphasis added)

In his new study of Friel, Richard Pine suggests another influence on the final shaping of Making History. Pointing to Friel's tendency to adapt or dramatize core arguments and central facts of sources, Pine suggests (apparently on the basis of an interview with the playwright) that as a child Friel read Sean O'Faolain's biography of O'Neill and "was fascinated by O'Faolain's suggestion that 'a talented dramatist might write an informative, entertaining, ironical play on the theme of the living man helplessly watching his translation into a star in the face of all the facts that had reduced him to poverty, exile and defeat'" (emphasis added). If O'Faolain is indeed one source for Friei's play, there is a happy conjunction between his use of the word "translation" and the use Steiner makes of it.

Precisely because history is a process of translation, Friel's play illustrates not just what happened when Lombard translated a real life into the myth of a hero, but also what happens when Friel retranslates the same real life into a different myth. Lombard is interested in O'Neill as a national figure—a man of war, politics, national consciousness. Friel (no doubt influenced by current debates about history) is interested in O'Neill the private man—the newlywed, the husband suddenly bereft of wife and son, the helpless exile who must be abjectly grateful for pensions and who consoles himself with wine and women. The extent to which both myths are translations—shaped realities—is emphasized by Lombard's and O'Neill's disagreement about whether O'Neill's wife Mabel should be portrayed in Lombard's biography. O'Neill is insistent that she should be. Lombard, however, is convinced that O'Neill's wives "didn't contribute significantly to … the overall thing … I mean they didn't reroute the course of history." But Lombard also recognizes that his myth is not the only one which could be woven from the threads of O'Neill's life:

In the big canvas of national events—in your exchanges with popes and kings and queens—is that where Mabel herself thought her value and her importance resided? Is that how she saw herself? But she had her own value, her own importance. And at some future time and in a mode we can't imagine now I have no doubt that story will be told fully and sympathetically. It will be a domestic story, Hugh; a love story; and a very beautiful love story it will be.

It is, of course, that domestic story, that love story, which Friel gives us in Making History, and he is quite conscious of the extent to which his own "O'Neill" involves a definite shaping of the facts:

I have tried to be objective and faithful—after my artistic fashion—to the empirical method. But when there was tension between historical "fact" and the imperative of the fiction, I'm glad to say I kept faith with the narrative … history and fiction are related and comparable forms of discourse and … an historical text is a kind of literary artifact.

                                           (Making History)

Friel's play thus both discusses and illustrates the extent to which to write history is indeed to translate the past, to make a story. It also illustrates Friel's agreement with Hugh in Translations that "we must never cease renewing those images [of the past embodied in language]; because once we do, we fossilise." In many ways, it is a recasting of Oscar Wilde's dictum, "The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it."

These are not new concerns for Friel. The fact that O'Neill's life is susceptible to retranslation is parallel to the existence of various translations of events in The Freedom of the City and to the more private retranslations which are at the core of Faith Healer—and it is not far removed from the retranslations of life histories in The Loves of Cass McGuire. What Steiner's book seems to have provided for Friel is a theory of language and culture which reinforces his own and allows for a refocusing of attention on things which have concerned Friel for decades.

This recurring sense that the major task is interpreted, communicated, transformed meaning—and the recurring use of the word "translation" to describe that process—meshes naturally with bilingual, largely Catholic Ireland's acute sense that both language and being need translation. Frank O'Connor, for example, in a chapter of his autobiography which discusses the link between language and imagination, describes his felt need to transform his world in literature:

All I could believe in was words, and I clung to them frantically. I would read some word like "unsophisticated" and at once I would want to know what the Irish equivalent was. In those days I didn't even ask to be a writer; a much simpler form of transmutation would have satisfied me. All I wanted was to translate, to feel the unfamiliar become familiar, the familiar take on all the mystery of some dark foreign face I had just glimpsed on the quays. (emphasis added)

The mixture of linguistic and religious terms in such a statement is also typical of the task of translation central to so many Friel works.

Richard Kearney for example, discusses The Faith Healer as a play about words (often words which "lie") as marvelous, miraculous instruments of faith—words which make possible the release of the faith healer's audience "from what they are into what they might be … the fiction of a life transformed;" "Frank's 'performance' can only work when the healer and the healed come together in a ritual of magic communion—when they agree to play the language game of faith." Building on Friel's statement that The Faith Healer is "some kind of metaphor for the art, the craft of writing," Kearney goes on to remind us of the "origins of drama in primitivistic ritual," and to suggest that the play "teases out that subtle knot in which religious and aesthetic faith are intertwined."

Patrick Rafroidi similarly argues that Friel uses "an approach which, to a point, is a religious one," and that Friel's plays are "catholic" in their "deep, crippling sense of … original sin." Rafroidi reminds us that Tim in The Communication Cord refers to the restored cottage (closely associated with the effort to restore Gaelic) as the "first cathedral" of the Irish, a structure which "shaped all our souls."

Richard Pine suggests that Friel "almost inevitably" fulfills "a liminal, shamanistic role as he sets about his task of divining the elements of ritual and translating them into drama" (emphasis added). Indeed, Pine's book in general supports the thesis that translation is a crucial metaphor for consideration of all of Friel's work, for the word peppers his critical evaluation. Friel, Pine suggests, "translates" private psychology into public culture, "translates" real places into words and images, "translates … the mind into the world and the world into the mind; intellect into emotion and emotion into intellect;" "translates … the absolute into the particular;" "translates" tragedy into comedy; "translates" the facts of Hugh O'Neill into a consideration of life as myth.

Pine asserts that the dramatist who produced Dancing at Lughnasa is "the same man, translated, who began writing short stories in the 1950s" (emphasis added). And Pine returns over and over—directly and indirectly—to the notion that there is a religious dimension to Friel's translations, which—as "drama-ritual"—are "a special form of communal process" which "translates us from one state to another" (emphasis added).

Earlier critics such as Ulf Dantanus were more likely to use words such as "interpret" or "transform" and to emphasize the importance of communication as a Friel theme. Once Friel used Steiner's discussion of translation as a basis for his play Translations, however, he pointed interpreters toward an inclusive, useful metaphor for approaching the body of his work. The term provides an entree to earlier Friel works, and it is equally applicable to much of what concerns the playwright in Making History and Dancing at Lughnasa—though the impact of Steiner on these works is nowhere nearly so direct as it was on Translations.

If translation is a useful concept for understanding individual Friel plays, it is equally useful in understanding Friel's place in Irish literature and culture. His plays embody an ancient and current debate in Ireland and provide images and vocabulary for discussing the connections between linguistic translation, historical understanding, colonialism and nationalism, and religion. As Friel's colleague Seamus Deane puts it in the general introduction to The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing,

[Nationalism] too is an act of translation or even of retranslation. The assumption it shares with colonialism is the existence of an original condition that must be transmitted, restored, recuperated, and which must replace that fallen condition which at present obtains. It is not necessarily true that something always gets lost in translation. It is necessarily true that translation is founded on the idea of loss and recuperation; it might be understood as an action that takes place in the interval between these alternatives. This conception lies at the heart of much Irish writing, especially in the modern period, and has of course affinities with the modern theories of writing as a practice.

To notice such affinities between Friel and Irish writing in general is, of course, simply to come full circle in awareness of the extent to which the playwright is both product and shaper of his culture. But it is to come full circle translated to a realm of fuller understanding.