[In the excerpt below, Kearney discusses Friel's exploration of the role of language in the formation of a community in Translations.]

With Translations Friel's exploration of language play takes a new turn. He moves beyond the critical examination of his own aesthetic conjuring with words to the broader question of the socio-cultural role of language in the historical evolution of a community.

Translations begins where Faith Healer ends—in the Donegal town of Ballybeg. Only now it goes by its original gaelic name of Baile Beag.

Friel has wound the clock back a century, recreating the life and circumstances of this small Donegal community as it faced into the social and linguistic upheaval provoked by the Great Famine of the 1840's. The year is 1833 and the old Gaelic language and culture are enjoying their last lease of life. The play relates the fortunes of a hedge school master, Hugh—Frank Hardy's spiritual and tribal ancestor—and his motley crew of scholarly disciples: the sixty year old 'infant prodigy', Jimmy Jack, fluent in Latin and Greek; Hugh's son and assistant, Manus; and the quasi-illiterate peasant pupils, Sarah, Máire and Doalty. The hedge school fosters an harmonious compound of Gaelic and Classical cultures. 'Our own culture and the classical tongue', boasts Hugh, 'make a happy conjugation'. Athena and Grainne, Apollo and Cúchulainn rub shoulders here with unpretentious ease. The poetic imagination still reigns supreme, roaming from Baile Beag to Athens and Rome in the breath span of a single verse.

But this cultural sanctuary is abruptly threatened by the arrival of a detachment of Royal Engineers from the British Army sent to make an Ordnance Survey map of the local landscape. This military mission is disguised as a benign exercise in geographical linguistics, its ostensible purpose being the transcription of Gaelic placenames into their English equivalents. Friel's play documents the nefarious consequences which this seemingly innocuous administrative project has upon the indigenous community. Special attention is given to the decisive role in this cultural genocide played by Owen, the school master's second son. Recently returned from the anglicized capital, Dublin, Owen enlists in the Survey project as translator and mediator between the two opposing languages, only to find himself spiritually spreadeagled in the collision of cultural loyalties.

The play opens with two crippled beings struggling to-wards communication: Manus, the master's lame and loyal son, is trying to teach a local dumb girl, Sarah, to speak. After much encouragement, she succeeds in repeating the sentence—'my-name-is-Sarah'. Manus hails this miraculous act of speech as the unlocking of a hitherto hidden landscape of consciousness. 'Marvellous', he expostulates, 'soon you'll be telling me all the secrets that have been in that head of yours all these years'. While Manus is shepherding Sarah into speech, Jimmy Jack is reciting, chorus-like, the Greek legend of the goddess Athene magically touching and transforming Ulysses with her wand. Friel provides us here with an hellenic tale of faith-healing which subtly counterpoints the reciprocal act of communication whereby Manus and Sarah cure each other of the paralysis of solitude which their respective forms of crippledom embodies. Jimmy's facility with languages is a token of his attunement to the original harmony between word and world—what the Greek philophers called the harmonia of the Logos. We are told that for him the world of the gods and ancient myth is 'as real and as immediate as everyday life in the townland of Baile Beag'. Jimmy represents that declining old order where man still felt at one with the divine (he talks of gods and goddesses 'as if they lived down the road') and where language was still a cohesive rather than a divisive force in the community. For Jimmy speech equals communication equals community.

The other characters in the opening act of the play are also defined in terms of their attitude to language. The first we hear of the master, Hugh, is that he is off at a christening, helping to choose a name for a baby. The choice of name is impatiently awaited by the community as a means of deciding the dubious identity of the child's father! Hugh is thus casually introduced as a minister of names, and by extension, a transmitter, guarantor and guardian of the community's cultural identity. Moreover, by professionally imparting to his students the scholarly art of translating Gaelic words into Latin and Greek, Hugh permits the community to communicate with cultures other than its own. It is of course significant that the classical tongues cultivated by the master represent past civilizations, now dead and gone. A hint of what is in store for his own Gaelic tongue and civilization. Hugh's vision is sighted on a vanished and vanishing kingdom. He is an inquisitor of origins and etymologies who speaks in the past tense. He is backward looking for the simple reason that the future holds no hope for his language.

When Hugh finally arrives on stage, he proudly announces the identity of the child disclosed at the 'ritual of naming'—or caerimonia nominationis as he hastens to add. He then proceeds to quiz his pupils on the Greek and Latin etymologies of the word baptize—baptizein, to dip; baptisterium, a bath etc. When his pupils apprise him of the departure of one of his students from the school, he extends the importance of the naming motif with the humorous quip: "Nora Dan can now write her name—Nora Dan's education is complete!'

But Nora Dan may well be one of the last graduates of Hugh's hedge school education. English—the new colonial language of commerce and maps—is already making deep incursions into the old system of learning. Several of the young peasants greet the arrival of this new tongue as holding out the promise of a new beginning. Máire is one such peasant pupil seduced by the allure of English words. She only knows three snatches which an aunt has taught her to recite by rote. Though still not having an idea what the words actually mean, she is prepared nonetheless to trade in her limited knowledge of the classics for more of the same: 'I don't want Greek. I don't want Latin … Fit me better if I had that much English'. Máire belongs to the emerging generation of aspiring peasants tired of treading the timeless mudtracks of oppressed Gaeldom. She dreams of finer things to come, approvingly citing the opinion of Dan O'Connell, the 'Liberator', that the sooner 'we all learn to speak English the better … The old language is a barrier to progress'.

Máire has secured passage money to the New World and knows full well that the only useful language for her now is English. She sits on the hedge school floor excitedly scanning the map of America for the English placenames of her future abode. But the lens of her youthful fascination soon focuses on a more literal map nearer to home. The British soldiers 'making the maps' for the Ordance Survey in the neighbouring fields have not escaped her attention. Máire's unsuspecting enthusiasm for the arrival of the Royal Engineers is, however, offset by two discreet allusions to the threat which their colonial culture represents to the native Gaelic-speaking community. First, we are casually informed that the hedge school is to be re-placed by a progressive National school where every subject will be taught through English. And second, we learn of the imminent danger of a potato blight—'just beyond where the soldiers are making the maps—the sweet smell was everywhere'.

The next character to make an appearance at the hedge school is the master's second son, Owen. He is something indeed of a prodigal son returning from his travels with a reputation of great business successes (Máire claims she heard stories that he owned 'ten big shops in Dublin'). Owen is accompanied by two English officers—Captain Lancey and Lieutenant Yolland—in whose employ he is presently engaged as a 'translator'.

(Hugh has already prepared us for the arrival of the English speakers. Having met with Captain Lancey on his return from the baptism, Hugh had pointed out to the Royal Engineer that his alien tongue 'couldn't really express us' and was only employed in the community on rare occasions for 'purposes of commerce', a use, Hugh comments with jocular disrespect, to which the English language 'seemed particularly suited'. Hugh mischievously informs the officers that his people are not familiar with their literature, feeling 'closer to the warm Mediterranean. We tend to overlook your island'.)

Owen arrives first at the school—like an Indian scout preparing the way for the ensuing cavalry. He greets his father, brother and the local pupils with genuine affection and camaraderie. It is after all his first homecoming to Baile Beag. And it is no less festive than that of Frank Hardy a century later. Owen immediately enters his father's game of translating Irish into Latin and vice versa, thus reminding his people that he is still one of their own, still familar with the rules of their language play. Owen is a master of what Kavanagh called 'the wink and elbow language of delight'. There follows a particularly poignant exchange between Owen and Sarah. Echoing the earlier act of communication between his brother and the dumb girl, Owen asks her name. When she falteringly replies that it is Sarah Johnny Sally, he spontaneously adds: 'Of course! From Bun na hAbhann! I'm Owen Hugh Mor from Baile Beag'. Owen thus subscribes to the pass-word of the tribe, uttering once again that communal dialect which identifies its members at birth according to their native origins—the name of their parents and local birthplace.

Owen does not try to hide the fact that he is on the pay roll of the Ordnance Survey expedition. On the contrary, he announces his brief as civilian interpreter with goodhumored candour: 'My job is to translate the quaint, archaic tongue you people persist in speaking into the King's good English'. Owen then introduces the two officers who have been waiting in attendance. Captain Lancey is a hardnosed military expert with little or no culture. He mistakes Jimmy's Latin for Gaelic and is only interested in language in so far as it may prove a useful instrument in the colonial conquest of a landscape by means of a mechanistic mapping system. Lancey's attitude perfectly epitomizes the British Empiricist philosophy of language as a crude reductionism of things to signs. 'A map is a representation on paper', he explains, subverting Hugh's pedegogical role. 'His Majesty's Government has ordered the first ever comprehensive survey of this entire country—a general triangulation which will embrace detailed hydrographic and topographic information and which will be executed to a scale of six inches to the English mile'. Nor does Lancey leave us in any doubt that this apparently inoffensive task of cartographical translation involves an ulterior purpose—the colonial and commercial exploitation of the native community as a whole. 'This enormous task', he blandly reveals, 'has been embarked on so that the military authorities will be equipped with up-to-date and accurate information on every corner of this part of the Empire … and also so that the entire basis of land valuation can be reassessed for reasons of more equitable taxation'. Lancey betrays himself to be a patronizing hypocrite, however, when he presents the entire exercise as a token of British altruism, undertaken to 'advance the interests of Ireland'. The Irish people are privileged, he ironically affirms, since no such survey will be undertaken in England! In short, Lancey's formal address exposes the devious uses to which his language is being put as an imperial ploy to patronize, deceive and conquer.

But Friel's depiction of the adversary resists the temptation to crude caricature. If Lancey is cast as a disingenuous and cheerless servant of the Crown, his subordinate officer, Yolland, impresses immediately as a sensitive and romantic youth. Yolland is a 'soldier by accident' whose birthplace was, significantly, only four miles away from that of William Wordsworth—a reliable signal, as it transpires, of his own spiritual identity. He takes his note from the temper of his native environment across the waters: an imaginative disposition which enables him to empathize with this strange Gaelic culture into which he has been dispatched. Yolland is a self-proclaimed hibernophile enamoured of the local people and modestly perturbed by his inability to understand their language. Struggling for words, in a manner reminiscent of Sarah's stammering towards speech, Yolland's opening address is in stark contrast to that of his military superior: 'I—I—I've nothing to say—really … I feel very foolish to—to—to be working here and not to speak your language … I hope we're not too—too crude an intrusion on your lives'.

In all this, Owen plays a double language-game, commuting with apparent ease between the two parties. But the ease is no more than apparent. In reality, Owen's linguistic duality entails a fundamental duplicity. He mistranslates Lancey's message winnowing off its mercenary implications in order to make it more palatable for the locals. Yet at the same time Owen is sufficiently circumspect to withhold his real name (and by extension, identity) from the English officers, operating under the pseudonym of Rolland. Owen is both a mistranslator and a misnomer, double-timing as it were in his efforts to keep in with both sides of the colonial schism. In response to his brother's objection that there is nothing incorrect about the existing Gaelic placenames, he declares—'They're just going to be standardized … where there's ambiguity, they'll be anglicized'. Owen's description of this linguistic transposition is in fact a self-description, accurately fore-shadowing his own fate. Friel touches here, with characteristic and unpretentious irony, on the crisis of cultural ambiguity which so indelibly hallmarks the modern Irish psyche.

In the second act of the play, Friel provides us with two dramatic instances of personal and cultural translation. The first is a translation of labour (between Owen and Yol-land); the second a translation of love (between Yolland and Máire).

The act opens with Yolland and Owen, bent over a Name Book and large map, embarked upon their task of transliterating the Gaelic toponymy of Baile Beag into an English alternative. The translation of names also involves a translation of namers; the roles of colonizer and colonized are reversed, as Yolland and Owen undergo an exchange of identity.

While Owen is patently engrossed by the mapping process, Yolland is lost in a world of dreams, savouring each Gaelic word upon his tongue, reluctant to 'traduce' it into its Anglo-Saxon equivalent. So that when Owen offers the practical suggestion of rendering Bun na hAbhann (in Irish, mouth of the river) as Burnfoot, Yolland's reaction is one of protective deference towards the original: 'Let's leave it alone. There's no English equivalent for a sound like that'. But it is not just the sound that is at stake. It is the stored heritage of local history which each Gaelic name recollects and secretes. The translation of these place-names closes off rather than discloses their mnemonic secrets, distorts rather than restores their original identity.

Yolland describes his first encounter with the Gaelic language as a quasi-mystical revelation. The language divide is experienced by him as a threshold demarcating fundamentally heterogenous modes of consciousness. He speaks of discovering a new continent of feeling, belonging to 'a totally different order. I had moved into a consciousness that wasn't striving nor agitated, but at its ease and with its own conviction and assurance'

But the threshold is also a frontier. It cannot be crossed with impunity, as Yolland will discover to his cost. Already he has intimations of the ultimately impenetrable barrier of words which no translation, however well-intentioned, can traverse. 'Even if I did speak Irish', concedes Yolland, 'I'd always be an outsider here, wouldn't I? 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?' Owen's reassuring rejoinder—'you can learn to decode us'—has an ominous ring, its scarcely veiled sarcasm reflecting his private complicity with his own native tribe. In short, the commercial collusion between Planter and Gael cannot be quarantined against the cultural-linguistic conflict which opposes them.

If language unites people by permitting communication, it divides them by cultivating the possibility of separate cultural and tribal identities. This paradox is a heritage of the felix culpa of our first parents: their fall from the edenesque Logos which enabled God and man to speak with one voice. And this original sin of language—the sin of speaking in a multiplicity of conflicting tongues—finds its ultimate nemesis in the subsequent biblical account of the Tower of Babel. In his study, After Babel, George Steiner writes of the literary history of translation as a series of attempts to build bridges between the disparate tongues of our fallen humanity. Friel has been deeply impressed by Steiner's disquisition and succeeds in Translations in dramatically extrapolating some of its scholarly insights. … What bears interest in this creative partnership of minds—itself a felicitous translation or exchange between English and Irish cultures—is the way in which Friel brilliantly contrives to refashion Steiner's academic research in the form of a drama concretely situated in his native cultural and historical context. Friel's play serves in this respect as a fine example of how literary theory may be reclaimed as literature, of how criticism may be retranslated into imaginative practice.

Yolland cannot help recognizing that the whole business of toponymic translation constitutes an 'eviction of sorts', an 'erosion' of the traditional Gaelic pieties in the name of Imperial Progress. But Yolland's disapproval of colonial conquest is counterbalanced by his naive and positivistic belief that there might exist an ideal system of translation where the atavistic obstacles thrown up by tribal dialects could be transcended. Yolland is hankering after a prelapsarian naming process, similar to that of Adam when he named the animals, capable of achieving an exact correspondence between word and thing. When Owen finally confesses to Yolland that his real name is not Rolland but Owen, or better still Oland—by way of a perfect compromise or synthesis between the nominal differences of Irish (Owen) and English (Yolland)—they celebrate their newfound confraternity of naming as follows:

Owen: A christening! …

Yolland: A thousand baptisms! Welcome to Eden!

Owen: Eden's right! We name a thing and—bang!—it leaps into existence!

Yolland: Each name a perfect equation with its roots.

Owen: A perfect congruence with its reality. Take a drink.

Yolland: Poteen—beautiful.

Owen: Lying Anna's poteen.

Yolland: Anna na mBreag's poteen … I'll decode it yet.

Once again, Friel reminds us that the magical equation of word and world is achieved by the power of a lie! The fact that Owen and Yolland consecrate their new transliteral unit (as Oland) with Anna's illusionist brew is it-self a hint of the disillusioning reality to follow.

Friel juxtaposes this 'translation of labour' sequence between Owen and Yolland with a scene featuring a 'translation of love' between Yolland and Máire. In this second exchange Friel highlights the tragic impossibility of ever attaining an ideal system of language capable of decoding semantic differences into some common, transcultural identity. Yolland and Máire meet at the local dance. Ever since Yolland arrived in the village they have been admiring each other from a distance. Now at last together they try to transcend this distance, stealing away to the fields so that they might communicate their mutual love. But if their love is mutual their dialect is not. Máire begins by speaking Latin which Yolland mistakes for Gaelic. Then she stammers forth the only three English words in her possession—water, fire, earth. But even though Yolland congratulates Máire on her 'perfect English', his lie of encouragement cannot alter the fact that they continually misunderstand each other's words. Finally they do appear to reach some level of communication by lovingly reciting to each other the litany of Gaelic placenames. The irony is of course that this common source of semantic agreement is precisely the issue which so tragically divides their respective tribes. Their commonly uttered words still consign them to separate worlds as Friel himself indicates in a textual note: 'Each now speaks almost to himself/herself. (One recalls Frank's and Grace's equally discrepant invocation of placenames in Faith Healer). As each name is intoned by one lover and antiphonally echoed by the other, they move closer together and embrace. This climactic touch serves as a sort of dramatic leitmotif reiterating once again the opening exchange between Manus and Sarah. The order is reversed, however, in so far as speech now becomes touch whereas in the former scene touch had become speech.

When Yolland and Máire finally kiss, their epiphany of loving silence is no more than a provisional reprieve from the sentence of language. At that very moment Sarah enters. Shocked by what she witnesses she rushes off calling out the name of Máire's suitor—'Manus!' Thus in a cruel twist of dramatic irony, Sarah's initial transition from silence to speech—her initiation into the naming process in the opening love scene between herself and Manus—becomes the condition for the betrayal of love.

According to the local code of the community, Máire has been promised to Manus and this tacit tribal contract cannot be gainsaid or 'decoded' by an outsider—even in an act of love. As Jimmy Jack explains in his final speech, enunciating his own fictitious betrothal to the Goddess Athene, 'The word exogamein means to marry outside the tribe. And you don't cross those borders casually—both sides get very angry. Now, the problem is this: Is Athene sufficiently mortal or am I sufficiently godlike for the marriage to be acceptable to her people and to my people?' Whatever about transgressing the mythological boundaries between the human and the divine, the real bound-aries between one human code and another cannot be ignored with impunity. Yolland is assassinated by the Donnelly twins—renegade pupils from the hedge school; and Captain Lancey promises retribution and revenge on the whole community—he orders their livestock to be slaughtered and their abodes levelled.

Friel's irony excels itself at this point: Lancey's threat to destroy the very locality which his own Ordnance Survey was proposing to civilize and advance, renders the whole 'translation' process null and void. Nominal eviction has been replaced by its literal equivalent. This reversal of plot also extends to a reversal of character. Summoned before a local gathering, Owen is now compelled to give a literal translation of Lancey's bellicose and punitive intentions, his compromising role as go-between now made embarrassingly plain. For the dubious benefit of his own tribe, Owen is forced to retranslate Lancey's English rendition of the names of the local villages to be destroyed back into their Gaelic originals. Owen's own labour of words has backfired; he is hoisted with his own petard.

Máire also becomes a victim of this reverse play of language. Exposed in the abrupt polarization of the two rival tribes, she can no longer feel at home in her own community and yet has no other home to go to now that Yolland is dead. Employing again his dramatic technique of in-verse repetition or leitmotif, Friel reinvokes the idiom of mapping to emphasize Máire's dilemma. Tracing out an imaginary map on that very spot on the hedge school floor where Owen's Ordnance Survey map had been spread, she lists off the placenames of Yolland's native Norfolk which he had taught her to recite during their love-duet the previous night—Winfarthing, Barton, Bendish, Saxingham etc. 'Nice sounds', she muses, as Yolland had done before her with reference to Gaelic names, 'just like Jimmy Jack reciting Homer'. But there is a fundamental difference between the recitation of Jimmy Jack and that of Maire and Yolland. Since the Greeks had no historic quarrel with the Gaels their two tongues could peaceably conjugate in a way that English and Gaelic cannot. In one particularly striking moment, Maire recalls that Yolland's parting message to her was in fact a mistranslation: 'He tried to speak in Irish, he said—'I'll see you yesterday'—he meant to say, 'I'll see you tomorrow'." This mistranslation is a poignant symptom of the tragic historical fact that in the colonial conflict between England and Ireland the time was out of joint. Or to put it in another way, linguistic discrepancies are the inevitable consequence of historical ones.

These reversals of plot, persona, and time, are reinforced by a more generalized reversal of perception. The radical disarticulation of language brought about by the various abortive attempts at translation, also expresses itself at the basic level of the characters' distorted perception of the world about them. The last scene of the play is littered with mistaken identities and misidentifications, on a par with the most convoluted comedies of Wilde or Shakespeare. Manus, who flees to Mayo, is mistaken for the assassins (the Donnellys); the fumes from the burning army tents are mistaken for the sweet smell of potato blight; Doalty is mistaken for the arsonist; a baconcuring school-master from Cork is mistaken for the village schoolmaster, Hugh—the National school replacing the old hedge school; and the anglicized Owen is mistaken for (again in the sense of taking over from) his inveterately Gaelic brother, Manus, as faithful son to their father, Hugh.

All these instances of misplacement and displacement serve to consolidate Friel's central message about the mis-taken substitution of Irish by English. But Friel, like Hugh, recognizes that this mistake is an irreversible, if regrettable, inevitability of history. 'We like to think we endure around truths immemorially posited', Hugh explains with rueful wisdom, 'but we remember that words are signals, counters. They are not immortal. And it can happen … that a civilization can be imprisoned in a linguistic contour which no longer matches the landscape of … fact'. The rich mytho-poeic resources of the Gaelic language, Hugh stoically adds, were themselves a response to the painful historical circumstances which conditioned its development: 'Yes, it is a rich language … full of mythologies of fantasy and hope and self-deception—a syntax opulent with tomorrows. It is our response to mud cabins and a diet of potatoes; our only method of replying to … inevitabilities'. Thus in sober acknowledgement that what is done cannot be undone, Hugh determines to make a virtue of necessity by creatively refashioning the English language so as to make sense of the new landscape of historical fact. At one point Owen tries to revoke the repercussions of translation, dismissing the whole sorry business as 'my mistake—nothing to do with us'. But Hugh has had enough of self-deception. Pointing to the Name Book, he counsels his community to reclaim in and through the English language that which has been lost to it. 'We must learn those new names', he soberly challenges, 'we must learn to make them our own, we must make them our new home'.

If history has deprived the Irish of their native tongue, this will not prevent them from recreating their identity in a new tongue. Speaking in his capacity as poet, Hugh bequeaths to his community a legacy of challenge, the challenge of an Irish literature written in English, the challenge to persist in an aesthetic reconquest of that cultural self-image brutally vanquished by the empirical fact of colonization. We the audience recognize of course that the entire modern tradition of Irish writers of English—extending from Synge, Yeats and Joyce to Friel himself—has arisen as a response to just this challenge. We know that for the Irish writer this is his heritage now. The historical fatality of linguistic dispossession has not condemned the Irish imagination to dumb show. Our best writers have masterfully succeeded in reworking their adopted language so as to reflect upon and renew the original images of their cultural past. Indeed Translations is itself a paramount example of this very success. Hugh outlines a blueprint for this poetic retrieval of lost ground when he appeals for an authentic discrimination between the separate laws of history and imagination, or if you wish between the laws of empirical necessity and cultural freedom. 'It is not', he insists, 'the facts of history, that shape us, but images of the past embodied in language … We must never cease renewing those images; because once we do, we fossilise'. Jimmy Jack, the otherwordly poet of the old order, has fossilized precisely because he was unable 'to make that discrimination'. The poets of the new order cannot afford the luxury of such indifference.

But Hugh's lesson in aesthetics also serves as a history lesson. Friel would seem to be cautioning us against the temptation of becoming political prisoners to historical fact. 'To remember everything is a form of madness', Hugh warns, implying a preference for a more discerning use of memory capable of discriminating between the past that liquidates by spawning a narrow obsession with revenge, and the past which liberates into new possibilities of self-recollection. Recalling the rebel Uprising of 1798 when himself and Jimmy went forth to battle, with pikes in their hands and Virgil in their pockets, Hugh humourously confesses that after several miles of marching they got drunk in a pub before staggering unheroically home. Hugh admits to the feeling of 'perception heightened … and consciousness accelerated' which the prospect of violence induced in them. But in a precise inversion of Frank's apocalyptic vision at the end of Faith Healer, Friel shows Hugh opting for an alternative version of home-coming, an option for a more domestic and poetic form of self-survival. 'Our pietas was for older, quieter things', Hugh recounts, 'the desiderium nostrorum—the need for our own'. If Frank condones the capitulation of words to violence, Hugh averts violence in the name of the recreative and recollective powers of words.

To rephrase this alternative in terms of a Yeatsian parallel, we would say that while Faith Healer mirrored the apocalyptic tones of Ben Bulben, Translations moves closer to the ancestral solace of A Dialogue of Self and Soul:

Why should the imagination of a man
Long past his prime remember things that are
Emblematical of love and war?
Think of ancestral night that can …
Deliver from the crime of death and birth.

A cultural fidelity to the images of the past, Friel seems to suggest, is not necessarily reducible to the facts of his-tory. There may be other, more complicated ways of recovering what has been lost and settling one's score with history. One of these ways is the poetic possibility of forging a new language of our own, of recreating a new home where the secrets of the old heritage may be restored. Any attempt at such a cultural translation and transition is, of course, freighted with risk and danger: the risk of losing everything, the danger of self-annihilation. But given the ominous alternatives, it may be a risk worth taking. Perhaps this is why Hugh agrees at the end of the play to teach Máire English. He frankly concedes the necessity for change, telling Máire that the word 'always' is a silly one. But Hugh will not, and cannot, guarantee that her acquisition of the art of translation will permit her to transport the secret heritage of the old culture into the new one. His parting verdict on translation promises neither too little nor too much. 'I will provide you with the available words and the available grammar', he assures Máire, 'But will that help you to interpret between privacies? I have no idea'.