[In the following essay, Zach evaluates the universal significance of Translations.]

In 1970, in a discussion with other Irish authors about the future of Irish drama, we find Brian Friel both critical of the 'quaint' peasant quality of John B. Keane's plays and distanced from Hugh Leonard's preoccupation with presentday urban civilization. Rejecting and, to some degree, combining these two alternatives, he describes the path which he intends to tread, with a somewhat Joycean emphasis on achieving universality through a concentration on the particularly Irish, in the following words [from 'The Future of Irish Drama,' The Irish Times, 12 February 1970]:

I would like to write a play that would capture the peculiar spiritual, and, indeed, material flux that this country is in at the moment. This has got to be done, for me anyway, and I think it has got to be done on a local, parochial level, and hopefully this will have meaning for other people in other countries.

The extent to which Friel achieved this aim in the considerable number of remarkable plays written by him over the succeeding decade, in the 1970s, may be a matter of debate. In 1979, however, Christopher Murray, echoing Friel, still prophesied that Friel's next play would most likely be one 'that attempts to describe what it means to be, to exist, in Ireland today' by having 'recourse to tradition' ['Irish Drama in Transition 1966-1978,' Etudes Irlandaises, 1979]. Only one year later, in 1980, this prophecy was undoubtedly fulfilled with the appearance of Translations. Since then, critics like Seamus Deane, among others, have also remarked, if somewhat briefly, on the significance of the play in revealing the modern Irish state of mind, and this in spite of the fact that the play is set in Ireland's past—to be precise, in an Irish hedge school in the 1830s [Deane, Introduction to Friel's Selected Plays, 1984].

Furthermore, Friel's success in universalizing the poetic appeal of Translations is beyond doubt. As was indicated by the standing ovation initiated by the Protestant Unionist lord mayor in Derry's Guildhall at the première of a play written by a Catholic and self-proclaimed nationalist, Translations united Ireland on 23 September 1980, at least on a cultural plane, and it has continued to do so all over Ireland. Shortly after, the play was also successfully per-formed to packed houses and electrified audiences not only in Ireland but also in many theatres all over Britain, from the East Coast to the West Coast of the United States and in Canada, as well as outside the English-speaking world. In fact, the play has certainly become the greatest international success to be achieved by an Irish dramatist for many years, perhaps the greatest since Friel's almost equally successful play Philadelphia, Here I Come! of 1964. Irish, British, American and Canadian drama awards were immediately showered on Translations, and, despite a few dissenting voices and occasional criticisms of allegedly imperfect characterization, structural weaknesses, and—to a lesser degree—anti-English Irish partisanship, the vast majority of critics have pronounced the play to be of the highest artistic merit. Many of them, including Irving Wardle of the London Times [13 May 1981], even hailed the play as a masterpiece, or have described Translations as the finest piece of Irish drama since The Plough and the Stars and Friel himself as the heir apparent to the long vacant artistic and spiritual throne of Irish dramatists.

When I saw the play in the Abbey Theatre in 1983 for the first time, I experienced it as a profound, epiphanic revelation myself. I must confess, however, that I was not then aware of being present at the performance of a dramatic 'infant prodigy' which had grown to classical stature within three years. It must also be admitted that, de-spite numerous theatre reviews and a few most perceptive articles, critical assessment of Translations has scarcely even begun. Thus, what I should like to do in the next few minutes is to indicate, albeit in a rather summary fashion, what I—through my Austrian eyes—see as some of the most significant aspects of the play both for Ireland and for the world at large. In doing so, I am well aware that it is not possible, for me at least, to do justice to the striking richness of the play's texture and that any disquisition must make the play poorer rather than richer, depriving it of its semi-mythical aura and of its deeply emotional impact.

Turning to a critical discussion of the play now, I should first like to quote Brian Friel himself who commented on the great success of his play by saying: 'Nowadays to write a three-act naturalistic play set in the 19th century in the Gaeltacht is a recipe for instant death, so its success astonished me' [Brian Friel, The Irish Times, 15 January 1981]. Friel, perhaps the most innovative dramatist in Ireland today, seems to have been speaking here with tongue in cheek, although he might also have been thinking here of the fate of M. J. Molloy's recent play Petticoat Loose, like Translations set in the West of Ireland in the early 19th century. In fact, both history plays and peasant plays as well as combinations of these two genres are still being staged, with varying success, in Ireland at least; here one need only think of Plunkett's The Risen People, Murphy's Famine, Keane's The Chastitute, Sheridan's Emigrants, or McIntyre's stage version of Kavanagh's The Great Hunger. More significantly, however, Friel's Translations is not merely 'a three-act naturalist play', in fact it is a play, both 'peasant and unpeasant' [Brian Friel, 'Plays Peasant and Unpeasant, TLS, 17 March 1972] of great modernity, asking questions about the present in the guise of a consciously chosen and just seemingly outmoded dramatic form.

At the most basic level, the play's setting in a crucial period of 'flux' in the past, in County Donegal in 1833, and its central themes—the dispossession of land and the abandonment of the Irish language—have implications for today that can hardly be overlooked by any reader or spectator familiar with present-day Ireland. What is perhaps not so obvious, however, is the fact that Friel's overall concern seems to have been to select precisely those elements of the Irish past which still haunt the Irish present and which indicate the effect of the English colonialization of Ireland and the more universal issues of a clash between two cultures and two languages. This, in my opinion, becomes quite clear in the discussion between Brian Friel and John Andrews held at Maynooth in January 1983 ['Translations and a Paper Landscape: Between Fiction and History,' The Crane Bag, 7, No. ii, 1983].

John Andrews, the writer of the authoritative study on the Ordnance Survey carried out in Ireland in the 1830s [A Paper Landscape: The Ordnance Survey in 19th Century Ireland, 1975], which, by the way, was Friel's main source on the subject, pointed out in this talk that Friel, in Translations, did not in all respects keep to the established historical facts, even where central issues were concerned: The translation of Irish place-names into English, which is at the centre of Friel's play, was the exception rather than the rule in the real Ordnance Survey, which, in the main, just anglicized the orthography of the Irish place-names: the destruction of land and the evictions as carried out by Captain Lancey could not have been ordered by his real-life counterpart, Colonel Colby, and, indeed, no such events took place. And there are a considerable number of minor inaccuracies and anachronisms as well: Lieutenant Yol-land is anachronistically classless and his characterization as a Norfolk man and his murder corresponds to the fate of a survey officer engaged in making a map of Donegal in 1602, not in 1833: Captain Lancey's and Lieutenant Yolland's total ignorance of Greek and Latin and their mistaking these languages for Irish is not in keeping with the known standard of education among British officers at the time: besides, the national schools were introduced a few years earlier, and the Ordnance Survey in Donegal was carried out a few years later than the date given for the time of action leads us to assume, and one could also point to other, more striking anachronisms like the repeated references to the catastrophic potato blight and the Great Famine of the 1840s.

We know from the diary which Friel kept when writing his play that he had actually read and reread many historical sources and scholarly works (especially on the Ordnance Survey, the Irish hedge schools and the loss of the Irish language in the 19th century) and, more important still, that he was perfectly aware of his historical inaccuracies. This helps us understand Friel's ostensibly flippant answer to John Andrews on the subject of historical incorrectness and anachronisms, 'I felt that I had merited more reprimands than that', and his statement, 'that the imperatives of fiction are as exacting as the imperatives of cartography and historiography' is, for the context at present under discussion, as interesting as the details he gives about his shifting intentions and his remodelling of certain historical characters in the course of writing his play. In his reply to John Andrews, Brian Friel, however, does not fully disclose what the specific 'imperatives of fiction' of which he speaks actually are, although one can find vestiges here of what he had stated more clearly in other contexts and expressed in earlier plays—his belief in the inaccessibility of objective reality, in the mind's tendency to construct myths about the past, and in the equal claims of real and imagined events (even in autobiography, by the way) to the status of 'truth'. Most important of all, however, we should see his attitude in the light of Hugh's words in Translations 'that it is not the literal past, the "facts" of history, that shape us, but images of the past embodied in language … To remember everything is a form of madness'. These sentences themselves are, in fact, anachronistic too. Like many other unacknowledged quotations they are remodelled from passages in George Steiner's book After Babel, whose views on language and culture Friel has, to some extent, dramatised in his play.

Hugh's words clearly point to the present-centred teleology of Translations and to Friel's method of selecting and fictionalizing historical events. As has already been tentatively suggested by John Andrews, the images which Friel takes from the past, and especially the anachronisms he uses, are being employed to create a clear picture of those inherited dimensions of experience which still impinge on the Irish present—the past is seen as filtered through the modern consciousness, in the sense of Croce's dictum that 'all history is contemporary history'. Thus, in merely presenting the 20th century myth about the Irish past, Friel, for example, managed to recreate 'the wholeness, the integrity of that Gaelic past' as embodied in the microcosm of his hedge school community, without believing in its historicity, as he states himself in his Diary [Friel, 'Extracts from a Sporadic Diary,' in Ireland and the Arts, ed. Tim Pat Coogan, 1983]. And it is central to his play that he has made his nostalgic and elegiac images from an imagined past into objective correlatives of present Irish issues, which themselves have universal significance.

Taking the above as a starting point, it is, of course, particularly obvious that Friel attempts to define the national distinctiveness of 'Irishness' and 'Englishness' by placing his Irish and English worlds in direct contrast to one an-other, which places him in the dramatic tradition of Irish plays from Shaw's John Bull's Other Island and D'Alton's This Other Eden, to Keane's Hut 42 or Friel's own earlier play The Freedom of the City. In Translations, Friel's stance in marking off his Irish from his English characters appears, at first sight, to be a nationalist one, and this is also corroborated by his view expressed in an interview: 'In a way … it would be better if the Irish were considered by the English to be truly foreign—which they are …—instead of resident clowns' [Victoria Radin, 'Voice from Ireland,' Observer, 1 March 1981]. In the play itself, the central image of the English army mapping Ireland and translating the Irish place-names into English, as well as the device of having Irish and English characters speak different languages or, rather, speak the same language without being able to understand each other, clearly indicates what Friel views as the great disparity and the mutual incomprehension which exists between the two communities.

Although Friel mainly attempts to sketch this divide in terms of language, he also implicitly comments on the present-day political and social situation in Northern Ireland. Stephen Rea, for example, has drawn attention to this dimension of the play, and Friel himself, although he wanted to tone down this aspect, actually couldn't or wouldn't really do so. His message, however, amounts to more than 'Brits out', as Hugh Leonard put it [quoted by Antoinette Roades in 'Field Day: The Communication Cord,' Theatre Ireland 2, January-March 1983]. In fact, Yolland's and Maire's romantic, though abortive and tragic love affair points to a yearning for a reconciliation between Ireland and England, although it is implied that the difference in heritages and tribal loyalties between the two societies does not allow for a union on a social and political level. Jimmy Jack's distinction between endogamein and exogamein leaves no doubt about this state of affairs. And, with cruel tragic irony, it is precisely Yolland of all the characters who is eventually killed—the romantic English lover of Ireland, a soldier by pure accident, who disagrees with the official policy of colonialization represented by Captain Lancey, and whose standard phrases are those of incomprehension and regret ['What? What?—'Sorry. Sorry']. As in Friel's The Freedom of the City and most of his other plays, the ultimate sufferers are the innocent and the powerless.

This, of course, points to the situation in Northern Ireland today, as does the deadly cycle of violence and counter-violence started off by Yolland's apparent murder, and which, most significantly, remains unresolved at the very end of the play. In addition, the final fate of the Irish characters in Translations, it seems to me, reflects Friel's sceptical view of the few possibilities which were then—and are now—open to the minority in Northern Ireland: emigration abroad, repression and evasion of reality, violence, or adaption to the confused state of affairs whilst combining a lament for the current situation with hopes of a new beginning. It seems to me of particular importance, however, that Hugh, seeing the futility of violence, in the end renounces the ideology of rebel martyrdom.

Though English colonialism is clearly condemned and its linguistic mask of benevolence torn away from its countenance, I think that one can, on the whole, subscribe to Seamus Deane's verdict that Friel's play is 'about the tragedy of English imperialism as well as of Irish nationalism' . Friel diagnoses the present-day political deadlock as a legacy of the past without offering easy solutions, which, he believes, it is not the function of the dramatist to provide. If one bears in mind the colonial strife so widespread in today's world, the uprooting of whole nations from their native soil, the vicious circle of hatred and violence which exists between and within nations, and the misunderstanding between people who ostensibly speak the same language, Friel's implicit vision of the political tragedy of Ireland takes on symbolic, universal validity.

The play's political implications, however, are only of minor importance and Friel's main concern does not even seem to be limited to demarcating the separate spheres of 'Irishness' and 'Englishness'. What, in fact, appears to be of central significance to him in Translations is the mapping of the Irish state of mind, caught as it is between the old Irish and the new English worlds, unable to resolve this conflict but inevitably having to come to terms with it. Friel presents these two worlds, which are shown in the process of becoming two layers in the Irish mind, in an antithetical and stereotyped way, revered at least from the times of the Irish Literary Revival onwards. On the one hand, the Irish culture as embodied in the Irish hedge school community is seen as old and indigenous, back-ward-looking and traditional, individualistic and spiritual, passionate and imaginative. The English civilization which supersedes it, on the other hand, is depicted as new and foreign, forward-looking and progressive, standardized and materialistic, rational and pragmatic.

The play also seems to indicate that the venerable old world of stasis and tradition is dying through lack of strength to resist the pressures of the new law of change and progress, which is too obvious to need further comment here. For many contemporary authors and scholars, this selfsame struggle between the old order and the new is viewed as the central conflict in the modern Irish mind, forcibly evicted from its myth about being 'a rural Gaelic civilization that retained an ancient pastoral distinctiveness' and having no real choice but to come to terms with 'adapting to the social forms of the English-speaking world' [Terence Brown, Ireland: A Social and Cultural History 1922-79, 1981]. As Thomas Kilroy has remarked, a dominant theme in contemporary Irish literature is 'not so much the experience of participating in modern life as the anguished process of adapting to it' ['Teller of Tales,' TLS, 17 March 1972]. This is particularly true of Translations, and of Friel's plays in general, as is shown by Philadelphia, Here I Come! for example, or by his latest play, The Communication Cord, which, to use Friel's words, should be seen 'in tandem' with Translations [F. O'Toole's Interview with Brian Friel, 'The Man from God Knows Where,' In Dublin, October 1982]. In The Communication Cord, set in a restored 'traditional' Irish weekend-cottage of today, Friel has again created potent images symbolizing the clash between the heritage of the past and the life of today, both in the very setting itself and in the character of Dr. Donovan, an Irish politician and international diplomat, chaining himself inadvertently by the neck to a post of this cottage. When he cannot open the chain again, his former eulogy of his Irish roots and his peasant legacy are revealed, in this painful situation, as hypocritical lip-service to a myth, when he once more exclaims: 'This is determined our first priorities! This is our native simplicity!', significantly adding in his anguish, however, 'Don't give me that shit. … Aaagh! My neck! My neck!'

Substantially, Friel's diagnosis of two worlds clashing in the Irish mind appears to be the same in both plays; in Translations, however, the predominant tone is not farcical but elegiac, and Friel, in this play, almost seems to have given dramatic expression to Liam de Paor's statement that Ireland faces 'a time of troubles because it is a time of accelerated change. The myths with which—whether we accepted them or not—we have lived for many decades have suddenly ceased to have the appearance of life and are assuming the faded look of old photographs' ['The Ambiguity of the Republic,' Atlantis, November 1971]. Friel's view of present-day Irish spiritual and ideo-logical problems as expressed in Translations also corresponds with the views of scholars like Terence Brown or Seamus Deane, according to whom 'an over-simplified anachronistic conception of Irish identity and history is found no longer to fit experience in an Ireland confronted by the Northern crisis' and by 'the problem of adjusting a hard-won, single-minded version of Irish identity to the complex realities of modern Europe!' [Brown, Ireland: A Social and Cultural History; Deane, 'Postscript,' The Crane Bag, 3, No. ii, 1979].

Hugh, in Translations, appears to echo this view when he juxtaposes the mythical vision expressed in his words 'We like to think we endure around truths immemorially posited' with the realities of Irish life and, in particular, with his realistic awareness that 'a civilization can be imprisioned in a linguistic contour which no longer matches the landscape of … fact'. Like the scholars quoted above Friel also diagnoses these two mutually jarring layers in the Irish mind, pointing to the historicity of the venerated myth of a specifically Celtic and present Irishness and to the insufficiency of this myth for our time.

The plot of Translations is so structured as to convey Friel's sense of the painful, distressing need to accept the inevitability of mental and spiritual changes when the environment itself is changing. At the end of the play, the lame Manus wants to flee from the English but it is made clear that he will be captured, Maire wants to emigrate to America, Jimmy Jack tries to escape into the world of imagination, and violence is seen as futile resistance. Hugh, however, has the last word and, though bewailing the destruction of Carthage in a quotation from Virgil, he clearly sees the necessity of adjusting to the new way of life. Thus, he now recites Virgil in English and turns to teaching English for the future. It is also significant that, at this very point, the death of Hugh's wife, Caitlín Dubh Nic Reactainn, is mentioned, which seems to hint at the passing of mythical Ireland, whilst Hugh's final quotation from the beginning of the Aeneid seems to indicate both the need and the will to rebuild a new city of the mind. This is also suggested by Hugh's insistence that 'we must never cease renewing these images [of the past], because once we do, we fossilize'.

Like Hugh many Irish authors are well aware of the danger lying in the petrification of myths, and we see Friel himself, in an interview, 'recognizing the redundancy of the idioms and shibboleths that have separated us up to now', wishing that his play may 'open up possibilities of finding a "different voice", which might enable us to understand ourselves in a new way.' This linguistic over-haul', he hopes, 'should lead to a cultural state, not a political one, … out of that cultural state, the possibility of a political state follows' [Richard Kearney, 'Language Play: Brian Friel and Ireland's Verbal Theatre, Studies, 1983]. Friel also expresses his hope that, in respect to what fatherland means, 'new definitions will be forged, and then new loyalities, and new social groupings' [Friel, 'Plays Peasant and Unpeasant']. In this challenge to the orthodox nationalist ideology, he is closer to George Russell, Sean O'Faolain or Conor Cruise O'Brien than one would perhaps assume and, in Translations, he has conveyed this concern in dramatic form, which is, as we have seen, a topical subject of discussion in the Ireland of today.

Not surprisingly, Friel envisages a resolution of the conflict between the myth of the past and the demands of the present in the Irish mind through language. Indeed, his central concern in Translations is, in his own words, 'the recognition of what language means for us in this island', his theme on a more universal level being 'the meeting of two cultures, and specifically of two languages, and the translations which follow—linguistic, psychological and social' [Liam McAuley, 'Something Stirs in the Londonderry Air,' The Sunday Times, 21 September 1980], and in his Diary ['Extracts from a Sporadic Diary'] he even states that his sole concern is with 'language and only language'.

On the national plane of Friel's play, the most obvious dimension is again his attempt to mark off the separate English and Irish linguistic and cultural heritages, which today are ostensibly embodied in the same language. In-deed, he clearly expresses the view [in 'The Man from God Knows Where'], that 'we are in fact talking about the marrying of two cultures here, which are ostensibly speaking the same language but which in fact are not'. Thus the fact that the English and the Irish characters speak English without understanding each other becomes Friel's brilliant dramatic device for expressing the present division and the amount of mutual incomprehension between the two communities, as well as for mirroring the conflict between these two different cultural and linguistic legacies in the Irish mind. The Anglicization of Irish place-names makes us see and feel the essential 'otherness' of the Irish heritage and sense that it is not just names that are being eroded, but the whole cultural tradition contained in them. Of course, we also find many other incidental comments and individual images pointing to essential differences and lack of understanding between the two worlds. One thinks, for instance, of the English officers' rechristening of Owen as Roland and his illusory attempt to fuse together his two names; Owen's translation of Captain Lancey's speech; the gibberish spoken by Doalty when he tries to imitate the speech of the English soldiers and Captain Lancey's comical explanation of what is meant by 'a map', which he believes to be necessitated by the idiocy of the Irish, but which in fact says a good deal more about his own; and, at a fundamental level, the impossibility of really translating Irish place-names into English. All this clearly charts the gulf dividing two cultural and linguistic legacies which superficially appear to be contained in the same language.

This, again, is not an end in itself; Friel's main concern and, indeed, unique achievement is that he has made the adoption of the English language by the great majority of the Irish people—with its present psychological and social consequences—the central subject of a play for the first time. The subject itself has, of course, been commented upon by a wide range of Irish writers from Thomas Davis to Flann O'Brien. We also find scathing re-marks about it in some other Irish plays, for example in D'Alton's This Other Eden. Here Crilly, an Irish Sergeant, classes Irish with French and Russian as a foreign language, and Roger Crispin, an Englishman in love with Ireland, remarks that 'it does not seem natural for a people not to speak their own language. Specially a people so intensely nationalist, as the Irish', and he cannot understand 'why the Irish people refuse to speak their own language'.

Seamus Deane [in 'Remembering the Irish Future,' The Crane Bag 8, No. i, 1984] has recently spelled out this paradox again by remarking, 'We try to be unique in two languages—in the native one we speak which is ours, in the other one which is not ours although native to us. It is a neurotic condition', and Liam de Paor [in 'Ireland's Identities,' The Crane Bag's Book of Irish Studies (1977-1981), 1982] has put this problem succinctly when he called it 'a major trauma in the Irish mind'. Over the last decade a host of scholars have drawn attention to this problem and especially to the cognitive dissonance caused by the wide gap between myth and reality, attitude and practice, words and deeds. Thus, they have especially highlighted such features as the anchorage of Irish as the first national language in the constitution of the Republic, the declared commitment of governments to preserving and spreading the Irish language, the great emotional attachment of the great majority of the Irish people to Irish and its function as a symbol of Irish nationhood, on the one hand; on the other hand they stress the fact that English is the language of the vast majority of people living in Ireland, the inexorable progress of Anglicization and Americanization as a result of exposure to the mass media and to economic pressures, the shrinking Gaeltacht and the lack of substantial support for the cause of the Irish language from the Government and the people. Thus, to mention just the most significant feature, the Committee on Irish Language Attitudes Research in Ireland has found, in its polls, 'general support for Irish as a cultural symbol, but little for actual language use'.

Besides this 'double-think', a fierce linguistic battle is raging between people committed to the cause of Irish and those who see support for Irish even in the Gaeltacht as a lost cause and plead that one should face the reality and allow the official pieties and the Gaelic language itself to die quickly and quietly. Furthermore, Whorfians and Chomskyans can still be seen quarrelling about the old question, still unresolved, of whether language determines thinking and culture, and are at odds as to whether English can be a suitable medium of expressing Irishness. A considerable number of distinguished scholars also believe that they have detected in the Irish culture 'an imitative insecurity and mediocrity in the face of British and North American culture that is a direct result of language loss' [Brown, Ireland: A Social and Cultural History]. and it has become almost commonplace in Ireland to attribute the Irish identity crisis, mentioned above and often diagnosed as 'schizophrenia' even by Friel himself [in 'Self-Portrait,' in Aquarius (Everyman) 5, 1972], to the unresolved language problem, if not wholly, yet nevertheless to a great degree. Thomas Kinsella, who speaks of 'the divided mind' of the Irish [in Irish Poets in English, 1973], and many other authors have subscribed to this view. All these issues are of importance in understanding Friel's play.

Although Friel, in Translations, did not want to write a 'threnody on the death of the Irish language', as he states himself [in 'Extracts from a Sporadic Diary'], he pinpoints the linguistic trauma which burdens the Irish mind and which Friel, too, sees as being central to the Irish, and especially the Irish author's, psyche. As regards the dilemma of the Irish writer's relationship with the English language, the locus classicus, of course, is Stephen Dedalus's resentment of the English Dean of Studies in Joyce's [A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man]. After his long conversation with him, Stephen meditates:

The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language.

Friel comes very close to subscribing to this view when he says [in 'The Man From God Knows Where']:

The issues of language is a very problematic one for all of us on this island. I had parents who were native Irish speakers … And to be so close to a … different language is a curious experience … in some ways. I don't think we've resolved it on this island for ourselves. We flirt with the English language, but we haven't absorbed and we haven't regurgitated it. … the use of the English language, the understanding of words, the whole cultural burden that every word in the English language carries is slightly different to our burden.

In his play, Friel's concern is again with a diagnosis of this situation, and the ingenious dramatic convention by which, on stage, English represents the speech of the Irish-speaking characters not only mirrors the language problem in the Ireland of today, it also points to Friel's view that a return to Irish is scarcely possible for a modern Irish writer. The play itself, at least, does not really seem to offer this as a valid alternative. Of course, Hugh's initial contempt for literature written in English, and the statement that he makes at his first encounter with the English officers, 'English … couldn't really express us', reflect a Heideggerean scepticism about the possibility of cultural transfer from one language to another, his attitude being reminiscent, for example, of what William Carleton tells us about his mother: 'She had a prejudice against singing the Irish airs to English words', because, as she used to say, 'the English words and the air are like a man and his wife quarrelling—the Irish melts into the tune, but the English doesn't' [The Life of William Carleton, 1896]. Hugh, a poet himself, finally realizes, however, that he has to accept the linguistic eviction symbolized for him and for us by the translation of the Irish place-names into English. He eventually comments on this: 'We must learn these new names … We must learn where we live. We must learn to make them our own. We must make them our new home', although he remains sceptical as to whether it will be possible 'to interpret between privacies' in the English language, but, he adds, 'it's all we have'. Hugh's sentences sound like a supplication, and they appear to be meant to speak to both the writers of today and the spectators alike. They also suggest that the controversy raging from the times of Hyde, Yeats, Synge and Pearse to the present day has not been, and possibly never can be, resolved.

The linguistic problem of Irish writers can, of course, also be seen both as the challenge they have to face, and as their great asset. Indeed, as has been suggested, it is perhaps the secret of their great poetic achievements that they, ontologically 'off the centre' of their innermost self, have to forge their language anew, each writer for himself, and, in the process, are not hampered by the linguistic standardization of modern times conceived in Friel's play as the legacy of the English tradition. Thus, the linguistic burden of the Irish is possibly also the secret of their wonderfully flexible language, as is perhaps best documented in Joyce's unsurpassed linguistic creativity or by Synge's success in creating an indigenous, poetic Anglo-Irish speech. As Alan J. Bliss has shown [in 'The Language of Synge,' in J. M. Synge: Centenary Papers 1971, ed. Maurice Harmon, 1972], Synge's language, in some of his plays at least, is meant to represent the Irish language but, in contrast to Friel, Synge does not explicitly say so and is only implicitly concerned with the problem of representing Irish speech in English and with marking off the Irish from the English linguistically.

However, the body of literature written in Irish today is constantly growing and some Irish authors have consciously decided to go back to writing in Irish, as Michael Hartnett indicated, for example, in giving a volume of poetry the title A Farewell to English (1975). This—along with, at the other extreme, Samuel Beckett's turning to French and silence—reveals to us the extent of the Irish writer's dilemma. Friel, though bilingual himself and well aware of modern writing in Irish, seems to suggest in Translations that the point of no return has been reached and that the Irish writer must try to find his particular voice—in English. In my view, this is what his play is also about.

Of course, Friel not only deals with the significance of language for the Irish writer, but he also dramatizes the Irish problem of identity caused by the loss of their native language. Comments and images reflecting this problem abound in Translations. The most impressive and moving image is, without doubt, Sarah's inability to say her name, which Manus has just taught her to say, her relapse into silence, when the English captain at the end of the play asks her who she is. Seamus Heaney has already aptly commented on this in writing: 'It is as if some symbolic figure of Ireland … the one who once confidently called herself Cathleen Ni Houlihan, has been struck dumb by the shock of modernity' [' … English and Irish,' TLS, 24 October 1980]. And Ronald Bryden has called Translations 'a play about Ireland's present griefs—the griefs, Friel suggest, of a people struggling to say who they are. For the traditional symbol of Kathleen ni Houlihan, he substitutes the figure of the tongue-tied peasant girl Sarah, unable to name herself to herself [quoted in Keith Garebian, 'The Stratford Festival,' Journal of Canadian Studies, 17, No. iv, 1982]. The same idea is also conveyed in the fate of the baby born at the beginning of the play, whose name points to the identity of his father and who dies at the end—what begins with birth and identification ends in death and annihilation.

When, in the tender love scene in Act II, Yolland and Maire try to cross the boundaries of their 'tribes', they are prepared to give up their inherited linguistic and cultural identities. However, they are unable to really communicate—at least verbally—except by conjuring up Irish place-names which have already been erased from the map, and, at the end of the play, Yolland has disappeared and Maire is left homeless, longing to emigrate to America and to take on a new national identity she does not know any-thing about. Manus tries to remain true to his Irish self and to run away, but this is shown to be futile; he cannot possibly escape his English pursuers. Violent resistance does not appear as a viable solution either, as is made clear by Hugh, who, instead, cherishes 'confusion', thus poignantly describing the present Irish problem of identity in the linguistic nut-shell of a single word.

We can, however, best see Friel's view of the problem of Irish identity reflected in the case of Owen, who is caught between his old Irish and his new English selves—as 'Owen' to the Irish, and 'Roland' to the English. This clearly points to a split in the psyche which, as we have seen, is widely believed to divide the Irish mind. Owen/ Roland's attempt to make his adopted English personality merge with his Irish one, by jokingly trying to fuse his two names into Rowan and Oland, is only possible in his state of intoxication caused by Anna of the Lie's poteen. Thus, an attempt at a harmonious fusion of the Irish and English identities is exposed as an illusion, and when Owen/ Roland angrily wants to regain his Irish self by shaking off his English name, insisting on being called Owen and reverting to the Irish place-names which he has just helped to erase, it is too late. He has discovered the falseness of his positivist maxim, 'Owen-Roland—what the hell. It's only a name. It's the same me. Isn't it? Well, isn't it?' but there is no way back into ontological Eden. As a final irony, Owen, who has helped to rob Ireland of her Irish identity, must, at Captain Lancey's command, retranslate the new English names of those places which will be destroyed by the English. Now, literally effaced, these places no longer exist—after the experience of Anglicisation a return to the Irish identity of old is simply not possible any more. At the very end of the play, when the solid, almost mythical unity of the hedge school community, this microcosm of ancient Ireland, is destroyed, the misunderstandings between the characters and their crisis of identity point forward to Friel's Communication Cord where we are confronted with the result of the process shown in Translations: the confusion about and loss of identity in modern Ireland.

Another of Friel's major achievements in Translations is the emotional and rational re-enactment it brings about in the spectators of the process which has led to the abandonment of the Irish language. Friel makes his audience feel the irrecoverable loss, and thus allows for an expiatory sublimation of guilt shared by author and spectators, colonizers and colonized, those who have enforced English and those who have cast off Irish. In this context it is to be noted that Denis Donoghue, for example, has recently drawn attention to the 'bad conscience' of the Irish for having forsaken their native Irish tongue and to the impossibility of their absolving themselves of their responsibility for this [The Problem of Being Irish,' TLS, 17 March 1972]. In Friel's play the spectator, with Owen [whose name is conspicuously close to 'own'] undergoes a process of enlightenment about his own complicity in the abandonment of the Irish language, and what this loss really means. In the Irish placenames Friel brings the Irish language back to life again, especially in Owen's explanation of 'Tobair Vree', which emphasizes that the loss of the Irish language has also entailed that of the storehouse of the indigenous Irish memory and tradition. In allowing Yolland, the English Hibernophile, and Maire, the Irish Anglophile, to communicate their love by just tenderly, almost poetically, reciting Irish place-names, Friel expresses intense love for the Irish language and makes the audience feel this love too—in a way they certainly will never have experienced before. What is conjured up, however, is merely the spirit of the past, of names that no longer exist and, as previously mentioned, Friel with artistic honesty also gives the main pragmatic reasons for the adoption of English by the Irish in the 19th century, conveying a sense of the irreversibility of this process.

It is in precisely such images of great archetypal and poetic resonance as the one just mentioned, that Translations transcends national bounds to take on universal significance. Of course, Friel's unique power to make conflicts tangible in images of great symbolic force has always been one of the secrets of his dramatic art: I am thinking here, for example, of the plan to make the West of Ireland the graveyard of the world in the Mundy Scheme, of the three civil rights marchers inadvertently trapped in the Guildhall of Derry in The Freedom of the City, of the excavations and the skeleton in Volunteers, or, of course, of splitting Gar into a Private and a Public self in Philadelphia, Here I Come! However, in Translations, I believe, he has again achieved that most 'happy fusion that occurs so seldom between content and form', which it is his declared aim to achieve in his plays—this time, however, with unparalleled success. The hedge school atmosphere reminding one of William Carleton but with mythical, Homeric undertones; the mapping of Ireland and translation of place-names; the device of using English to represent the Irish language as well and, by doing so, solving the problem left unresolved in the scene between Mortimer and his Welsh bride in Shakespeare's Henry IV; the love scene between two lovers who do not speak the same language but who still manage to express their mutual love reminiscent of a similar scene in Shakespeare's Henry V, and probably even surpassing it in lyrical tenderness and symbolic significance; and many other instances too numerous to list here—all these suggest that Friel, in Translations, has surely reached the culminating point of his ability to create symbolic images of unsurpassed poetic concentration and archetypal universality.

As has been suggested by Friel himself, the form of his play is just one of the reasons for its universal appeal, the other side of the coin being the issues he deals with. In fact, in his picturing of the Irish situation is mirrored the situation of modern man in general, who is also 'in a spiritual, and, indeed, material flux'. In our global village we are all seen to be equally trapped between two worlds, haunted by the same problems of identity, alienation from our environment, loss of our indigenous past, erosion of our language, economic standardization, failure of communication etc., at the same time longing for an ontological Paradise from which we, too, feel we have been evicted. In addition, Friel [in 'Self-Portrait'] makes us see 'what the word native means, what the word foreign means', whilst showing us the common bond which has been lost, and—this, of course, is the most important aspect of all—we are all made aware of what language means to us.

The greatness and modernity of Translations lies in the fact that it is, first and foremost, a play about language in which Friel's unique vision actually makes the medium the message, to modify Marshall McLuhan's by now commonplace phrase. This is, of course, the most universal level of the play's significance, transceding all considerations of time and place, far surpassing any mere dramatization of Heidegger's and George Steiner's theories of language and culture. This and other aspects, however, have already been dealt with in a most perceptive study by Richard Kearney ['Language Play: Brian Friel and Ireland's Verbal Theatre'], whose findings I do not want to duplicate. It must suffice here to say that the dimensions of the play on this plane are truly inexhaustible, extending from the learning of a language, and even breathing, to linguistic confusion and the death of a language, encompassing all nuances of verbal and non-verbal communication from its most basic forms to its finest shadings. These questions, I believe, ought also to be tackled by linguists who, as Richard Kearney has already pointed out, will find in the play an antidote to the current, predominantly structuralist and pragmatic, way of looking at language and, as I have suggested, much more than that. Indeed, the play makes language itself image 'identity, survival, escape, vainglory, enrichment, impoverishment, oppression, understanding, amity and I daresay a lot else too', as Benedict Nightingale [in 'Escapology,' The New Statesman, 22 May 1981] has succinctly put it. I also concur with Seamus Deane's view [in his Introduction to Selected Plays] that language lost in the fashion shown in Friel's play 'is also language rediscovered in such a way that the sense of loss has been overcome', and, I should like to add with Frank Rich that it is certainly Friel's unique achievement to have shown that language is 'a matter of life-and-death-importance' ['Cultures in Conflict,' The New York Times, 15 April 1981].

In concluding, I would again like to emphasize, as I have tried to demonstrate all along, that Brian Friel in Translations has succeeded in making his parochial, allegorical Ballybeg of the 1830s the centre of the Irish and the modern mind—his achievement being similar to that of Joyce who, when confining himself to Dublin, was aware of the fact that 'if I can get at the heart of Dublin I can get at the heart of all cities in the world. In the particular is contained the universal' [letter, quoted in Arthur Power, From an Old Waterford House, 1944]. I have tried to map out some of the aspects and devices which, in my view, make Friel's Translations a truly unique play of the highest artistic merit and of the greatest significance for Ireland, and beyond. As an Austrian I am well aware of problems of identity as well as of the possibility that two countries may be 'divided by a common language', to use a Shavian phrase. As a stranger in the Irish world trying to decode an Irish play, however, I ask myself whether my fate, in one respect at least, may not be that of Lieutenant Yolland, whose questions find a responding echo in my mind:

Even if I did speak Irish 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?