Authors: Declan Kiberd
The iterative image of such imperial designs in this play is Lieutenant Yolland's attempt to draw a map of his native
Norfolk for his Irish lover on the wet sands of Baile Beag. The hopeless stupidity of the attempt to impose a foreign grid on Irish reality is manifest in the fact that Yolland's model is etched in shifting sands. His attempt to draw Norfolk on the Donegal seashore is a fair image of what his own government is trying to do in the Ordnance Survey. Such a map,
however romantic in this particular context, is the usual occupier's response to what he perceives as uncharted wilderness. And the attempt to write all the new names into a book represents the colonizer's benign assumption mat to name a thing is to assert one's power over it and that the written tradition of the occupier will henceforth enjoy primacy over the oral memory of the natives. A map, in short, will have much the same relation to a landscape as the written word has to speech. Each is a form of translation.
Such a translation has always been an aspect of imperialism, for as Edward Said has written:
. . . cultures have always been inclined to impose concrete transformations on other cultures, receiving these other cultures not as they are but as, for the benefit of the receiver, they ought to be. To the Westerner, however, the Oriental was always
like
some aspect of the West ... for the Orientalist makes it his work to be always converting the Orient from something into something else . . .
18
For "Orientalist" read "Celticist". Said adds, in what might be a bleak reference to the name book, that "it seems a common human failing to prefer the authority of a text to the disorientations of direct encounters with the human ..." The next stage, he says, occurs when all that is in the books is preposterously put into practice, reducing the complexities of a culture to a kind of flatness, in much the same way that Captain Lancey decides to level Baile Beag. No Orientalist text, Said adds, was complete without a ritual infatuation on the part of the narrator with some mysterious woman of the native tribe, much along the lines
of
Yolland's assignations with Máire Chatach, an infatuation often experienced by the wayward son who is sent to an outpost because he can find no suitable job or partner at home. The woman, like the colony, is a mystery to be penetrated; and the real issue in all this, says Said, is
whether there can indeed be a true representation, or whether any and all representations, because they
are
representations, are embedded first in the language and men in the culture, institutions and political ambience of the representer.
19
Of nothing are these observations more true than of an insurgent nationalism, which is perpetually doomed to define itself in the loaded language and hegemonic terms set by the colonizer. So, because England's was an aristocratic, class-ridden culture, the Irish – in order to
feel as nobly born – had to claim an aristocratic lineage. One of the peculiarities of the aristocratic English was their growing interest in Ireland, or indeed any colony, where things seemed to have petrified and time to have stood still, even as the home country slowly industrialized. The anti-modern, anti-democratic component of Irish revivalism greatly appealed to, because it was a creation of, the English upper-class mind. Echoes of this aristocratic fetishism may be heard in the revivalist association of England with levelling vulgarity. . . and in Yolland's comment that the English-language version makes the classical Latin of the hedge-school sound only plebeian.
Yolland is in open revolt against this modernization, and against the father who equates the new imperial mission with such modernization. That father was born in 1789, on the very day that the Bastille fell: so he inherited a new world of restless experiment, innovative rationalization, the bustle of an order which placed more emphasis on money than on land, on profit rather than on leisured elegance. Yolland, however, on setting foot in Ireland feels that he has recovered the ease of the
ancien régime,
"a consciousness that wasn't striving nor agitated, but at its ease and with its own conviction and assurance".
20
The account, late in the play, of how Hugh and his friend walked towards the
French-inspired rebellion of 1798 only to turn back suggests not so much a fear of the English enemy as a timidity in the face of revolutionary French modernity, a collective decision by the Irish to keep the modern world at bay. Now modernity has caught up with them in the shape of the survey, implemented by a Yolland who scarcely believes in it and by a collaborator who has strong reservations.
The hedge-schoolmaster Hugh seeks to resolve the consequent dilemmas. Having lost his nerve back in 1798, he found that he had opted instead for a world of regressive nostalgias – the kind of foolish dreams epitomized at the end by his star pupil Jimmy Jack as he mumbles through an alcoholic haze about his recent engagement to the goddess Athene. Hugh has learned enough by now to know that a culture which refuses to make some adjustments will eventually find itself mummified. Hence his willingness to take over the post in the new national school – though there is something negative in this gesture, since it will deny the aspirations of his loyal son to a steady job and to marriage with Máire Chatach.
Apart from failing to grow and adapt, the other way in which a culture dies is when it is suffocated and overlain with that of a foreign power. It is surely deliberate that either possible meaning could be inferred from Hugh's statement that
... words are signals, counters. They are not immortal.
And it can happen – to use an image you'll understand – it can happen that a civilization can be imprisoned in a linguistic contour which no longer matches the landscape of. . . fact.
21
.
Facts were, of course, the tyranny with which the Celt was held unable to cope: but the fact that these most famous lines in the play – culled from
George Steiner's
After Babel: Aspects of Language in Translation –
are so ambivalent nicely illustrates
Friel's underlying theme: that once Anglicization is achieved the Irish and English, instead of speaking a truly identical tongue, will be divided most treacherously by a common language. This division is literally enacted onstage whenever Owen has to translate Captain Lancey's circumlocutions into homely words.
So, in the final moments it is, most surprisingly, Hugh who voices the pragmatist's willingness to embrace English and the new order, even as Owen indicates that he may join the rebels for one last stand. Holding the name book in his hand, Hugh says
We must learn where we live. We must learn to make them our own. We must make them our new home.
22
A shrewd reading of the play would reveal that this realistic tone had been implicit in Hugh's utterances all along. In that earlier scene, wherein he had offered just the kind of Arnoldian explanations of Irish eloquence that Yolland wanted to hear, he had not in fact been speaking literally so much as parodying himself (the stage direction is explicit on this). In saying "we like to think we endure around truths immemorially posited",
23
he was being sarcastic less about Irish self-images than about English self-deception. Nowhere is that thrust more deadly than in his mimicry of the liberal imperialist notion that culture thrives in direct proportion to poverty and sacred simplicity, that those who lose the material wars are consoled by having all the best songs:
You'll find, sir, that certain cultures expend on their vocabularies and syntax acquisitive energies and ostentations entirely lacking in their material lives. I suppose you could call us a spiritual people.
24
This isn't just savage anti-pastoralism of the kind practised by Myles na gCopaleen in
An Béal Bocht;
it is also a critique of that Irish revivalism which saw culture as a compensation for squalor. As a hedge-schoolmaster Hugh knows the costs of such eloquence. His circumlocutions –
"vesperal salutations" for "good evening" – are in the familiar mode of long-winded but diplomaless hedge-schoolteachers. The fabled jawbreakers of Hiberno-English are rooted less in native Irish exuberance than in a tragic defensiveness in the face of a more powerful language.
Seen in that light,
Friel's play is a brilliant reconciliation within a single work of two apparently disparate Irish dramatic traditions: the Abbey revivalist and the Shavian socialist. The desire of all early Abbey playwrights was, Lady Gregory said, a theatre with a base of realism and an apex of beauty. That combination eventually came under baleful scrutiny from radical critics who saw in it evidence of the Abbey's neo-colonial position, Lady Gregory's view of poetry as a compensation for poverty being taken as a tell-tale instance. To the radical mind it would never be enough simply to juxtapose the mythical and mundane, unless each was also made to form part of a critique of the other. This is what happens in Friel's play: the pragmatic warnings of Shaw against dreaming as a function of repression are placed alongside the lethal fantasies of Jimmy Jack and those English Yollands who would sentimentalize them. If Friel has in the play been massively
influenced by the creative art of Heaney and Montague, as well as by Shaw and Synge, he is perhaps most indebted to the ideas of critics such as George Steiner and Seamus Deane, and particularly to the suspicion which dominates the writings of the younger Deane
25
of all attempts to present high eloquence and rich culture as an adequate consolation for suffering and loss.
The Irish Renaissance had been essentially an exercise in translation, in carrying over aspects of Gaelic culture into English, a
language often thought alien to that culture. Oscar Wilde had predicted as much when he averred that a
national literature can only emerge as a result of contact with a foreign literature: what he said, in effect, was that the concept of the "original" comes into existence only after it has been translated. Taken further, this meant that the translator was as often
inventing as reflecting
an original Ireland: when writers dubbed Standish O'Grady the father of modern Irish literature, they were recognizing that to translate Ireland was but another way of bringing it into being. This has been true of most of the great creative phases of cultural history: in the words of Octavio Paz, they "have been preceded or accompanied by inter-crossings between different poetic traditions".
1
Standish O'Grady's versions of the Cuchulain legends were intended for readers who could not understand the Irish-language texts. What is different about Friel's
Translations
is that, although it is to be imagined as enacted in Irish, in fact there is no original. This has not prevented enthusiasts from translating it back with much success into the native language in which it was never written. Perhaps intentionally, it mimics
the
Irish Constitution of 1937 which, while written in English, asserts Irish as the first official language, whose version should therefore prevail over the English version in the event of a mistranslation. Not for nothing did the philosopher
Jacques Derrida warn that "one should never pass over in silence the question of the tongue in which the question of the tongue is raised".
2
Friel is well aware that his play is a post-colonial text to precisely the extent that its powerful diagnosis of a traumatized Irish consciousness nonetheless adds to the glories of the English language.
A root-meaning of "translate" was "conquer": the
Romans conquered not only Greece but the Greek past, which they refitted for
their present purposes. Yet coded into even this imperial gesture was the recognition that the plundered culture possessed many a quality worth stealing. By a somewhat similar logic, the former greatness of the Celts was established in the first instance by British public servants and translators, who set out to reform and improve the debased contemporary realities of Irish culture. Since the ancient Celtic past was a thinly-disguised version of the British imperial present, acceptance of that present (albeit in the English language) could presage a restoration of former Irish glories. The work of nineteenth-century antiquarians, of defenders of the Anglo-Irish gentry such as O'Grady, provided native readers with a curtailed if potent set of images, available in
translation. Yet that golden age was a myth, and a myth moreover which at least some of its sponsors privately saw as such. A Trinity College professor, Robert Atkinson, secretly despised the Celtic literature whose study had made his academic name. His strictures against it in 1899 recalled all too aptly Lord Macaulay's claim that "a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia".
3
(That European library was, of course, non-Celtic.)
It was the communication of this idea to the natives which led generations of boys, like those who boarded
Charles Trevelyan's steamer at
Comercally, to say "Give me any book, all I want is a book".
4
The Irish shared this longing for learning, but with one major difference. In India only a native élite was destined to be improved by the study of English; in Ireland the whole population was not only taught English at school, but even the poor themselves decided to speak English on all possible occasions. Accordingly, rather than learn that language from its native speakers, most of them learned it from one another with the effects of "brogue" and mispronunciation that became a source of easy laughter on the British stage. In short, they opted to become their own translators. This was a violation of one of the tenets of imperialism, which declared it "highly dangerous to employ the natives as interpreters, upon whose fidelity they could not depend".
5
No wonder that Owen in Friel's play is a figure of much ambivalence for the English as well as the Irish; and
Translations
in its conclusion shows that those official doubts were well-grounded.
The cultural violence which underlay this change of languages remained largely invisible, since it presupposed the consent of the Irish to that change. Yet
Translations
shows that Owen is finally more committed to
"translating back" into his native language all that has been translated out of it. Seen in this light, his agenda has its roots in Seathrún Céitinn's retranslation of Spenser and Stanyhurst back into
"truer" Gaelic terms; and its corollary in the writings of Nuala ní Dhomhnaill, Seán Ó Ríordáin and Máire Mhac an tSaoi. This process – which allows for an
Irish
translation of the Irish past – is something very different from, and far more positive than, the mechanism of imperialist translation. It involves what Nietzsche pithily called "a reversal of the theft".
6
Denying that the colonizer alone has the power to represent the native, it permits the colonized to represent themselves, not alone to the world but also to one another. Instead of the Irish past being pressed into service of a British imperial present, what is discovered by an artist like Synge is the power of the past to disrupt the revivalist present. This is evident in the dynamic uses of Gaelic tradition in
The Playboy,
and more generally in the fact that Synge's oeuvre was a sustained act of translation.
Synge's literary sensibility found its fullest expression in the manoeuvre between Irish and English. His own poetry, composed in English, seems all too often a stilted pastiche of second-rate contemporary styles, whereas the brilliant translations from continental languages into Hiberno-English dialect give us a sense of the man himself. The dialect in which he finally found his desired medium was the bilingual weave, the language of his innermost being, what George Steiner has called "the poet's dream of an absolute idiolect".
7
In the years of dramatic success from 1903 to 1909, Synge's interest in translation was compounded by his desire to test the resources of Hiberno-English. Even towards the end of his life he translated the works of
Petrarch,
Walter Von der Vogelweide and other continental artists into his dialect. These exercises were far more successful than many standard English versions of the work of these poets. This genius went far deeper than a conventional flair for turning a piece of Irish poetry or prose into English. It involved a capacity to project a whole Gaelic culture in English. Each of Synge's works is an act of supreme translation: the language of his plays is based less on the
English spoken in rural Ireland than on the peculiar brand of English spoken in
Gaeltacht
areas. This English is an instantaneous and literal translation from Irish.
8
Renato Poggioli has argued in an inspired paraphrase that the translator is "a character in search of an author" in whom he can identify a part of himself. His translation of such an author's work is no masquerade in which he deceives his audience by mimicking the original writer; rather "... he is a character who, in finding the author without, finds also the author within himself. . . Nor must we forget that such a quest or pursuit may intermittently attract the original
writer also, when he too must search for the author in himself".
9
In the example of Searhrún
Céitinn, Synge found a reflection of himself and his own concerns. In the native literature and lore, he found all those characteristics for which his artistic soul had longed – intensity, homeliness, wry irony, sad resignation, sensuality and the love of place. His years of writing in Paris had yielded nothing but morbid and introspective works; but the discovery of Aran, and the challenge to project its life to the world in English, signalled his discovery of himself as a writer. The English in which he had tried and failed to express himself in those Paris writings had been mannered, weary and effete; only when that language was vitalized by contact with a "backward" oral culture did it offer him the chance of real self-expression.
That Synge's plays should, after his death, have been triumphantly "translated back" into Irish, in the attempt to get even closer to the psychic state of his chosen localities, is but a further confirmation of their authenticity. The lesson seems clear: the more "translated" a work is, the more fully does it seem to perfect its inherent form. It was doubtless a similar kind of thinking which inspired George Moore to suggest to Yeats and Lady Gregory in 1901 that the right way to create a version of the story of Diarmuid and Gráinne was for Moore to compose it in French, for Lady Gregory to translate it into Kiltartanese, for
Tadhg Ó Donnchadha to convert that into Irish, and then for Lady Gregory to retranslate it into English.
10
Presumably, his point was an aesthetic one: that Bohemia, more than this or that country, is the artists true dwelling-place, and that the ceaseless activity of
translation expresses the solidarity of the supranational artistic community.
All great works of literature are so because in some way or another they surpass the usual potentials of their own tongue, reaching out to a universal language. At certain moments of high intensity, that surplus potential may entirely escape the entrapments of language, being contained between the lines rather than in them. Such a moment is the dumbshow of wordless love between Máire Chatach and Lieutenant Yolland in Friel's
Translations:
in a strict sense it embodies the achievement of the higher ideal underlying every act of translation, for in a language of silence which has no need of recasting is the hope of a privileged space in which resistance to all degrading systems may be possible.
Translation is in the most literal sense a reminder of that high aspiration, for the earliest translators hoped to exceed their originals, to use them as pre-texts for greater inspirations in their own languages. The energies unleashed when one element bonds with another are often
volatile, but potent for all that. A translation, therefore, may release qualities which were latent but unexpressed in either the source or the target language. By redeploying ideas, images and structures from English literature in Irish, for instance, Seán Ó Ríordain massively extended its limits, using the lyrics of Wordsworth or Hopkins as a point of release for his own. Similarly, Synge, by allowing his English to be powerfully remodelled by
Gaelic syntax, liberated in it yet-unsuspected meanings. This process enacted on a linguistic level the
desire of many that in renovating Ireland they should also "save England". For such reasons, Walter Benjamin in a somewhat different context wrote of the translator as one who watches over the maturing process of the original language and the birth-pangs of his own. He saw every translation as an intrepid attempt to reach a little closer toward that lost, prebabelian universal idiom:
It is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language which is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his recreation of that work. For the sake of pure language, he breaks through decayed barriers of his own language.
11
The new version glances off the original, as a tangent touches a circle, before pursuing its own primary course:
yet
that course is forever determined by the point of impact.
For Walter Benjamin the great flaw of most nineteenth-century translations was their excessive respect for the conventions of the target language (usually an imperial one), and their refusal to allow its usages to be creatively disrupted by the syntax of the source. This was Synge's theme-song in his critique of most previous translators: they kept turning Irish into English, rather than remodel English as Irish. His alternative programme to release hidden potentials of English was analogous to Wilde's desire to make England a pastoral republic. In effect, both men wished to reverse the trajectory of Spenser and Stanyhurst: instead of a new England called Ireland, they hoped to make a new Ireland called England.
Ultimately, however, only the English could save themselves, by following the examples mapped out for them in the writings of the Irish. "In translating", said Godfrey Iienhardt, "it is not finally some mysterious 'primitive philosophy' that we are exploring, but the further potentialities of our own thought and language".
12
Every society, every culture can only be reformed from within: and the lesson of imperialism is that one's own society is the only society which one can reform
without destroying. The aim of the Irish Renaissance was such renovation: saving England turned out to be a mere rehearsal for the work of inventing Ireland. How were the Irish to do this? By performing their own acts of translation and retranslation ... by writing their own history and then rewriting it. This would be a literal re-membering – not a making whole of what was never whole to begin with, but a gluing together of fragments in a dynamic recasting.
13
If the past were to be exactly repeated in detail, it would smother the present: this is why Friel's sage says that it is a form of
madness to remember
everything.
Indeed, to remember anything at all one must first learn how to forget it; for it is that temporary
forgetfulness which gives memory the excitement of surprise, the force of revelation.
Marcel Proust knew better than most the vividness of a past recalled after a period of denial. He called it "involuntary memory" which he saw as triggered by associative mechanisms; and he said that it offered "an air which is new precisely because we have breathed it in the past ... since the true paradises are the paradises that we have lost".
14
Others went further, arguing that in order to act at all – and memory is but another action – one must forget a great deal.
15
Since absolute forgetting is as impossible as total recall, the need is to bring elements of the past into contact with the present in a dynamic constellation.
Benjamin called this
citation,
but it could as validly be termed
translation,
for what is suggested is neither a break with the past nor an abject repetition of it, but a rewriting.