Patrick Leech
To Marry Outside the Tribe:
Lettura pubblica di Translations di Brian Friel
Sala affrescata del Dipartimento SITLeC, Forlì 28 maggio 2007

“Do you know the Greek word endogamein?” asks Jimmy Jack Cassidy, the 60-year-old “Infant Prodigy” of Brian Friel’s Translations towards the end of the play. “It means to marry within the tribe. And the word exogamein means to marry outside the tribe.” This, as an introduction to his particular problem: in Jimmy Jack’s fantasies, Athene has asked him to marry her, and he worries whether she is human enough, or he godly enough, to bridge the divide.

Jimmy Jack’s drunken worries about marriage between goddesses and men is an example of a more general preoccupation about movement across divides and the conjugation of differences at the heart of Friel’s play. Translations was first put on in Derry at the height of the troubles in Northern Ireland. As such, with its story of the love between Maire, the Irish villager, and Lieutenant Yolland, the British officer, it dramatized the problems of attempting to put together differences, to hold hands across the divide. On 28 May 2007, there was another attempt to cross a divide, with a public reading of the play in a setting far removed from Derry in 1980: at the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies in Translation, Language and Culture, part of the University of Bologna, in Forlì. On this occasion, students in the final year of their Translation Studies degree programme performed a dramatized reading of this play against backdrops of rural Ireland and accompanied by Irish folk music (see programme).

Plays come to life, in fact, through performance, in particular temporal and geographical circumstances, in times and places long after and far away from their premiere. Quixotic though it may seem to perform a Northern Irish play in Romagna on a Monday afternoon, this was another witness to the success of Irish studies in places far from the original context of their imagining. Forlì in 2007 is not Derry in 1980. But changes in contexts may also bring changes in meaning, or at least may highlight different areas of meaning implicit in the play. On this occasion, for example, the resonances of the play in terms of issues of translation may have been particularly strong in a department which is occupied above all with problems of mediation between languages and cultures. Friel wrote Translations shortly after reading George Steiner’s After Babel, and closely follows Steiner’s intuition that “translation” in its widest sense, can be found in all acts of human communication. And although Friel’s play may be read in many senses as a commentary on the cultural, political and military encounter between the British and the Irish, there is a certain universal pull in the play which can emerge in performance.

One universal element which emerged strongly from the performance was the classic tale of the importance of love, in particular in the face of the use of translation as an instrument of power. The translation of Irish place names into English place names by the Ordnance Survey commission (of which Lieutenant Yolland is part) becomes a way of enabling the colonial forces to gain military and administrative power over Ireland. But the love between Maire and Yolland, despite the tragic ending, represents a powerful affirmation of a universal principle. Although she speaks to him in Irish and he to her in English, and despite their own sense of the hopelessness of their linguistic incomprehension, ultimately their love for each other has no need of translation. The sound of their own voices is enough to bridge the divide. The sound of Yolland reciting place-names in Irish, lovingly echoed by Maire, is sufficient (End of Act II, scene II).

The love between Maire and Yolland is, as already noted, doomed. Yolland disappears, probably assassinated by the rebellious Donnelly twins, who never appear in the play but whose violent responses to British conquest are darkly invoked a number of times in the play. But their love, or at any rate Maire’s loyalty to Yolland, is enunciated through the invocation of fixed places and times which again challenge the supremacy of the translational move. She sits in the hedge school, at the end of the play, and says:

“When he comes back, this is where he’ll come to. He told me this is where he is happiest.”

The place of their love, then, represents a fixed point in a world of rapid change, a world where the centre cannot hold. The fixed place is paralleled by their invocation of a fixed time, the eternal nature of their love, the “always” which Maire pronounces, a similar utopian projection of a timeless state.

These universalisms, however, powerful though they are, are undercut by the pragmatism of the schoolmaster, Hugh O’Donnell, who advises Maire that “always” is a “silly” word, “not a word I’d start with.” His final speech, “Urbs antique fuit…” (end of Act III), in fact, halting and hesitant as it is, invokes a contrary sense of the mutability of all human states. In it he recites the elegy of the fate of Carthage from Virgil’s Aeneas at the hands of the Romans, “a race … springing from Trojan blood,” one which represents an implicit analogy with the death of Irish civilization at the hands of the British. As Carthage was razed to the ground, Baile Beag will surely be razed by the English soldiers failing to find their companion, Lieutenant Yolland.

Translations is about translation, about the translating of place names, about the difficulties of translation, about the relexicalisation which can accompany the process of translation (for example in the rendering explicit certain “meanings” of some Irish place names hitherto left implicit), about translation as a tool of power, about the difficulties and ambiguities of those who attempt to straddle the divide such as Owen, the interpreter and mediator between the British and the inhabitants of Baile Beag. But it is also about the opposite principle, the possibility of reaching out across the divide, the successful communication, through the sounds of language alone, between two cultures and languages which on the surface are opaque, between Maire and Yolland. For if in the play their attempt to cross the divide is doomed, it is their attempt at exogamein that, in this performance at least, remained impressed on the spectator.