Short Summary & Analysis
The play is written in 1979 and first staged in 1980. And this is at the end of a very dark, difficult decade in the Troubles of Northern Ireland.
In the 1970s, the incidents like the Bloody Sunday events in Londonderry and the Birmingham pub bombings occurred.
Translation itself is a very resonant term and it means a movement of things, movement of people, a movement of language and understanding from one place to another.
It is addressing how we might understand one another, what meanings we might make, and also what happens when those meanings break down — what happens when we get missed translations as well.
The play begins set in a hedge school, which is a sort of school set up in Ireland to educate relatively impoverished Catholics.
People going to those schools wouldn't pay necessarily in money, but perhaps in turf or in butter or in milk, those kinds of things.
Manus is helping his father at the hedge school, helping to educate this community.
Meanwhile, his brother turns up in the play, having decided to help the British Army, who are trying to standardize the landscape of Ireland and are trying to produce the first Ordnance Survey maps, which includes changing lots of the Irish names to anglicize them to English names.
So these two brothers, who seem to be on different sides, seem to be ready for some kind of confrontation.
And so Friel's play, in looking at that arrival of the Army into this hedge school set-up, is trying to say something about contemporary Northern Irish politics and the north of Ireland.
The play itself has quite a straightforward story. It's a love triangle, and it's a cross-cultural love triangle. One of the English soldiers falls in love with one of the Irish female characters, who is already attached to the schoolmaster's son.
Máire is an Irish character who speaks only in the Irish language. Yolland is a British soldier who doesn't really know what's going on in Ireland.
Their ways of viewing the world are very different, and that becomes clear through their syntax. And yet by listening to the sound of one another, by being with one another, they get a great affinity for one another and learn to love each other.
Perhaps Máire and Yolland give us that sense that there might be just that luminous moment where characters from different traditions and people from different communities can understand each other.
Hugh is a very interesting character in this play. He's the master of a hedge school. Friel had trained as a teacher, so Friel himself is embedded in that world of education. In fact, his great-grandfather used to be a hedge school master.
So he has a real personal link, with the character of Hugh in the play. By the end, Hugh has to go and teach in a national school, where education is in English.
And that symbolises in the play a passing of an entire order, that passing of that earlier Gaelic order, with all of its stories and traditions.
The line in the play where Hugh says,
'To remember everything
is a form of madness,'
This line speaks to the condition of the time in which the play was produced. Their society is changing.
There are lots of indications that things will not go well in the future.
Translations continue to be relevant because it does make us mourn the loss of cultures. It makes us feel sad for cultures that may be slipping away.
Conclusion:
The point is that Hugh is aware that some of the things he has treasured might be going away like the stories, the classical stories that he knows earlier on.
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