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Remember to do your research and post information on Brian Friel for Friday!

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Remember to do your research and post information on Brian Friel for Friday!

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I have just started work on Book 6 in the A* Way Series of study guides for advanced literary studies. One of my favourite plays is Brian Friel's 'Translations ', and it will be the focus of study guide 6. What follows is some information to flesh out the background to Brian Friel's 'Translations' to set the play's concerns into context.

BACKGROUND to Brian Friel's 'Translations' Part 1

Translations was first performed in 1980 in Derry, Northern Ireland. It was the first play to be put on by the new Field Day Theatre Company started by Brian Friel (playwright), Stephen Rea (actor), Seamus Heaney (poet), Seamus Deane (writer), Tom Kilroy and Tom Paulin - three Catholics and three Protestants - in an attempt to revive and revitalise an Irish culture almost in danger of being obliterated by the colonial past, the current deadly political situation in Northern Ireland and by the Republic of Ireland's isolationist and conservative policies under the leadership of Eamon de Valera and his Fienna Fail government (1932 - 1973 - with only one break in power when his party was voted out [1948-1954]). The play's reception by the largely Irish audience in the Derry Theatre in 1980 was nothing short of jubilant.

The play's title takes the plural form, Translations, which suggests that Friel intended the play to explore a range of consequences and effects flowing from these acts of 'translation'. In other words, Friel explores what happened during the process of translating Ireland and its people into a 'satellite' of England - its language, culture, religion, and all. In this way, Friel is able to draw attention to the many 'translations' that occur when a nation's language is replaced by the language of a colonial power and its place names, which embody a wealth of local history and experience and form an integral part of an individual and a community's sense of place and belonging, are replaced by bald translations into the imposed language.These changes affect a people's identity both as a nation and as individuals; it brings about changes to their culture which is inextricably intertwined with its language, history, mythology and religion.

The play Translations centres on the loss of the Irish language and the ramifications of that loss. In fact, the anglicising of place names took place over centuries, but its pace and thoroughness increased in the 19 th century and onwards.

In 1830:

Ireland's population stood at 8 million:

2 million spoke only Gaelic with no English

2 million were bilingual

Thus half the population spoke Irish.

In 1911, only eighty years later immediately before independence from British direct rule, i.e. at the introduction of Home Rule.

Therefore, over the course of a century, Ireland became largely anglicised and in many areas the Irish language almost died out as a living communal language.

Many factors contributed to the loss of Irish over a long period:

Colonial economic and legal systems

Industrialisation and urbanisation

The decision by the Catholic Church to use English as its ecclesiastical language

The extension of the British state into Ireland with the Act of Union 1800

National schools and their policies of compulsory school attendance and instructing only in English - speaking Irish was prohibited in schools.

British Ordnance Survey with its mapping and its policy to 'standardise' place names.

Translations focuses on two cultural factors in this process of Anglicisation:

1. The introduction of state-sponsored, English-language based education system for Irish children by means of the National Schools in 1831 to replace the illegal Hedge School system where Irish was the medium of instruction with the classical languages forming an integral part of the syllabus. The Hedge Schools were the Irish people's response to Britain's attempt to keep their children ignorant and uneducated by the banning of Irish schools. Adults also attended these underground (secret) hedge schools.

2. The 'standardising' of Irish place names through the Ordnance Survey starting in 1824.

I will discuss these two factors in more detail in Part 2 of this article (forthcoming).

Follow the link to buy a copy of Friel's Translations.

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Background to Brian Friel's 'Translations' - A-Level Literature Notes

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I have just started work on Book 6 in the A* Way Series of study guides for advanced literary studies. One of my favourite plays is Brian Friel's 'Translations ', and it will be the focus of study guide 6.

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Brian Patrick O’Friel was born in 1929 in Omagh, County Tyrone, his father a schoolmaster from Derry and his mother a postmistress from Glenties, Co Donegal.
Friel attended Long Tower School, Derry and continued his education at St Columb’s College, Derry and St Patrick's College, Maynooth, where he studied for a career in the priesthood.
Friel would eventually decide to follow his father into the teaching profession and went on to enter St Joseph’s Teacher Training College, Belfast. He taught as a school teacher in and around Derry from 1950-60 and in 1954 married Anne Morrison. They went on to have four daughters and one son.
Friel's grandparents were illiterate Irish speakers from Donegal, and they would prove influential in his work, which often centres on the divide between religious, rural Ireland and the more progressive Ireland of the north and urban south.

In 1969, frustrated with the Unionist domination of Ulster, Friel moved to his beloved Donegal. Many of his later plays, including the celebrated Dancing at Lughnasa, were set in Ballybeg, a rural settlement in remote Donegal. As Seamus Deane notes, in 'that borderland of Derry, Donegal and Tyrone in which a largely Catholic community leads a reduced existence under the pressure of political and economic oppression', and which Friel understood perfectly.

Friel's first major success stage success, Philadelphia, Here I Come, was the undisputed hit of the Dublin Theatre Festival in 1964. Subsequent plays include The Loves of Cass McGuire (1966), Lovers (1967), The Mundy Scheme (1969), The Freedom of the City (1973), Volunteers (1975), Living Quarters (1977), Faith Healer (1979), Translations (1980), an adaptation of Chekhov’s Three Sisters (1981), an adaptation of Turgenev’s novel Fathers and Sons (1987), Dancing at Lughnasa (1990), a version of Turgenev’s A Month in the Country (1992), The London Vertigo, from Charles Macklin’s The True Born Irishman (1992), Wonderful Tennessee (1993), Molly Sweeney (1994) and Give Me Your Answer Do! (1997).

In 1980 Friel co-founded the Field Day Theatre Company with actor Stephen Rea. They staged Friel's Translations as their first production in Derry’s Guildhall.

Field Day Theatre Company sought to find a middle ground between the traditional culture of rural Ireland and the more secular culture of the north. Plays such as Dancing at Lughnasa deal with this divide, and through the five Mundy sisters Friel explores an Ireland where tradition, religion and modernity meet head on.
In 1981, Translations, one of Friel's seminal works, was awarded the Ewart-Biggs Peace Prize. After co-founding Field Day, Friel continued his interest in the arts as a member of Aosdana, to which he was elected in 1982. In 1983 he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Literature by the National University of Ireland. Dancing at Lughnasa, probably his most successful play so far, received three Tony Awards in 1992, including Best Play.

Two of Friel’s plays, Philadelphia, Here I Come and Dancing at Lughnasa have also been adapted into film. Collections of short stories include The Saucer of Larks (1962) and The Gold in the Sea (1966).

A shy and reclusive man, Friel rarely makes public statements. A quote from his own Self Portrait however perhaps sheds some light on the true character of modern Ireland's leading playwright.

'I am married, have five children, live in the country, smoke too much, fish a bit, read a lot, worry a lot, get involved in sporadic causes and invariably regret the involvement, and hope that between now and my death I will have acquired a religion, a philosophy, a sense of life that will make the end less frightening than it appears to me at this moment.'

Brian Friel lives in Donegal.