1. Language and Identity in the Contemporary Irish Literature
Brian Friel and Seamus Heaney
English cultures and literatures
Bődy Edit
2015/2016

2. Brian Friel (1929 – 2015) Northern Irish playwright, theatre director
His best known plays:
Philadelphia Here I come! (1964)
Translations (1980)
Dancing at Lughnasa (1990)
Molly Sweeney (1994)
Field Day Theatre Company: in 1980, Stephen Rea and Friel
They stage Translations in Derry.
1981: Heaney joins the board of directors.

3. Translations: questions to discuss
How far are the aspects of colonialism present in the play? What is the historical-colonial context?
What is the role of language?
What is the role of translation?
Sense of place?

4. 1. Aspects of colonialism in the play

5. Historical-colonial context
The drama can be located both in time and space to a fix point in Irish history: Baile Beag, Donegal in 1833.
Actual temporal circumstances (historical bg.)
penal laws (against Catholics)
: Wolfe Tone rebellion
: Union with Britain
: rise of Daniel O’Connell claiming better civil rights and living circumstances
(O’Connell believed in the necessity to use English to progress in a modern world)
- 1824: Ordnance Survey: “A representation imposed from outside and from above: from the colonizer to the colonized.”(cf. Lancey’s words, p. 405)
- 1831: National Education System and the use of English language (Morrison)

6. Possible (implied) consequences of the Survey
Aim: map, rename → anglicize Ireland,
Edward Said: it is usually one of the first things the colonizer does: to re-shape the other county/culture to make it similar to his mother country.
Intention of English policy: to create “a new England called Ireland.”
Map easily used by the British → base of a military operation
Also an attempt to colonize the mind of people
Feeling of being exiled: uncertainty of a new world, uncertainty of the identity (Owen-Roland)

7. 2. Language

8. Language Clash between languages
Struggle for self-definition within language
Use of education: a method to resolve an unequal relationship bw. colonizer and colonized – dilemma: whether to learn in English or Irish?
Friel’s Irish: English + Derry dialect to achive a representative, universal Irish dialect
Role of the ancient languages

9. 3. Translation
Main question: does it ever work? Is it possible to translate one language to another? One culture to another?
Failure on a general level: the names of places cannot be translated without a loss in the meaning. (p. 420)
Failure on an individual level: Maire and Yolland.

10. Sense of place (Donegal)

11. Irishness and sense of place
Names (places, families, tribes)
- a way of memorizing a lost world and maintaining a sort of identity.
- death and destruction are linked to memory and place.
Sense of place
- A product of the native tradition
- A verbal or nominal preoccupation, little to do with the actual
- It relates to death rather than to life (Sheeran, Patrick, “The Irish Sense of Place”)
Although the Irish sense of place is not a product of colonization it has been reinforced by it.
Sense of place and feeling of displacement.

12. Irishness and sense of place
Phenomenon behind it: two kinds of landscape emerging in the 17-18th c.:
- Political, Anglo-Irish, merely material
- Vernacular, Gaelic, merely verbal 
“The Anglo-Irish dwelt in a land to which they did not belong, and the Irish belonged to a land they did not dwell.” (Sheeran, Patrick, “The Irish Sense of Place”)

13. Sources Kiberd, Declan, Inventing Ireland
Deane, Seamus, Introduction to Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature
Sheeran, Patrick, “The Irish Sense of Place”
Morrison, Andy, “The Historical and Colonial Context of Brian Friel’s Translations”
Said, Edward W., Yeats and Decolonization
Friel, Brian, Translations