The Irish mentality was deeply fractured because the Irish people were mired in the liminal space of the new and the old, the modern and the traditional

Chapter Two.Translation as a Trope for Negotiation between English Modernity and Gaelic Traditionalism in Translations

The ultimate awareness of Hugh O’Donnell, the school master of the Irish hedge school in Translations, that change is the inevitable category in dealing with historical successions, especially in the colonized society, reveals the central message of this play: “[W]e must never cease renewing those images [of the past]; because once we do, we fossilise” (66). What this change implies is the historical dynamism that precipitates the successions of epochs and dynasties. In the context of Irish history, it was the historical dynamism the English colonialism initiated to rouse the hibernating Ireland from its timeless social and cultural stasis. Translations captures the traumatic identitarian conundrum the Irish experienced in the drastic historical transition from the traditional Gaelic civilization to the colonizing English modernity around 1830s in modern Irish history. It was a time of social upheaval and psychological insecurity for the Irish: the advent of English modernity in the forms of the Ordnance Survey and the National Schools was about to erode and replace the ancient and native Gaelic culture. The struggle between the recalcitrant resistance of the Celtic order and the forceful dominance of the English colonial rule had thrown the Irish into a maelstrom of sharp identity crisis. The Irish mentality was deeply fractured because the Irish people were mired in the liminal space of the new and the old, the modern and the traditional. Holding on to the old values and beliefs would not secure a stable identity that could sustain one through the political, social and cultural turbulences caused by the English colonialism, and looking forward to the imperial modernity would prove enslaving oneself to the discourse of the British Empire. Translations examines how the Irish people caught and torn between the two cultural forces, one representing the native traditionalism and the other the invading colonial modernity, had coped with

the task of identity negotiation and formation.

Translations, with its central linguistic, translational, historical and colonial

themes and concerns that have sparked resounding repercussions across the academic and theatrical spectrums of postcolonial and Irish studies, is simultaneously the most highly celebrated and the most ideologically misunderstood and debated play among Friel’s works. The critics, mainly dividedly into the two camps of the nationalist and the anti-nationalist, are obsessed with Friel’s politics of nationalism, unaware of the fact that they have inherited the legacies of imperial discourse.¹ As both views are trapped in the binarism inherent in the imperial discourse, the nationalist-oriented critics, such as Tim Gauthier, focus on the historical moment when the English colonization was tolling the death bell to the Irish language and culture while the anti-nationalist-oriented critics, including Sean Connolly and Edna Longley, condemn the sentimental and unexamined nationalist mythology of an authentic pre-British Celtic civilization. Both views can be justified to a certain extent since the play itself is so enriched with the possibilities of multiple thematic explorations and of the taking of various vintage points from which to mount one’s criticism. However, either view is sheltered from a more complicated vision Friel advances in the play. Friel does offer his condemnation of English colonialism in Ireland that has depredated the land and traumatized the Irish mentality, yet he also problematizes and complicates the binary perspective by presenting his view that the English modernity, in the forms of

1 Friel’s politics of nationalism will be discussed in depth in the next chapter entitled “Irish Nationalism and Its Discontents: A Tourist Reading of The Communication Cord.”

The nationalist critics advocate Celticism as the essence of Irishness and Irish identity to minimize the effects of Anglicization on the realms of Irish culture and identity. Nevertheless, Celticism is an invention of the English, and particularly the invention of the 19^th-century classicist, Matthew Arnold, as Shin Kikkawa says, “Arnoldian Celticism is…stretched to mean the modern Irishness, be used as an Irish identity, and be favored by the writers of the Celtic Renaissance” (47). Luke Gibbons also points out that “in the Celticism of Matthew Arnold, for instance, Irish identity was reduced to a cultural imaginary, in a restricted aesthetic sense, all the more to remove it from more quotidian matters of power and self-determination” (9). On the other hand, the anti-nationalists, namely the unionistsand loyalists, are preoccupied with the politics of union with Britain and would not recognize the inhumanity of English colonialism in Ireland which they see as “engendering modernization.”

both the inevitable adoption of the English language and the Irish imperial participation, has been formative of the Irish identity, and that the introduction of colonial modernity has instilled some dynamism into the paralytic Irish society, initiating negotiation, if not compromise, between the two languages and cultures despite unequal power relations. Nevertheless, the anti-nationalist critics and historical revisionists are preoccupied with downplaying the negative effects of English colonialism in Ireland by arguing that “Ireland was conquered and Gaelic civilization destroyed because….it was out of step with and even hostile to the March of Progress, of which capital development and the English language were identifying features” (Deane “Dumbness and Eloquence: A Note on English as We Write It in Ireland” 110) whereas the nationalist critics assume that the Irish suffered under English violence without being aware of the Irish imperial participation.² English colonialism in Ireland is not to be understood exclusively as either patronage or victimhood but as “a relationship within which new, dialogical discursive practices of self-fashioning emerged” (McDougall 6). As Cormack argues that translation is “a negotiation between languages” (qtd. in Cronin 199), in this paper, the reading that has focused on the unbridgeable chasm between English modernity and Irish archaism will give way to a dialectical reading in which “negotiation” between the English modernity and the Irish traditionalism, embodied most vividly in the “go-between”

maneuvers of Owen (33), plays an important role in the articulation of Irishness at a transitional moment of modern Irish history—Eager to escape from the medieval inertia that has paralyzed the Irish society, Owen chooses to adopt the English language and enlist in the service of the Empire, which does not compromise his

2 The historical revisionists convinces themselves that Ireland is less a colony than part of the Union, of the British Empire. The nationalists willfully and determinedly reject the idea that the Irish benefits from the operation of the British Empire for they believe that the Irish were victims of the Empire rather than beneficiaries.

agency and identity but instead provides him with the site of resistance, enunciation and negotiation between the colonizer and the colonized.

The very concept of the modern designates the break with the past and tradition.

Without severing the ties with the past, the present can hardly come into being in its own terms, as Jameson illustrates Schelling’s idea: “the past is created by way of its energetic separation from the present; by way of a powerful act of dissociation whereby the present seals off its past and expels and ejects it” (Jameson A Singular Modernity 25). Foucault also notes, “Modernity is often characterized in terms of

consciousness of the discontinuity of time: a break with tradition” (“What is Enlightenment?” 39). Ontologically, the modern is invented with the epochal rupture that makes a sharp division between the present, that is the modern, and the past, that is the traditional. Without this separation, the modern would continue to exist under the shadowing influence of the past.

This ontological invention of the modern that is premised upon the rejection of the old and upon the advancements in science and technology, the emergence of Enlightenment thinking, the dominance of the capitalistic mode of production, and the expansion of overseas imperial enterprise, has paved the trajectory of the West entering the historical epoch of modernity, causing the overwhelming cognitive sense of up-rootedness and the phenomenon that “all that was solid melts into air” (qtd. in Berman 15). In a colonized society, the intensity of the confrontation between the modern and the traditional is even more radical than that in the home countries of modernity.³ While the “break” between the modern and the traditional in the West designates a division between the past and the present, the “break” in the colonized

3 Modernity arose from within Europe, and its mature development was facilitated by extending to other continents, as Enrique Dussel argues, “modernity is, in fact, a European phenomenon, but one constituted in a dialectical relation with a non-European alterity that is its ultimate content” in his

“Eurocentrism and Modernity (Introduction to the Frankfurt Lectures)” (65).

societies designates a fault zone between the obsolete and waning native culture and the modern and advanced colonial culture.

Modernity is inherently colonial and should be understood as “a project of governing” (Gomez 219). The emergence of the mature modern European subjectivity from the archaic medieval period was founded upon European conquests abroad, creating its august European ego by bringing other lands under control, as Dussel argues, “the experience not only of ‘discovery’ but especially of ‘conquest’ is essential in the constitution of the modern ego” (74). The threat from other competing civilizations, such as the Islamic world, and from the unknown territory, like the New World, can only be repelled by gaining dominance over them. In the process of discovering and conquering other lands, Europe elicited the discourse of modernity, the nature of which is premised on binarism: the differences between the non-Europe and Europe is embodied in a series of opposition between “tradition and modernity, ritual and rationality, myth and history, community and state, emotion and reason, East and West” (qtd. in Mignolo 228). Manipulating this discourse of imperial binarism that distinguishes the modern of the West from the backwardness of the non-West and positioning itself at the center of World History, thus World Civilization, the modern European ego was formed by justifying colonialism as a project and process of bringing the periphery into World History and disseminating the seeds of reason and nation-state in the barbaric space.⁴ Without alternatives, the non-West was destined to “follow Europe’s course,” the course of modernity (Washbrook 597).

While Enlightenment proclaims order and civility that culminate in the political form of nation-state through the “politics of subjectification” that creates homogenous identity among the citizens (Gomez 219), colonial modernity, as “a project of

4 For Hegel, nation-state is the ultimate realization of the Enlightenment modernity, as Leela Gandhi points out, “the overlapping narratives of ‘Reason’, ‘Modernity’ and ‘History’ reveal their proper

‘end’—the final truth of their significance—in the consolidated form of the nation-State” (105).

governing,” dictates a disciplinary mission of uplifting the uncivilized non-Western world into the order of reason and nation-state to create a manageable colony out of lawlessness and backwardness. The practice of implanting colonial modernity manifests itself in the exercising of measures and policies that are the technologies for easier exploitation of local resources, such as the building of railway networks and the introduction of capitalistic market system, and the Foucauldian technologies for disciplinary control. Mark Elvin, in studying China, suggests that modernity be understood as the “ability to create power”: power here is understood as both the

“capacity to direct energy [in factories, bureaucracy or the military]” and the

“capacity to change the structure of systems [in nature, social organization, economic production or the worlds of thought and belief]” (qtd. in McDougall 6). Armed with powerful military force and advanced technology in construction, transportation, and production, the colonizers introduce and monopolize the technologies for more efficient production in the colonial space, and through the domination and accumulation of this power they also monopolize the superstructure of the colonized society—Europe used the normalizing power of modernity to promulgate European languages, art, history, laws, religion, and political and educational systems to the colonized people.

To understand modernity as “a project of governing” is to understand that the dynamics of colonial modernity is anchored in the mechanism of unequal power relations. In approaching this issue of unequal power relations, two questions then arise: What does modernity mean for the colonial subject? And who is modernity for in the colonial space? For most colonized societies, modernity does not germinate from within but is imposed from above and without, which unexceptionally results in colonial modernity without subjectivity, and subsequently a sense of disorientation for the colonized subjects. Europeans did not had the native people in mind when they

began to implant modernity in the lands they have conquered; instead, they were concerned merely with how to expand overseas imperial lands and how to extract the local natural resources and exploit the cheap labor force. In the project of installing modernity and modernization in the colonial space, the colonized people were simply scrapped from the picture—the implantation of colonial modernity, including the institution of the colonial government, the Western educational systems that were to promote the culture of the colonizer, and the construction of efficient transportation systems, was not set for the colonized people but for the colonial masters. The truth is that the native people were not entitled to the rights to enjoy the benefits brought by modernity but subjected to its traumatic consequences.

In implementing the project of modernity in the colonial space, a discrepancy always exists between the colonizer’s rhetoric and the expectation of the native people for the Europe-initiated projects are sugarcoated with the colonizer’s verbosity that they would bring benefits for the native people. The Royal Ordnance Survey carried out in 1830s in Ireland, in the name of “advancing the interests of Ireland,” was in fact a disciplinary project to further control Ireland militarily and to extirpate the Irish culture by Anglicizing the Irish place-names. Lancey, the general heading the English Royal Ordnance Survey in Translations, advises the benefits of this Survey, apparently from the perspective of the colonizer: “This enormous task has been embarked on….so that the entire basis of land valuation can be reassessed for purposes of more equitable taxation” (31), and he quotes from the government white paper to strengthen his remarks: “‘Ireland is privileged. No such survey is being undertaken in England. So this survey cannot but be received as proof of the disposition of this government to advance the interests of Ireland.’ My [Lancey’s]

sentiments, too” (31). Manus, the nationalist in the play, simply cannot be deceived by the sly rhetoric of the colonizer, as he says, “[I]t’s a bloody military operation” (32).

Lying beneath these officially neutral and benign remarks is the real purpose of the English rule in Ireland, that is to tighten the control of the neighboring island militarily, politically and culturally as the survey provides the necessary military strategic information and Anglicizes the Irish place-names, thus conforming the Irish people to the value system of the English culture.

Through its normalizing power, the discourse of modernity gains not only legitimacy but also hegemony in the colonial space, and the hegemony, not infrequently, turns into oppression. Monopolizing the power of both the superstructure and the base—the economic production, the colonizers dominates the system of representation and the means of enunciation. The colonized people, who are stripped of the means and rights of enunciation due to the fact that the official language is the language of the colonizer, are forced into ideological manipulation by the colonizer of the project of colonial modernity, and their presence/participation in it, if there is any, is sidelined to the periphery. The imperial discourse of binarism the Europeans wielded to subdue the natives easily degenerates into asymmetrical power relations because the colonial masters would argue that the native people, due to their lack of technology and the immature development of the nation-state, are hopeless in running their own country and developing the economy, and thus the colonizer is endowed with the mission of governing the native people and developing the local resources.

The governing is always accompanied with ruthless exploitation and brutal oppression.

It is often seen in the colonial space that the adoption of the European language is a sign of accepting the colonizer’s ideology and rule, and the refusal of speaking it is met with a severe penalty. The adoption of the European language and its culture often leads to the oppression of the native culture because the latter is seen as uncivilized, and thus not worth preserving.

The qualitative difference between the imported modernity and the native culture

causes not only cultural dislocation but also a sense of mental disorientation and alienation to the colonized people. The time and space of the colonized countries have been “distanciated,” that is, abstracted from the local context, as Foster explains,

“mechanical clocks and standardized time zones detach time from locality” (65). The native systems of time ordering and space arrangement have been “emptied” with the introduction of the Western systems of time and space—categorically linear and differentiating. Thus, local holidays and festivals are replaced with Christmas and Easter, and the local place-names are renamed as Virginia, Victoria or Georgia. The instillation of European time and place-names accordingly severs the colonized people from their deep-rooted cultural consciousness, resulting in “the disembedding of social activity from contexts of presence” (Tomlinson 54). As a result, the presence of the colonized people in their own culture is simply erased because “locally situated lifewords become saturated with distant social influences and events” (Foster 66).

In Translations, the whole town is being Anglicized in the project of Ordnance Survey, and accordingly everything familiar has become “strange” to the local people.

This sense of strangeness is caused both by the different linguistic system and by the loss of cultural memories that have been preserved in the Irish language and the Irish place-names. The Anglicized place-name, “Crossroads,” that has been proposed to replace the original “Tobair Vree” does not carry the cherished Irish cultural memories and consciousness (44). Hugh is fraught with hopelessness when he says,

“We must learn to make [the new Anglicized place-names] our own. We must make them our new home” (66). The acceptance of a new cultural outlook encoded in a different language had dazed the cognitive consciousness of the Irish people, as Kiberd quotes Friedrich Engel in saying that “the whole project of British colonialism in Ireland through the nineteenth century was ‘to make the Irish feel like strangers in their own country’” (“Strangers in their own country: multiculturalism in Ireland”

317). Hugh’s sense of hopelessness for the disappearing native culture and his awareness of the inevitability of assimilating into the colonial culture embody the dilemma of the Irish people when they were caught between the two cultural forces.

Deep-rooted in the superstitious belief, manual skills, traditional trading system and loose tribal community of their native culture, the colonized Irish people were overwhelmed by the rational concepts, advanced scientific technology, expanding capitalist market and centralized and ordered constitutional government of England.

The fear of being stifled by the oppressive traditional culture was coupled with the prospect of taking advantage of the opportunities for better living offered by colonial modernity. The dread of being accused of betrayal to their native community was equally joined with the fear of being ridiculed as one with “black skin and white masks.”⁵ The cultural estrangement and the resultant subjected and split identity of the colonized people reduce them to a sense of alienation and disorientation in their familiar and yet not so familiar home-country.

Despite the suffering and the sense of disorientation experienced by the colonized people, the imposition of modernity, particularly the mode of capitalistic production, in the colonized society is deemed by some thinkers, Karl Marx among them, as the necessary evil for the European powers to help the uncivilized feudal society overcome the “oriental despotism” (Marx “The British Rule in India” 40) so that the latter could be incorporated into the world system of modernity and modernization. Marx’s discussion of colonialism in relation to modernity is ambivalent and problematic because the core of his thinking is still in the keeping with that of his predecessor, Hegel, while he criticizes the violence and the

5 The Irish do not qualify physiologically as a people with “black skin and white masks” due to their white skin color, and yet the English imperial discourse still categorizes them as an inferior race. The nature of the racial discourse renders them the same as other colored colonized people.

exploitative nature of the European overseas conquest.⁶ With his vision of the teleological end of World History towards which all countries on earth are moving, Marx views colonialism as the necessary instrument of introducing progressive Western modernity in the colonial space, and the economic depredation and cultural displacement caused by colonialism are treated as the side effects of this inevitable progress. The liminality of the fault zone between the native culture and the colonial culture is seen as the excruciating pain the colonized countries have to undergo before the advent of liberation.

In one of his letters contributed to New York Daily Tribune, Marx argues that the mode of feudal society in India would have remained permanently static if the English colonialism, in complicity with capitalism, had not activated the potential of the revolution in Indian economy and social life:

England, it is true, in causing a social revolution in Hindustan, was actuated only by the vilest interests, and was stupid in her manner of enforcing them. But that is not the question. The question is, can mankind fulfill its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia? If not, whatever may have been the crimes of England she was unconscious tool of history in bringing about the revolution. (“The British rule in India” 41)

The violence and brutality of English rule in India are thus justified by its role as the historical engine of initiating Indian revolution and evolution towards the European modernity. English colonialism in India has inaugurated the dialectical process

6 Both Hegelian and Marxist concept of history dictates progressivity and linearity in the historical movement leading towards a teleological end of human history. Hegel proposes that human history is in constant movements, and the motions going through the Hegelian dialectical process would move towards perfection at the end of history, towards a synthetic category that is called Geist (Spirit), the absolute knowledge. His disciple, Marx, envisions a utopian future where communism will replace capitalism, where the proletarian class would defeat the bourgeoisie and capitalists. Embedded within this thinking is also a teleological end, a communist utopia, towards which human history is magnetically drawn.

between Indian tribalism and traditionalism and English modernity and modernization:

“England has to fulfill a double mission in India: one destructive, the other regenerating—the annihilation of old Asiatic society, and the laying of the material foundations of Western society in Asia” (“The Future Results of the British Rule in India” 82). The synthetic category derived from this historical dialectical process will be the triumph of English modernity in the form of capitalism: “[The devastating effects of English industry] are only the organic results of the whole system of production as it is now constituted” (“The Future Results of the British Rule in India”

86). Without the enforced imposition of modernity and modernization, the colonized countries would be deprived of the chance of ever witnessing the social revolution that would prepare them to be members of World History.

At the core of Marx’s thinking is the concepts of change and movement in history, despite the controversy of Euro-centrism in his ideas that is often cited and criticized as a testament of European colonialism.⁷ A historical epoch would always give way to another one due to some internal or external factors, and a society would not remain static unless it is a dying one. Marx portrays European colonialism, an integral part of capitalism, as a “cataclysmic movement, a disruptive upheaval throughout the world that bursts old feudal relations asunder and turns traditional stasis into a process of transformation” (Young 102). In the West, if not in the rest of the world, feudalism had given way to capitalism and then would give way to socialism that would lead to communism, in the social theories of Marx. Underlying these historical successions is a dynamism that would activate human activities and actualize human possibility. New sources of stimulus, in the forms of revolution or social crisis, are always pushing a society forward, though not necessarily in the

7 Robert Young points that Marx’s writing on colonialism is “notorious problematic,” and this may

“explain the degree to which, contrary to what might have been anticipated, postcolonial theory and critique have rarely drawn directly on Marx’s—as opposed to Marxist—analysis” (102).

teleological mode of European Enlightenment tradition, and this would create continuity between different periods of the social history, a continuity marked by changes and movements.

Marx celebrates the revolutionary power of capitalism and the triumph of modern bourgeois technology, which he sees as instigating the historical dynamism and bringing World History to its next stage, although he criticizes severely the alienation effect caused by capitalism on the laborers. In an evocative passage, he praises the bourgeois activism:

The bourgeoisie, in its reign of barely a hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive power than have all previous generations put together. Subjection of nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to agriculture and industry, steam navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization of rivers, whole population conjured out of the ground—what earlier century had even an intimation that such productive power slept in the womb of social labor?(qtd. in Berman 93)

The immensely inexhaustive energy of capitalism has maximized human potential, and its revolutionary power has sent an earthquake through all aspects of human life.

With its endlessly expansive nature, capitalism, in complicity with colonialism, has instilled some source of dynamism into the parched land of the static society, as Wolfe points out what English rule has done in India: English colonialism “had introduced a dynamic historical germ that would rouse Indian society from the timeless stagnation of the Asian mode of production and set it on its own course of historical development” (390).

Modernity in Ireland, like the modernity in India, did not originate from within

the Irish society itself but was imposed by the English colonizers.⁸ Ireland, with attributes associated with ancient mysticism, had remained a medieval country, a land of saints and scholars, with Catholicism placing its tight hold on the people in every walk of daily life. The Irish society seemed to have stagnated into stasis, and this medieval stillness soon turned into numbness, and then into dumbness: the Irish society had stagnated with an inertia that had stifled the whole society, an inertia that was worsened by the oppression of the English rule. The Irish language was reduced to linguistic reticence, and the Irish people were traumatized with identitarian inarticulacy—the population speaking the Irish language was greatly reduced to a third of the original population, and the English produced an imperial discourse that derogatorized the Irish as incapable of governing themselves. In imperial discourse, the modernity imposed by the English colonizers had been set in a sharp contrast to the Gaelic traditionalism, creating a fault zone in the Irish culture and society:

Modernization…is coterminous with the Anglicisation of the island:

Gaelic culture by the same move is aligned with the medieval, with the pre-modern, the archaic and the maladapted; with all those things whose inevitable fate it was to be vanquished by modernity. (Cleary 3)

Thus, modernity and modernization in Ireland did not emerge within the Gaelic order to modernize itself, and this imposition of modernity had pushed the Gaelic order further back into its enclave of archaism.

The chasm between the English modernity and the Gaelic archaism implicates the state of modernity in Ireland in the struggle between the cultural issue and the

8 Modernity in Ireland had a debatable provenance point. Joe Cleary, in her “Introduction: Ireland and modernity,” maps out two starting points of modernity in Ireland: the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when the Tudor plantation commenced; the end of the eighteenth century and the mid-nineteenth century, “with the United Irish Rebellion of 1798, the Act of Union in 1800, Catholic Emancipation in 1829 or the Great Famine in the late 1840s” variously offered as the watersheds in the wider transition.

economic issue, the former denoting the “conjugation” between the Gaelic culture and the classical tongue (Translations 25) while the latter the incorporation into the capitalistic market, as Deane points out in his Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing since 1790: “Irish modernity was precisely a condition in

which the ‘cultural’ view of ‘tradition’ and the ‘economic’ view of capital development were joined in unequal combat” (110). The discourse of modernity and the English system of representation through the English language were considered failures in involving the Irish in the condition of modernity, and Deane argues that a series of contradictions centering around this struggle has run through the writings of Edmund Burke down through Edgeworth, Hardiman, Moore and Manga, to Flann O’Brien, Joyce and Yeats, the contradictions being between tradition and modernity, strangeness and normality, irrationality and rationality, paralysis and energy, apocalypse and boredom. Imprisoning themselves in the self-praised illusion as “a spiritual people” (Translations 42), as opposed to the English as a “plebeian” people who are preoccupied with commerce (41), the Irish people see their language “as the means to express an essential privacy, the hermetic core of being, to divine origins and etymologies, thus enabling a community to recollect its past,” a language that is

“superior” to the English language as “a system of signs for representing, mapping and categorizing—for ‘colonizing’ the chaos of reality” (Andrews The Art of Brian Friel 170). In reality, the Irish people faced a serious dilemma between “either to

abandon its commitment to Ireland as a specific civilization and territory in order to be incorporated into the normalizing ideology of international capitalism, or to become fetishized as a ‘strange country’ by resisting such incorporation” (Boxall 204).

The Irish obsession with the authenticity and uniqueness of the Gaelic civilization had led to a powerful discourse that would deter Ireland from being incorporated into global capitalist market, causing a sense of “strangeness” in the Irish society in the

sense that Ireland was maladapted to the trend of modernity and modernization.

Deane’s thesis of the existent contradictions does not dictate an unbridgeable gap between the cultural issue and the economic issue, a life-and-death choice between the Irish traditionalism and English modernity. A nationalist reading of Translations would favor the former issue while the anti-nationalist the latter. Modernity, in spite of the fact that it was imported from the neighboring powerful country, that it had led to an anomalous state of modernity in this country, “was not a state which the Irish could choose or reject at will” (Kiberd Inventing Ireland 134). Rather, it should be understood as part of the historical dynamism driving the Irish society into activity. In this respect, the issue is about “how best to modernize” (Kiberd Inventing Ireland 134). The either-or position taken by the staunch nationalist, like Manus in Translations, who was portrayed as the “saddest loser”, would sink one into

irretrievable plight.

To a large extent, Translations is about the dynamism of historical change and movement in modern Ireland. It is set in 1833, around a decade prior to the onset of the Great Famine (1845-1849), which has changed the constitution of the Irish national character permanently and created the largest diaspora ever since. The Great Famine has been identified as a watershed in the history of Ireland, especially in its modern history, “creating new conditions of demographic decline, large-scale emigration, altered farming structures and new economic policies, not to mention an institutionalized Anglophobia among the Irish at home and abroad” (R. F. Forster 318).

This historical event exposed the flawed and inhumane rule of English colonization and at the same time aroused the awareness of the Irish people that colonial modernity and modernization were the inevitable trend overwhelming their static society. In the words of Kiberd, “The famines of the 1840s, unutterably traumatic, were also modernising in some of their effects” (“The Celtic Tiger: a cultural history” 281). The

Gaelic order devastated by the Great Famine provided no outlet for survival and the colonial enterprise provided an alternative to the oppression at home, prompting a large portion of the Irish populace to involve in English modernity—the Irish people began to adopt the English language and to serve in the British Empire.

The Irish people were beginning to adopt the English language because they saw it as the language of opportunity, success and commerce. The Famine hit the poverty-stricken Irish-speaking area most devastatingly, mainly in the west and the south-west of the country, with two thirds of the natives speaking the vernacular language starving to death or on the route to emigrate. From the memories surviving from the community that was affected most severely by the Famine, there was a sense of apocalypse in the Irish community, that “there must have been a radical fault in Irish civilization, and most especially in the Irish-speaking civilization, that allowed it to succumb so completely to the potato blight and all its attendant ills” (Deane

“Dumbness and Eloquence: A Note on English as we Write It in Ireland” 109). The

“fault” is seen in that the Irish language, the language of the dispossessed, was perceived as “a barrier to modern progress” (Translations 25) and was associated with the past, poverty, backwardness and hopelessness. The opposition between the Irish and English languages is configured in the binary terms of the modern and the traditional and their ramificatory attributes, including inarticulacy and articulacy, death and survival, inertia and energy: “The relationship between the Irish and English languages in modern Ireland, at least since the Famine, has a bearing upon and may even be homologous with the wider relationship between tradition and modernity” (Deane “Dumbness and Eloquence: A Note on English as we Write It in Ireland” 113). While the politicians were still manipulating the rhetoric that

“Almighty sent the potato blight but the English created the Famine” for their political interests, the Irish people were more pragmatic. They were concerned with their

livelihood: Choosing to speak English, the language of modernity, would equip them with more advantages in the colonial society and the Empire at large.

The Famine, whether it was of natural or man-made cause, symbolized the culmination of the intended effects of the English policies of oppressing and eroding the Gaelic tongue and culture. The British government helped the Anglo-Irish class secure their socially privileged position by passing a series of discriminatory policies and laws, such as the Penal Laws, against the Irish Catholics and the laws about the land in favor of the Anglo-Irish nobles and at the expense of the Irish peasants.

Deprived of any means of survival in their home country, the Irish people proved

“reactive and responsive to imperial schemes” (Ohlmeyer 29) because the imperial participation provided an alternative to the oppression at home. The historical revisionist was correct in pointing out that the Irish took advantage of the opportunities afforded by the British Empire, as Kenny argues, “Irishmen helped conquer and govern both Ireland itself and the British colonies overseas, and took full advantage of the military, career, and commercial opportunities presented by their situation at the heart of the largest Empire in history” (93). The Irish people, caught in an ambivalent position, were both colonial subjects and agents simultaneously—they served as colonial ministers, generals, soldiers, priests and nuns, and teachers in the colonies that belonged to the British Empire. Therefore, if the British Empire initiated colonialism that had worsened the livelihood of the Irish people at home, it also provided the Irish people a means of survival abroad: “Irish people who might be constrained at home also had free access to the Empire and to the social and economic opportunities it provided. For Ireland, therefore, the Empire was simultaneously a chain and a key: it was a source both of constraint and of liberation” (Jackson 136).

Owen, the most complicated character in Translations, embodies this trend of modernity: He adopts English, “the king’s good English” (29), and serves in the

British Empire, helping the English soldiers and sappers map the Irish landscape and translate/transliterate the Irish place-names into English. Coming from Baile Beag, literally a small place, he “got out in time” from the claustrophobic and stifling Irish society (37). The abject poverty and the hopeless future of this “small place” that is microcosmic of Ireland was portrayed by Maire in despairing terms: “The rents are going to go up again—the harvest’s going to be lost—the herring have gone away for ever—there’s going to be evictions. Honest to God, some of you people aren’t happy unless you’re miserable and you’ll be right content until you’re dead” (21). Maire’s description of the absurdly desperate life intimates a sense of apocalypse that haunts the Irish society. Owen is aware that “there were certain inadequacies within the original culture that unfitted it to survive the impact of the English presence and domination” (Heaney 558), and he questions his father’s obdurate nostalgia for the classical essence of the Gaelic civilization: “Is it astute not to be able to adjust for survival? Enduring around truths immemorially posited” (43).

Seeing in the English language the chance for better survival and progress, Owen chooses to adopt the language of the colonizer though he would have experienced what Stephen Dedalus has experienced in using the English language: “The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine….My soul frets in the shadow of his language” (Joyce 205). For Hugh and Manus, the English language fails to “express us [the Irish]” (25), and it is only fit “for the purpose of commerce” (25) while “the Irish language is a rich response to famished conditions” (Deane “Brian Friel: The Name of the Game” 108). On the contrary, for Owen, the Irish language is full of “the mythologies of fantasy… and self-deception” (Translations 42) that paralyze the Irish national character—Hugh is always drunken into unconsciousness; Manus is “lame”

(11); Sarah suffers a “speech defect” (11). Most Irish people simply indulged themselves in the self-complacency about the enriched spirituality and mythological

allusions of the Irish language and turned a blind eye to the English presence and domination, as Hugh says, “It can happen that a civilization can be imprisoned in a linguistic contour that no longer matches the landscape of fact” (43), the landscape of colonial modernity, and to be more precise, of the English Ordnance Survey and the National Schools. Pathetically, the Irish people, imprisoned in their conservative and self-denying linguistic and cultural outlook, were crippled and could not withstand the historical overwhelming currents of modernity and modernization.

Two drastically different views on the issues of the English language and modernity are embodied in the strained relationship between Owen and Manus: “In this latent confrontation between brothers is epitomized the choice between a modern, Anglicized Ireland and a traditional, Gaelic one,” between a pragmatist ideology and a conservative and essentialist nationalist one (Richtarik 30). As a nationalist, Manus is implicated in a conflict between ideological rumination and the colonial reality: To accept and participate in colonial modernity would admit the justification of English rule in Ireland and “the success of the Union” (Morash 114-5), and to reject the English language and the English modernity would unyoke the Irish from the

“Anglocentric imperial narrative of progress” (Morash 114). Nevertheless, this rejection failed to uplift the Irish society from its protracted cultural and social stasis and to solve the problems of the latent poverty and emigration. The pragmatist view of Owen and the nationalist outlook of Manus are intertwined in the issue of English modernity—It represents advantages to Owen while it poses a threat to everything Manus holds dear.

Owen’s imperial participation—the pragmatism he exhibits in his adoption of the English language and the English colonial modernity—renders him in an ambivalent, if not awkward, position—he is both a colonial subject and agent. Caught between the two worlds of the Irish and English cultures (O’Brien 105), he belongs to neither the

Celtic nor the Anglo order. He is constantly under suspicion from both sides. Lancy, the general of the English army, mistrusts Owen of his inaccurate and sly translation;

Manus, the staunch nationalist in the play, questions his brother’s authentic Irishness by ridiculing him for allowing the English colonists to mistakenly call him “Roland.”

Owen vacillates in the limbo space without securing a stable foothold on either side.

This ambivalent and uncertain position affords him greater possibility of involving himself in the historical dynamism overwhelming Ireland, with affirmative or negative consequences depending on different views of interpreting the state of modernity in Ireland.

Owen’s case may be treated as the co-option and cooperation of local elites, as Manus accuses Owen of helping the English army commit crimes against the Irish people. To find a medium and a convincing spokesman for the promotion of the enterprise of colonialism in the colonized society, the colonizer often applies the strategy of co-option of the local elites who were given a certain limited power and some wealth in return for their service for the colonial masters. Their enlistment in the colonial service would have stemmed their roots in the local community, and, on the other hand, their native background would not make them an equal partner with their colonial masters for their loyalty to the colonial government is often under suspicion and their rights and lives are often sacrificed if the necessity arises. They were treated as puppets without agency: their immanent identity formed in the local culture has been sold for their buying the ideology of the colonizer, and thus they were reduced to be disgraced automatons that execute the orders issued by their colonial masters.

In the eyes of Manus, Owen is co-opted into the colonial conspiracy against the colonized Irish people, his own people. Owen works as a translator and interpreter for the English colonists, as he says, “My job is to translate the quaint, archaic tongue you people persist in speaking into the King’s good English” (29), which is countered by

Manus’s remarks, “[what Lancey said is] a bloody military operation, Owen!....What’s

‘incorrect’ about the place-names we have here?” (32). The Anglicization and standardization of the Irish place-names pose a serious threat of exterminating the autonomous state of the Celtic civilization, and Owen’s involvement in the English Ordnance Survey makes him an accomplice of the English scheming plot. Moreover, his possession of “ten big shops in Dublin…twelve horses and six servants” (27) makes him a superior class to his original family members who were still perspiring in the desperate and squalid lifestyle. The escape from the family poverty, from the national poverty, is seen as abandoning the Catholic teaching of endurance and patience required of the Irish people if they were to see the justice of God.

Furthermore, his closeness to the colonizer, to the center of colonial power, increases his people’s suspicion towards him. The expectation of his people that his proximity to the center of colonial power would motivate him to do something for the sake of his own people was failed when he remained reticent in the face of the impending

“ravishing” of “the whole parish” (62) if Yolland is not found. To the nationalist sympathizers, Owen is decried for being deprived of his agency and his identity in the sense that he has sold his soul in exchange for the limited interests the Empire grants him—a deal with the devil.

Manus’s view that Owen’s divided loyalty is a sign of weakness can be counterpoised to the argument that Owen has used modernity as a means for negotiation with English colonialism. Precisely because he is involved in the English project of modernity and modernization in Ireland, he can take advantage of the manipulatable space between the colonizer and the colonized. The duty to carry out the orders from his colonial masters is accompanied with some power, a power he can turn into a form of resistance. As Foucault points out, where there is power, there is resistance:

[I]n power relations there is necessarily the possibility of resistance because if there were no possibility of resistance (of violent resistance, flight, deception, strategies capable of reversing the situation), there would be no power relations at all. (Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth 292)

Embedded within the asymmetrical power relations between the colonizer and the colonized is the resistance stemming from the oppressed side, the “possibility of reversing the situation.” The adoption of the language of the colonizer and the involvement in the discourse of modernity facilitate a site from which to mount resistance.

Owen’ ability to speak the English language, the language of modernity, provides him with the site from which he can perform a game of resistance against his colonial masters. Owen’s translation of Lancey’s words is greatly simplified and inaccurate, and he strips the terms that signal power, authority and oppression in Lancey’s speech.

In formal and majestic language, Lancey says,

His Majesty’s government has ordered the first ever comprehensive survey of this entire country—a general triangulation which will embrace detailed hydrographic and topographic information and which will be executed to a scale of six inches to the English mile.

This enormous task has been embarked on so that the military authorities will be equipped with up-to-date and accurate information on every corner of this part of the Empire. (italics mine 31)

A sense of succinct and subversive playfulness predominates Owen’s translated passages:

A new map is being made of the whole country.

The job is being done by soldiers because they are skilled in this work.

(31)

One of the reasons for Owen’s intention of eliminating the italicized words is that there may not be equivalent terms for them in the Irish language. Nevertheless, it might be argued that Owen gets rid of the terms symbolizing power deliberately. All these terms carry power and oppression with them: “His majesty,” “military authorities” and “Empire” mean centuries of brutal foreign domination to the Irish, and the “English mile” means the categorical standardization and the Anglicization of the Irish culture, thus its displacement by the aggressive English culture.

If the Irish tongue was silenced due to the Great Famine and successive English policies of Anglicization, Owen’s adoption of the English language endows him with the power of enunciation. Most characters in the play, except Owen, Hugh and Maire, talk in an enclosed community in both Irish and Greek, indulging in the undistinguishable realm of facts and images/illusions, a situation portrayed most vividly in the person of Jimmy Jack, who is going to “get married [with] Pallas Athene at Christmas” (65). They are enclosed in the dumbness of the “enriched” Irish language without any exchange of words with Lancey and Yolland. Even if Manus can speak English, he chooses to be silent in his encounter with the English generals.

His attitude is reflected by what Jimmy Jack says: “You don’t cross the borders [of tribes and nations] casually—both sides get very angry” (68). This narrow and conservative attitude precludes any possibility of development of dialogue between the Irish and the English, thus any form of negotiation between them, which would accentuate the imperial binarism that formulates a version of Irishness, cast in racial terms, as equated with anachronicity and un-civilization, and thus reduced to linguistic reticence and identitarian inarticulacy.

In contrast to the self-chosen cultural and linguistic exclusion, a strategy the nationalist-oriented characters in the play use to maintain their identity and agency, Owen’s choice to speak English, the colonizer’s language, does not compromise his

agency and identity. Instead, this choice enables him with the power of enunciation:

Unlike Manus or Jimmy Jack who are willing to silence themselves in front of the colonizers, Owen carries on conversations in English with the colonizers, the conversations that foreshadow the possibility of negotiation between the colonizer and the colonized. Not blinded by Anglophile, Owen does not empty himself of Irish consciousness nor does he conform completely to the values of the English culture in spite of his ability to speak the English language and his responsibility for the Empire.

His knowledge of the allusion of the place-name, Tobair Vree, shows his attachment to the land of Ireland even if he has “left here” (44). Although the power of the final decision of the translation of this place-name rests in the hands of Yolland, the English general, Owen’s knowledge of the allusion compounded with his ability of the English language with which he is able to negotiate with Yolland secures the original name, Tobair Vree, and its meaning for the Irish people in the project of Ordnance Survey, so that Tobair Vree is not anglicized arbitrarily into “The Cross” or

“Crossroads” (44). Therefore, Owen’s adoption of the English language and his imperial participation do not result in his co-option by the colonial master nor the compromise of his agency and identity. In the end, he reinvents and restores himself as Owen.

Centuries of English colonial oppression and internal inertia have contributed to the cultural stasis of the Irish society, and this social stagnation is not going to be improved through the religious teachings of self-amelioration or the nationalist’s exclusivist and essentialist attitude because the Catholic and nationalist alliance was the very source of the despotism that made the social impasse in Irish society. Marx’s argument of the European power serving as the instrument for setting the static societies into revolutionary dynamism merits our attention: The English presence in and domination of Ireland, despite all those familiar stories of colonial exploitation,

have instilled historical dynamism into the static Irish society and provided the Irish people with some alternatives to the stagnation and oppression at home. The English presence in Ireland thus could awaken the hibernating Ireland and start, though by force, some negotiation between the two cultures. Thus, translation, as a trope for reexamining the legacies of English colonialism in Ireland, is not to be understood as a unilateral Anglicization of the Irish culture but as a process of negotiation between the English language and the Irish language, and between the English modernity and the Irish traditionalism. Despite unequal power relations, there is always manipulatable room for mounting resistance and initiating negotiations, as Foucault says that where there is power, there is resistance. It is just impossible to entrust the essentialist nationalists, like Manus, with the hope of the negotiation of power relations and cultural imbalance for they willfully imprison Ireland in medieval Celticism. A viable future lies in Manus and Hugh, who embody the spirit of dynamism of historical successions, for they are willing to recognize the inevitable trend of modernity overwhelming Ireland.