Language and Identity Theory

Translations is a play in which personal identity blends with national identity. It shows how the people of Ireland, because of their country’s history of colonization and struggle for independence, define themselves for the most part, as Irish above all. This is demonstrated in the play by the Irish characters’ identity crisis ensuing the renaming of the places of their motherland. In other words, in Ireland, impairing national identity equates to impairing personal identity. It is then important to pay close attention to the renaming of Irish places as it can be understood as having a crucial impact on the characters.

Renaming is power. The power to take control of a thing, or a person, and decide that from that moment on it or they are something/someone else. In his essay titled “Translations: The Ritual of Renaming”, Ronald Rollins quotes Michael Quingley who said in “Language of Conquest, Language of Survival” that “‘the naming of things has always been a magical act. The magic is, of course, an expression of power… Every people seem to have some ritual surrounding the naming of a person. Naming is one of our crucial, distinctive powers. We attach our presence, our magic, to the things we name” (35). This demonstration of power is illustrated in the play when Owen, working on the Name Book with Yolland in Act II, says: “We name a thing and – bang! – it leaps into existence!” (Friel 56) Making things “leap into existence” is indeed a very powerful act, almost an act of a divine nature. By giving themselves the right to rename Irish places, the British gave themselves this kind of power. Consequently, this was a way to assert their superiority and self-attributed right to change the essence of a nation. Dawn Duncan quotes Seamus Dean in her titled book Postcolonial Theory in Irish Drama from 1800- 2000, who argues that“‘Field Day’s preoccupation with naming’ is directly related to claims of priority" and that "the naming or renaming of places, the naming or renaming of a race, a region, a person, is, like all acts of primordial nomination, an act of possession” (Duncan 204). The objective of the anglicizing of Irish places was therefore to establish such control in order “to dissociate the Irish from their past and to control their future” (Rollins 36). Rollins states that “tragically the translating process which replaces all the Irish place-names with new, standardized English ones surgically cuts off the natives from their culture – their living geography, history, mythology and literature – and leaves them stranded and apprehensive in a strange, new world with unfamiliar language” (35). Through this process of renaming, the British succeeded in completely uprooting the Irish from their past. However, the process did not stop there as it extended to the Irish education system. Translations is also a play about the establishment of National Schools throughout Ireland, schools in which students were allowed to speak only English. Thus, the British not only took control of the Irish people’s past (renaming of places), but also their future through this new “education process,” and “especially the use of language” (Rollins 36).

English is considered, as suggested in the play, the language of “progress and commerce” (Rollins 35). Ireland, being a colony of the Empire, could not show the signs of backwardness and stagnation which were associated with the Irish language. This reminds us of Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The Whiteman’s Burden”, in which he expresses the idea that it is the white men’s duty to rid the colonized indigenous people of their primitive habits and enlighten them with culture and civilization in order for them to reflect a positive image of the Empire. For this reason, the renaming of Irish was a deliberate attempt to eradicate Irish culture and language. Author of "Translations, the Field Day debate and the re-imagining of Irish identity", Martine Pelletier says:

Translations dramatizes this key transitional moment when Irish gave way to English, when a culture was forced to translate itself into a different linguistic landscape. The Ordnance Survey map acts as a powerful metaphor of the transformation of this linguistic and cultural environment. Irish loses the ability to describe what is, and becomes, like Latin and Greek, a language that is only capable of saying what used to be (68).

In other words, the Irish become unable to name the world they live in. Therefore, not only does the imposition of English in Ireland create a painful feeling of estrangement for the Irish people, but it also made them illiterates. As Rollins puts it, it “instantly reduc[ed] the Irish to cultural illiterates, to tongue-tied children uncertain about their identities” (41). Thus we understand the intricate connection between language and identity: because the Irish see their language and culture being taken away from them to be replaced by another, they do not know who they are, where they belong and who they are related to anymore (qtd in Duncan). They are strangers to their own country.

Altogether, most characters in Translations go through a similar identity crisis. However, the focus of this website’s ontological page is more on the characters who differ from it. The purpose of our discussion is to show that the play presents a common identity crisis, but that it can also take different forms.

Our main focus is on the three following characters:

1) Owen, who is in an in-between situation as he seems to have rallied to the British cause but yet does not deny his Irish roots.

2) Yolland, the British Hibernophile who dreams of living in Ireland and becoming part of the community.

3) Maire, who although she does not deny her Irish origins, sees the English language as the language of progress and modernity and sees Gaelic as the language of the past and stagnation.

Works Consulted:

Duncan, Dawn. "A Flexible Foundation: Constructing a Postcolonial Dialogue." 2002. Relocating Postcolonialism. Ed. David Theo Goldberg and Ato Quayson. Bodmin: Blackwell, 2002. 320-32. Print.

Friel, Brian. Translations. London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1981. Print.

Pelletier, Martine. "Translations, the Field Day debate and the re-imagining of Irish identity." The Cambridge Companion to Brian Friel. Ed. Anthony Roche. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 66-77. Print.

Rollins, Ronald. "Translations: The Ritual of Renaming." The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 11.1 (Jun. 1985): 35-43. JSTOR. Web. 17 Feb. 2014.

Written By: Fanny Robuchon