The Gaelic People

So it makes sense that as a writer, one would have a healthy respect for language. (At least, you would hope so.) But in his 1980 play Translations, Brian Friel suggests that in for the Irish, language is not only important—it’s the core of their very identity. Translations is set in 1833 in the fictional town of Ballybeg in Donegal, Northern Ireland. A group of English soldiers have come to the town as part of an initiative to map all of Ireland, and part of this mapping includes “standardizing” (ie, Anglicizing) Irish place-names. The English characters speak only English, and several of the Irish characters speak only Gaelic, but this is shortly to be remedied by the foundation of a new, free public school system in Ireland, in which only English will be spoken. According to my director, the generation of young people represented in the play is the last to speak only Irish; our hypothetical children will go to the National School and speak English at school and Irish at home, and their children will speak almost exclusively English. Thus in one generation the Irish national language is almost swept away, relegated to something studied in school or spoken in a few remote hamlets.

The unease that one of the English soldiers, Yolland, feels about the erosion of the Irish language is dismissed by Owen, a native of Ballybeg who has lived in Dublin for six years and is now working with the English army.  (Sorry for that abominable use of the passive voice there, dear readers.) Owen’s older brother Manus, who has never left Ballybeg, finds it extremely disquieting that the mapmaking is being carried out by soldiers—“It’s a bloody military operation, Owen,” he says. The play is skillfully constructed so that this relatively gentle, apparently innocuous act of English imperialism—changing place-names into English—foreshadows the physical brutality at the end of the play as the English, seeking information on the now-missing Yolland, plan to kill all the livestock in Ballybeg (this is in a society, remember, where agriculture and livestock are so critical to survival that stealing someone’s horse or sheep is a capital offense). If they still have not found their missing officer, they will begin evicting and leveling every house in the parish, rendering all the inhabitants homeless. This violent plan of action comes as a shock to most of the characters onstage when it is announced, but one has the sense that if Yolland or Manus were present, they would consider it no more than a physical extension of the linguistic and cultural attack the British were already carrying out.

Friel’s argument, articulated most eloquently by Hugh, the bombastic but astute Irish schoolmaster, is that language defines identity. This is a question that could be taken back to the most abstract philosophical grounds—does language define existence and thought? Is to think of something to name it?—and a conversation between Owen and Yolland compares their place-naming to God in the garden of Eden, naming things and bringing them into existence. But Hugh also argues that language, and the oral and written cultural heritage that accompanies it, is particularly important in Ireland. He tells Yolland, “Certain cultures expend on their vocabularies and syntax acquisitive energies and ostentations entirely lacking in their material lives…It is our response to mud cabins and a diet of potatoes, our only method of replying to…inevitabilities.” He says dismissively of English that it’s a language “particularly suited” to commerce, as opposed to Gaelic’s suitability to romance, mythology, fantasy and hope. In a land of extremely impoverished, poorly educated and politically oppressed people, the spiritual and intellectual treasures of their accumulated literature and history is all the Irish have in the way of pride in themselves and gifts to hand down to their children. And in this way, we see, the leveling of homes and killing of livestock is only a temporary, limited, if devastating attack on a few individuals; the leveling of the Irish language is an attack on an entire people.