35 pages • 1 hour read
Brian FrielTranslations
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1981A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Act IChapter Summaries & Analyses
Act I Summary
The first act begins on an August day in 1883, in the Irish agricultural village of Baile Beag. The scene is a hedge school run by Hugh O’Donnell, an erudite man who teaches Irish language to the villagers, along with Latin and Greek literature. His oldest son, Manus—a man in his late 20s who is “lame” (1) and wears shabby clothes—serves as an unpaid teaching assistant. In the opening scene, Manus works patiently with a young woman named Sarah, who has a severe speech impediment, teaching her how to pronounce her own name. It is clear from this scene that Sarah harbors a secret infatuation with Manus, but he does not appear to return her feelings.
While they wait for Hugh to return from a baptismal service he’s performing in town, Hugh’s old bachelor friend, Jimmy Jack, reads from the Aeneid and waxes about the “flashing eyes” (4) of Athene. An attractive young woman, Maire, arrives bearing a pail of milk. Maire joins Jimmy in speaking what little Latin she knows, reflecting that she wishes she knew English. The only English Maire knows is a saying acquired from her Aunt Mary, when Maire was four: “In Norfolk we besport ourselves around the maypoll” (8). Maire has memorized the saying without learning what it means. The only English word Jimmy Jack knows, “bosom” (9), bespeaks his obsession with mythical women.
Two young villagers, Doalty and Bridget, enter the schoolhouse and speak about the British Royal Engineers, who are conducting the first Ordinance Survey. Doalty describes his quiet sabotage of the soldiers’ map-making operation: to disrupt the soldiers’ measurements, Doalty moves the surveyor’s poles when they aren’t looking (11). Conversation briefly shifts to the Donnelly twins, who usually attend class at the hedge school but have not been present in some time. Doalty proclaims he has no idea where they are, but the viewer is led to imagine he may indeed have some knowledge of their whereabouts (15). Bridget begins to discuss the brothers’ subversive activities against the British, but quickly realizes what she’s saying and changes the subject. Moving on from the Donnellys, Maire describes a map of America she’s working on, explaining that she wants to move abroad once the crops have been harvested (16). Doalty hints, however, that the harvest this year may be rotten, describing an ominous “sweet smell” (17) coming from the fields.
Hugh enters the school, jovial after his celebratory drinking. He speaks of the British soldiers and their leader, Captain Lancey, who seemed surprised to learn that the locals didn’t speak English. Maire discusses the opinions of progressive Irish leader Dan O’Connell, who believes that the Irish need to learn English as soon as possible to aid in their understanding of the British. Quoting O’Connell, Maire quips that “the old language is a barrier to modern progress” (25).
Hugh’s younger son, Owen, enters the schoolhouse and greets everyone warmly, returning home for the first time in several years. Owen is currently employed by the British army to work on the map survey of Ireland, much to the displeasure of his father and brother. Owen explains that he serves as a translator for his English colleagues, so they can translate place names on the map and communicate with the Irish-speaking villagers.
Owen introduces Captain Lancey, a cartographer who is responsible for making the map, and Lieutenant Yolland, an orthographer, who is responsible for the map’s text. A strong attraction stirs between Maire and Yolland, the latter of whom shyly requests that Owen teach him Irish.
Act I Analysis
Although the first act (and the entirety) of Translations takes place within the hedge school, the play reads like a map of, and guideto, small-town Irish culture. Here, Hugh is not merely headmaster of the hedge school, but a steward of the town, performing a baptismal ceremony for a newborn child. When Manus inquires about Hugh’s whereabouts with Sarah, his line of questioning (a list of different place names where he could be) provides a panorama of this small town, ending, of course, with the bar. In this vein, drinking is introduced as a motif and symbol for Irish culture: Hugh is frequently taking drinks of the poteen (whiskey) from Anna na mBreag, though he never appears fully intoxicated.
Act I also introduces language, communication barriers, and translation between languages as major themes of the play. The first act begins on an optimistic note, as Manus successfully coaches Sarah to pronounce her name, declaring that she will now be able to share the unspoken secrets that have lived in her head for years. By learning to articulate her thoughts, Manus believes, Sarah will demonstrate her intelligence to the villagers, who assume (because of her speech impediment) she is intellectually disabled. This optimism is complicated, however, even within the play’s first act, as the play illustrates the disparity of perspective between Manus and Sarah. For Manus, Sarah is merely a student; at most, she is a symbolic extension of his own desire to traverse the barriers he experiences as someone with a disability (described as his “lameness”). For Sarah, however, these lessons are a means of gaining attention from Manus, for whom she harbors obvious romantic feelings (as demonstrated when she gives him a flower and attempts to divert his attention from Maire).
With her reference to the Irish politician Daniel O’Connell’s words—“The old language is a barrier to modern progress” (25)—Maire introduces the idea of English-language acquisition as a form of necessary progress. Though he speaks English, Hugh is initially resistant toward the idea of teaching it because he knows that part of the British imperialist aim is to wean the Irish away from their native language. Hugh feels—initially—that when an Irish person translates their thoughts into English, they betray the rich traditions and history embodied by Irish language. He opts, instead, to teach Latin (another “dead” language) because he identifies the Irish struggles under British rule with those of the epic poets, who wrote of their similar conflicts with Roman imperialism. In light of this conflict, Act I suggests (mostly unseen) stirrings of local uprisings among the people of Baile Beag, both in the form of Doalty’s small pole-shifting sabotage and the Donnelly twins suggested underground uprising.
There are those from Baile Beag who have a more fluid understanding of communication, however, and they desire to engage with cultures beyond the village (which is to say, beyond their reading and recitation of classic texts). Owen notably left his home village and moved to Dublin for this very reason, and now returns to Baile Beag to profit from his dually-ambivalent position: as someone who is both a local and a man of the city, and as someone who speaks both Irish and English. Maire is another young resident who has a more complicated view toward her homeland. She shares her plan to immigrate to America after the harvest is over. Strains of a foreboding “sweet smell” (17) however, suggest the beginnings of the Great Irish Hunger (or Potato Famine), and the viewer understands that this harvest will likely fail. In addition to referencing this significant moment in Irish history, these allusions to potato blight generate a sense of dread, and an understanding that life in Baile Beag is about to undergo devastating changes.
