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Irish Babel: Brian Friel's Translations and George Steiner's After Babel F. C. McGrath Literary history sometimes provides us with the opportunity to observe the supernova-like flash that appears when one imagination catches fire from another, when two natures die into each other's embrace and emerge in the beautiful new light of another world. We witness such brilliance at the intersection of Shakespeare and Plutarch, of Schiller and Goethe, of Kant and Coleridge, of Hegel and Marx. Contemporary critics refer to this phenomenon in lusterless technological jargon as intertextuality . Recently one of these rare flashes has resulted from the intersection of George Steiner's scholarly text on language and translation with the dramatic skill and imagination of Brian Friel. The play Translations was the beautiful new world that flared into existence when Steiner's After Babel intruded into Friel's orbit and penetrated a dark Irish world that appropriated its energy, assimilated its mass, and drew its orbit into its own. When we observe how Friel incorporated Steiner's insights about language and translation into his own play, what emerges is Friel's genius for converting seemingly recalcitrant abstract material into compelling dramatic metaphors. In this ability he matches Tom Stoppard. Because Friel's metaphors are less obtrusive and more smoothly integrated into the structure and texture of the drama, they do not dazzle us as much as Stoppard 's. Their ingenuity, however, is easily equal to Stoppard's, and they are more compelling because they derive from the F. C. McGRATH is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Southern Maine, where he teaches nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature. He is the author of a book, The Sensible Spirit: Water Pater and the Modernist Paradigm, and a number of essays on Pater, Yeats, Joyce, and Friel. 31 32Comparative Drama emotional fabric of the drama. Our awe at the intellectual and dramatic acrobatics in plays like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Travesties, or Jumpers is tempered by the distance Stoppard maintains from the conceptions he so agilely endows with dramatic life, by the apparent lack of connection between those conceptions and Stoppard's own most deeply felt convictions . We cannot say the same about Friel. His profoundest emotional attachments as well as his theatrical ingenuity enliven his dramatic creations. Several critics have noted Friel's debt to Steiner and his deft metamorphosis of scholarly argument into living drama. None of them, however, has shown how pervasively and ingeniously Friel has woven Steiner's book into the narrative fabric of Translations? It is as if Steiner's insights and ideas provided the warp and Friel's Irish materials the woof in the play's design. After Babel interweaves Friel's narrative material about hedge schools and ordnance surveys in several ways. At the most global level Steiner's Heideggerian, post-structuralist epistemology reinforced a similar though perhaps less systematic orientation in Friel. Beyond appropriating Steiner's general epistemological orientation, Friel also introduced many of Steiner's ideas into Translations in much more concrete ways. The most obvious of these implants are some direct quotations from After Babel given to the central character Hugh, the hedge-school master; but certain scenes and characters also had their genesis in passages from After Babel. Remarkably, some of these scenes and characters seem the least likely to have originated in scholarly linguistic abstractions. Friel first turned to Steiner's After Babel as part of his preparation for "translating" Chekhov's Three Sisters into Irish English.2 After Babel provided Friel with a thorough and contemporary theory of translation, but Steiner's Heideggerian notions of translation extended far beyond translating between languages to investigate the fundamental nature of all language and communication. In the end Steiner provided Friel not only with a rationale for his Chekhov "translation" but also with the inspiration for two plays—Translations and The Communication Cord. Friel constructs the intellectual framework of Translations out of the central thesis of After Babel and several of its corollaries . Steiner organizes his book around the conviction that all communication, even witiiin a single language, involves transía- F. C. McGrath33 tion. The corollaries that Steiner derives from this thesis and...

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