The Hermeneutic Motion in Brian Friel's Translations

The Hermeneutic Motion in Brian Friel's Translations ROBERT s. SMITH "I keep returning to the same texts: the letters of John O'Donovan, Colby's Memoir, A Paper Landscape by John Andrews, The Hedge-Schools ofIreland by Dowling, Steiner's AfterBabel.'" This record ofreading, from the' 'Sporadic Diary" which Brian Frielkept while writing his play, Translations, indicates the central place which written texts and traditions occupy in this playwright's attempt to understand his relation to the past. He could not simply translate himselfback into the pre-English environment in which the play is set. His sense of place, when he visited the site of the hedge-school at Urris, the model for the school in the play, was like that of' 'the ordinary British sappers" to a "remote, bleak, desolate strip ofland attenuated between mountain and sea" ("Sporadic Diary," p. 57). Objectivity and detachment are, of course, the conditions ofthe scientificmapping ofthe world. Morefundamentally, however,sciencebuilds its approach over an ontological "distance" which is a permanent condition of every effort to approach the past, the world, and others. "One aspect that keeps eluding me," Friel notes, is "the wholeness, the integrity, of that Gaelic past" (p. 58). Friel's reading witnesses to a distance which cannot be closed. In his treatise on hermeneutics, Truth andMethod, Hans-GeorgGadameruses the metaphor of a "fusion of horizons" of the past and present,' the ideal, if ever elusive goal at which interpretation aims: the horizon recedes as the observer approaches it. No doubt Brian Friel's sense of the magnitude of the problem of historical understanding motivated his repeated reading of George Steiner's After Babel, a book devoted to the history and theory of translation. The paradox of a play, in English, about an Irish-speiling community at the moment when it is being rendered, by translation, irrevocably past and speechless, points to the paradox of understanding in general. "Insofar as the fusion of horizons excludes the idea of a total and unique knowledge," comments Paul Ricoeur, .,this concept implies atension between what is one's (199I) 34 MODERN DRAMA 392 Henneneutic Motion in Friel's Translations 393 own and what is alien, between the near and the far; and hence the play of difference is included in the process ofconvergence.' "The taskofinterpretation is not to remove, but to make productive the refractory distance and otherness.' Brian Friel responds to the tension between near and far, in relation to the historical past, and between one's own and the other, in relation to languagethat is, to what Paul Ricoeur calls the "paradox of otherness" (p. 61) - by making it the subject of drama. Friel's primary source for this " henneneutic motion" is George Steiner's After Babel. Steiner is quoted extensively in the play: characters "speak his lines.", Richard Kearney' has drawn up an inventory of key passages from Steiner's book without, however, exploring theiruse by Friel. F.e. McGrath' has elaborated on many ofthe borrowings in the play, emphasizing Steiner'S notion of the counterfactual power of language. However, of even greater significance is the use which Friel makes of Steiner's description of the "henneneutic motion" proper. Describing "understanding as translation" (the title of his opening chapter) Steiner provides Friel with his central metaphor and dramatic action. " Translation is no specialized, secondary activity at the 'interface' between languages. It is the constant, necessary exemplification of the dialectical, at once welding and divisive nature of speech" (p. 235).' What the translator does laboriously and consciously, those who speak "the same language" do unconsciously. The translator amplifies and renders problematic the shadowy everyday situation. "Every understanding is actively interpretative. Even the most literal statement ". has a henneneutic dimension. It needs decoding. It means more or less or something other than it says" (p. 280). Language is elusive; the scholar learns the humility which infonns an epigraph to the book, a quotation from Martin Heidegger's meditation, "Poetically Man Dwells": "Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man." If language is only an implement or means of self-expression, then ambiguity is an obstruction of literal truth. However...