Of silly words and the prose of peace

'MASTER, WHAT does the word 'always' mean?" It is the question a young Irish-speaking girl asks her teacher toward the end of Irish writer Brian Friel's brilliant play, "Translations," a drama partially about the uprooting of the Irish language by the English in early 19th century Ireland. Hugh, the schoolmaster who teaches an eager group of rural students Latin and Greek but not English, responds to the inquiry by suggesting that "it's not a word I'd start with. It's a silly word, girl."

The play was first performed in Derry -- called Londonderry by most Protestants -- in 1980 during the height of Northern Ireland's "troubles." With its themes of English invasion, cultural domination and the brutal imposition of military power, "Translations" was initially embraced as the authoritative dramatic rendering of the English domination of Ireland. But Friel, who has never been content to allow his art to be imprisoned by political ideology, concluded that a good deal of "pious rubbish" was written about the play.

Friel did not intend "Translations" to be a political tract but more an ambiguous meditation on the devastating effect of colonialism and the often debilitating consequences of living in a world of illusions. Jimmy Jack, one of the Irish students, spends most of the play pitifully fantasizing about an impending marriage to the Greek goddess Athena, but he ends up impotently drunk while the British army ravages his community.

At the end of the play, the schoolmaster surrenders to the inevitable. "We must learn those new [English] names," Hugh tells his students. "We must learn to make them our own."

In the collision of Irish and English worlds and words, Friel's rejection of the static and certain "always" was accepted ruefully, acknowledging the trauma of change but also the risk of becoming trapped by myths and rituals that no longer corresponded to reality.

Over the last few weeks, several of Friel's dramatic works have been mounted in Ireland. Although a number of his plays are set in the isolated and fictional village of Ballybeg, the themes that Friel mines are universal: the slippery relationship between narrative history and the "facts"; the loss and preservation of personal and communal memory; and the ways in which the creative use of language is implicated in solving intractable political conflicts.