User:Keenan.Churchill/New sandbox

The new sections, 'Politicization' & 'Post-Colonialism' are to be added to the separate Translations wiki page.

Politics
Translations as a play focuses primarily on language issues through the lense of 19th century rural Ireland. However through the choice of setting, Friel reveals his attempt to maintain an ideological distance from the ongoing Northern Irish Troubles and the era's extremely divisive political climate. As Friel said of the process of dislocating Translations from the political context of the late 70's and early 80's, "I know of no Irish writer who is not passionately engaged in our current problems. But he must maintain perspective as a writer, and - equally important - he will write about the situation in terms that may not relate even remotely to the squalor of Here and Now." Friel saw Translations, in his own words as, "...Stepping stones to the other side." In light of these quotations, Translations emerges as an attempt by Friel to reconcile of the divided state of Northern Ireland. This goal was the explicit driving force behind the first production of Translations. Translations premiered on September 23rd, 1980, in Derry's Guildhall, a symbol of Unionism in the politically divided city, the staging of the play there an overt political message of reconciliation attempted by Friel. Within Translations, the relationship between Yolland and Máire speaks strongly to the binary of political belief in Northern Ireland. The couple, who cannot speak one another's language, never-the-less fall in love, a potent metaphor for the lack of communication between the politically divided communities of Northern Ireland. Friel marked Translations as trying to, "...find some kind of generosity that can embrace the whole island."

Post-Colonialism
Friel's engagement with post-colonialism in Translations arises primarily through an examination of the language issues of 19th century Ireland. As Friel himself said of Translations, it, "...has to do with language and only language,” Friel's often quoted denial of the other themes in Translations, is directly at odds with other statements, "...Of course, it‘s also concerned with the English presence here. No matter how benign they may think it has been, finally the presence of any foreigner in your land is malign." Friel's creation of Translations was inspired by two colonizing projects of the British. Firstly, the ending of independent 'hedgerow' schools which taught subjects in the Irish language, to be replaced with English language schools. Secondly, the Ordnance Survey which sought to create standardizations of Irish maps, primarily through the Anglicization of Irish place-names. Friel uses these two historical events as the framing for his discussion of Colonialism within Translations. As Frantz Fanon said, colonialism, "...turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures and destroys it." In this sense, Friel highlights the colonial nature of the projects depicted in Translations, literally 'distorting' the landscape of Ireland by the loss her native place-names. One such example of Anglicization provided by the play in the renaming of an Irish river. The characters, Yolland and Owen reject the use of its Irish name, in place choosing a new name, 'Burnfoot', at random. The Irish place name is washed over and replaced with a meaningless English one, a potent allusion to the power of the colonizer, imposing linguistic and cultural domination over the physical spaces of Ireland by the elimination of her native names. The colonial projects depicted in Translations are used by Friel to discuss post-colonial tensions in modern Northern Ireland. Edward Said, noted post-colonial scholar said of Translations, “Brian Friel’s immensely resonant play Translations...immediately calls forth many echoes and parallels in an Indian, Algerian, or Palestinian reader...the silencing of their voices, the renaming of places and replacement of languages by the imperial outsider, the creation of colonial maps and divisions also implied the attempted reshaping of societies, the imposition of foreign languages and other forms of dispossession."

bits n' pieces
In 1988, The Field Day Review published a pamphlet titled 'Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature' highlighting noteworthy authors of the post-colonial and nationalist discourse. The pamphlet included the works of notable authors of post-colonial discourse like Edward Said, Terry Eagleton and Fredric James.

Friel, despite his extensive engagement with Northern Irish politics and culture through his plays held complicated personal views in regards to politics questions his play's engaged with. Friel's first overtly political play, The Freedom of the City, was written in the wake of The Bloody Sunday Riots of which Friel was personal witness to. Friel began to examine the political, cultural, ethnic and religious divide in Northern Ireland through plays such as Volunteers and Living Quarters.

1959 – 1975
Friel's first radio plays were produced by Ronald Mason for the BBC Northern Ireland Home Service in 1958: A Sort of Freedom (16 January 1958) and To This Hard House (24 April 1958). Friel began writing short stories for The New Yorker in 1959 and subsequently published two well-received collections: The Saucer of Larks (1962) and The Gold in the Sea (1966). These were followed by A Doubtful Paradise, his first stage play, produced by the Ulster Group Theatre in late August 1960. Friel also wrote 59 articles for The Irish Press, a Dublin-based party-political newspaper, from April 1962 to August 1963; this series included short stories, political editorials on life in Northern Ireland and Donegal, his travels to Dublin and New York City, and his childhood memories of Derry, Omagh, Belfast, and Donegal.

Early in Friel's career, the Irish journalist Sean Ward even referred to him in an Irish Press article as one of the Abbey Theatre's "rejects". Friel's play, The Enemy Within (1962) enjoyed success, despite only being on Abbey stage for 9 performances. Belfast's Lyric Theatre revived it in September 1963 and the BBC Northern Ireland Home Service and Radio Éireann both aired it in 1963. Although Friel later withdrew The Blind Mice (1963), it was by far his most successful play of his very early period, playing for 6 weeks at Dublin's Eblana Theatre, revived by the Lyric, and broadcast by Radio Éireann and the BBC Home Service almost ten times by 1967. Friel had a short stint as "observer" at Tyrone Guthrie's theater in early-1960s Minneapolis; he remarked on it as "enabling" in that it gave him "courage and daring to attempt things".

Shortly after returning from his time at the Tyrone Guthrie Theatre, Friel wrote Philadelphia Here I Come! (1964). The play made him instantly famous in Dublin, London, and New York. The Loves of Cass McGuire (1966), and Lovers (1967) were both successful in Ireland, with Lovers also popular in The United States. Despite Friel's successes in playwriting, Friel saw himself as primarily a short story writer, in an 1965 interview stating, "I don't concentrate on the theatre at all. I live on short stories."

Friel then turned his attention to the politics of the day, releasing The Mundy Scheme (1969) and Volunteers (1975), both pointed, the first bitter, satires on Ireland's government. The latter stages an archaeological excavation on the day before the site is turned over to a hotel developer, and uses Dublin's Wood Quay controversy as its contemporary point of reference. In that play, the Volunteers are IRA prisoners who have been indefinitely interned by the Dublin government, and the term Volunteer is both ironic, in that as prisoners they have no free will, and political, in that the IRA used the term to refer to its members. Using the site as a physical metaphor for the nation's history, the play's action examines how Irish history has been commodified, sanitized, and oversimplified to fit the political needs of society.

In 1968 Friel was living in Derry City, a hotbed of the Irish Civil Rights Movement, where incidents such as the Battle of the Bogside inspired Friel's choice to write a new play set in Derry. The play Friel began drafting in Derry would become, The Freedom of the City. Friel, defying a British government ban, marched with the Civil Rights Association against the policy of internment. The protest Friel took part in was the infamous Bloody Sunday protests of 1972. In an 1983 interview, Friel spoke of how his personal experience of being fired upon by British soldiers during the Bloody Sunday riot, greatly affected the drafting of The Freedom of the City as a political play. Friel in speaking of the incident, recalled, "It was really a shattering experience that the British army, this disciplined instrument, would go in as they did that time and shoot thirteen people...to have to throw yourself on the ground because people are firing at you is really a terrifying experience."