January Conference 1999
THEATRE
: ANCIENT & MODERN
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(Mis)Translating
Tragedy: Irish Poets and Greek Plays
Des O'Rawe, Queens University, Belfast, U.K.
'It
pained him that he did not know well what politics meant and
that he did not know where the universe ended.'[1]
One of the more
curious developments in contemporary Irish poetry has been its
engagement with classical Greek drama. Given the range of 'translators'
(chiefly, Tom Paulin, Seamus Heaney, Brendan Kennelly, Desmond
Egan and Derek Mahon) and texts (Antigone, Prometheus,
Philoktetes, Medeia, Trojan Women and Bakkhai)
one might be forgiven for thinking that no (male) Irish poet's
œuvre can any longer be considered complete without
at least one published version of a Greek play.[2]
This translational tendency (tradition) is hardly remarkable
in a culture peculiarly alert to the poetics and politics of
bilingualism, a culture where the act of translation, whether
from the Irish, East European or Classical canons, yields potent
metaphors that signify 'the degree to which … inherited
definitions of national life, of social origins and expectations,
fail to account for much individual and collective experience'.[3]
Such an explanation suggests that the preponderance of translations
from Greek drama, particularly tragic drama, is less a coincidental
activity than a collective project, a discrete cultural product
of the Ireland's post-colonial condition: 'These Irish writers
seem to be harnessing the transfixing energy of Greek tragedy
– the snakes of Medusa's hair – in order to inspire
political and social change rather than maintain the status
quo'.[4]
This paper argues
that the celebration of these plays as catalysts of political
and social transformation exaggerates both the dissident potential
of the translational act in Ireland, and the availability of
mainstream Irish theatre to genuinely radical, éngagé
even, productions. Comparisons with dissident translations in
other 'occupied' or post-colonial situations are tantalising,
but contemporary Ireland, North and/or South, is hardly Vichy
France and, as W.J. McCormack has cautioned: 'The urge to associate
Ireland with the Third World has many virtues to recommend it,
but a clear conception of Ireland's relation to the first is
not always assisted'.[5] While
not suggesting that such practices should be discouraged, this
paper is arguing that future Irish translators (and critics)
must attend to a wider range of aesthetic and performative issues
before assuming the availability of Greek tragedy to allegory
and ideology. The structure of the discussion that follows,
and the selection of plays, is based on the general hypothesis
that versions of Greek plays by contemporary Irish poets, and
their critical reception, tend to fixate around one of three
translational/interpretative options: the 'tragedy' of political
violence in the North (Paulin and Heaney), the tension between
residual and emergent social values in the South (Kennelly),
and the procedure of subordinating culturally comparative possibilities
to the quest for lexical equivalence (Egan). In lieu
of a translational approach that can successfully eschew such
susceptibility to the paradigmatic and resistance to the polyvalent,
Irish poets have continued to (mis)translate tragedy.
Tom Paulin's 1984
version of Antigone (The Riot Act) and Seamus
Heaney's 1990 version of Philoktetes (The Cure at
Troy) were both written and produced under the ideological
auspices of the Field Day Theatre Company,[6]
with both writers situating Sophocles within a distinctly Northern
Irish context. While there is a certain plausibility in Richard
Jones's contention that '[i]n neither of these plays …
does a particular political creed dominate either the action
or the perception of it',[7] this
type of reading, in foregrounding the 'language question' and,
more specifically, the ways in which the Irish-English idiom
is used to ensure that 'political issues are dealt with obliquely',[8]
can exaggerate the amount of ideological free-play available
to, or desired by, Paulin, Heaney (and Field Day). Both The
Riot Act and The Cure at Troy remain inseparable
from their immediate political contexts. The life-span
of any translated text is short, particularly if it invests
heavily in the political imagery and rhetoric of the moment.
Caught between the dubious metaphysics of Field Day and the
contingent mess of developments on the ground, The Riot Act
and The Cure at Troy continue to (mis)translate.
Field Day may have
been less 'a doctrinaire enterprise [than] an enterprise which
[was] alert to the world beyond the constrictions of Irish cultural
debate',[9] but neither was it
ever a particularly subversive movement anxious to deconstruct
colonised/coloniser, Green/Orange opposition/s by amplifying
Ireland's subaltern voices:[10]
one person's 'fifth province' is another's 'tiocfaidh ár
lá'.[11] Colin Graham,
in commenting on Seamus Deane's 'Introduction' to Nationalism,
Colonialism and Literature,[12]
indicates how the absence of a Subaltern Studies critique limits
Field Day's post-colonial reading of Irish culture:
While Subaltern
Studies are able to produce a critique of post-colonial nationalism
as an imitative, repressive entity and to focus on those groups
within society for whom nationalism has been a continuity
of oppression, Deane inverts post-colonial dissent against
nationalism to the point where it is forced to return to the
ethical origins of post-colonialism. 'British nationalism',
because Irish nationalism copied it, is to blame. Deane's
implication is that Irish nationalism, without the pernicious
influence of Britain, would have been liberating – the
Subaltern Studies critique, in my view, insists that nationalism
per se is restrictive, over-homogenising and repressive.[13]
Although Graham
concedes, albeit via negativa, that Field Day does 'provide
an interesting path towards a post-colonial reading of Irish
culture', his emphasis on the Company's critical, rather that
its theatrical, repertoire tends to preclude a consideration
of Field Day's policy of commissioning 'translated' texts.[14]
Paulin's and Heaney's translations from Sophocles were part
of a wider 'post-nationalist' agenda and appear alongside productions
of 'translated' works from Chekhov, Molière and Athol
Fugard.[15] Within this context,
it was hardly surprising that Field Day has been attracted to
Classical texts, nor that Translations, the company's
inaugural production is famously replete with references to
classical writings and writers.[16]
Ironically, Field Day's translational practices may have owed
as much to the impact of 'revisionism',[17]
as to any 'recognition that it is necessary to look beyond Ireland
in order to examine the condition of Ireland'.[18]
The cultural transmission of the Classics, after all, had been
commonly associated with the colonial education system and the
hegemony of the Anglo-Irish élite. By the mid-1980s,
such assumptions were being challenged by 'revisionism', which
in interrogating some of the certainties associated with Anglo-Irish
hegemony ,[19] doubtless assisted
in weakening the nexus between classicism and colonialism. Unfortunately,
such cultural anomalies (and further subaltern possibilities)
found little or no expression in the Field Day/Revisionism debates
of the 1980s and 1990s. If anything, Paulin's and Heaney's recruitment
of Sophocles to re-mythologize the condition of the North in
The Riot Act and The Cure at Troy can emerge as being disappointingly
symptomatic of this carefully regulated 'battle of the books'
.[20]
When Paulin came
to write his version of Antigone in the early 1980s the
political situation in Northern Ireland had moved into another
new but no less uncertain phase. The IRA (Irish Republican Army)
had enjoyed wide-spread nationalist sympathy for its 1981 Hunger
Strike and its political wing, Sinn Féin had gained 13.4%
of the popular vote in the North and a Westminster seat in the
1983 General Election. The political scene was dominated by
debates about the Prevention of Terrorism Act, 'Supergrass Trials',
and the continued improbability of a consociational settlement.
In August 1984, one month before The Riot Act was premiered,
serious rioting broke out in West Belfast when the RUC (Royal
Ulster Constabulary) attempted to arrest the Irish-American
(NORAID) fund-raiser Martin Galvin. In the mêlée
that ensued a civilian bystander, Sean Downes, was killed by
a plastic bullet. Serious rioting continued for the rest of
that week and on August 16 the RUC were shot at during riots
on the Shankill Road. Four days later allegations of an RUC
'Shoot to Kill' policy gathered further credibility with the
resignation of the Armagh Coroner, who found 'grave irregularities'
in the RUC files relating to the shooting of two Republicans
in 1982.[21] This immediate
context remains crucial to any understanding of The Riot
Act's ideological remit and reception. Paulin is nothing
if not attentive to the 'moment' and it may now be more instructive
to read The Riot Act in conjunction with his 1987 dramatic
satire, The Hillsborough Script than with his other translational
foray into Greek tragedy, Seize the Fire (1990).[22]
Generally, Paulin's
sense of an appropriate poetic is maintained throughout The
Riot Act. The timbre is terse and measured, at times
reminiscent of W.R. Rogers's sardonic characterisation of Ulster
(speech):
I am Ulster, my
people an abrupt people
Who like the spiky consonants in speech
and think the soft ones cissy; who dig
the k and t in orchestra, detect sin
in sinfonia, get a kick out of
Tin cans, fricatives, fornication, staccato talk,
Anything that gives or takes attack … [23]
The adaptation of
the chorus's 'Ode to Man'(23-4), however, does an injustice
to the (Sophoclean) significance of this speech, although
its ironic tempo fits well into Paulin's collection of poems,
Fivemiletown,[24] 'where
poems repeatedly draw analogies emphasising the parallelism
between personal and institutional histories, only to undercut
the stability of each'.[25] Similarly,
the play's deployment of Irish-English, like its plethora of
'Protestant' images ('The stage is the grey of bedrock. Triangles,
Masonic symbols, neo-classical architrave'(9)) may have
more to do with Paulin's own aesthetic concerns than with correcting
Conor Cruise O'Brien.[26] Despite
Paulin's abject disenchantment with O'Brien (post-1968), and
in particular 'O'Brien's inability to understand [Antigone]',[27]
both writers occupy positions which can at times seem more complementary
than contradictory. As an advocate of imaginative, secular,
republicanism, who has remarked upon the ease with which 'Romantic
ideas of authenticity, rootedness, traditional crafts and folklore,
take on the stink of power politics and genocide' [28]
(in a book comprised of essays that are, in part, 'stages towards
a work which would seek to complement O'Brien's remarkable [1952]
study of the Catholic imagination, Maria Cross'[29]),
Paulin is certainly close to occupying the same category of
Irish intellectual dissidence as Conor Cruise O'Brien.
The assumption that
The Riot Act is mainly a corrective to O'Brien's ethical
rehabilitation of Creon through Ismene, and 'severe distortion
of the tragic conflict',[30]
must give some consideration to such anomalies. Paulin's play,
even with its return to Hegel and its re-assertion of 'the pre-individual
state of the camps in the North of Ireland',[31]
is both an important contribution to Field Day's oppositional
critique of the causes of contemporary political violence in
the North and an opportunity for Paulin to further assert the
linguistic integrity of Ulster-English.[32]
It is chiefly within this latter context that The Riot Act
merits critical attention. If we still look to Antigone
to elucidate the moral and political questions posed by political
events in Northern Ireland, like the violation of the dead (the
missing corpses of the 'Disappeared')[33]
or cultural Creonism (in both its Unionist and Nationalist forms),
Sophocles' original remains more illuminating than Paulin's
'version'. While Paulin's translation may be less 'cynical'
than O'Brien's sophistry, it too is 'pragmatically rigged'.[34]
As Christopher Murray comments: 'all style is lowered to such
a common level that the tragedy dwindles into provincial simplicities.
[The Riot Act] merely reinforces political stereotypes'.[35]
Like Paulin's play,
The Cure at Troy also deploys much of the same type of
Ulster vernacular language: words and phrases like 'staunch',
'slabbering', 'blather', 'throughother' and 'more power to you'
are used throughout. It is also a play that is profoundly conscious
of a specific political context. By 1990 Northern Ireland had
now entered the phase of inter-governmental conferences against
a background of 'legitimate targets' and 'acceptable levels
of violence'. Nonetheless, a rapprochement between all
sides was certainly starting to appear imaginable. The then
Northern Ireland Secretary of State, Peter Brooke, was pushing
vigorously for a devolved settlement with a Dublin dimension
and one month after The Cure at Troy was premiered, Brooke
made his controversial – and, as it turned out, highly
significant – speech at Whitbread in which he claimed that
Britain had 'no selfish, economic or strategic interest' in
Northern Ireland and would accept unification by consent.[36]
When placed within this context, The Cure at Troy quickly
assumes a (Field Day-friendly) allegorical form.
While Heaney's rendering
of the play is poetically smooth and disciplined, the thrust
of its pivotal speech, the choral ode deployed to precede Hercules'
speech, seems to point an accusing finger at Unionism. It is
less the specific references, than the general thrust of Heaney's
choral interpolation, that seems to deprive Unionism of any
purchase on tragic insight:
Human beings suffer,
They torture one another,
They get hurt and get hard,
No poem or play or song
Can fully right a wrong
Inflicted and endured.
The innocent in
gaols
Beat on their bars together,
A hunger-striker's father
Stands in the graveyard dumb,
The police widow in veils
Faints at the funeral home.
History says,
Don't hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme …(77)
Abstracted from
its context, this speech seems to fulfil the elementary requirements
of a tragic chorus, namely, the expression of general moral
applications. This strategy, however, seems less successful
when contextualised within a play replete with references to
'saying no',[37] a play that
invites its audience to associate Philoctetes with the 'staunch'
and distrustful voices of Ulster Unionism, Odysseus with the
Northern Ireland Office and the Dublin Government, and Neoptolemus
with John Hume and constitutional nationalism. This much-cited
choral ode, with its wager on the 'rhyming' of 'history' and
'hope', discloses not only an aspiration full of 'fifth province'
promise, it also reveals one of the ways in which poets, like
Heaney and Paulin, can declare ideological convictions under
the cover of translation. Furthermore, Heaney's over-investment
in political specificity (rather than universality) has been
further evinced by the omission of this speech's second stanza
from Liam Neeson's recitation on Across the Bridge of Hope
(1998), a compilation album by various artists, produced by
the organisers of the Omagh Bomb Memorial Fund.
The Cure at Troy
is relevant within the context of Heaney's œuvre
and should best be considered 'in light of the endemic tensions
in [Heaney's] poetry between private experience and public utterance,
between poet as lyricist and poet as priest-figure, between
lyric and didactic poet'.[38]
In Greek mythology Hercules' bow can signify the harnessing
of the tensions between the creative and destructive forces
which dominate the Cosmos. The myth of Philoctetes (after Wilson[39])
is also a myth of the artist:
it asserts that
society may not have the necessary powers of the artist without
ensuring his/her disagreeable personality: one may not have
the benefit of the magic bow without having to put up with
the stench of its owner's wound. For Heaney, … Philoctetes
was another alienated artist 'displaced, guilty, assuaging
himself by utterance'.[40]
Here we can locate
a relationship between Heaney's decision to translate Philoktetes
and his anxieties as a witness to civil violence who must
practice good 'government of the tongue': a lyrical 'bystander'
whose 'music', amidst the horrors and brutalities of civil conflict,
might seem a 'culpable indulgence'.[41]
However, such a relationship, while explicit and disturbing
in Heaney's 'Mycenae Lookout' sequence,[42]
is finessed (for Field Day) in The Cure at Troy.
This problem is
one which Desmond Egan attempted to remedy in his (1998) version
of Philoktetes. It would be incorrect to accuse Egan
of deliberately attempting to out-play Heaney. In a critical
study of Egan's work, published in 1992, Brian Arkins states
that Egan had been translating from Philoktetes for some
time and that a complete translation was well on the way.[43]
However, in his introduction to that long-awaited translation,
Arkins asserts that
[Egan] resists
any temptation to add to Sophocles – unlike e.g. Heaney
who, in his version, makes the chorus refer to Northern Ireland.
This rare fidelity to the source language ensures, paradoxically,
that Egan makes a radical statement: we are required, now,
to examine the Philoctetes of 409 BC. In other words,
because the original significance of Philoctetes is
lost and because Egan provides no modern apparatus to interpret
it, we must, as readers, actualise the potential of the source
text without recourse to familiar yardsticks. The resulting
dialogue between past and present will of necessity be open-ended.
[44]
As a trained classicist,
Egan has the advantage of both considerable linguistic expertise
and a broader appreciation of the problems facing the modern
translator of classical Greek literature.[45]
Certainly, one would like to believe that Egan's standing as
an Irish poet translating classical Greek tragedy, at this particular
historical 'moment', is a significant ideological statement
in itself. Egan's translation of Philoktetes exudes interpretative
prudence and precision but it is nearly impossible to assess
its theatrical merits. At least with Heaney (and Paulin) we
can read across and between text and performance. In offering
nothing by way of production guidelines or suggestions, Egan's
version of Philoktetes can emerge as being more a piece
of (conservative) scholarship than a viable translation that
is more than a replacement but less than an trite appropriation.
A translation of this type becomes sterile unless we are given
some sense of its performative shape, some sense of its alterity
and resistance to logocentricity. Although Egan's previous Greek
translation, Medea, was 'staged in a reader's theatre
production in Omaha in February 1991 and was presented in four
performances in Little Rock in October 1991',[46]
it too barely leaves the page. Indeed, the published edition
of this translation is accompanied by the original Greek text.
All of which invites comparison with the strategies adopted
by Brendan Kennelly, who in addition to Medea (1988),
has also written versions of Antigone (1986) and Trojan
Women (1991).
Although first performed
in April 1986, Kennelly's Antigone was written in the
summer of 1984. As Anthony Roche has argued, Kennelly's Antigone
is a conscious response to contemporary events in the Republic
of Ireland: the New Ireland Forum Report (a pan-nationalist
conference that proved a key factor in the drawing-up of the
Anglo-Irish Agreement but which also debated the relationship
between church and state in modern Ireland), the draconian 1984
Criminal Justice Bill and the Catholic church's continued interference
in divorce and abortion debates.[47]
The patience of Irish liberalism was further strained in June
1984 with the arrival of Ronald Reagan to visit his (apparently)
ancestral home, Ballybunion. If Paulin's translation served
to 'reinforce political stereotypes', Kennelly, fired by the
zeal of the disappointed liberal, transformed Sophocles' play
into a piece of pseudo-feminist propaganda that foregrounds
a simplistic opposition between the individual and the state.
Despite describing
his Antigone as a 'straight translation',[48]
Kennelly, like Paulin, was not overly concerned with the task
of writing a version of this play that was linguistically faithful
to the original. Kennelly's Antigone was distilled from
his readings of several different English translations. This
fact may partly account for his version's preoccupation with
the relationship between language and power, 'the word' or 'Creon's
word', for example, appears no fewer than fourteen times in
the (short) first scene. While this is possibly dramatically
effective, in an anaphoric sense, it can eventually prove irritating.
What one hears throughout this translation is Kennelly's own
iconoclastic lyrical voice, as exemplified in his rendering
of the stasimon that precedes Antigone's 'last journey' to her
execution:
Love, you are
the object of our lives,
Love, you are the truest crime;
Love, you prove the obscenity of money,
Love, you are a waste of time […]
The chief problem
with Kennelly's version of Antigone can be located in
his ambivalent desire to be 'loyal' both to his 'understanding
of the Greek world' and to his 'experience of life in Ireland';
or, to be more accurate, the Republic of Ireland.
Kennelly's next
foray into Greek tragedy, his version of Medea, was first
performed in the 1988 Dublin Theatre Festival before playing
at the Gate in the summer of 1989. Kennelly's Medea,
like his Antigone, provided him with another opportunity
to say something about the social and psychological position
of women in contemporary (southern) Irish society. As he writes,
in his preface to this play, the 'rage' of Medea seemed to correspond
to some of his own 'rage' while undergoing treatment in St.
Patrick's Psychiatric Hospital, in the summer of 1986, and,
more precisely, to the 'rage' of the 'unutterably hurt' women
he encountered there (6-7). Not surprisingly, Kennelly's version
extends Medea's speeches (her 'rage'), makes Creon's motives
for her banishment appear purely vindictive and devoid of any
principle and characterises Jason as abjectly callow, snobbish
and selfish; the text repeatedly refers to him as 'plausible'.
Furthermore, the choral odes are augmented and radically reshaped
to suit Kennelly's feminist concerns: Medea's killing of her
children, for example, is exploited to allow a choral comment
on abortion: 'It would have been merciful to kill them in the
womb. Abortion can be a kind of mercy' (56). Any attempt at
an authentic translation of an Euripidean vision is consistently
obscured by the quotidian world of Irish sexual politics. For
all its lyrical sprightliness and fluency, Kennelly's Medea
is overwhelmed by an excessive out-pouring of guilt about the
way men treat women. The intervention of Helios and deportation
of Medea to Athens is poorly dealt with and, if anything, seems
to have presented itself to Kennelly as an anachronistic nuisance.
Many of these criticisms
seem equally applicable to Kennelly's The Trojan Women,
which was premiered at the Peacock in the summer of 1993. Again
Kennelly wanted to use this tragedy to say something specifically
about the oppression of women by men: 'I felt, after I'd finished
Medea, that I wanted to write another play about women.
So many things had been left unsaid. They always are. Again,
I was drawn to Euripides' (5). In so-doing, Kennelly distorts
what is essentially an anti-war play into an anti-male play.
It seems plausible to argue that in using the story of the Trojan
woman, Euripides' play is concerned more with the tragic consequences
of patria rather than patriarchy. In his efforts to make
the women morally victorious, Kennelly again alludes to the
issues of divorce and abortion. As in Antigone and Medea,
Kennelly capitalises on the complexities of male guilt. As he
says in his preface: 'I wasn't writing a hymn to heroic women
although I believe a man might spend his lifetime praising certain
women and count that life well spent' (5). No feminist seriously
believes that if men replace one type of idealisation for another
that women's social and economic freedoms will be substantially
extended. Nevertheless, critics like Kathleen McCracken responded
very positively to Kennelly's translations from Greek tragedy
as a kind of penance for the sins of patriarchy:
Kennelly's version
[of Trojan Women] retains the complementary arrangement
of victim-protagonists of Euripides' play so that, like Hecuba
and Cassandra, Andromache articulates a feminist philosophy
which has been formed in a crucible of silence, reflection
and bitter experience. Her discourse on the nature of masculine
lust and men's calculated praise of women constitutes an all
too familiar tale of feminine capitulation and conformity.[49]
A cynic might dwell
on the phrase 'men's calculated praise' but such a concession
to ad hominem argument is unnecessary. Suffice to say
that while Kennelly's Antigone, Medea and The
Trojan Women attest to what McCracken describes as 'an acute
listening and giving voice to women'[50]
they do not attest to 'an acute listening and giving voice'
to Greek tragedy.
Derek Mahon's The
Bacchae (1991) might also be read as an attempt to translate
the conflict between conservatism and liberalism in modern Ireland,
particularly the struggle of women for greater freedom from
patriarchal expectations. According to Colin Teevan, the significance
of Mahon's translation may lie in the fact that it 'marks an
end of the cycle of women-against-authority plays that were
receiving new versions at the hands of Irish writers'.[51]
Given Mahon's status as an elegist of the flotsam and jetsam,
alongside his prodigious translational output,[52]
the notion that he would be drawn to the Bakkhai for
such quotidian reasons is debatable. Similarly, the suggestion
made by Teevan that there 'are many hints that this version
might be equally applicable to the North'[53]
is too speculative to be convincing. Marianne McDonald has also
argued that Mahon's translation 'offers a parable suitable to
Ireland'. Focussing on Mahon's rendering of the choral ode[54]
'in which the Asian Baccantes describe the pleasure of holding
one's hand over the head of a conquered foe', McDonald comments
that:
Mahon positions
this appeal in the play where Euripides placed it in his play,
but it also concludes Mahon's play. Mahon does not
allow Euripides' rather didactic, formulaic, and pious ending
to have the last word. Instead, the note of vengeance, as
sounded in the earlier chorus, and pleasure in vengeance is
what Mahon ironically stresses. Part of the tragedy is history
itself, and Mahon's lines beat with the lifeblood of passion.[55]
If Teevan's treatment
of this issue errs on the side of wistful speculation, McDonald's
approach veers towards the politically prescriptive in its paradigmatic
formulation (rather than critical interrogation) of metaphysical
categories like vengeance, tragedy and (Irish) history. What
is significant about Mahon's chorus is its 'quotation' from
Casablanca and ironizing of all passion (including Kennellyean
'rage' and/or 'pleasure in vengeance'): 'It's still the same
old story, / a fight for love and glory, / and every heart admits
that this is so!'. In this play, as in his poetry, Mahon rarely
leaves his 'Antarctica':[56]
'What he celebrates – and it's a celebration conducted
in a temperature of absolute zero – is the perfection of
art, an intense quidditas which exists outside history'.[57]
Although Mahon takes liberties with the source language (the
second half of Tiresias' opening speech is rendered thus: 'I'm
old myself, of course, but [Cadmus is] older still. / We agreed
to get ourselves some bacchic gear / and go to the famous ceílí,[58]
like half the women here' (15)), his attention to stage directions,
music and dance enables him to translate something of the spirit
of Euripidean scepticism. In this way Mahon finds a performative
shape and linguistic register to ensure that his encounter with
Greek tragedy can be both energetic and bewildering.
Two factors have
inhibited the successful translation of Greek tragedy by Irish
poets. First, in making the most of their immediate socio-political
contexts, many of the plays discussed here too readily invite
ideologically heavy-handed interpretations. Inevitably, where
the text has not exceeded the circumstances, the circumstances
have quickly exceeded the text. Secondly, such plays remain
prone to excessive textuality, too much concerned with a lexical,
rather than a theatrical, understanding of image and gesture,
although Mahon's translational approach seems to negotiate these
hazards more successfully than the approach favoured by his
contemporaries. The task is clear: to produce a radical (disturbing)
encounter with classical Greek culture and mythology that is
neither an exercise in prosaic political allegory nor a linguistically
arid experience for all concerned. In the meantime, we must
make do with (mis)translation.[59]
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Endnotes
[1]
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Grafton,
1977) 15.
[2]
Tom Paulin, The Riot Act: A Version of Sophocles' Antigone (Faber,
1985) and Seize the Fire: A Version of Aeschylus' Prometheus
Bound (Faber, 1990); Seamus Heaney, The Cure at Troy: A Version
of Sophocles' Philoctetes (Faber, 1990) and the 'Mycenae Lookout'
sequence from The Spirit Level (Faber, 1996) 29-37; Brendan
Kennelly, Antigone: A New Version (Bloodaxe, 1996), Medea: A
New Version (Bloodaxe, 1991) and The Trojan Women: A New Version.
(Bloodaxe, 1993); Desmond Egan, Euripides: Medea (Kavanagh,
1991), Sophocles: Philoctetes (Goldsmith, 1998); Derek Mahon,
The Bacchae: After Euripides (Gallery, 1991).
[3]
Terence Brown, 'Translating Ireland,' Krino: An Anthology of
Modern Irish Writing, eds. Gerald Dawe and Jonathan Williams
(Gill and Macmillan, 1996) 138.
[4]
Marianne McDonald, 'When Despair and History Rhyme: Colonialism
and Greek Tragedy,' New Hibernia Review, 1.2 (1997) 58.
[5]
W.J. McCormack, From Burke to Beckett: Ascendancy, Tradition
and Betrayal in Literary History (Cork UP, 1994) 14.
[6]
Field Day was set up in 1980, initially by Brian Friel and Stephen
Rea, who were then joined on its board of directors by Heaney,
Paulin, Seamus Deane and David Hammond: 'all the directors felt
that the political crisis in the North and its reverberations
in the Republic had made the necessity of a reappraisal of Ireland's
political and cultural situation explicit and urgent'. Field
Day Theatre Company, Ireland's Field Day (Hutchinson, 1985)
vii. Central to this 'reappraisal' was the construction of an
Irish 'fifth province': 'an equivalent centre from which the
four broken and fragmented pieces of contemporary Ireland might
be seen in fact as coherent'. Seamus Deane and Richard Kearney,
'Why Ireland Needs a Fifth Province,' Sunday Independent 22
Jan. 1984 (qtd. in Shaun Richards, 'Field Day's Fifth Province:
Avenue or Impasse?' Culture and Politics in Northern Ireland:
1960-1990, ed. Eamonn Hughes (Open University Press, 1991) 140.
See also, Elmer Andrews, 'The Fifth Province,' The Achievement
of Brian Friel, ed. Alan J. Peacock, Ulster Editions and Monographs
6 (Colin Smythe, 1993) 29-48. See also Marilynn J. Richtarik,
Acting Between the Lines: The Field Day Theatre Company and
Irish Cultural Politics: 1980-1984 (Clarendon, 1994).
[7]
Richard C. Jones, 'Talking Amongst Ourselves': Language, Politics
and Sophocles on the Field Day Stage,' International Journal
of the Classical Tradition, 4.2 (1997) 244.
[8]
Jones, 233.
[9]
Eamonn Hughes, 'To Define Your Dissent: The Plays and Polemics
of the Field Day Theatre Company,' Theatre Research International.
15. 1 (1990) 69.
[10]
At the time of writing, the most accessible (and up-to-date)
overviews and analyses of the subaltern and post-colonial theory
are to be found in Vinayak Chaturvedi, ed. Mapping Subaltern
Studies and the Postcolonial (Verso, 1999).
[11]
Republican slogan which translates as 'our day will come', i.e.
a unified and independent Ireland.
[12]
Terry Eagleton, Frederic Jameson, Edward W. Said, Nationalism,
Colonialism and Literature (U Minneapolis P, 1990) 3-19.
[13]
Colin Graham, 'Liminal Spaces: Post-Colonial Theories and Irish
Culture,' Irish Review. 16 (1994) 36-37.
[14]
For a more comprehensive study of the discursive problems that
arise through the application of many traditional post-colonial
theories to the study of Irish culture see, Colin Graham and
Richard Kirkland, eds. Ireland and Cultural Theory: The Mechanics
of Authenticity (Macmillan, 1999).
[15]
Friel, Three Sisters: A Translation of the Play by Anton Chekhov
(Gallery, 1981); Derek Mahon, High Time: A Comedy in One Act
Based on Molière's The School for Husbands (Gallery,
1985). A production of Fugard's Boesman and Lena was staged
in 1983.
[16]
Brian Friel, Translations (Faber, 1981). Alan J. Peacock, 'Translating
the Past: Friel, Greece and Rome,' The Achievement of Brian
Friel 113-33. Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: The Literature
of the Modern Nation (Jonathan Cape, 1995) 614-23.
[17]
'[The] controversy over 'revisionism' … had it origins
in objections, first voiced in the mid-1980s, to a specific
body of recent writing that was seen as openly hostile to the
traditional nationalist understanding of the Irish past. Since
then the debate has expanded to include a broader critique of
the way in which Irish history in general has been written since
the late 1930s. Essentially the argument is that the concern
of academic historians to distance themselves from a nationalism
identified with propagandist myth making and violence has led
them to produce a bland, 'value-free' history that has failed
to do justice to crucial aspects of Irish experience. The apparent
eagerness of most writers to minimise the responsibility of
the British government for massive loss of life during the Great
Famine is often cited as one example. This process of self-censorship
is seen as intensifying from the 1970s, in response to the resurgence
of physical force nationalism in Northern Ireland. An alternative
argument, more political in character, is that 'revisionist'
history, denigrating the nationalist tradition, is a conservative
attempt to undermine the forces of political change in Ireland
north and south'. The Oxford Companion to Irish History, ed.
S.J. Connolly (Oxford University Press, 1998) 244.
[18]
Hughes, 'To Define Your Dissent' 70.
[19]
For example, see R.F. Foster's Modern Ireland: 1600-1972 (Penguin,
1989) 373-460.
[20]
W.J. McCormack's The Battle of the Books: Two Decades of Irish
Cultural Debate (Lilliput, 1986) still offers a highly stimulating
survey of the major critical debates in Irish letters.
[21]
For precise details and related facts and figures see: W.D.
Flacks and Sydney Elliot, Northern Ireland: A Political Directory:
1968-93 (Blackstaff, 1994), Paul Bew and Gordon Gillespie, Northern
Ireland: A Chronology of the Troubles: 1968-93. (Gill and Macmillan,
1993).
[22]
Tom Paulin, The Hillsborough Script: A Dramatic Satire (Faber,
1987). Seize the Fire, Paulin's version of Prometheus, while
not a Field Day production, afforded him a further opportunity
to interrogate the contemporary antagonism between rights and
responsibilities through the vista of Greek tragedy. As with
The Riot Act, Seize the Fire is shaped by an attachment to 'Enlightenment'
rationalism that is not always aesthetically beneficial.
[23]
Rogers, W.R., 'Epilogue to "The Character of Ireland"',
Collected Poems (Gallery, 1971) 101.
[24]
Paulin, Fivemiletown (Faber, 1987).
[25]
Clair Wills, Improprieties: Politics and Sexuality in Northern
Irish Poetry (Clarendon, 1993) 124.
[26]
O'Brien originally made the Antigone analogy in a lecture he
gave to a Civil Rights meeting at Queen's University, Belfast
in October 1968. Part of this lecture was then reprinted in
the October edition of The Listener and was then included, with
significant revisions, in his 1972 collection of essays, States
of Ireland (Random, 1972). Critical treatments of The Riot Act
invariably relate it to Paulin's interpretation of O'Brien's
volte-face. In 1968, O'Brien used Antigone to illustrate the
ethical validity of civil disobedience, by 1972 he has revised
this reading to such an extent that he was able to declare that
'after four years of Antigone and her under-studies and all
those funerals … you begin to feel Ismene's common-sense
and feeling for the living may make the more needful, if less
spectacular element in "human dignity"'. Qtd. in Tom
Paulin, 'The Making of a Loyalist,' Writing to the Moment: Selected
Critical Essays: 1980-1996 (Faber, 1996) 6.
[27]
Tom Paulin, 'The Making of a Loyalist,' Writing to the Moment:
Selected Critical Essays: 1980-1996 (Faber, 1996) 12.
[28]
Paulin, 'Dwelling Without Roots: Elizabeth Bishop,' Minotaur:
Poetry and the Nation State (Faber, 1992) 190.
[29]
'Introduction,' Minotaur 12. Conor Cruise O'Brien, Maria Cross:
Imaginative Patterns in a Group of Modern Catholic Writers (1952;
Chatto and Windus, 1953).
[30]
Paulin, 'The Making of a Loyalist,' 6.
[31]
'O'Brien's version of the myth internalises the positions of
Antigone, Ismene and Creon as a continuum along which the liberal
individual conscience can slide. Paulin by returning to [the]
Hegelian reading, re-asserts the pre-individual state of the
camps in the North of Ireland. Instead of an achieved individuality
(one which would be markedly different from that assumed by
O'Brien) there are only appeals to rights and tribal loyalties.
Under these conditions Antigone and Creon, the representatives
of rights, form an intimate opposition in which each knows the
other's point of view without being able to comprehend it.'
Hughes, 74.
[32]
It is also worth bearing in mind that in addition to his Field
Day Pamphlet, 'A New Look at The Language Question' (Writing
to the Moment, 51-67) Paulin has edited the Faber Book of Vernacular
Verse (Faber, 1990).
[33]
Civilians executed by the IRA for various offences during the
'troubles'. Only recently, has the IRA agreed to assist in locating
the twelve graves. The results of various searches have not
been promising.
[34]
Paulin, 'The Making of a Loyalist,' 12.
[35]
Christopher Murray, Twentieth-Century Irish Drama: Mirror Up
to Nation (Manchester UP, 1997) 214.
[36]
Brian Rowan, Behind the Lines: The Story of the IRA and Loyalist
Ceasefires. (Blackstaff, 1995) 46-8.
[37]
The 'Ulster Says No' campaign was organised by Unionists to
mobilise popular opposition to the Anglo-Irish Agreement. Part
of its protest strategy was the erection of 'Ulster Says No'
banners on council buildings and town halls throughout Northern
Ireland.
[38]
Alan Peacock, 'Meditations: Poet as Translator, Poet as Seer,'
Seamus Heaney: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Elmer Andrews
(Macmillan, 1992) 235.
[39]
Edmund Wilson, 'Philoctetes: The Wound and the Bow,' The Wound
and the Bow: Seven Studies in Literature (Methuen, 1961) 244-64.
[40]
Murray, Twentieth-Century Irish Drama 215. Quotation is from
Heaney's introduction to his translation of Buile Suibhne, Sweeney
Astray (Faber, 1983) vi.
[41]
Seamus Heaney, 'The Interesting Case of Nero, Chekhov's Cognac
and a Knocker,' The Government of the Tongue: The 1986 T.S.
Eliot Memorial Lectures and Other Critical Writings (Faber,
1988) xii.
[42]
An insightful and succinct analysis of this sequence can be
found in Helen Vendler, Seamus Heaney (Harper Collins, 1998)
168-175.
[43]
Brian Arkins, Desmond Egan: A Critical Study (Milestone, 1992)
95. Coincidentally, this book is dedicated to Desmond Fennell
who authored an audacious, if not particularly rigorous, assault
on Heaney's political manoeuvrings in 'Whatever You Say, Say
Nothing,' Heresy: The Battle of Ideas in Modern Ireland (Blackstaff,
1993) 130-77.
[44]
Arkins, 'Introduction,' Philoctetes 8.
[45]
See, Egan's 'Poetry and Translation,' (Studies. 76, 1987. 227-34)
and 'Thucydides and Lough Owel: The Greek Influence' (The Death
of Metaphor (Colin Smythe, 1990, 113-28).
[46]
Arkins, Desmond Egan: A Critical Study 115.
[47]
For a sociological overview see, Chrystel Hug, The Politics
of Sexual Morality in Ireland (Macmillan) 1999.
[48]
Qtd. in Anthony Roche's 'Ireland's Antigones: Tragedy North
and South,' Cultural Contexts and Literary Idioms in Contemporary
Irish Literature, ed. Michael Kenneally (Colin Smythe, 1988)
237.
[49]
Kathleen McCracken, 'Rage for a New Order: Brendan Kennelly's
Plays for Women,' Dark Fathers into Light: Brendan Kennelly,
ed. Richard Pine (Bloodaxe, 1994) 144-5.
[50]
McCracken, 'Rage for a New Order' 116.
[51]
Colin Teevan, 'Northern Ireland: Our Troy? Recent Versions of
Greek Tragedies by Irish Writers,' Modern Drama 41.1 (1998)
82. Like Roche and McDonald, Teevan also discusses Aidan Carl
Mathews's (unpublished) version of Antigone (1984).
[52]
Mahon's cosmopolitanism is particularly evident when one considers
his translations from French literature. In addition to High
Time, Mahon has also published: The Chimeras: A Version of Les
Chimères by Gérard de Nerval (Gallery, 1982),
The School for Wives: A Play in Two Acts After Molière
(Gallery, 1986), Racine's Phaedra (Gallery, 1996), Words in
the Air: A Selection of Poems by Philippe Jaccottet (Gallery,
1998).
[53]
Teevan, 82.
[54]
Mahon, Bacchae: 41-42, 62.
[55]
McDonald, 68-69.
[56]
Mahon, Antarctica (Gallery, 1985).
[57]
Paulin, 'A Terminal Ironist: Derek Mahon,' Writing to the Moment
81.
[58]
Irish gathering with traditional dance and music.
[59]
Invaluable suggestions for, and corrections to, this paper were
made by Lorna Hardwick and the referees. Thanks are also due
to Carol Gillespie for her patience, and The Open University
Arts Faculty in Belfast, for financial support.
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Classical Receptions in Drama and Poetry in English