Da luogo a spazio: il Donegal in Translations di Brian Friel

Set in Irish-speaking Donegal in August 1833, Translations is one of Brian Friel’s best-known plays, which has elicited extensive criticism since its premiere in 1980. Drawing on Edward Said’s studies, most scholars interpret the play as Friel’s attempt to expose the imperialist implications of the Ordnance Survey of Ireland, whereby the process of mapping Donegal is precursor of a cultural programming aimed at the erasure of the Gaelic heritage. Consequently, another major branch of criticism discusses the playwright’s historical accuracy in depicting this cartographic project. In the wake of Morash and Richards’s Mapping Irish Theatre and Yi-Fu Tuan’s Space and Place, however, the present essay proposes to analyse the recalcitrant geography of Pre-famine Gaeltacht as is evoked in the play. Due to its remoteness, Donegal was a twilit region difficult to reach and one of the last bastions of Celtic culture in the eyes of the British «sappers», entrusted with charting its wilderness in the 1830s. Friel used their diaries and letters as sources to describe the encounter between two cultures – with the Gaelic one threatened with extinction – in Donegal Baile Beag, which the British characters view as a village crystallised out of time. The dramatic landscape mirrors the tensions engendered by the encounter between Irish and British peoples, who also differ in the way of knowing the landscape and relating to it; on the one hand, Gaelic lore and mythology inform the Irish peasants’ perspective: for instance, they believe that the heroes and gods of the Ulster Cycle live by their side. On the other, the British see the Irish woodlands and wetlands as spaces to anglicise and control, with maps and technology functioning as instruments of colonisation. Britain’s project is bound to succeed and its scorched-earth policy will change the physical appearance of the landscape. Importantly, the occupiers’ incursion only quickens an ongoing process of modernisation. Despite appearing as a «flight from contemporaneity», the rural Baile Beag has been already transformed by socio-economic pressures. The lands of Donegal, here represented as a precarious repository of Celtic culture where boundaries dividing reality from mythology are permeable, is becoming more and more a lieu de memoire, which will only exist in the memory and tales of its inhabitants. The familiar place is being replaced by the openness and freedom of the space: a space that poses threats or promises for its original inhabitants.