Misc,
Mapping Postcolonial Ireland: The Political Geography of Friel’s ‘Translations’
(2015)
Abstract
While political geography has long been concerned with the interplay between space and politics, an emerging body of work investigates the significance of this relationship for literary texts (for other studies, see e.g. Randel 2003; Elden 2013), informed by both a wider ‘cultural turn’ in geographical scholarship (Rossetto 2013: 1) and an acknowledgement of political geography’s post-disciplinary status (Saunders 2010: 436). This paper continues this strand of research by offering a political-geographical account of Brian Friel’s play Translations (1981). The narrative begins in the 1830s in the rural Gaelic-speaking community of Baile Beag/Ballybeg in County Donegal. Into the townland arrives a detachment from the British military, charged with Anglicizing the Irish place-names for the Ordnance Survey. Friel therefore reconstructs an early nineteenth-century Ireland after the violent disruption wrought by English colonialism.
