SOURCE: "Brian Friel's Plays and George Steiner's Linguistics: Translating the Irish," in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 35, No. 1, Spring 1994, pp. 83-99.

In the following essay, Lojek establishes the concept of "translation" as a central metaphor for Friel's concerns as a playwright.

The tremendous success of Brian Friel's 1980 play Translations—and the vigorous discussion which it still elicits—is one sign of the deep resonances it struck in a country where, as Seamus Deane has noted, "The assertion of the existence of a cultural (and largely literary) tradition … depended to an extraordinary degree on a successful act of translation". That the play which many at the time saw as a "climax" to Friel's career served instead to usher in a vigorous new period in that career is one sign of the deep resonances it struck within Friel himself, who seems to have discovered in the concept of translation a metaphor for...