Archived Writing

<< back to the search results

A daunting, often tragic role: The Go-Between

Thursday, February 1, 2007

It’s a mind-stunning and heart-opening merger of words (their very sound, as well the images they evoke) … of silences … and of inescapably human faces and bodies in captivating motion and stillness. Pure theatre. The new version of Brian Friel’s Translations has arrived on Broadway – a production that does powerful credit to one of the best dramas created in over a century.

The first performance - by Friel’s traveling company Field Day Theatre, including its co-founder, the shrewd actor Stephen Rea - was in 1980 at the Guildhall in Derry, where sandbags were piled outside, British troops patrolled the city, and memories were still sharp of Bloody Sunday, the day 14 Derry citizens were shot to death by members of the British Parachute Regiment. (As I write, a public inquiry is still studying the facts of that case – with a report now expected next January, a full 36 years after the massacre. I also acknowledge some partiality here, as eyewitness and survivor of that murderous day.)

On stage, citizens of 1833 Baile Beag, Friel’s fictional community in County Donegal, just across what is now the border from Derry, react in their differing ways to the British military occupation of their day. They encounter a new soldierly element, in a detachment of Royal Engineers whose mission is to map the countryside, and in the process to “standardize”, and of course that means to Anglicize, the familiar if often rather inscrutable Irish place-names.

Tragedy abounds in the piece – not least that of divided loyalties, like those faced by the upwardly mobile character played by Alan Cox (above, far left) who works for the British as translator, and forms a friendship with a Lieutenant in the Engineers (Chandler Williams, also pictured, in uniform). He silently bridles – among his many trials – at having his Irish name, Owen, constantly malformed as “Rowan” by the Brits.

Indeed much of the situation’s cultural confusion is played for laughs – poignant though many of them are – not least when the Lieutenant falls, partly through being enchanted by the Irish language itself (in the poetry of those redolent place-names) for the restless village girl Maire, played by an exquisitely torn Susan Lynch. One running, and telling, joke is that while the superior Army officer cannot understand a word of Irish, the Irish peasants are pretty adept in both Latin and Greek.

The informal but intense education offered then by so-called “hedge schools” throughout Ireland (later to be replaced by institutional “national schools”, predictably employing English as their teaching medium) is a central plank to the play’s structure – classes are the characters’ recurring meeting ground, in the schoolmaster’s peat-floored barn (part of the cannily versatile staging, from designer Francis O’Connor).

After his tryst with Maire, the Lieutenant goes missing, and foul play is suspected, maybe involving the absent but sinister-sounding Donnelly brothers (I speculate they may be Ribbonmen, precursors at the time of the Fenian Brotherhood, precursors in their turn of the IRA). And this ominous development provokes both personal agonies and much imminent community terror.

In a climactic address to the audience, the schoolmaster invokes the inevitable destruction of an ancient homeland. It’s Carthage, destroyed despite being loved by the sympathetic goddess Juno, and the foretelling comes from Publius Vergilius Maro’s The Aeneid … delivered of course in Latin, pointedly enough the language of Carthage’s Roman destroyers.

Director Garry Hynes developed this deep and exhilarating take of hers in Princeton, at the McCarter Theater Center. During a colloquium there I asked Stephen Rea, who visited for the occasion, if he could ever see the piece, which has traveled the world in the past 27 years, being staged in Baghdad - amid another military occupation characterized by cross-cultural incomprehension. Rea replied in understated tones: “It could have some relevance in Iraq”.



UNDENIABLY THE DANGERS OF TRANSLATING ARE A FACT OF IRAQI LIFE. Listed still missing is Ahmed Qusai al-Taie (pictured above right, with his wife Israa) the Iraqi-American army specialist from Ann Arbor, Michigan who - during a duty-tour as a translator - broke military rules last October and left barracks to visit his in-laws’ home, only to be kidnapped.

He’s reportedly been held by the extremist Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army, but more likely was taken by a death-squad off-shoot from that militia that’s led by the shadowier Abu Deraa (a nom-de-guerre meaning “Shield” – his real name is a matter of media conjecture). Whether the translator is still alive must now be doubtful, following ransom demands delivered to his uncle, a reward for information offered by the US military, and Army searches of Sadr City for his likely whereabouts – searching that was thwarted by Iraqi government intervention.

We should remember, too, the name of Alan Enwiyah, translator for someone whose name we probably will long remember -- Jill Carroll, the freelance correspondent with the Christian Science Monitor, who was kidnapped by jihadists and held hostage for nearly three months. Enwiyah was shot and left dead in the street when the kidnappers seized Carroll. He’s one of a casualty list that remains hard to enumerate, since these vital linguistic and societal go-betweens are spread widely among the coalition military, the media, aid groups and representatives of foreign businesses.

You might expect the military, though maybe this is overoptimistic, to look after their interpreters better than other institutions. But Iraqi “terps”, as soldiers’ slang has christened them, are having a hard time of it. Many are actually hired by subcontractors to the Pentagon, like the Titan Corporation of San Diego, which is being paid $4.6 billion for a five-year supply of linguistic services to US forces. The corporation estimates that 257 terps have been killed since the war began in 2003.

The injured are harder to count. They include 20 year-old Ali Adil, who has translated for the British forces in the southern Basra region, and then for US Marines in the especially dangerous “Sunni Triangle” in the north – until, that is, a suicide truck-bomber blew up the building his Marine unit was guarding.

Adil suffered severe burns, and has been undergoing skin grafts (a total of nine so far) in a hospital in Amman, Jordan. He's one of about a hundred injured terps being treated there each year. If Adil is finally able to resume a “normal” life, it is hard to see where. He regards returning to Iraq as a death sentence - for having worked with the occupying forces; his family in Basra routinely receives deadly threats.

Would there be a refuge in America? It’s unlikely. The Homeland Security Department insists Adil and others like him will simply have to join the general (and enormous) waiting list for admission to the US as refugees.

A valiant and typically loyal attempt by the Marine Corps to make interpreters a special case has gotten only so far. Congress has reacted to Marine lobbying by approving a dedicated immigration program for translators, but it apportions only 50 slots per year, to be shared among all those who've served in Iraq and Afghanistan.

That's nowhere near enough to meet the likely need, since in Iraq alone there are an estimated 5,000 individuals who’ve taken on this perilous task as a bridge between cultures.

Is this a measure of our nation’s capacity for gratitude?