35 pages • 1 hour read
Brian FrielTranslations
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1981A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Act IIIChapter Summaries & Analyses
Act III Summary
Act III opens on Sarah and Owen working distractedly in the school room. There is an atmosphere of tension. Manus enters the room and hurriedly packs his books into traveling bags, dropping items in his state of distress. Manus reveals that he is hurt by Maire’s affection for Yolland, as he’d hoped to marry Maire himself. On the night of the dance, he even contemplated attacking Yolland with a stone, but he refrained because Maire and Yolland appeared to be so happy together (70).
Owen and Manus discuss Yolland’s mysterious disappearance after the dance. The lieutenant has gone missing and a British search party is in pursuit of him. Manus asks Owen to communicate with the two men from the Inis Meadhon hedge school on his behalf, claiming he still wants the teaching job but that he feels the need to be alone for awhile (69-70). Owen tells Manus that if he leaves now, the British army will suspect he is responsible for Yolland’s disappearance. Manus decides to leave nevertheless. He bids Sarah good-bye, asking her to say her name once again (72).
Bridget and Doalty enter the schoolhouse. They announce that many British soldiers have arrived and are searching for Yolland and ransacking the village. They describe Hugh’s shouting rage over the army’s activity, explaining he’s in no state to teach (75). Owen queries them about the events of the night Yolland disappeared, knowing the British soldiers will suspect Manus, and they confirm that Manus stayed until end of dance. All three seem to believe the Donnelly twins may have kidnapped Yolland as part of their resistance against the British (76).
Maire arrives. She is so distraught over Yolland’s disappearance that she has forgotten to fill the milk can. She reports that the baby, Hugh, recently baptized, died in the night, suggesting this unfortunate event is a bad omen (77).
Captain Lancey enters and threatens the villagers (80). He demands that the villagers identify themselves, including Sarah, who finds she can no longer pronounce her own name (82). Lancey announces that if the British army does not find Yolland in twenty-four hours, they will kill all the livestock in the town. If they don’t find Yolland in two days, they will evict the people and destroy their homes. At the end of Lancey’s speech, Doalty casually remarks that the British camp is on fire, signaling the beginning of a local uprising (82). Lancey departs, shouting that he will remember Doalty.
Bridget panics over this threat. She smells a sweetness in the air, once again, and declares it is the smell of blight on the potato crop. Doalty declares that the smell comes from the burning camp (83). He leaves to find the Donnelly twins and join in their rebellion.
Hugh and Jimmy enter together. Both have been drinking, but Jimmy is especially drunk. Jimmy attempts to repeat an earlier gesture toward Athene from first scene of the play, but his drunkenness makes the action grotesque (86). Jimmy bemoans his deep sense of loneliness. Hugh drinks from a flask as he flips through the Name Book that Owen and Yolland created. He pronounces the place names from the Name Book and states that the villagers must learn these new names. Stirred by this pronouncement, Owen leaves to find Doalty, likely hoping to join him in the Irish uprising (88).
Hugh kindly offers to teach Maire English. She asks him to explain what the word “always” (90) means, but Hugh tells her this is not a good word to begin with. Maire says that she believes Yolland is alive and that he will return to the village because he loves it there.
Hugh and Jimmy reminisce about the time they marched—bearing only their copies of Virgil’s epic poem, the Aeneid—to join the 1798 rebellion against the British in Ireland. When they arrived in the distant village, however, they drank together, became homesick, and marched back to Baile Beag. Hugh commemorates this impotent struggle by reciting a passage from the Aeneid,which speaks of a small town’s conquest. In his drunken state, Hugh’s memory of the poem is inconsistent, so he repeats the passage, trying to recapture some of its glory (90-91).
Act III Analysis
Act III is filled with repetitions from Act I that resound with the echoes of change, much like the aftershocks of an explosion. The explosion, in this instance, is a collusion of Yolland’s disappearance, Lancey’s threat to evict and burn Baile Beag if Yolland is not found, and the first fires of the Irish uprising, which overtake the British encampment. The echoed aftershocks include (but are not limited to): Sarah’s repeated pronunciation of her name (and her failure or refusal to pronounce it for the British, upon their demand); Jimmy Jack’s repeated gesture toward Athene’s flashing eyes (now imbued with a sense of loneliness and loss); the repeated reference to the baptized baby (who passes away in Act III); and the repeated reference to an ominous “sweet smell” (83) in the fields. Though Bridget worries that the sweet smell is the potato blight the audience knows it to be, Doalty dismisses her worries, saying that what she smells is the fire from the camp. This dismissal inspires the viewer to question what the characters might be forgetting (both unconsciously and deliberately) in the wake of so much explosive excitement and change.
In Act III, Owen and Hugh appear to have shifted perspectives on communication. In the wake of the British army’s threat, Owen expresses regret for his role in creating the maps. Hugh, however, declares that the villagers must “must learn those new names” from the Name Book. He appears to recognize that an important form of communication has occurred between Yolland and Owen in the process of translation. In a sense, even this reversal of perspectives feels cyclical in nature: an orbiting between one position and another oppositional position, which may continue over and over again.
The resounding theme of Translations’ final act is that history repeats itself. When the British threaten to burn the village, Doalty explains that the British said (and did) the same thing when his grandfather was a child. Hugh and Jimmy also recall marching to another Irish rebellion several years ago. The play culminates with Hugh’s recitation from the Aeneid, a text which speaks to the theme of repeated history. In a state of drunkenness, Hugh cannot accurately recall the words of the epic. Therefore—as with numerous events in Act III—he must stop, reflect, and begin again.
