Translations

This weekend was all about Irish drama and baseball. Princeton University held a symposium on Irish drama to coincide with the donation of a large collection of memorabilia donated to the library by a benefactor. Several prominent people from Irish theater (including three different artistic directors of the Abbey Theater) took part. On Friday night, a former director, Joe Dowling, gave the keynote address. On Saturday morning, actor Barry McGovern, who is well know for his roles in the plays of Samuel Beckett, performed a one-man reading of some of Beckett's works. He closed with one my favorite lines in all of literature: "You must go on. I can't go. I'll go on." I think I'll have that etched on my tombstone.

Following that was a staged reading of a one-act play by Sean O'Casey, The Cooing of Doves. The play was thought to be lost. No one went into details about where it was found. Those who read ranged from amateurs, such as Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon, who as head of the Fund for Irish Studies was all over the place this weekend (and not a bad actor) to Stephen Rea, prominent film actor (he was nominated for an Oscar in The Crying Game). Rea also participated in two panel discussions later in the afternoon. It was nice to be attend something like this, and reminded me of how engaged I was in these kinds of topics when I was in college. I could also listen to Irish people talk for hours, even if they were reading the phone book, because the accents are just delicious.

On Sunday I attended the play Translations, by Brian Friel, who is a a prominent Irish playwright. It was directed by Garry Hynes, the first woman to ever win a Tony Award for Best Director. She also participated in panel discussions. The play was first staged by a company founded by Friel and Rea, back in 1980, at the height of the Troubles. It is set in Donegal in 1831, when an ordnance company of British soldiers comes to a town to map the area and Anglicize the place names. So what we are seeing, essentially, is another step toward the eradication of the native culture, as the people there speak very little English. It's a very universal theme, and reminded me of the loss of native-American culture, as young Indians were sent to reservation schools and taught English, and several native languages have disappeared.


In between all these events I did my best to keep up with the Tigers. More on that in my next post.