My paper studies the entangled relationship between language and an
embodied sense of place in the Irish dramatist Brian Friel’s play
Translations (1980), which is set against the backdrop of British colonial
linguistic hegemony. Within a postcolonial framework, my paper studies
how Friel uses language as a decolonizing trope. I deploy literary scholar
Sten Pultz Moslund’s topopoetic approach which brings forth humanplace relations by reconnecting language with a sensory relation to the
world in order to study how language not only performs another
(nonrepresentational) dimension of itself but also challenges the ‘suprasensory ego-logic of modernity’ (Moslund). By approaching spatiality as
an embodied human-place relation, a topopoetic reading locates how the
materiality of place presents itself in language to resist territorial
ideologues and posits instead, an agency of space and embodied relation
with the phenomenal world in language. Language’s “senseeffect” (Deleuze) embodies a relationality between the word and
material world, thereby contesting the imperialistic use of language as a
representational semantic tool for meaning-based signification.
Translations in its colonial resistance offers a topopoetic reading since
Friel inheres in the play a felt sense of platial locatedness and
geographical affect which impacts (in affirmative and/or negating
capacities) not only the locals and the transformed natives of Baile Beag
but the colonizers as well. Hence, through the tropes of language, place,
and embodiment, I study how the text’s aesthetic dimension (poeticaisthetic) offers an alternative decolonial strategy in relating to the word and the physical material world.