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Essay / Transcend the Limits of Time and Space
This essay will examine the scene in which Maire and Yolland finally kiss from the play "Translations" by Brian Friel and the poem "Meeting Point" by Louis MacNeice to discuss of the way both authors present love as something. which transcends universal boundaries: in Friel, it transcends the boundaries of language and words; and in MacNeice this transcends the boundaries of time and space. Transcendence is therefore more human in Friel, and more physical in MacNeice. Both writers use repetition to present their ideas. In Friel, the repetition is light and connects the characters Maire and Yolland, despite their inability to communicate in a conventional way. In MacNeice, repetition interrupts the flow of time, suggesting that love has suspended its incessant passage. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why violent video games should not be banned”? Get an original essay The repetition in the “Translations” scene initially creates a circular and painful linguistic pattern, showing the plight of the characters trapped in a state of uncommunicative and inconsequential dialogue. The characters repeat each other (“Earth…Earth”, “George…George”) and repeat sentences (“O my God… O my God”, “Say anything. I like the sound of your speech… Say anything to everything. I like the sound of your speech). While this repetition highlights their fate, it also highlights the fact that it is a shared fate, with dramatic irony making the repetition even more apparent to the audience who are aware of the fact of the repetition as the characters are not. They share the same unhappiness and, as we see, the same emotions (“the futility of this… the futility of this”). The endless repetition is funny in English, but unnoticed by the characters, who mix the humor with the tragic fact that, although these two characters love each other, they are unable to communicate their feelings in conventional ways due to the constraints of the language. do not need to communicate in a conventional way: their feelings are communicated despite the fact that the words have no literal meaning to their recipient. Both characters remark that they "like the sound" of the other's "speech", and just hearing each other speak makes them both "smile". Indeed, even if they cannot understand each other, they claim to “know” what they are “saying”. In fact, the only moment in the scene where the words have only a literal meaning, where Maire speaks "as if English were his language", leads to a "misunderstanding" and the distancing of the characters from each other. from others, instead of “getting closer”. » as before. This provides a visual representation of the characters moving “closer” through an understood deeper meaning and moving away” when speaking only literally. Friel showed how love is able to transcend the boundaries of language and words to allow two people to communicate their love in a language neither can understand. MacNeice also uses repetition in her poem, but instead of evoking an inability to communicate, it represents a transcendence of conventional perceptions of time. Time is generally linear, a process of incessant change. But in MacNeice's poem, the structure of time does not follow a linear progression, but is made up of many circular cycles. Each stanza has 5 lines, the 5th line being an exact repetition of the 1st. In addition to intra-stanza repetition, there is also inter-stanza repetition, with the refrain of "Time was away" at the beginning, middle, and end of the poem. Indeed, it is this refrain of “The time was.