Often, what Oscar Wilde's name brings to mind is the cruel fate of the Canterville ghost or Dorian Gray's strange experience, rather than the numerous plays the writer composed. A Woman of No Importance should not seem too unfamiliar to the reader, though, for this play too is haunted by a ghost, that of the past leaning on the characters' world. Above all, the reader should recognize in Lord Illingworth, the main character, a literary cousin to Lord Henry, Dorian Gray's friend. (.)
Through his glance - which may also be Wilde's, who once wrote that he was Lord Illingworth - we get a ruthless picture of the wealthy in England at the end of the nineteenth century. It looks as if it were an external point of view, given from afar, so much so that one cannot help thinking the Irish writer must have enjoyed a lot showing how hollow, how meaningless and worthless the Lords and nobility of the United Kingdom were. (.)
It was a gamble to translate A Woman of No Importance, and a challenge too: in the circles belonging to the culture depicted here, Breton was not the uage of social life, at the end of the nineteenth century. While translation always is a creative work, this was even more delicate than is usually the case. The gamble paid off, though, and Mari Elen has opened up a pass to the Breton uage, leading to a field that had been lying fallow until now.