Words fail everywhere exquisitely in Brian Friel’s Translations, and never is this failure more beautiful than in the moonlit courtship scene that opens the play’s second half. The setting is rural Ireland in 1833, and a delegation of British soldiers has arrived in the town of Baile Beag. Among them is Yolland (Chandler Williams), infatuate with all things Irish; having hazarded upon a land he takes for Eden, he is charged with the Adamic task of officially renaming the towns there. Yolland speaks no Gaelic, and the headstrong local woman he loves, Maire (Susan Lynch), speaks no English. But when they find themselves in the woods after a dance one night, their stumbling cross-talk has an eloquence beyond expression.

As the cultural aggression implicit in the soldiers’ presence turns to literal violence, Friel’s rich, reflective 1980 masterwork offers both an implicit critique of colonialism and a Chekhovian portrait of linguistic erosion. The action mostly takes place at a “hedge school” held in a drafty barn, where the pedantic Hugh (Niall Buggy) teaches local adults Latin and Greek: dead languages soon to be joined by the Gaelic they all speak. (It is an organizing irony of the play that their dialogue is rendered throughout in English, a tongue they pointedly lack.) In Translations’s extraordinary new Broadway revival, staged with luminous grace by Garry Hynes and performed by a splendid ensemble cast, stone hitching posts rise from the dirt floor like rows of time-washed graves: physical reminders that wars of words can claim very real casualties.