About Performance Translation

Transcription

INTRODUCTION
Gay McAuley
University of Sydney
Translation has been widely practised over the centuries in all European societies, the
founding myths and holy texts of the dominant European religions are based on translations,
and in literature, science, politics and commerce translation has been essential to
development and change. Yet the translators who make all this possible have traditionally
been denied appropriate recognition and esteem, as Dryden pointed out somewhat
plaintively as long ago as 1680: ‘there is so little praise and so small encouragement for
so considerable a part of learning’.1 Translators have been viewed as mere technicians or
literary hacks and, until recently, translation was regarded by the universities simply as
an adjunct to foreign language learning. As a result, our understanding of the translation
process is flawed and incomplete, and more dangerously, the role of the translator in the
construction and transmission of ideas is frequently ignored.
In the last twenty years Translation Studies has begun to emerge as an academic
discipline in its own right, departments or interdepartmental programmes have been
established in several universities, and there are a number of specialised journals devoted to the theory and practice of translation. It has to be acknowledged, however, that
translation for the theatre is not yet a very visible part of this developing field of study,
and the specific problems of theatre translation are rarely treated in books and manuals
on translation theory. If it figures at all, it is only as a sub-branch of literary translation
(just as playwriting figured in academic thinking for so long merely as a sub-branch of
literary writing), which means, of course, that there has been little attempt to explore or
even acknowledge its real specificity.
Translation for the theatre may be marginalised and under-theorised in Translation
Studies, but in theatre practice it has never been more vibrantly present. The idea of the
classic that has developed over the last thirty years as a result of the so-called ‘director’s
theatre’ has also involved a great deal of translation and retranslation. Construction of
the Eurocentric canon of classics has entailed certain plays being translated over and over
again, into and out of German, French, Russian, Swedish, Norwegian, Italian and English,
not to mention Greek and Latin. Peter Brook recognised the importance of translation in
the creation process when he claimed that any new production of Shakespeare in France
requires its own translation,2 and contemporary theatre practice also favours adaptations,
re-writings and other sorts of re-working as well as translation.
In recognition both of the importance of translation in contemporary performance
practice and of the lack of critical and analytical studies of translation for the theatre, the
Centre for Performance Studies decided to focus on questions of translation in its 1993
teaching and research projects. The projects were designed to facilitate study of the way
About Performance 1: Translation and Performance
theatre practitioners work with translated texts, and of the difference that different translation choices make in the performance outcomes. There were two comparative projects
and two in which the focus was a single play in translation. The emphasis in most of the
workshops was on the actors for they are the practitioners who work most intensively
with the written text.
In the first comparative project, three different translations of the same scene from
Sophocles’ Antigone were rehearsed and performed by three actors (Angie Milliken,
Justin Monjo and Jamie Jackson) with director Rhys McConnochie. The translations were
by Lewis Campbell (1873), Elizabeth Wyckoff (1954) and Judith Malina (1966). Malina
had not translated from Sophocles, but from Brecht’s 1948 adaptation which was itself
based on Hölderlin’s 1804 German translation. The three English translations as well as
the two German texts and Sophocles’ original Greek were printed in columns, facilitating
comparison line by line, and students and staff observed the actors as they explored in
workshop conditions performance possibilities suggested by the English versions.
The second comparative project involved native speaking French actors (Véronique
Bernard and François Bocquet) with French director Rénald Navarro and native speaking
German actors (Gertraud Ingeborg and Hannes Streck) with Austrian director Florian
Messner working on a section of the trial scene from The Merchant of Venice in a number
of French and German translations respectively. The German versions included the
Schlegel translation (1797-1801) which reigned supreme on the German stage for well
over a hundred years, Hans Rothe’s 1920’s version and a prose translation by Barbara
Puschmann-Nalenz (1975). The French versions selected were the classic 19th century
translation by François-Victor Hugo through which generations of French readers and
theatre audiences have experienced Shakespeare, a scholarly translation by F.C. Danchin
published in a bilingual edition in 1938, and Jean-Michel Déprats’ 1987 translation made
for the production by Luca Ronconi at the Comédie Française.
There were two other major projects in which the object was to observe and document
practitioners’ work processes in the production of a play in translation. Paul Dwyer’s
translation of La Demande d’Emploi by Michel Vinaver for the performance group
Public Works was refined over a number of working sessions involving the actors and
students from Performance Studies and French. The final version was rehearsed at the
Centre for Performance Studies and later performed in a public season at Belvoir Street
Theatre. During the workshop phase of the project the actors became familiar with the
complexities of Michel Vinaver’s play and the observers gained many insights into the
intricate process of mapping emotional impulse, word and bodily expression that is at the
heart of the actors’ work in text based theatre.
In the fourth project, Chinese playwright Gao Xinjiang, currently living in Paris, was
invited to Sydney to work with Australian actors on his play Between Life and Death.
Assisted by Sally Sussman, Gao Xinjiang directed a workshop production of the play
with actors Glenda Linscott, Annette Evans and Zhou Liang. The play was originally
written in French, entitled Entre la vie et la mort, and then translated into Chinese by Gao
himself, and the English text used in the workshop had been translated from the Chinese
version by Jo Riley. This project provided opportunities to observe the work process of
the writer directing his own work, as well as raising interesting questions concerning self
translation and original composition in a foreign language.
The papers that have been collected into this first issue of About Performance were
either generated by the projects listed above or have emerged from related work being
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Introduction
done by staff and postgraduate students in departments that collaborate with the Centre
for Performance Studies. The approaches adopted are theoretical, analytical or empirical,
and frequently range over all three in a manner which seems to exemplify the developing
disciplinary practice in performance studies. Reports by theatre practitioners (Rhys
McConnochie as director, Peter Snow as actor, May-Brit Akerholt as translator) on their
own experiences in the creative process are extremely valuable, as are the reports from
academic observers of rehearsals, such as the one by Kristine Cala. Comparative studies
focussing particularly on textual choices made (Tim Fitzpatrick & Ksenia Sawczak
and Laura Ginters), or on reflections arising from the performance practices observed
(Jonathon Bollen, Penny Gay, Frances Muecke, Gay McAuley) have proved particularly
fertile ground.
Several of the essays make reference to Patrice Pavis’s attempt to model the translation
process as a series of ‘concretisations’, involving linguistic, cultural and theatrical
conventions in both source and target cultures, and there are also several references to
the notion of ‘filters’ proposed by Hervey and Higgins.3 These two conceptual notions,
especially used in conjunction with one another, seem from the experience of the analyses
documented in this volume to provide a useful means of illuminating and talking about
what is going on in the translation process and in the construction of performance with
translated texts.
The range of practices involving translation in contemporary theatre is extremely varied, and perhaps the most valuable feature of a collection of essays such as this is to draw
attention to the variety and complexity of these practices. Translators today may be working on commission for a particular director or for a company, they may be on a contract to
a publisher, or even working ‘on spec’, out of enthusiasm for the work of the playwright
in question. The director may have translated the text, one of the actors may have done so,
and sometimes a playwright who does not know the original language produces a text on
the basis of a so-called literal translation done by someone else. The degree of adaptation
and re-writing that goes on under the banner of translation is also of great interest, and
more analysis is needed of the outcomes of the widespread practice of cobbling together a
text during the rehearsal process from a number of existing translations.
Another interesting general observation is that the status of the translated text in the
creative process is very different from that of an original. My perception is that the text
becomes a fluid entity, there is continual pressure to make textual changes, and the text is
radically destabilised in ways which do not occur when actors and directors are working
with originals. In rehearsing with a translated text, any problem of interpretation or of
physicalisation is likely to lead very quickly to a decision to change the words rather than
to struggle to find a way to perform them. The degree of trust that actors and directors are
prepared to accord translators seems much less than to the original playwright, although
here too there seems to be a sliding scale of trust that depends on the reputation and
experience of the playwright. The greater the degree of trust, the longer the practitioners will work to find a performance solution rather than simply cutting or rewording the
difficult passage.
These essays all represent work in progress, all of them raise further questions, open
further avenues of enquiry, suggest more projects. In my view their major contribution
is that, notwithstanding the above comment about destabilising the text, they provide
abundant evidence for translators and writers alike of the intensity with which actors
scrutinise the texts with which they are working, and of the impact that very small
v
textual details can have on actors’ bodily practices and on the overall meanings that
are produced. If they can also encourage other translators and practitioners to write up
their experiences and analyse their practices they will have served an even more useful
purpose, for theoretical insights need to be grounded in detailed and careful analyses
from the perspective of both the makers and the receivers of performance.
NOTES
1
John Dryden, ‘On Translation’, in R. Schulte and J. Biguenet (Eds), Theories of Translation, University of
Chicago Press, 1992.
2
Quoted by Georges Banu in his interview with Jean-Claude Carrière, ‘Naviguer au plus près’, Théâtre/Public,
No. 44, March-April 1982, p. 41.
3
Patrice Pavis, Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture (translated L. Kruger), London, Routledge, 1992; Sandor
Hervey & Ian Higgins, Thinking Translation, London, Routledge, 1992.
vi
“I had not better return
with you to the croft
then, Nils, had I?”
The Text,
the Whole Text,
and Nothing but the Text
in Translation
May-Brit Akerholt
Australian National Playwrights’ Centre
A nation’s culture is a combination of diverse voices which have a common goal: the need
to tell their stories, to constantly research, redefine and recreate their myths. But cultural
diversity also includes ‘appropriating’ works written in other languages, making other
countries’ stories part of one’s own theatrical repertoire. Translating fiction is, in the final
instance, about creating literature and theatre in a new language.
For a long time, a large crop of earnest British dramatic translations dominated not
only our theatre but also the teaching of drama, shaping our perception and understanding
of classical works written in languages other than English. Australian theatre staged the
classics with British translations and traditions producing a distinctly British interpretation and tone. It was Chekhov set in an English rose garden; Ibsen’s male characters as
Victorian pompous fools married to inexplicably wonderful and strong women; how did
they come to love and marry these men in the first place?
Often perceived to be read as literature, original works in translation lost their
contemporary freshness and authenticity. Even today, the translations used in schools
and universities (but increasingly less in the theatre) are often at least thirty years old,
meticulously academic, bland and characterless, removed from the very quality which
made the works classical in the first place. The translations may have the same number of
characters and, on the surface, the same themes, conflict and action as the source works,
but the nuances, tone, colours and energy of the original works have often been dissipated
in the translators’ efforts to recreate faithfully the period and observe the lexical meaning
of every word and in some cases, because of the translators’ lack of intimate knowledge
both of the source language and of the theatre.
John Dryden phrased his ideas on translation both succinctly and poetically:
‘... thought, if it be Translated truly, cannot be lost in another language, but the words that convey it to
our apprehension (which are the Image and Ornament of that thought) may be so ill chosen as to make
it appear in an unhandsome dress, and rob it of its native Lustre.’1
There is a small but interesting example of how a translation may appear in ‘an unhandsome dress’ in the Penguin version of a line from the first act of Henrik Ibsen’s The
Wild Duck. The original is convivial, elegant and slightly pompous, conveying the style
of the drawing-room banter between Werle’s guests:
FAT GUEST:
But good God, is it true you’ve abolished our blessed freedom to
smoke?2
Una Ellis-Fermor’s version ignores the tone and loses the style of the line:
FAT GUEST:
Now, now! Is it true that you’ve done away with that pleasant privilege
of smoking where we liked?3
The division into two sentences has no specific rhythm; moreover, an actor would not
find it as easy to say the line without pausing for breath.
Ezra Pound makes a pertinent observation when he maintains that every translation is
a criticism of the original, because of each translator’s interpretation of meaning and the
various stylistic factors of the original, as well as his or her idiosyncratic writing style and
expression of content.4 Each translation is as original, then, as the original work, because
the translator’s own style and interpretation inevitably creates a ‘new’ work. There was
a school of thought earlier this century, and the argument persists even today, that the
finest translations ought to be like a pane of glass—they should fail to be noticed. But it
is an author’s unique voice which makes a work live and surely, if the translator’s voice
fails to be distinct, the new version will be a pale replica of the original with no peculiar
character of its own. And the work has less chance to become part of its new country’s
literary canon and theatre repertoire.
Apart from the obvious necessity of theatre translations being eminently speakable and
containing the proposals any dramatic text must have for physical action, they influence
‘the dress’ in which a play appears on stage. A theatre text achieves its designation in
performance—the initial vision of the director and the final expression of the production
can only come from the text itself. A translation with a heavy emphasis on psychological
forces and a style which strengthens the naturalistic perspective of a work will guide a
director’s concept, the design, the casting, and the actors’ interpretation in a very different
way to a translation of the same play with, let’s say, overtly political overtones.5
With this in mind, delegates at a translation forum in Poland in 1985 discussed a variety of Brecht translations, some of which were read aloud by English-speaking participants. These are some of their conclusions: John Willett’s attempt to adapt the text into
English contemporary idiom, mixing freely both regional and class distinctions, resulted
not merely in a ‘mixed bag of tricks’ but also in a paradoxically academic approach which
would create problems in a production. Eric Bentley’s version was dismissed as inaccurate (containing major mistranslations), heavy-handed, dull and all but unspeakable for
actors.6 The playwright David Edgar’s attempt was a long way from the original, and
although the delegates thought it sounded very convincing and ‘theatrical’, they agreed
that it shifted the original’s balance heavily towards the ‘naturalistic’ and ‘psychologi2
Akerholt
The Text, the whole text...
cal’, both being tendencies alien to Brecht. Interestingly, a literal translation prepared
for a Royal Shakespeare Company production was found to be far from ‘literal’, with
misguided ambitions of its own limiting the decisions of the playwright/translator who
was to create the performance version.
Straight mistranslations apart, perhaps the only conclusion to be drawn from this is to
agree with Pound that each translation, even a literal one, is a criticism of the original. It
seems to me that there is only one factor that governs every translation: that the relationship between reader/audience and translated text should be as close as possible to that
between reader/audience and original text. This includes taking into consideration the
theatrical conventions as well as the political and social background of the translator’s
contemporary time as well as those of the original.
There was a recent debate in America about the ‘appropriateness’ of translating
Ibsen’s word ‘skitt’ with the English ‘shit’.7 The discussion was particularly referring to
Hilde Wangel’s use of this word in The Master Builder. Most participants in the debate
claimed that in Ibsen’s time, the word would be the equivalent of ‘shoot’ or ‘shucks’, so
to translate it with ‘shit’ was to distort the original. But surely, the question is not what
the Norwegian word meant then, but how to recreate the effect it had then. To use ‘shoot’
or ‘shucks’ now would be to lose Ibsen’s dramatic point: the characterisation of Hilde
through her language. Solness’s reactions to Hilde are partly based on the nature of her
language, which conveys that she has a freer, more modern outlook on life than that of the
other characters. If a translation fails to convey this, it may fail to express other levels of
the work—the strange relationships between people and landscape in which they live; the
cold, isolated house with its cheerless living room, the environment which suffocates and
alienates because nature itself, physical or human, is not allowed to intrude. Unless all
this is dramatised, the audience is going to watch a somewhat quaint 19th century piece
which has little relevance to the Australian condition they go home to enjoy or to suffer,
as the case might be.
Another linguistic argument is based on the nature of the two languages. It has
been maintained that the ‘poverty’ of Norwegian vocabulary meant that Ibsen had to
resort to repetitions whereas the richness of English allowed for a richer variety. Thus
several translations ignore Ibsen’s repeated use of certain words in the mouths of certain
characters. How can translators possibly fail to ask themselves if Ibsen, perhaps, used
repetitions deliberately? To characterise, perhaps, or to dramatise the obsession of a
particular character, or his or her passion, or his or her pedestrian nature? When Jørgen
Tesman in Hedda Gabler repeatedly utters phrases such as ‘I dare say’ and ‘I suppose’, it
is not because there are no other expressions available to him, but because he lacks trust
in himself, his marriage and in the final instance, his talent. He keeps repeating the word
‘imagine’, for instance, because he lacks the imagination of an original thinker.
Jean-Paul Sartre’s work has also suffered from a similar misconception. The following
lines from Huis Clos:
GARCIN:
Et dehors?
VALET:
Dehors?
GARCIN:
Dehors! De l’autre côté de ces murs?8
were translated by the British director and translator Frank Hauser with:
GARCIN:
What goes on outside?
3
VALET:
Where do you mean?
GARCIN:
There—in the corridor.9
And what was Hauser’s reason for losing the repetitions of the original, the rising
rhythm and the persistence they create? That ‘the hysteria of the original ‘dehors-dehorsdehors’ is dissipated by the very richness of choice that exists in English’.10
A more common misconception, that Ibsen is a naturalistic writer, has distorted many
English translations and productions of his plays. Ibsen’s works were no more ‘naturalistic’ in our contemporary interpretation of that word, no more conventional in their time,
than Patrick White’s plays were in the 1960s. These two writers were both at the forefront
of change, experimenting with form and dramatic language.
I translated the text for the 1986 Sydney Theatre Company production of Hedda
Gabler; a production which was designed around the concept of freeing the characters’
movements—physical and emotional—by creating a set with minimum furniture and
props.11 One reviewer was a little disturbed at the failure of the set to reproduce the clutter and naturalistic detail that Ibsen’s stage directions demanded. He failed to recognise
that in the late 19th century, to reveal the characters on stage in an authentic living room,
with all its homely and intimate touches, was an innovative, even daring concept. It
stripped the characters of their privacy; it had a thematic impact, and was part of the
dramatic conflict.
Since Hedda Gabler, most of my translations of Ibsen’s plays have been produced
on fairly bare stages, and particularly the Belvoir St Theatre productions of Ghosts and
Master Builder.12 In these two plays, the designer Brian Thomson’s sparsely furnished
space and use of stark colours such as black (Ghosts) and red (Master Builder) created
a sense of the characters’ emotions and secrets reverberating along the large and bare
walls. These people were exposed and vulnerable to the action around them. The designs
had a thematic and dramatic impact and, I believe, played their part in making the plays
relevant to an Australian audience a century later.
In The Death of Tragedy, George Steiner says that ‘the walls of the drawing room in
an Ibsen play are transparent to the radiance or blackness of the controlling symbolic vision.’ He also maintains that with Ibsen, drama returned to a use of ‘effective myth and
symbolic action which had disappeared from the theatre since Shakespeare.’13 The New
Zealand director Colin McColl’s innovative staging of Hedda Gabler14 emphasised the
play’s ‘symbolic action’ by removing its linear structure and exploring the relationship
between Hedda and the other characters through surreal sequences which juxtaposed several angles of the dramatic conflict. For this production set in New Zealand in the 1950s,
they used a hybrid text created by the company and based on several English versions.
McColl and the actor Catherine Wilkin, in discussing the translation, said that even long
into the season, they were still constantly looking for nuances which would open up new
aspects and dimensions of the characters’ relationships. Sitting in the theatre, I had recognised much of Michael Meyer’s version and particularly a mistranslation he makes—so I
could point them to one line, at least, which distorts a moment in a relationship.
This line occurs in the first act just after Miss Tesman has left; Hedda feels the need to
justify her rude behaviour towards her new husband’s aunt:
HEDDA:
But what extraordinary manners—throwing your hat down in people’s
living room. You simply don’t do that sort of thing.
TESMAN:
Well, you can be sure Auntie Juju won’t do it again.
4
Akerholt
Tesman’s reply contains a rebuke of Hedda, and a defence of Miss Tesman. It becomes
an awkward and revealing moment between them. Meyer’s version of Tesman’s answer
is thus misleading; to me, it suggests an agreement with Hedda and an apology for Miss
Tesman:
TESMAN:
I’m sure Auntie Juju doesn’t do it very often.15
Examples of similar misinterpretations are numerous in Ibsen translations. Sometimes
one translator’s mistake keeps recurring in the works of others. In the last scene of The
Wild Duck, after Hedvig’s death, Dr. Relling maintains that by the end of nine months
she will be no more to her father than a ‘beautiful subject for recitation.’ He goes on to
answer Gregers’ shocked protestation with: ‘Let’s talk about it again when the first grass
has withered on her grave.’ In four of nine translations on my shelf, the line has become
‘...when the first grass shows on her grave.’ The difference between the Norwegian word
for ‘wither’ and ‘show’ speaks for itself: respectively ‘visne’ and ‘vise’. Not only have
the translations lost the symbolic link between nine months and Hedvig’s life and death,
and the time it takes for the grass to grow and then wither on her grave; they have also
ignored the image of withered grass, which speaks about the nature of Hjalmar’s recitations, and perhaps even his soul. Presumably, each new translator has simply copied the
word used in previous versions through lack of knowledge of Norwegian.
I often think the ‘clue’ to Ibsen’s language is to be alert to its many ambiguities.
Sometimes a line may contain two meanings, and although the differences may be very
subtle, they may also act as ‘stage directions’ for the actors. If the primary meaning has
no resonance in English, it is necessary to choose the secondary meaning, or at least to
enhance it. During the rehearsals of Ghosts in the Belvoir St Theatre production, a scene
between Mrs. Alving (Julia Blake) and Osvald (Robert Menzies) caused certain problems
for the actors because of these lines:
MRS ALVING: Osvald—you are thinking of leaving me!’
OSVALD:
Hm—(sighs heavily) I’m not thinking of anything. I can’t think of
anything! (In a low voice) I’m doing my best not to.
Osvald kept his back to his mother and there was no connection between them, or
no reason for him to seek it, until I mentioned a possible ambiguity in the last sentence:
although the primary meaning of the original phrase is that Osvald avoided thinking, the
sentence is structured so that it may also read ‘No, I won’t do it’—that is, ‘I won’t think’
or ‘I won’t leave you.’16 Both are true, as Osvald also knows. When we changed the line
to ‘I wouldn’t do that’, we lost the first meaning, but we gained something else: Menzies
was given an impulse to turn towards his mother, and a moment was established between
them.
Nora’s language in the first scene of A Doll’s House provides several examples of textambiguities. When Torvald asks what she wants for herself for Christmas, she says: ‘Oh
no—for me? I don’t care for anything really.’ In Norwegian, the phrase ‘Å pytt; til meg?
Jeg bryr meg slett ikke om noe’ could be interpreted as ‘Oh me? I don’t want anything at
all’17 However, the Norwegian line is constructed with the verb ‘care about’ and may also
read ‘I don’t care about anything’. This becomes too obvious in English, with an overt
statement. ‘Care for’, however, may suggest both. It is a significant ambiguity.
In the Belvoir St. Theatre production, for which my version was translated, Helen
Buday said ‘I don’t care for anything really’ with a dismissiveness suggesting she didn’t
5
want anything for Christmas, but implying the secondary meaning with a movement
away from Torvald.18
In the same scene Torvald complains that last year’s pre-Christmas period was the
most boring time of his life because Nora shut herself up for three whole weeks, as he
believes, to make decorations to surprise them with. Nora answers: ‘Da kjedet jeg meg
slett ikke’: literally, ‘Then I wasn’t bored at all.’ This is very different to ‘It wasn’t the
least bit boring for me’ which most translations have some variation of. Again, the literal
version is too loaded in English, but the ambiguity is easily solved by simply placing
‘then’ at the end of the sentence: ‘I wasn’t bored at all then’.
Nora is not aware of the subtext; not conscious of saying that she fails to care about
anything, or that she is bored most of the time. The playwright is simply giving the character a language which constantly undermines the image of the happy playbird we see in
the first part of Act 1. Another important example of the underlying meaning in Nora’s
word choice occurs when she asks her husband to give her money for Christmas:
TORVALD:
What do we call birds who are always wasting their money?
NORA:
Playbirds—I know, I know. But let’s do what I suggest, Torvald. That
gives me time to decide what I need most. That’s very sensible, isn’t
it?
Watts has lost the precision of the original through the addition of words in this passage. But much more significant is the strange decision he makes about Nora’s words:
HELMER:
What do they call little birds who are always making money fly?
NORA:
Yes, I know—ducks-and-drakes! But let’s do what I said, Torvald, and
then I’ll have time to think of something that I really want. Now, that’s
very sensible, isn’t it?19
‘Birds who are always making money fly’ is a clever line—however, Watts has ignored
the fact that Nora uses the words ‘need’ and ‘decide’. These reflect will and an aversion
to waste. She needs the money; she is not a doll, but someone capable of making decisions.
I was regularly in touch with the director and actors of the 1991 Perth production of
A Doll’s House before I joined them in the last week of rehearsals. At the beginning
of rehearsals, Greta Scacchi, who played Nora, wanted to change my use of ‘father’
to ‘daddy’ (used in most other translations) throughout, as she felt the latter reflected
Nora’s dependency on this male figure, and the way her father had treated her like a doll.
However, Ibsen uses ‘father’, and my use of the word was just as deliberate as Ibsen’s.20
The answer lies in the points I have made above about Nora’s word choices emphasising
her underlying strength; her inner distancing from having been treated like a doll by her
father, and continuing to be treated the same way by her husband, are reflected in her use
of ‘father’ rather than ‘daddy’. Once the significance of this was discussed with the actor
and director, they were enthusiastic about going with the translation as it was.
Ibsen allegorises the world of the Helmers from the beginning. There is a distinct
rhythm, reminiscent of a nursery rhyme, in the opening lines between Nora and Torvald:
TORVALD:
Can I hear a skylark chirping out there?
NORA:
Yes you can.
TORVALD:
Can I hear a squirrel rustling out there?
NORA:
Yes!
6
Akerholt
TORVALD:
When did the squirrel come home?
NORA:
Just now...
The repetition, the rhythm, and hence some of the nature of their game, have been
dissipated in the Penguin version:
HELMER:
Is that my little skylark twittering out there?
NORA:
It is.
HELMER:
Scampering about like a little squirrel?
NORA:
Yes.
HELMER:
When did the squirrel get home?21
Torvald depersonifies his wife in several ways:
TORVALD:
Has the playbird been out wasting money again?
..........
TORVALD:
Nora! Is frivolity getting the upper hand again?
Watts’ version seems to create a mis-balance in their relationship:
HELMER:
Has my little featherbrain been out wasting money again?
..........
HELMER:
Nora! The same little scatterbrain.22
To give Torvald such derogatory words as ‘featherbrain’ and ‘scatterbrain’ is to ignore
that he puts Nora on a pedestal with the plaque ‘Womanhood’ on its base. She exemplifies all that he admires, while part of his male teaching ritual is to scold her extravagance.
I coined ‘playbird’, his repeated pet-word for Nora, from the Norwegian ‘spillefugl’,
which has connotations of ‘play’ as well as ‘gamble’. The actors of the initial Belvoir
St. production of this translation were hesitant about using this word at first, wondering
if an audience would understand it and its connotations, but after a discussion about its
particular relevance, and a few try-outs in rehearsals, they soon became quite enamoured
of it and it produced a different tone to the one that a word like ‘featherbrain’ would have
conveyed.
‘Frivolity’ is not a happy stage word; it carries a heavy weight, and it is difficult to
make it sound natural. ‘Frivolity’ and ‘frivolous’ occur quite frequently in A Doll’s House,
but I used them sparingly, trying to create other patterns to compensate, for instance with
‘irresponsible’ and ‘irresponsibility’. However, in the quotation above, ‘frivolity’ works,
I think, as it is linked with Torvald’s depersonification of Nora and the phrase ‘the playbird’, one of many in which Ibsen deliberately avoids using the personal pronoun. All
English translations that I am aware of use ‘my’ in most of the cases when Ibsen heightens
the distance that exists between husband and wife through impersonal constructions.
The language in this first scene of A Doll’s House lays the foundation for the relationship between husband and wife in the rest of the play. It establishes the pride as well as
reproach of Torvald’s attitude towards his woman, and suggests the underlying strength
of which Nora is capable. The last scene between them cannot work satisfactorily without all these elements being dramatised through the dialogue in the first scene.
There has always been on-going discussion about the text during the rehearsals of all
my translations. This is a stimulating and rewarding process. A translation should in
7
many ways be seen as a ‘new work’, with fine-tuning of the language taking place while
the whole creative team is working on it.
One word caused much debate during rehearsals of Hedda Gabler: Brack (Arthur
Dignam) and Hedda (Judy Davis) using ‘groin’ for the part of the body in which Løvborg
has been shot. All other versions use ‘stomach’; the actors also wanted to use ‘stomach’,
arguing that ‘groin’ could easily get a laugh, which would be an undesirable reaction. I argued that although Ibsen’s ‘underlivet’, meaning literally ‘below-the-waist’, was slightly
more euphemistic than ‘groin’, it did have strong sexual connotations, and a more direct
word than ‘stomach’ was called for in order to convey the full impact of the line—besides,
I felt that ‘stomach’ was wrong, and I couldn’t think of a better word than ‘groin’. We
finally agreed to stay with groin—and at the first preview, the audience laughed. But from
then on, the actors ‘placed’ the word—treating it in such a way that it became the ‘right’
one to use, and the laughter stopped. On occasions when it did elicit a titter, it suggested
a nervous or surprised reaction, echoing some of the emotions on stage.
Ibsen uses a wide range of linguistic tools to heighten his themes and add depth to his
characters. In Norwegian, as in German and French, there are two forms for ‘you’, formal
and informal (‘du’ and ‘De’). Each play poses various problems in this respect for a
translator. An interesting case occurs in Hedda Gabler, where Miss Tesman refrains from
using the personal pronoun ‘you’ when she addresses Hedda.23 She would find it difficult
to use the formal ‘De’—Hedda is, after all, one of the family. Neither can she bring herself to be informal, as Hedda’s demeanour towards her indicates a possible rebuke should
she attempt it. Miss Tesman therefore avoids the personal pronoun altogether:
MISS TESMAN: Well ... did the young mistress sleep well in her new home? (Act 1)
..........
Lovely...lovely...lovely is our Hedda. ...God bless and protect Hedda
Tesman. For Jørgen’s sake. (Act 1)
..........
But I thought I ought to come myself to Hedda—to the house of
life—with the news of death...Hedda’s house shouldn’t be in mourning
at this time of joy...Hedda Tesman mustn’t occupy her hands—or her
thoughts—with death. (Act 4)
She constructs all her sentences in indirect ways until she exclaims ‘God forgive you,
child’ in the fourth act, and then she uses the formal ‘De’. The happy intimacy she was
hoping for in Act 1 has failed to happen. Thus the language suggests Miss Tesman’s
uncertainty in regard to this marriage between the General’s daughter and her nephew, her
role in their relationship, and undermines the happy pride she displays at the beginning
of the play. While this is not a pattern an audience necessarily becomes conscious of, it
gives Miss Tesman a slight peculiarity of speech which adds a dimension to her character
and is a specific ‘tool’ for the actor in her interpretation and portrayal.
Gina Ekdal (The Wild Duck) is one of the most elusive characters for whom to find a
language, with the difficult mixture of her malapropisms, her astuteness and her artlessness. At times, her lines convey both humour and sadness; it is easy to laugh at her, but
the laughter is often quickly swallowed, as something more serious steals its way through
the comedy.
In the breakfast scene in Act 5 between Gina and Hjalmar, for instance, a misrepresentation of even the smallest detail could shift the tone and hence the balance of the
scene. There must be no sense of pleading on Gina’s part; not only is that the best way
8
Akerholt
of ensuring that Hjalmar will stay, it is also her way of keeping her dignity in the face of
his accusations about her past:
HJALMAR
Would I, without being harassed by anyone—anyone at all—would I be
able to stay in the living-room, just for a day or two?
GINA
Yes, of course you could, if you want to.
Gina’s line in Ellis-Fermor’s version adds a pleading tone, distorting her attitude;
the fact that the last part has become a sentence on its own adds to this, making it less
casual:
GINA
Yes, you could, perfectly well. If only you would.24
I also feel that ‘perfectly well’ is a very unsuitable expression for Gina, and one she
would only use if making an effort to copy Hjalmar’s language—but even then, she
mainly misuses words with a foreign origin. Ellis-Fermor argues that ‘Gina’s original
illiteracy breaks through the surface of that ‘education’ that Hjalmar had imparted, not in
moments of deep feeling, but, as might be expected, in moments of irritation or embarrassment. It is then that she misuses words that she has overheard in her husband’s conversation and speaks ungrammatically.’25 This fails to acknowledge that more often than
not it is Hjalmar’s embarrassment and Gina’s indifference or irritation which produce
both the comedy and the subtext of the situation. It should also be pointed out that the
‘education’ Hjalmar has imparted is a reflection on him rather than Gina, as the extent to
which she has culturally profited by her marriage is ironically heightened by the fact that
she misuses the words she has picked up from her husband.26
In Act 3, Gregers surprises Hjalmar shooting live rabbits in the attic. Flustered, he
displays his irritation over Gina’s malapropisms:
GINA
You and old Grandfather are going to cause an accident with that
pigstol.
HJALMAR
I believe I’ve told you that this weapon is called pistol.
The point here has nothing to do with the correct names of weapons:
GINA
Yes, you and Grandfather’ll end by having an accident one of these
days with that gun.
HJALMAR
I think I’ve told you that a firearm of this kind is called a pistol.27
Hjalmar is not embarrassed by Gina’s lack of knowledge of firearms, but by the way she
displays her commonness in front of Gregers by mispronouncing ‘pistol’. The Norwegian
word for ‘pistol’ is the same as the English, and I think it is possible to simply copy the
original here, but it may depend on other factors in a production, for instance, whether or
not it was set in its original period. One could also copy Christopher Hampton’s variant,
‘pistool’ [Faber]. But many translations fail to solve this problem satisfactorily, using
‘gun’ like Ellis-Fermor, or better, but still somewhat misleading, colloquialisms for a
weapon, such as ‘shooter’28 and ‘popgun’.29
Shakespeare wrote his plays with specific actors in mind; he even created roles around
their individual talents. Ibsen, Chekhov and Strindberg all had a very good idea of who
would play the roles, and like Shakespeare, often wrote for actors whose styles and voices
they were familiar with. To be able to write dialogue for a particular actor means the
lines are anchored in a specificity whose ultimate result is universality—perhaps because
there is an authenticity which cannot otherwise be achieved. It is not so much a matter
9
of changing the text according to an actor, as writing it with a specific actor in mind.
Unfortunately, most of our playwrights suffer from being deprived of that luxury, but it is
one I have often been afforded in my translations.
When translating Ghosts (with Louis Nowra), we were aware that Osvald’s at times
elaborate and intense speeches might seem somewhat euphemistic to a contemporary
audience. The director Neil Armfield suggested that we pull back a little on Osvald’s language, as Robert Menzies is a rather intense actor, capable of putting a wealth of emotions
into his lines. This was very good advice, and one I remembered when Menzies played
Krogstad in A Doll’s House the following year. By simplifying some of the words and
the sentence structures, I think we also managed to reveal their core, and thereby heighten
their meaning, while their embedded emotions were added by the actor.
When working on Hedda Gabler, I was translating a passage involving Løvborg one
night when Colin Friels (who was cast as Løvborg) happened to be in a film on television. I turned it on and sat with my back to it while I worked, listening to Friel’s voice,
his speech-rhythms and ways of ‘treating’ the words. Like Menzies, Friels’ style tends
towards the colourful and the forceful, and to listen to his voice helped me make certain
choices. Similarly, Judy Davis is an actor with an enormous capacity for nuance and
subtlety, and an irony, or a sense of fear, or doubt, need to be barely suggested in a line
for her voice to express it.
The version of Gogol’s The Government Inspector, which I wrote with Neil Armfield
and Geoffrey Rush, from a literal translation by Lech Mackiewicz, was completely designed around the production and the cast.30 Rush, playing Khlestakov, took part in the
writing process of his lines, trying them out in his own voice as they were being created.
Dobchinsky and Bobchinsky were played by Paul Blackwell and Paul Livingstone, and
the opportunity to tailor the speeches around their inimitable talents and acting styles
added a certain flavour to these characters. I believe that most of the characterisations,
movements, actions and reactions to a large extent arose from the fact that these aspects
had already been ‘imagined’ in the text before the rehearsals. However, the fine-tuning
of the final performance version went on throughout the rehearsal period; inspired actors
gave us paraphrases which improved the lines; an improvised action led to a change of
words; and various and at times severe cuts were made to tighten the dramatic conflict
once we could see what was happening on the floor, particularly in lengthy descriptions
of the world outside the one we are confronted with on stage.31
There were extreme reactions to the language of this production of The Government
Inspector, from one Russian-Australian Sydney Theatre Company subscriber who took
us to task for destroying a wonderful classic by ‘Australianising’ and trivialising it, to
a grateful Russian-Australian who said he had given up hope of seeing a good English
version and production of this play. There was no particular attempt to Australianise the
language by using local expressions. We kept as close as possible to the original and its
often colourful Russian expressions rather than substituting them with English cliches
or common phrases. We also attempted to convey the very Gogolesque rapid changes
between raw colloquialisms, pretentious outpourings, swear-words, and hypocritical
civilities. The language of the original is a wonderful mixture of styles which acutely
characterises the people of this drama, without being rooted in psychological truths or any
kind of reverence for stylistic unity. Like the characters, the language took imaginative
leaps; the actors used their own voices without putting on any kind of accent, but like the
characters, they changed their language according to the situation. The very nature of
10
Akerholt
the play allows a creative freedom which is sometimes impossible with works based on a
‘psychological’ cause-and-effect structure and conflict.
In an international car race at the turn of the century, an American car stalled in the
Chinese hinterland; it had a tiny puncture in the radiator. By dumbshow, the Americans
persuaded a local craftsman to make a copy of the radiator, which was in due course installed and the car continued. But of course it stalled again—the craftsman had studiously
copied the hole as well. We no longer copy the holes of other countries’ versions of the
classics. We may, of course, pierce a few new holes of our own—but at least they are
ours. Australian theatre has begun to appropriate the classics. We are making them our
own. Not just by writing new versions for our own productions, but also by interpreting
them in the light of ourselves and our lives, and creating a unique theatrical language and
vision which springs from our own culture and experiences.
11
NOTES
1
John Dryden, Preface to Ovid’s Epistles, quoted in Ronnie Apter, Digging for the Treasure: Translation after
Pound, New York: Paragon House Publishers, 1987, p. 6.
2
3
Quotations that are not identified by translator or publisher are always my own versions.
4
Digging for Treasure, cit., p. 4.
5
This is one reason for the importance of translations being created for specific productions, in consultation
with directors and designers.
6
When translating The Government Inspector (see footnote 21), we consulted five or six other translations,
and came to very similar conclusions about Eric Bentley’s version of this play. We also found that it was far
removed from the tone and the language of the original, and without a specific character of its own.
7
Also spelt ‘skid’ and ‘skit’. The Norwegian language underwent many reforms in the second half of the 19th
century, and Ibsen’s spelling changed over the long period in which he wrote.
8
Jean-Paul Sartre, Huis Clos, Paris, Gallimard, 1947, p. 15.
9
This translation has not, to my knowledge, been published.
10
Frank Hauser, interviewed in The Quarterly Theatre Review, 2nd Quarter 1988, No. 168, p. 20.
11
Hedda Gabler, Sydney Theatre Company, Wharf Theatre, opening 14 May 1986. Directed by Richard
Wherrett, designed by Geoffrey Gifford, with Judy Davis, Drew Forsythe, Colin Friels, Arthur Dignam,
Melissa Jaffer, Victoria Longley, Philippa Baker. The translation has also been used in amateur productions.
12
Ghosts (co-translated with Louis Nowra), Belvoir St. Theatre, opening 4 March 1988. Directed by Neil
Armfield, designed by Brian Thomson, with Julia Blake, Robert Menzies, John Bell, Rebecca Frith, Peter
Whitford. The translation was used by Aubrey Mellor in his production for Queensland Theatre Company,
opening 5 July 1989, with Jennifer Flowers and Eugene Gilfedder in the main roles. Master Builder, Belvoir
St. Theatre, opening 16 April 1991. Directed by Neil Armfield, designed by Brian Thomson, with John
Stanton, Angie Milliken, Jane Harders, Jacqueline McKenzie, Lewis Fitzgerald, Ralph Coterill. We dropped
the definite article in the English title; the Norwegian title is: Byggmester Solness: Masterbuilder Sollness.
13
George Steiner, The Death of Tragedy, Faber and Faber, London, 1961, p. 305; p. 292 (the latter quotation
refers to The Wild Duck).
14
York Theatre, Seymour Centre, Sydney Festival, January 1991.
15
Ibsen: Plays Two, trans. Michael Meyer, London, Eyre Methuen, 1980; Hedda Gabler was first published in
1962 (Rupert Hart-Davis).
16
The Norwegian line is: ‘Det lar jeg nok vœre’.
17
Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House and Other Plays, trans. Peter Watts, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1965, p. 150.
18
A Doll’s House, Belvoir St. Theatre, opening 26 September 1989. Directed by Gale Edwards, designed
by Mary Moore, with Helen Buday, John Howard, Robert Menzies, Jane Menelaus, George Whaley. The
roles of the maid Helen and the nurse Anne-Marie were combined into one, and the text needed only a few
adjustments and changes with Anne-Marie taking over Helen’s role. But I felt a sense of loss in not having
the ‘status symbol’ that a maid presented. This production also used only two children, again with very
little rewriting needed. The translation was then used in the Hole in the Wall production for Perth Festival,
opening 10 February, 1991, directed by Aarne Neeme, with Greta Scacchi, Michael Loney, Adrian Mulraney,
Annie Murtagh-Monks, Andrew Warwick, Jenny McNae, Jane Prendergast; several minor cuts in the Belvoir
St. Theatre production were put back in. ABC Radio National broadcast the version with the Perth cast, 25
August 1991. Amateur productions have also used the translation.
19
Henrik Ibsen, trans. Watts, cit., p. 150.
20
The Norwegian ‘far’ is somewhat more common than the English ‘father’; but Ibsen could just as easily have
used the also common word ‘pappa’—‘daddy’—if that was the effect he wanted.
21
Henrik Ibsen, trans. Watts, cit., p. 148.
22
Ibid.
23
This is easily solved by simply following Ibsen’s patterns, except in the expression ‘thank you’. Miss Tesman
would not say ‘thanks’, but she could say ‘I’m grateful’ or a similar phrase. Besides, ‘thank you’ does not
contain suggestions of formality or informality.
24
Henrik Ibsen, Hedda Gabler and Other Plays, trans. Una Ellis-Fermor, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1961, p.
251.
Henrik Ibsen, Hedda Gabler and Other Plays, trans. Una Ellis-Fermor, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1961, p.
251. I mainly use translations published by Penguin in my examples; they are readily available and widely
used.
12
Akerholt
25
Ibid., pp. 17-18.
26
Gina’s moments of irritation are closely linked with agitation and fear over things going wrong. Her errors of
language create a link with Gregers, whom she blames, and with Hjalmar, whose words she mispronounces.
Her equanimity which normally keeps things on an even keel is upset by an intruder from the past, who
brings with him a ‘bad smell’. There is a noticeable repetition of the word ‘stink’, or ‘stench’, in the third act
in which Gina also excels in her malapropisms.
27
Henrik Ibsen, trans. Una Ellis-Fermor, cit., pp. 198-9.
28
Henrik Ibsen, The Wild Duck & John Gabriel Borkman, trans. Peter Hall & Inga-Stina Ewbank, Bath,
Absolute Classics, 1990, p. 67.
29
Henrik Ibsen, The Wild Duck, trans. Michael Meyer, London, Methuen, 1977, p. 75.
30
The Government Inspector by Nikolai Gogol, Sydney Theatre Company, Drama Theatre, opening July 1991.
Directed by Neil Armfield, designed by Stephen Curtis, with Geoffrey Rush, Kerry Walker, Max Cullen, Paul
Blackwell, Paul Livingston, Camilla Sobb, Paul Chubb, Willie Fennell, Russell Cheek, Donal Gibson, Lois
Ramsay, Keith Robinson, Frank Whitten, Barry Rugless.
31
The danger of cutting this text, though, is that you may also losing the balance Gogol sets up between the
group of characters we meet and the picture he paints through words and action of the whole city—even
Russia; a picture which constantly intrudes on and colours the action in front of us.
13
ACCIDENTAL DEATH
OF A TRANSLATOR:
THE DIFFICULT CASE
OF DARIO FO
Tim Fitzpatrick & Ksenia Sawczak
According to David Hirst, one of the dangers which actors face when performing Dario
Fo’s Accidental Death of an Anarchist in translation is that of ‘judging the performance
solely by the number of laughs it obtains and thus allowing the farcical features to run
away with the play rather than using them to score political points’ (Hirst 1989, p. 99).
What Hirst has in mind in reaching this conclusion, based on observation of various
productions of this play, is the problem of translating and performing Fo in a context other
than that intended by the author. A comparison of Fo’s original to three translations and
the transcript of one recent Australian production of Anarchist illustrates the problems
faced by translators and adaptors, even in the famous ‘extra shoe’ sequence in which Fo
himself intended to bring to the forefront the comic and farcical possibilities of the play.
By analysing this sequence and one other, and focusing upon the social, linguistic and
theatrical structures that need to be dealt with by translators, we shall attempt to underline
the various degrees of slippage from translation towards adaptation which inevitably arise
through the difficulty of finding or creating structures in the English language and context
which are analogous with those employed by Fo.
From translation to adaptation
Nowhere is the impossibility of translation so evident as in the theatre, if only because
it adds another obvious level of complexity to the operation: the theatre translator has to
deal with all the usual non-equivalences between linguistic structures, social phenomena
and the social and ideological frames by which phenomena are ‘read’, but in addition
has to deal with problems of non-equivalence between the pertinent theatrical frames
from which the text emerges and those into which it is injected by the translation
process. This means that there will always and inevitably be a slippage away from the
impossible ideal of translation towards the less ideal but pragmatically necessary notion
of adaptation—it is only a question of extent and of the explicitness with which such
a strategy is admitted. This article will examine the measure to which such adaptation
to the target culture is necessary even in the least-interventionist ‘translation’ process.
The figure below summarises what is involved in the impossible task of translation for
the theatre. Double-headed arrows indicate dialectical relationships between elements
which influence and problematise each other. The various circles represent the general
and specifically theatrical ‘knowledge’ of the audience and producers of performance.
Single-headed arrows indicate various sorts of textual interdependence:
The central question is whether and to what extent there exists any equivalence or
analogy between the two cultural structures that are the termini of the transfer which
translation attempts. Pertinent elements in the cultures are indicated within the ‘culture’
balloons: language itself, social realities and the frames (both socio-political and
ideological) whereby such realities and events are interpreted. These elements are in
a dialectical relationship, and in particular to frames regarding theatrical representation
within (and of) the culture concerned. There is no guarantee of necessary equivalence or
analogy between these various components and those of another culture which may be the
target of a translation initiative.
It is this group of elements constitutive of a culture that comes into play—again
dialectically, as the bold arrows suggest—when a production is mounted and performed
before an audience: audience members develop a dialectical relationship to the production
and to its representation of the culture in which they live, comparing such a representation
to their own cultural constructs. Further, there is no guarantee that the triangular
relationship (bold arrows) between production, audience and culture is replicated in any
analogous manner in the target culture.
Translation usually operates on the text of a production—a text, it is assumed, which
encapsulates certain key features of the production, and can serve as the original has done
as the basis of a production in the target culture. It is obvious that such an assumption
distils all the problematics of the translation exercise: the lack of analogous structures
at the levels of culture, theatre, performance and then performance-text relationship
16
Fitzpatrick & Sawczak
Accidental Death: Dario Fo
will all ensure and necessitate slippage away from the central and idealised position of
translation as unmediated mediator between cultures, towards at least some degree of
adaptation—adaptation which, as its positioning in the figure suggests, slips to the right
to draw more on structures in the target culture, attenuating the significance of those in
the original culture.
Fo’s original and the translations
Fo’s Morte accidentale di un anarchico was published in Italy in 1974, after several years
of successful performances (and textual development) by La Comune, Fo’s and his wife
Franca Rame’s theatre company. It was designed explicitly as ‘counter-information’ to
raise public awareness of the extent to which the political situation was being manipulated
by sinister forces intent on creating a crisis of confidence which would facilitate a rightwing coup. The arrest and death in custody of an anarchist suspected of having placed
the Piazza Fontana bomb became a national talking-point, and Fo’s play was intended to
be part of the discussion. Clearly, then, it is extraordinarily closely linked to a specific
socio-political context. Further, it is inextricably tied to a performance context involving
not only the commitment of La Comune to political theatre, but also the overwhelming
presence of Fo himself, one of the great performers of our age, in the central role of the
‘Matto’ or Maniac. His character (in his various disguises as investigating judge, forensic
expert etc.) is obsessively intent on ferreting out by means of interviews and re-enactments
the truth behind the stories of the police officers responsible for the anarchist’s ‘flight’
from the upper-floor window of the police station, and as such is the pivot around which
the action revolves.
It will be clear immediately why this play constitutes such a translation problem: it
comes from a specific political context, was generated from a unique political theatre
matrix and is largely performer-driven by Fo himself in the central role. And yet it has
had numerous productions—some of them very successful—in the English-speaking
world. What has happened to it in the translation process is fascinating. Gavin Richards’
1980 translation was performed in the West End (Richards 1980; see Hirst 1989, p. 77
for discussion of the genesis of this translation); Cumming and Supple’s translation
(Cumming & Supple 1991) was done for performance and further adapted to an
Australian performance context for Robin Archer’s production (of which a transcript has
been used below). Ed Emery’s translation (Emery 1992), on the other hand, is avowedly
an attempt to minimise the adaptational processes implicit and at times extremely explicit
in the other versions.
This article will examine, by means of a discussion of two short excerpts, the sorts of
slippages towards adaptation that occur with a text of this degree of difficulty. The two
passages (provided in their entirety in the original and in Emery’s ‘literal’ translation in
the Appendix) are in themselves not particularly complex, but are indicative of the tone
and characteristics of the play. The first involves discussion by the Maniac of the role
and career-paths of judges in the Italian judicial system, comparing their lot with that of
other professionals and the ordinary workers. The second involves the Maniac’s attempt
to ‘help’ the police concerned elaborate an explanation for the presence of one shoe too
many: despite their depositions to the effect that they had attempted to stop the anarchist’s
suicidal leap from the window, and that in the process one of his shoes had come off in an
officer’s hands, independent witnesses have confirmed that the anarchist was still wearing
17
both shoes as he lay dead on the pavement below. A number of examples from each
passage will demonstrate the effect of four different but overlapping precipitating factors
at work in the translation-adaptation process.
Four precipitants of adaptation strategies
This text, because of the particular characteristics, constitutes a limit-case for the translation/adaptation exercise. It illustrates perfectly the extent to which the flight to adaptation
is precipitated under pressure from four overlapping but distinguishable sources: nonequivalence of linguistic structures; of social phenomena and the frames, both social
and more generally ideological, employed to make sense of them; of a particular sub-set
of such frames, the specifically theatrical; and finally of the exigencies of theatrical
performance itself.
Linguistic structures
The question of how Fo uses linguistic devices to create his desired effect is perhaps one of
the most fundamental problems faced by translators, as it entails overcoming the invisible
obstacles imposed by language, and finding a suitable theatrical or linguistic structure
which has the dual function of transposing the sense of Fo’s text, and at the same time
making sense in the English language and context. The impact of linguistic structures is
succinctly exemplified in a simple example: the translations of the Italian ‘manicomio’,
which oscillates in the various versions between the ‘scientific’ and colloquial-derogatory:
‘lunatic asylums’ (Cumming-Supple, Archer), ‘nut-house’ (Emery) and ‘looney bin’
(Richards). This is not a question of performance-orientation—Emery’s avowedly literal
translation is less formal than Cumming-Supple—but is rather a result of the polyvalence
of the word ‘manicomio’ in Italian, which can function in both scientific and colloquial
registers:
Fo
INDIZIATO
In manicomio!
Emery
MANIAC
In the
nuthouse!
Cumming-Supple
MADMAN
In the lunatic
asylums.
Archer
MADMAN
In the lunatic
asylums
Richards
BERTOZZO
In the looney
bin no doubt.
A more complex example is provided by a string of infinitives as the Maniac describes
the functions of a judge that he would like to fulfil: three of the translations follow this
infinitive patterning, without however being able to reproduce the incantational effect
created by the repeated ‘-are’ endings of the Italian. Emery’s academic translation is
sensitive to this, and attempts to capture something of the sound patterning by using ‘-ing’
forms, and embellishing the pattern with a crescendo:
18
Fo
INDIZIATO
...a me piace
giudicare
condannare
reprimere
perseguitare!
Emery
MANIAC
...I prefer
sitting in
judgement
handing down
sentences
coming down
like a ton of
bricks!
Cumming-Supple
MADMAN
...I want
to judge,
condemn,
repress,
persecute.
Archer
MADMAN
...I want to
judge,
arrest,
condemn,
persecute.
Richards
MANIAC
...I like to
accuse,
convict,
judge and pass
sentence.
Equally indicative is the following example, in which to create a joke Fo employs
linguistic devices which are non-existent in English:
Fo
Emery
AGENTE
CONSTABLE
Sí, ma mi è
Yes, but his
rimasta in
shoe came off
mano la scarpa,
in my hand,
e lui è andato
and down he
di sotto lo
went anyway.
stesso.
MATTO
MANIAC
Non ha
Never mind.
importanza.
The important
Importante è
thing is that
che sia rimasta
his shoe came
la scarpa.
off in your
La scarpa
hand. That
è la prova
shoe proves
inconfutabile
irrefutably
della vostra
that you were
volontà di
trying to save
salvarlo!
him!
Cumming-Supple
Archer
CONSTABLE
CONSTABLE
Yes, but the
Yes, b-but his
shoe came off
shoe came off
in my hand
in my hand,
and he fell
and he fell
anyway.
anyway.
Richards
CONSTABLE Yes,
but his shoe just
came off in my
hand.
MADMAN
MADMAN
No matter.
No matter,
The shoe
no matter.
remained with
The shoe
you. The shoe
remained
is irrefutable
with you, the
proof that you
shoe is proof
tried to save
positive that
him.
you tried to
save him!
MANIAC
That’s it!
Brilliant! Why
didn’t I see it
before. The vital
thing was you
had the shoe
in your hand.
Incontrovertible
proof of your
efforts to save
the suspect.
You’ve done it,
gentlemen. Well
done, Constable.
They slowly twig
they are in the
clear
Through careful repetition and placement of the words ‘importanza’, ‘importante’ and
‘la scarpa’, Fo uses phrasing as a means of creating a joke. By ending a sentence with
one word or idea and beginning a new sentence with that same word he turns the tragedy
of the event into a farce with his irreverence for the death of the anarchist through his
concentration on the importance of the shoe. Emery, Cumming-Supple and Archer each
attempt to translate the sequence as literally as possible, which entails repeating the same
words as does Fo. However, none of these translations succeeds in communicating Fo’s
joke, due to the boundaries imposed upon them by English: it is syntactically impossible
or at the very least markedly rhetorical or ‘poetic’ to end a sentence with a subject. While
their use of repetition aids them in their attempts to emphasise the search for proof of the
innocence of the police in their dealings with the anarchist, the impossibility of placing
19
these repeated words in strategically important places in the sentence prohibits them from
achieving the type of syntactical stress which is essential to Fo’s joke. This is an example
of an almost word-for-word substitution which fails to achieve the sense of Fo’s text.
Another instance of linguistic obstacles is found further on in the scene, in which the
Maniac provides a possible explanation of how the anarchist managed to hit the ground
with both shoes on his feet:
Fo
MATTO
Neanch’io!
A meno che
quest’agente
velocissimo
abbia
fatto in tempo,
precipitandosi
per le scale, a
raggiungere un
pianerottolo
del secondo
piano,
affacciarsi alla
finestra prima
che passasse
il suicida,
infilargli la
scarpa al volo
e risalire come
un razzo al
quarto piano
nell’istante
stesso in cui
il precipitante
raggiungeva il
suolo.
Emery
MANIAC
Neither can
I! Unless this
officer was
very quick
about it,
and went
rushing down
to the second
floor, stuck his
head out of the
window as the
anarchist was
coming past,
put his shoe
back on midflight, and then
shot back up to
the fourth floor
just in time for
the body to hit
bottom.
Cumming-Supple
MADMAN
Isn’t it.
Unless, the
constable here
managed to
dash
down the stairs
to a landing
on the second
floor, leant
out of the
window before
the anarchist
reached it, put
his shoe on as
he went past
and rushed
back upstairs
to the fourth
floor, getting
here at the
same moment
as the man hit
the ground.
Archer
MADMAN
Oh!! Unless
the constable
here managed
to dash down
onto a second
floor landing,
leant out the
window before
the anarchist
reached it,
popped the
shoe on as he
went past, ran
back up onto
the fourth
floor landing,
getting here
at exactly the
same time as
the man hit the
ground.
Richards
MANIAC Unless
the constable
here, moving
like the
clappers,
had time to
belt down to
the balcony
a few floors
below, lean out
and slip the
suspect’s shoe
back on as he
came sailing
by.
The humour of this scene depends upon the combination of absurdity and pace.
Fo succeeds in achieving both through the use of certain theatrical and grammatical
structures: the Maniac underlines the hypothetical nature of this scenario by the use of the
subjunctive, thus signalling the unlikelihood of his suggestion: ‘A meno che...abbia’. Fo
then maintains the pace and idiocy of such a possibility by means of a string of infinitives.
Although Emery, Cumming-Supple and Archer attempt to translate Fo’s sense of a
hypothesis by introducing it with the connective ‘unless’, their substitution of Fo’s technique of using present infinitives—a technique which works well in Italian—with the more
commonly used English structure of a verb in the past tense removes the pace and idiocy
from the Maniac’s suggestion. Emery, probably conscious of Fo’s use of pace, attempts
to achieve this same theatrical effect by replacing what Fo has done grammatically with
English idioms (e.g. ‘shot back up’). However a direct translation of Fo’s grammatical
devices is possible in English, as can be seen from Richard’s translation—and it is in
fact Richards’ adaptation which comes closest to translating the pace and hypothetical
tone of Fo’s text. Although he omits details and adds English idioms (‘moving like the
20
clappers’), Richards manages to find a theatrical and grammatical frame which comes
close to transposing the sense of the speech into the context of his own adaptation. This is
an example of an adaptation which avoids a word-for-word substitution, yet still manages
to grab the sense of the original text.
Set formulaic patterns either in the original language or in the target language will
lead inevitably to adaptational strategies of this sort. The different orientations of the
translations are illustrated in their versions of a reference in the original to the common
working man. While Emery stays close to the original, Cumming-Supple embellish by
means of a copia of formulaic phrases, and as well (in common with Archer and Richards)
by deferring to political correctness by including women:
Fo
INDIZIATO
...un uomo
comune, un
lavoratore
qualsiasi
Emery
MANIAC
...your average
working man
Cumming-Supple
Archer
Richards
MADMAN ...your MADMAN ...your MANIAC ...Your
average,
average man or
ordinary,
common or
woman
humdrum
garden,
ordinary man
or woman in
the street
sons and
daughters of
toil
It is the sound-patterns of the target language rather than the original which determine
Richards’ translation of a passage in which the judge’s career is contrasted to that of a
miner—whose retirement age is varied from fifty-five to fifty for the sake of a neat and
pithy punch-line (why Emery changes it to forty-five is unclear):
Fo
INDIZIATO
...Il minatore a
cinquantacinque
anni ha la
silicosi...
via, scartato,
licenziato,
svelto, prima
che scatti la
pensione...
Emery
MANIAC
...Your miner
has silicosis
by the time
he’s 45—get
rid of him,
quick, sack
him before
he sues for
compensation!
Cumming-Supple
Archer
Richards
MANIAC
...Coal miner, bit
of silicosis and
he’s fucked at
fifty.
In the following excerpt there are two adaptation phases: Cumming-Supple introduce
the ‘docker’ into the list of workers—a case of social phenomena causing adjustment due
to the proud heritage of trade-unionism on the British docks. This is then further adapted
in the Archer production: stevedores or dock workers have played an analogous industrial
role in Australia, but are not called ‘dockers’:
Fo
Emery
Cumming-Supple
The docker,
the miner, the
steel-worker—
21
Archer
The wharfie,
the miner, the
steel-worker—
Richards
Simple linguistic elements can cause problems: the immensely useful Italian connector
‘invece’ (‘instead’) is not used in quite the same way in English (‘on the other hand’ would
be a roundabout equivalent), and has understandably been substituted by milder forms of
opposition such as ‘but’: however the significance of the opposition that it introduces is
not lost, and in the Archer version as performed (and as punctuated here to capture some
sense of the paralinguistics) is quite explicit:
Fo
Invece per i
giudici no, per
i giudici è tutto
l’opposto
Emery
For a judge
it’s quite the
opposite
Cumming-Supple
And the judge
Archer
But!...The
Judge!
Richards
But the frailer
and feebler the
judges get...
An interesting non-coincidence of connotation occurs with the description of judges
as being ‘personaggi’ or ‘characters’ (in the theatrical sense, costumed, role-constrained
etc.). Emery translates directly to ‘characters’ and glosses over the non-theatrical sense
which ‘characters’ has in English, entailing as it does notions of particular or peculiar
personality traits. However something of the sense of role and display is achieved in the
Cumming-Supple adaptation, which turns the judges into ‘national treasures’:
Fo
Ebbene, ’sti
personaggi
hanno il potere
Emery
And these
characters have
the power
Cumming-Supple
These national
treasures
exercise a
power
Archer
Oh, yes:
these national
treasures
exercise the
power
Richards
In summary, both these scenes underline important factors with regard to linguistic
structures. Firstly, it cannot be assumed that a word-for-word substitution will succeed
in translating the sense of Fo’s text. Secondly, it cannot be assumed that the linguistic
structures of Italian, used for the sole purpose of gaining a theatrical effect, correspond to
those of the English language. In both cases slippage from translation towards adaptation
is likely to occur, due to the necessity of finding a linguistic structure (be it syntactic or
grammatical) that corresponds to the language into which the text is being translated.
Social frames and phenomena
The non-equivalence in different cultures of the social phenomena and the frames by
which we process, understand and interpret what is occurring in our world is a major
source of adaptational strategies on the part of the translator. An obvious example is
the adaptation of peculiarly Italian financial terms (brought into the Maniac’s outline of
various professions—here that of a bank clerk—which contrast to that of the judiciary).
Emery expands and finds rough equivalents, whereas Cumming-Supple and after them
Archer opt for outright adaptation (Richards elides this section altogether):
22
Fo
il tasso di
sconto, la
casella della
Biam, e quella
della SA.SIS.
Emery
Cumming-Supple
he starts getting
he’s getting
his sums wrong,
confused. He
starts forgetting
thinks the inthe names of
tray’s the outthe bank’s
tray, forgets to
clients, can’t
send a memo
tell a discount
and costs the
rate from a
company a
mortgage rate.
couple of
hundred.
Archer
he’s getting
confused,
doesn’t know
the in-tray
from the outtray, forgets to
send a memo,
costs the firm
a couple of
hundred bucks.
Richards
Similar adaptations occur in regard to the simile Fo offers to underline the detachment
of sentencing judges: Emery is precise, Cumming-Supple overlay the discourse with
explicit reference to the supposed expensive lunching habits of the judiciary; Archer
follows, but also records the early 1990’s Australian fashion for chardonnay over other
wine styles (and once more Richards has adapted this section out of existence):
Fo
dànno certe
condanne
all’ergastolo
cosí come uno
dice: “Beh,
forse domani
piove...”
Emery
they hand out
life sentences
like somebody
saying:
‘Maybe
it’ll rain
tomorrow...’
Cumming-Supple
with less
deliberation
than they
choose which
chablis to
accompany
their fish.
Archer
with less
deliberation
than they
choose which
chardonnay
to accompany
their fish.
Richards
Similar operations are evident in regard to a section in which these detached sentencers
are given voice, passing various sentences involving preferential treatment granted to
some offenders. Cumming-Supple adapt, Archer further adapts to the location of the
(Sydney) performance by reference to an exclusive private school, and Richards brings
into the discourse a cynical commonplace which is not at all inappropriate, but which
derives in no way from Fo’s original:
Fo
a te solo venti,
perché mi sei
simpatico!
Emery
Only twenty
for you,
because I like
your face!
Cumming-Supple
Six months
in an open
prison for you,
because you
used to work
for Guinness.
Archer
Six months
in an open
prison for you,
because, well,
your daddy
went to Joey’s!
Richards
Case
dismissed.
Council can
come and
corrupt me in
my chambers.
An exchange between the madman and one of the police officers gives an interesting
insight into the problem of translating linguistic formulas that actualise and activate
cultural and interpersonal patterns. In Italian conversation the transition from formal to
informal address is usually made at the initiative of the socially superior participant, and
negotiated via a formula: ‘Diamoci del tu’ (‘Let’s use ‘tu’ [the familiar form of address]
with each other’). Here it is the Maniac who inappropriately makes the suggestion; he
is of course rebuffed by the Commissario, and then apologises by means of another
common formula:‘Come non detto’ (‘[Let’s act] as if it was never mentioned’). This of
course causes major problems for the translator: not only is it a question of structures
23
of formality in the language that have no immediate equivalence in English, but of
patterns of social behaviour (here the inappropriate seizing of initiative by the socially
subordinate Maniac) that are realised in such language patterns, and as well the highly
codified formulas whereby the cultural pattern of transition from formality to familiarity
are negotiated. Emery makes a good attempt at the problem, Cumming-Supple create a
vague sense of what is going on—but it is so vague that Archer and her actors turn it into
an explicit and inappropriate homosexual reference:
Fo
INDIZIATO
...Diamoci
pure del tu!
COMMISSARIO
Attento
matto...
vacci piano a
sfottere...
Emery
MANIAC
...You can call
me Antonio, if
you like.
BERTOZZO
You just
watch your
step... I’ve
had enough of
you taking the
mickey.
INDIZIATO Come MANIAC Alright,
non detto...
alright...
Cumming-Supple
MADMAN
...Let’s not be
so formal.
BERTOZZO
don’t push it,
madman.
Archer
MADMAN
—maybe we
should stop
being quite so
formal. Come
here you big
lout!
BERTOZZO
Jesus! Don’t
push it, shitstick!
Richards
What must be taken into account when attempting to overcome the obstacle of nonequivalence of social phenomena and frames is the general or specific knowledge of the
audience when it enters the theatre (indicated by the circles in the diagram). An analysis
of the scene in which the Maniac gives a documentary account of the reports filed by the
media and by witnesses of the anarchist’s landing on the pavement provides some clues
as to how translators attempt to transpose purely Italian phenomena into the context of the
culture for which they are translating:
24
Fo
Emery
Cumming-Supple
MATTO
MANIAC
MADMAN
E sí, una
That’s what
The Constable
sarebbe
I said. One
was left with
rimasta tra
ended up in the
one in his
le mani del
hands of this
hand. He told
poliziotto...
officer here...
that to the
L’ha
We have his
press soon
testimoniato
statement to
afterwards.
lui stesso
that effect, a
qualche
couple of days
giorno dopo
after the event.
il fattaccio...
..(He shows
(Mostra il
them the sheet
foglio) Ecco
of paper )
qui.
Look, here.
COMMISSARIO SPORTS JACKET PISSANI
Sí, è vero...
Correct, your
Yes, that’s
L’ha raccontato
Honour...He
right.
ad un cronista
was
del “Corriere
interviewed
della Sera”.
by a journalist
from Corriere
della Sera.
MATTO
MANIAC
MADMAN
Ma qui, in
But in this
But in this
quest’altro
Appendix
statement, it
allegato, si
here, we’re
appears the
assicura che
assured that as
anarchist had
l’anarchico
the anarchist
one shoe on
morente sul
lay dying on
each foot when
selciato del
the pavement
he lay dying on
cortile, aveva
below, he still
the pavement.
ancora ai piedi
had both his
tutte e due le
shoes on his
scarpe.
feet.
Ne dànno
This was
This was
testimonianza
witnessed
witnessed by
gli accorsi,
by various
several people
fra i quali un
bystanders,
including two
cronista dell’
including a
reporters.
“Unità”, ed
journalist from
altri giornalisti
L’Unità and
di passaggio!
various other
press people
who happened
to be passing.
Archer
Well, the
Constable
here was left
holding one in
his hand—he
told that to the
press shortly
afterwards.
Richards
You see
according to
page five of
the judge’s
evidence the
Constable
states, as he
has just done,
that he had
the anarchist’s
shoe in his
hand...
Yet, it
appears in
this statement
here that the
anarchist had
one shoe on
each foot as he
lay dying on
the pavement.
But according
to this
addendum on
page 16, four
witnesses in
the courtyard
below,
including a
reporter from
This was
witnessed by
several people,
including
a couple of
members of
the press.
Corriere
della Sera,
swear the jam
sponge was
accoutred with
a pair of shoes
consistent with
the average
biped.
Cumming-Supple and Archer omit the names of the Italian newspapers Corriere della
Sera and Unità, preferring to translate them simply as ‘the press’. This is wise if the
assumption they have made of their likely audience is that they are unfamiliar with the
Italian press. But by avoiding the use of direct names, their versions of the passage lose
the theatrical frame which Fo intended it to have, since the omission of detail strips the
passage of its documentary thrust. What Fo clearly wanted to stress in this passage is
25
the raw truth, complete with all the details. Emery provides an almost word-for-word
translation, but it cannot be assumed that he had an audience in mind in undertaking his
task, as in the notes to his translation he stipulates that his intention was to provide as
literal a translation as possible, conscious of both the English and Italian language, rather
than a piece intended to be used for performance. Richards also employs the names of the
Italian newspapers, and even exaggerates the documentary quality of the Maniac’s speech
through elaboration upon what the audience already knows (‘the Constable states, as he
has just done...’; ‘according to this addendum on page 16’; ‘four witnesses’). However
despite this he fails to gain the effect which Fo intended in this speech. Fo uses the
documentary mode as a way of underlining the truth and of displaying the ugly side of the
police force, but on the other hand Richards, seemingly more concerned with obtaining a
laugh, falls victim to the danger outlined by Hirst above. He does so by punctuating the
Maniac’s speech with comic one-liners: even before he begins to document the details
of information from witnesses and the press, he comically chides the superintendent
(‘Temper! Temper! It’ll end in tears.’), emphasising the comic vein of the speech. The
seriousness of the true state of affairs is further attenuated by the Maniac’s reference
to the anarchist on the pavement as a ‘jam sponge’. In this instance the question of
authorship becomes important. By employing the same theatrical frame as that used
by Fo (documentary theatre) Richards’ role as translator surfaces. Yet by combining
this with his own theatrical frame (comedy) he emerges as an adaptor, since the thrust
of the Maniac’s speech alters considerably: buffoonery rather than counter-information
becomes the focus.
Theatrical frames
Many adaptations can be pinpointed as deriving from the need to adapt to the target
theatrical culture, with its particular conventions of what constitutes stage action
(particularly comedy or farce), and how it should be structured.
In particular the translations manifest a tendency to adopt a more ‘dialogic’ structure
built upon questions and answers, thus down-playing the monologic structure of the
original (in which there is no question who the principal focus of attention is: Fo playing
the Maniac). What results is a more ‘ensemble’ interactional tone, more in keeping with
comic stereotypes (straight-man/funny man). Here is a simple example of an observation
by one of the police being turned by all the translators into a question to simplify
interactional patterns:
Fo
Emery
COMMISSARIO BERTOZZO Read
Ah, vedo che
up on the law,
te ne intendi
have we?!
anche di legge!
Cumming-Supple
BERTOZZO
Oh, you’re an
expert on the
law too, are
you?
Archer
Richards
BERTOZZO
BERTOZZO Law
So, you’re an
student as well
expert on the
now, eh?
bloody law, are
you?
A further example shows the same adaptational process at work—all except Emery
opt for a question-and-answer structure, with Richards offering in addition motivation for
Bertozzo’s interest:
26
Fo
COMMISSARIO
...Qui, però,
non c’è nel tuo
curriculum che
tu abbia fatto il
giudice
Emery
Cumming-Supple
Archer
BERTOZZO
BERTOZZO
BERTOZZO And
...It says
...and am I to
am I to assume
nothing in your
assume you’ve
that you might
CV about your
impersonated
have, you
being a lawyer!
members
know, passed
of our legal
yourself off
profession too?
as members
of our legal
profession?
Richards
BERTOZZO
Is this a clue
to further
undetected
transgressions?
Nothing
in your
curriculum
vitae about a
lawyer...
Richards is not alone in his tendency to supply ‘motivation’ for some of the police
utterances—in the following example Emery assigns curiosity to Bertozzo, while
Richards suggests rather that bureaucratic thoroughness is behind his question—but both
exemplify a theatrical convention in which naturalism and psychologising of character
are highly valued:
Fo
COMMISSARIO
Allora ti sei già
fatto passare
qualche volta
per giudice, o
no?
Emery
Cumming-Supple
Archer
BERTOZZO Now BERTOZZO
BERTOZZO
this might be
A judge then.
A judge,
interesting.
maybe?
Have you
ever passed
yourself off as
a judge?
Richards
BERTOZZO
Never actually
impersonated
a judge, have
you? Just for the
record?
Equally anathema in an English-speaking theatrical tradition seems to be the dominance of one central character (and star performer) over all the others. To compensate for
this characteristic of the original Richards punctuates the Maniac’s long monologue on
Judges with a number of interruptions from the listeners, clearly intent on reducing the
exclusivity of the audience’s attention on Fo’s character:
BERTOZZO Will you...
MANIAC Silence in the court!!!
BERTOZZO (Caught off guard) Beg your pardon M’Lud.
BERTOZZO Don’t be fooled, Constable. This raving is a conscious effort to confuse us and avoid
prosecution.
MANIAC No it’s not...
BERTOZZO Sit down!!
MANIAC sits..
The adaptor’s freedom to deviate from the text becomes particularly apparent as the
‘shoe’ scene reaches its close, signalled by the ringing of the phone. In Richards’ version
the Maniac disappears completely from the dialogue, and the police, through their own
buffoonery, admit to having pushed the anarchist from the window. This addition to the
text bears no resemblance whatsoever to the original, and hence it is impossible to discuss
it under the heading of translation:
PISSANI Anyway it wasn’t raining.
CONSTABLE Ah, but the anarchist may have thought it was about to.
SUPERINTENDENT Galoshes are a ridiculous garment. An anarchist wouldn’t be seen dead in them.
CONSTABLE Exactly!
SUPERINTENDENT Bloody balls, Constable!
27
CONSTABLE Only trying to help.
SUPERINTENDENT Cock! Complete cock!
PISSANI Anarchists are often very eccentric, he may well have been wearing galoshes.
SUPERINTENDENT Well where are they? Where are the fucking galoshes? Not in the transcript, not
amongst the dead man’s possessions, the shoe he had in his hand was a shoe...
Runs to get a cardboard box. Empties dead man’s possessions on floor.
...this shoe, which you...(waves shoe at PISSANI) ...secretly put there after we’d first given evidence...
PISSANI and CONSTABLE Sssssshhhhh!!!
SUPERINTENDENT I will not shush! Look, look, look there’s its little tag... item 99b: one shoe. Not
galosh! Pinheads! Whose writing is that?
PISSANI I only did it on your orders!
SUPERINTENDENT Me!? Me?! You weren’t involved all of a sudden.
CONSTABLE Please! Sir!
SUPERINTENDENT Keep out of it! It’s all me now! You didn’t enjoy yourself, of course?!
PISSANI I was having a laugh. Yes. You said that, didn’t you Constable!
CONSTABLE Yes.
SUPERINTENDENT Some laugh! Ha! Laughing now, aren’t we?!
PISSANI I was just scaring him. You are the nutter!
SUPERINTENDENT I’m a nutter?!
CONSTABLE Please.
PISSANI Well you bloody pushed him, chum!
SUPERINTENDENT Did I? Did I! That is a laugh alright! All on my own, was I!
Suddenly all three realise at the same instant that the MANIAC is listening. They freeze. Slowly turn.
The MANIAC has a beatific smile. Pause. No-one speaks.
Phone shatters the silence. It rings.
This can also be adduced as an example of the impact of theatrical frames: the tendency
to rewrite the play less as a bravura piece for Fo’s character of the Maniac and more as an
ensemble farce in which all the characters have an opportunity to participate.
The translations seem to share a perception that the original is in need of embellishment
for comic effect, with—in this example—extravagant metaphors replacing Fo’s matterof-fact statement (accurately translated by Emery):
Fo
INDIZIATO
...per il
giudice,
invece,
comincia il
bello della
carriera.
Emery
Cumming-Supple
MANIAC
...your judge
is just coming
into his prime.
MADMAN
...a judge is
well-groomed
and galloping
into his prime.
Archer
MADMAN
...your judge
is being wellgroomed and
galloping into
his prime!
Richards
MANIAC
...your average
magistrate
blooms into
a high court
judge...
And the conventions of farce as a ‘physical’ genre are perhaps behind the adaptations
of the Maniac’s imagined conversation between his doddering judge and a court official
who has found a stray bone and wonders if it belongs to the judge:
28
Fo
... oh, guardi,
ha perso
un osso... è
suo? No, è
impossibile,
io non ne ho
piú!”
Emery
... Oh dear, lost
our marbles,
have we, Sir?
I’ll let you
know if I find
them...’
Cumming-Supple
‘Oh, Your
Honour,
you’ve
dropped
something. Is
this your arse?’
‘Thank you,
young man. I
need that to
talk through.’
Archer
‘Excuse me,
your Honour,
did you drop
something? Is
this your arse?’
‘Thank you,
young man—
I’ll need that to
talk through.’
Richards
A final example of the potential significance of theatrical frames in the translation
enterprise is provided by an interesting metatextual instance in the original:
Fo
MATTO
Ma c’è chi le
porta ancora...
anzi, sapete
che vi dico?
che quella che
è rimasta fra le
mani dell’agente
non era una
scarpa, ma una
caloscia.
Emery
Cumming-Supple
MANIAC
MADMAN
No, but people
What’s wrong
do still wear
with that?
them... And do
People have
you know what
been doing
I say? I say
it for years.
that what the
What the
officer was left
constable had
holding wasn’t
in his hand
a shoe at all, it
could have
was a galosh.
been a galosh.
Archer
MADMAN
Yes, yes! What
the constable
could’ve been
left holding
in his hand
could’ve been
a...a galosh.
Richards
CONSTABLE
That’s not
the point I’m
pursuing.
I’m saying
that what I
held in my
hand may,
in fact,
have been a
galosh.
The thrust of this passage does not depend upon the words themselves, i.e. the content
of the text, but upon the fact that what is being made (in the original text, at least) is
explicitly labelled as an assertion: the Maniac’s speech-act is not just an assertion, but
an assertion of an assertion. Emery provides a most faithful translation of the theatrical
frame employed by Fo by placing emphasis on the speaker: ‘And do you know what
I say? I say that....’ The other three texts, however, seem to disregard the necessary
theatrical frame for a successful translation, as what emerges in their passages is not an
assertion but a hypothesis. The content of the original text is there, but what is lacking is
that which lies beneath the text, namely the metatextual structure.
The exigencies of performance
Finally, a short series of comparisons between the Cumming-Supple translation and the
Archer version as performed indicate some of the things that happen to a translation in its
actual performance. These are instances in which it is not Archer’s adaptation of CummingSupple which creates the variations—rather they indicate the extent to which the actors work
on and from a written text, adapting it to their particular styles, and punctuating it with extra
vocalisations and phrases (some clearly adaptations to the context of performance, some in the
interests of fluency, and others probably with a mnemonic function). The first example shows
the first of these three factors operating, with the addition of a common Australian adjective:
Cumming-Supple
BERTOZZO Oh, you’re an expert on the law too,
are you?
Archer
BERTOZZO So, you’re an expert on the bloody
law, are you?
29
The familiar form of Australian address, ‘mate’, is added to the following excerpt,
which also contains a formulaic addition (‘you know’) probably functioning as a ‘filler’
while the next piece of text is recalled for utterance:
Cumming-Supple
BERTOZZO I haven’t the time—and am I to
assume you’ve impersonated members of our
legal profession too? What? Barristers?
Archer
BERTOZZO Look, I don’t have the time mate.
And am I to assume that you might have, you
know, passed yourself off as members of our
legal profession? Perhaps barristers?
Another example of a filler of this sort is provided by an addendum to the speech
outlining judges’ career-paths, and is in all likelihood the performer’s response to
audience laughter at his punch-line:
Cumming-Supple
MADMAN ... a judge is well-groomed and
galloping into his prime.
Archer
MADMAN ... your judge is being well-groomed
and galloping into his prime! Yes! You know
what I mean.
Conclusion
This comparative analysis demonstrates the extent to which adaptation is forced upon even
the most ‘literal’ translator. While Richards’ adaptation has justifiably drawn criticism due
to the overwhelming influence of theatrical frames on the choices made by the adaptor, it is
clear nevertheless that his adaptation is merely more explicit in its choices—and that at times
it succeeds better than the other translations in encapsulating detail from the original. It is not
therefore simply a question of decrying the slippage to adaptation—rather it is a question of
pointing out its necessity.
30
APPENDIX
THE COMPLETE TEXTS OF THE SECTIONS DISCUSSED,
IN THE ORIGINAL AND THE MOST LITERAL
OF THE TRANSLATIONS
Fo
COMMISSARIO Ah, vedo che te ne intendi anche
di legge!
INDIZIATO Sulla legge? Tutto so! È venti anni
che studio legge!
COMMISSARIO Ma cos’hai, trecento anni? Dove
l’hai studiata legge?
INDIZIATO In manicomio! Sapesse come si
studia bene là dentro! C’era un cancelliere
paranoico che mi dava lezioni. Che genio! So
tutto: diritto romano, moderno, ecclesiastico...
il codice giustiniano... fridericano...
longobardo... greco-ortodosso... Tutto! Provi
ad interrogarmi!
COMMISSARIO Non ho tempo... Figurati! Qui,
però, non c’è nel tuo curriculum che tu abbia
fatto il giudice... e nemmeno l’avvocato?!
INDIZIATO Ah no, l’avvocato non lo farei mai.
A me non piace difendere, è un’arte passiva; a
me piace giudicare... condannare... reprimere...
perseguitare! Io sono uno dei vostri... caro
commissario! Diamoci pure del tu!
COMMISSARIO Attento matto... vacci piano a
sfottere...
INDIZIATO Come non detto...
COMMISSARIO Allora ti sei già fatto passare
qualche volta per giudice, o no?
INDIZIATO No, purtroppo non ne ho ancora
avuto l’occasione. Ah, come mi piacerebbe:
INDIZIATO il giudice è il meglio di tutti i
mestieri! Prima di tutto non si va quasi mai in
pensione... Anzi, nello stesso momento in cui
un uomo comune, un lavoratore qualsiasi, a
cinquantacinque sessant’anni è già da sbatter
via perché comincia ad essere un po’ tardo,
un po’ lento di riflessi, per il giudice, invece,
comincia il bello della carriera.
INDIZIATO Per un operaio alla catena o alla
trancia dopo i cinquant’anni è finita: combina
ritardi, incidenti, è da scartare! Il minatore
a cinquantacinque anni ha la silicosi... via,
scartato, licenziato, svelto, prima che scatti la
pensione...
Emery
BERTOZZO Read up on the law, have we?!
MANIAC Know it inside out. Studied it for
twenty years!
BERTOZZO Where did you study law?
MANIAC In the nuthouse! Very good for
studying, you’ve no idea! There was a
paranoid clerk to the court who gave me
lessons. A genius, he was! I know it all.
Roman law, Italian law, ecclesiastical law...
The Justinian code... the Frederican... the
Lombard... the Greek orthodox... the lot! Try
me with a few questions!
BERTOZZO No thank you. Can we get on. It
says nothing in your CV about your being a
lawyer!
MANIAC Ah, no, I’d never want to be a lawyer.
Defence never was my style. Too passive. I
prefer sitting in judgement... handing down
sentences... coming down like a ton of bricks!
I’m one of yours, Inspector. You can call me
Antonio, if you like.
BERTOZZO You just watch your step... I’ve had
enough of you taking the mickey.
MANIAC Alright, alright...
BERTOZZO Now this might be interesting. Have
you ever passed yourself off as a judge?
MANIAC No, unfortunately. Chance never arose.
I’d love to, though:
MANIAC best job in the world! First of all, they
hardly ever retire... In fact, just at the point
when your average working man, at the age
of 55 or 60, is already ready for the scrapheap
because he’s slowing down a bit, losing his
reflexes, your judge is just coming into his
prime.
MANIAC A worker on the line’s done for after
the age of fifty—can’t keep up, keeps having
accidents, chuck him out...! Your miner
has silicosis by the time he’s 45—get rid
of him, quick, sack him before he sues for
compensation!
31
cosí anche per l’impiegato in banca, a una
certa età comincia a sbagliare i conti, non si
ricorda piú i nomi delle ditte, dei clienti, il
tasso di sconto, la casella della Biam, e quella
della SA.SIS.
Via, a casa... sloggiare... sei vecchio...
rincoglionito!
Invece per i giudici no, per i giudici è tutto
l’opposto: piú sono vecchi e rinco... svaniti,
piú li eleggono a cariche superiori, gli affidano
cariche importanti... assolute!
Vedi dei vecchietti di cartone tutti impaludati:
cordoni, mantelline di ermellino, capelloni a
tubo con le righe d’oro che sembrano tante
comparse del fornaretto di Venezia, traballanti,
con delle facce da tappi della val Gardena...
con due paia d’occhiali legati con le catanelle,
che se no li perdono... non si ricordano mai
dove li hanno appoggiati.
Ebbene, ’sti personaggi hanno il potere di
distruggere o salvare uno come e quando
vogliono: dànno certe condanne all’ergastolo
cosí come uno dice: “Beh, forse domani
piove...” Cinquant’anni a te... a te trenta... a te
solo venti, perché mi sei simpatico!
Dettano, legiferano, sentenziano,
decretano... e sono pure sacri!.... perché,
non dimentichiamocelo, da noi c’è ancora
il reato di vilipendio, se uno dice male della
magistratura... da noi e nell’Arabia Saudita!
Ah, sí, sí... il giudice è il mestiere, il
personaggio che chissa cosa non pagherei per
riuscire a recitare almeno una volta nella vita.
Il giudice di cassazione, dell’ordine superiore:
“eccellenza... s’accomodi, silenzio, in piedi
entra la corte... oh, guardi, ha perso un osso... è
suo? No, è impossibile, io non ne ho piú!”
Fo
AGENTE E lei non ha idea di come fosse agile
quel demonio ... io ho fatto appena in tempo
ad afferrarlo per un piede.
MATTO Oh! Vedete, vedete che la mia tecnica
della provocazione funziona: lei l’ha afferrato
per un piede!
AGENTE Sí, ma mi è rimasta in mano la scarpa,
e lui è andato di sotto lo stesso.
MATTO Non ha importanza. Importante è che
sia rimasta la scarpa. La scarpa è la prova
inconfutabile della vostra volontà di salvarlo!
COMMISSARIO Certo, è inconfutabile!
Same goes for the bank clerk, after a certain
age he starts getting his sums wrong, starts
forgetting the names of the bank’s clients, can’t
tell a discount rate from a mortgage rate. Off
home, you... move along, son...You’re past it!
For a judge it’s quite the opposite: the more
ancient and idio... (He corrects himself )
... syncratic they are, the higher they get
promoted, the classier the jobs they get!
You see them up there, little old men like
cardboard cutouts, silly wigs on there heads,
all capes and ermine... with two pairs of
glasses on cords round their necks because
otherwise they’d lose them...
And these characters have the power to wreck
a person’s life or save it, as and how they want:
they hand out life sentences like somebody
saying: ‘Maybe it’ll rain tomorrow...’ Fifty
years for you... Thirty for you... Only twenty
for you, because I like your face!
They make the law and they can do what they
like... And they’re holy too...Don’t forget, in
Italy you can still be done for slander if you
say nasty things about judges... In Italy... and
in Saudi Arabia!
Ah, yes, yes... The judge is the job for me—
what a role! What wouldn’t I give to be able to
play a judge just once in my life? An Appeal
Court judge would be lovely!
‘Your Honour... this way please... silence in
court... please be upstanding for the judge...
Oh dear, lost our marbles, have we, Sir? I’ll let
you know if I find them...’
Emery
CONSTABLE And you have no idea what a
slippery customer he was... I only just managed
to grab him by one foot.
MANIAC Ha! You see, you see, my technique of
provocation works! You grabbed him by one
foot.
CONSTABLE Yes, but his shoe came off in my
hand, and down he went anyway.
MANIAC Never mind. The important thing is
that his shoe came off in your hand. That shoe
proves irrefutably that you were trying to save
him!
SPORTS JACKET Irrefutably and incontrovertibly!
32
QUESTORE (alla guardia) Bravo!
AGENTE La ringrazio signor quest...
QUESTORE Zitto!
MATTO Un momento... ma qui, qualcosa non
quadra. (Mostra un foglio ai poliziotti) Il
suicida aveva tre scarpe?
SUPERINTENDENT (To the CONSTABLE) Well
done!
CONSTABLE Thank you, Super...
SUPERINTENDENT Shush!
MANIAC Just a minute... something doesn’t quite
fit here.
(He shows the POLICE OFFICERS a sheet of
paper) Did our suicidal friend have three shoes?
QUESTORE Come, tre scarpe?
SUPERINTENDENT Three shoes?
MATTO E sí, una sarebbe rimasta tra le mani
MANIAC That’s what I said. One ended up in
del poliziotto... L’ha testimoniato lui stesso
the hands of this officer here... We have his
qualche giorno dopo il fattaccio... (Mostra il
statement to that effect, a couple of days after
foglio) Ecco qui.
the event...(He shows them the sheet of paper )
Look, here.
COMMISSARIO Sí, è vero... L’ha raccontato ad SPORTS JACKET Correct, your Honour... He was
un cronista del “Corriere della Sera”.
interviewed by a journalist from Corriere della
Sera.
MATTO Ma qui, in quest’altro allegato, si
MANIAC But in this Appendix here, we’re assured
assicura che l’anarchico morente sul selciato
that as the anarchist lay dying on the pavement
del cortile, aveva ancora ai piedi tutte e
below, he still had both his shoes on his feet.
due le scarpe. Ne dànno testimonianza gli
This was witnessed by various bystanders,
accorsi, fra i quali un cronista dell’ “Unità”,
including a journalist from L’Unita and various
ed altri giornalisti di passaggio!
other press people who happened to be passing.
COMMISSARIO Non capisco come possa
SPORTS JACKET Well, I can’t imagine how that
essere successo...
happened...
MATTO Neanch’io! A meno che quest’agente
MANIAC Neither can I! Unless this officer was
velocissimo abbia fatto in tempo,
very quick about it, and went rushing down
precipitandosi per le scale, a raggiungere un
to the second floor, stuck his head out of the
pianerottolo del secondo piano, affacciarsi
window as the anarchist was coming past, put
alla finestra prima che passasse il suicida,
his shoe back on mid-flight, and then shot back
infilargli la scarpa al volo e risalire come un
up to the fourth floor just in time for the body to
razzo al quarto piano nell’istante stesso in cui
hit bottom.
il precipitante raggiungeva il suolo.
QUESTORE Ecco, vede, vede, riprende a fare
SUPERINTENDENT There, you see, you see,
dell’ironia!
you’re making fun of us again!
MATTO Ha ragione, è piú forte di me... mi
MANIAC You’re right... I couldn’t resist it... I’m
scusi. Dunque, tre scarpe... Scusate, non vi
sorry. So, three shoes... Would you happen to
ricordate se per caso fosse tripede?
remember if he was a tri-ped?
QUESTORE Chi?
SUPERINTENDENT Who?
MATTO Il ferroviere suicida... se per caso aveva MANIAC Our suicidal railwayman... If it turns out
tre piedi, è logico portasse tre scarpe.
he had three feet, that would explain why he had
three shoes.
QUESTORE (seccato) No, non era tripede!
SUPERINTENDENT (Tetchily) No, he was not a
tri-ped!
MATTO Non si secchi, la prego... a parte che
MANIAC Alright, no need to get ratty... Anyway,
da un anarchico ci si può aspettare questo ed
that’s the least you’d expect of an anarchist!
altro!
AGENTE Questo è vero!
CONSTABLE That’s true!
QUESTORE Zitto!
SUPERINTENDENT Shut up, you!
COMMISSARIO Che guaio, per la miseria...
SPORTS JACKET Oh God, what a mess... We’re
bisogna trovare una ragione plausibile, se
going to have to find a plausible explanation,
no...
because otherwise...
MATTO L’ho trovata io!
MANIAC I’ve got it!
33
QUESTORE Sentiamo.
MATTO Eccola: Senz’altro una delle scarpe
gli era un po’ grande, e allora, non avendo
un sottopiede a portata di mano, ha infilato
un’altra scarpa piú stretta, prima di infilare
quella larga.
COMMISSARIO Due scarpe nello stesso piede?
MATTO Sí, che c’è di strano?... come con le
calosce, vi ricordate? Quelle soprascarpe di
gomma che si portavano una volta...
QUESTORE Appunto, una volta.
MATTO Ma c’è chi le porta ancora... anzi,
sapete che vi dico? che quella che è rimasta
fra le mani dell’agente non era una scarpa,
ma una caloscia.
COMMISSARIO Ma no, è impossibile: un
anarchico con le calosce!... roba da gente
all’antica ... da conservatori. ..
MATTO Gli anarchici sono molto conservatori...
QUESTORE Già, ed è per questo che
ammazzano i re!
MATTO Certo, per poterli conservare
imbalsamati... Se uno aspetta che i
re muoiano vecchi, incartapecoriti,
consunti dalle malattie, poi si disfano,
si decompongono, non si riesce piú a
conservarli... Invece cosí, ammazzati di
fresco...
COMMISSARIO La prego signor giudice, su
certi argomenti, non mi va proprio...
QUESTORE Non accetto neanch’io...
MATTO Oh tu guarda, io vi credevo nostalgici,
ma non della monarchia... Ad ogni modo, se
non vi vanno né le calosce, né la storia delle
tre scarpe...
Squilla il telefono, tutti si arrestano, il
commissario afferra la cornetta.
SUPERINTENDENT Let’s hear it.
MANIAC Here goes: obviously, one of his shoes
was too big, so since he didn’t have a handy
insole lying around, he put another, smaller shoe
on first, and then put the bigger one on, on top
of it.
SPORTS JACKET Two shoes on the same foot?
MANIAC Yes. Perfectly normal... Remember
galoshes? When people used to go around
wearing rubber overshoes...
SUPERINTENDENT Exactly. Used to.
MANIAC No, but people do still wear them... And
do you know what I say? I say that what the
officer was left holding wasn’t a shoe at all, it
was a galosh.
SPORTS JACKET No, that’s impossible: an
anarchist in galoshes...! Only conservatives wear
galoshes...!
MANIAC Anarchists can be terribly conservative,
you know...
The phone rings.
References
Cumming, A. & Supple, T. 1991, Accidental Death of an Anarchist, London, Methuen.
Emery, E. 1992, Accidental Death of an Anarchist, in Dario Fo, Plays One, London,
Methuen.
Fo, D. 1974, Morte accidentale di un anarchico, Torino, Einaudi.
Hirst, David, 1989, Dario Fo and Franca Rame, London, Macmillan.
Richards, G. tr. 1980, Accidental Death of an Anarchist: A Farce, London, Pluto.
34
TRANSLATION AND
THEATRICAL SPACE:
THE ANTIGONE
EXPERIMENT
Frances Muecke
In the Centre for Performance Studies’ 1993 ‘Greek Tragedy in Translation’ workshop
the director’s and actors’ brief was to explore three versions of the same scenes from
Sophocles’ Antigone, the first stasimon or choral passage (382-83) and the following scene
of the watchman’s return with Antigone, containing his account of how she was caught
burying her brother Polynices’ corpse and her defence of this act to Creon (384-525). The
three versions were those of Lewis Campbell (1873) and Elizabeth Wyckoff (1954), and
Judith Malina’s 1966 translation of Brecht’s 1948 version of Hölderlin (1804).
To characterize briefly the resulting three ‘performances’: the Lewis Camp–bell
version was done as a simple confrontation in Shakespearean-Elizabethan style
between a regal but benevolent Creon and an innocent Antigone; the Malina version
of Brecht aimed to follow Brechtian principles of distance from the role, and of acting
to the audience. Similarly, decisions about how to stage the Wyckoff version, the least
immediately suggestive, were prompted by the language of the translation. Once its style
was recognised as being very like that of the 50s verse drama contemporary with it (e.g.
that of T. S. Eliot and Christopher Fry), a period setting seemed appropriate. This being
the era of the cold war, the context the director chose was that of political repression
behind the iron curtain. So the confrontation between Creon and Antigone was put inside
an interrogation room. With the invisible fourth wall separating actors and audience and
the chorus located ‘out of sight’ on the street outside, the scene became an essentially
private one.
The more this setting’s implications were worked out in the relationships between the
characters, a vulnerable and defeated Antigone, and a Creon with no external constraints
to his power, and, we suspect, very few personal restraints to his cruelty, the more I felt
something had been lost. It is hard to define exactly what this was, as the interpretation
still suggested wider ethical and political resonances. The working out of the scene was
consistent, imaginative and sensitive. Perhaps my unease is to be explained by the fact
that Antigone had already lost and was doomed, so that Creon had no reason to be swayed
by what she said. He could ignore it because there was no one there to hear it and, more
particularly, to see and hear him hearing it.1
However, I do not want so much to quarrel with that particular reading of the scene
as to follow up what it made me realize about an aspect of Antigone as a Greek tragedy.
This did not come up in either of the introductory sessions, when Kevin Lee talked about
the specific difficulties of translating the language of Greek tragedy, and David Pritchard
outlined modern interpretations of the play’s political themes, yet an understanding of it
is vital to decisions about the play’s performance.
This aspect, invisible in the play-text as words on the page,2 leaps to visibility the
moment you start constructing a three-dimensional performance. In what follows it may
sound as if I am advocating only an ‘archaeological’ type of production of Greek tragedy.
Rather, my point is that in translating a play this aspect is as much subject to translation
as any other, that the translation ought to be as self-conscious and as well-informed as
the linguistic translation and that it is translation ‘by’ performance, affecting all the other
interpretative activities involved in performance.3
What I refer to, of course, is space: the spatial relationships and their cultural meanings. It so happens that Antigone is a key play for understanding how intricately the
physical space of the Greek theatre came to be related to the construction of the play both
as mimetic action and as a field of social meanings. To begin with, we should recall a fact
so obvious that it often escapes notice or is not given the attention it deserves.
All surviving Greek dramas were written for the same theatre, the theatre of Dionysos
at Athens. This is not to say that they were not performed in other theatres, in Attica
and elsewhere, or that the theatre of Dionysos remained unchanged. In fact, and much
to our frustration, later reconstruction has obscured the earlier stages of this building.
Nevertheless, if important details of the fifth-century plan remain obscure,4 a general
schema of the spatial disposition can be drawn.
In this open-air theatre the acting space was in front of a back wall (or façade) which
had a central door and a building behind it.5 We call this the ‘scene-building’: the door
led backstage to a changing room, where props were kept. In the imaginative world of
36
Muecke
The Antigone Experiment
the play this building represents a house, a temple, or a king’s palace, conceived of as
constructed around an inner courtyard. In the real Greek house the only access to outside,
to the road, was through the single entrance door to this courtyard. Hence, the play’s
action, in front of the ‘house’, always takes place in space that is outside, public space,
where the chorus—in theatrical space half-way between actors and audience, in scenic
space inhabitants of the same public place—may realistically be found. The acting area
also had two side entrances, one on either side of the scene-building, leading not back,
but away, to an imagined space beyond. The definition of this off-stage (or extra-scenic)
space of course depends on the individual play. Antigone has two precisely identified
and vividly evoked extra-scenic locales, the hill side where Polynices lies unburied and
the cave in which Antigone is immured. (As places associated with death Greek cultural
assumptions would locate them outside the city limits.) This imaginative construction of
extra-scenic space is striking in Antigone, but my main concern is with the opposition of
outside and inside implied in the disposition of theatrical space.6
This polarity entered Greek drama with the construction of the ‘scene-building’
(before Aeschylus’s Oresteia) and immediately became one of the major organizing
principles of its dramatic action. Social divisions of space could now be mapped visually
onto the organization of the theatre itself, for in Greek society ‘inside’ was the domain
of the female, women being associated with the values of house and family, whereas
‘outside’, the public realm, was the proper sphere of the male.7 Yet tragedy does more
than mirror this dichotomy. By its nature it threatens it, in that to act at all women must
come outside, play a role in the public world. P. E. Easterling makes some subtle remarks
about the difference between scenic space and the inside/outside division of spheres
in Greek society, arguing that the one does not simply reflect the other.8 Yet she does
concede that ‘Antigone is the Sophoclean play that best fits the model in which opposition
between male and female is seen as a way of talking about the relation between public
and private, polis and oikos.’ (p.22) The upshot of her discussion, however, is not that
the play reinforces the public/private distinction but that it shows that attempts to keep
the public and the private separate are a disastrous failure. Earlier, in an article entitled
‘The Place of Antigone’9 Oliver Taplin had analysed a series of passages in the play which
relate to this theme of ‘proper’ places and the localised opposition of city and household,
beginning with the prologue where Antigone says she has brought her sister ‘outside the
courtyard gates’ (paradoxically) in order to talk to her in secret.
It follows from what I have said that the various elements of a production of Antigone
will come together more easily in a version which is aware of the interrelationship in
Greek drama, on the one hand, between theatrical and scenic space, and, on the other,
between the imaginative construction of scenic space in the play and the Greek divisions
of social space. But as this particular connection between an arrangement of theatrical
space and its exploited meanings is no longer a given, there is no point in simply assuming
it. I imagine that for a modern audience the link would have to be re-established even
in a production in an ancient theatre, though it would be reinforced by the language and
the rhetoric of the play. Modern directors, it seems to me, are faced with the challenge of
finding a setting or mise-en-scène in which the public dimension of the play’s rhetoric is
not lost. It was a vital part of the meaning of the struggle between Creon and Antigone
that it was enacted in public, for an audience assembled on a public occasion as citizens
as well as spectators.
37
One result of the experiment of testing the performability of the three translations
was that the translation closest linguistically turned out to suggest a mise en scène which
conflicted with an important characteristic of Greek tragedy, while Malina’s version of
Brecht’s adaptation (obviously the least literal of the three) enabled not a reconstruction,
but a ‘translation’, of the political quality of its use of space.
38
THREE
ANTIGONE
PLAYS
Rhys McConnochie
West Australian Academy of Performing Arts
Edith Cowan University
If I didn’t know it already, I discovered very early on in this project that it is impossible
to recreate the original conditions of Ancient Greek drama. Firstly, because obviously
we are not performing in the original language and the questions thrown up by translation
were the object of the exercise—I shall come back to that. But secondly, because it is
impossible to recreate the social, political and religious background which was the context
of the plays at the Festival of Dionysus in the Fifth Century B.C. Even an extremely well
researched re-creation of the form of the performance would be an academic exercise
only, as the world of the plays is so removed from ours. But the themes of the plays,
especially Antigone, are not so removed—they are universal and eternal, otherwise they
wouldn’t have survived till now. But every generation re-interprets the plays with the
perceptions of their own time, and the translations that we worked on revealed this only
too clearly. The Lewis Campbell has a feeling for mid-Victorian values and ideals while
the Elizabeth Wyckoff from the fifties reflected that time very clearly. Brecht consciously
puts the play into his own time—postwar Germany—making the point doubly clear. So
it was with the awareness that we were working on three different plays, albeit telling the
same story, that we set out to solve the problems thrown up by the three versions.
The Scene and the Chorus to be presented were chosen by the Centre for Performance
Studies, however because of the time pressure I eliminated the Second Stasimon which
comes after the scene with Ismene and Creon (which would have been cut anyway). This
proved to be sensible since there was quite enough to chew over as it was. I will endeavour
to give you some idea of the problems involved in each translation as well as share some
of the research we needed in order to find the World of the Play—or in this case, the world
of this version of the play. All great plays inhabit their own world and the director must
discover this or the play doesn’t work. Plays of our own time inhabit our world so that is
easy and we don’t need to research it. But plays of an earlier time, even of ten years ago,
need research even if it is only oral history to put one in touch with the time. Directors
who ignore this tend to impose their ideas on to the play or twist the play out of its context
to fit their concept of it. Finding the world of the play doesn’t necessarily mean setting
the play in its own time—it is quite possible and even profitable to set a Shakespeare in
modern dress (I actually don’t think it matters what period you set it in)—you can set it
in Elizabethan times and still not find the world of the play. Conversely you can update
it and make it as trendy as you like but not find the world of the play. Many poets like
Tennyson, Browning, etc. wrote five-act plays in the Elizabethan Style but they are
unperformed today because they are not essentially dramatic—the form is not natural and
is therefore hollow. So researching the world in which the play was written is crucial,
and certainly with the Greeks the director would be foolhardy to ignore the Ancient Greek
world even though he has no intention of setting the production in that world.
So with the Scene which was chosen—the confrontation between Creon and Antigone,
which is the pivotal scene of the play—I could feel fairly clearly the direction we would
go with each version. However the Chorus is something else. How does one present the
Chorus in performance? Speak it chorally (i.e. in unison)? Sing and/or dance it? Break
it up between the speakers?
Choral speaking has a rather staid, old fashioned classroom feeling about it for me and
it can get boring after a time. It also takes a long time to train people to speak in unison.
Singing the text is a very real alternative, however I think that a composer needs to be on
hand to train the singers and choose or write appropriate music. If it could be danced,
well and good—but for us the idea of Dance in Tragedy seems to undermine the drama
rather than add to it. Therefore unless the dance is very carefully and skilfully done it
could be counterproductive.
In the end I opted for breaking the speech up between the three actors with a few
crucial lines spoken in unison to heighten their importance. My choice was made in order
to make the sense clear because ‘what’ they say seemed more important than ‘how’ they
say it. But what are they saying in the First Stasimon? ‘They reflect on the greatness and
duties of Man.’ It is quite difficult for us to identify with this as an idea and the point
seems to be very laboured in our terms—it could be made more succinctly. Therefore
maybe my choice was wrong, although the exploration would require another whole
workshop. My own tendency to go for the sense might in a production prove less exciting
than a more visual and aural choice—singing, dancing, etc. As long as the theme of the
poem is reasonably clear and its function in the play is understood.
Defining who the Chorus is in relation to the other characters is also difficult. In
Antigone the Chorus enter after the Prologue in which Antigone and Ismene plot the
burial of their brother. This is presumably to allow the Chorus to be ignorant of the deed
until it happens.
The recreation of the Greek view of the Chorus is very difficult for modern actors
and directors. Whether we like it or not, the 20th century theatre is firmly rooted in
post-Freudian psychology and the search for the motivation of the characters is for us the
search for the truth of the play. In a sense, for us, this is the equivalent of the religious
drive of the original. Certainly Antigone’s religious zeal is for us her motivation which
makes it easy for an actor to identify with. But clarifying the Chorus’ emotional journey
is more difficult. In Antigone they do change their attitudes from preservers of the status
quo on Creon’s side to being strongly critical of his actions. This is for us a condemnation
of tyranny. However we were limited by the fact that the three actors playing the Chorus
were also playing Antigone, Creon and the Guard. So the question of ‘who’ the Chorus
are as individuals and as a group remains for me unsolved.
40
McConnochie
Three Antigone Plays
Campbell
The exercise as a whole was basically about language. I certainly did not imagine when
I started that the three versions would end up so vastly different. When I started work
on the Lewis Campbell version written in 18731 I was reminded of the empty bombast
of Victorian imitators of the Elizabethans. The humorist Max Beerbohm satirized the
pretensions of such authors in Seven Men, in his portrait of ‘Savonarola Brown’. Brown
is Beerbohm’s friend, an amateur playwright who gets run over by a bus before he has time
to finish his five-act verse drama based on the life of Savonarola. So Beerbohm, as his
friend, prints the work incomplete. It is a hilarious pastiche of Renaissance Florence: one
of the stage directions reads ‘Enter Lucrezia Borgia, St Francis of Assisi and Leonardo da
Vinci’, and another ‘Enter Michaelangelo. Andrea Del Sarto appears at a window. Pippa
Passes’. The whole is written in very correct iambic pentameter—here is an example:
FRIAR:
Savonarola love-sick! Ha, ha, ha!
Love-sick? He, love-sick? ‘Tis a goodly jest!
The confirm’d misogn a ladies’ man!
Thou must have eaten of some strange red herb
That takes the reason captive. I will swear
Savonarola never yet has seen
A woman but he spurn’d her. Hist! He comes.2
Let me hasten to add that the Campbell translation is a great deal better than that. The
play is translated into iambic pentameter and some of it is not bad at all. However we
did have difficulty with the Guard’s speech. Here is a character, who if one is following
the Elizabethan model, would speak prose. But because he speaks the same sort of
language as the other characters in the original, Professor Campbell has been very correct
in giving the Guard the same kind of verse as Antigone and Creon. But for a part which,
for us, cried out to be characterized so that the comedy of the scene will have greater
rein, it seemed an odd choice. This was something we never resolved satisfactorily and
the comic potential was unrealized. The verse is therefore uncharacteristic as it is in
Shakespeare. It is serviceable and it certainly avoids the bathos which Max Beerbohm
was sending up.
It demanded a declamatory style of delivery which reinforced the idea that the scene
is public—which must be so whenever the Chorus is present. Our actors had to double
as the Chorus which made it difficult, so Creon spoke to the audience as though they
were also the Chorus. The Verse for the Stasimon has 7 stresses to a line which seems an
unnaturally long line to us, but it helped to use the caesura and to think of it as 4 stresses
and 3 stresses. However it was still hard not to play a generalized ‘poetic’ tone. One of
the problems of any verse play is to keep control of the language. Because the structure of
hearing accented verse is strong it can control you rather than you controlling it. Acting
in verse requires more vocal and physical muscle and breath than conversational speech.
In terms of the relationship between the characters, Creon seemed to have more
affection and understanding of Antigone in this version, whereas in the Brecht she actually
says ‘I know you’ve never liked me’. Occasionally Campbell uses words which were
already archaic by his own time—e.g. ‘corse’ (body or corpse), ‘gloze’ (to interpret or
speak in a highfalutin’ way). But it is clearly rooted in his own time and in the Victorian
view of the nobility of the characters, especially those of royal blood.
41
Wyckoff
The translation by Elizabeth Wyckoff was published in 1954 and present a totally
different set of problems. The form of the verse is basically iambic pentameter, but it
is not stressed as emphatically as in the Campbell and the whole thing sounds more like
conversational speech which happens to be in verse. It is almost Free Verse except that
the line length is fairly consistent.
I was reminded that the early fifties was the period of the Verse Drama revival. This
movement was started in the thirties and flowered briefly after the war to be forever
buried by the 1956 coup—Look Back in Anger, Angry Young Men, Kitchen Sink and the
whole Royal Court Renaissance. T.S. Eliot wrote Murder in the Cathedral and Family
Reunion in the thirties but wrote The Cocktail Party in 1950 and The Confidential Clerk
in 1954. Christopher Fry had a major success with The Lady’s Not for Burning in 1949,
Venus Observed 1950 and A Sleep of Prisoners in 1951. Other writers included Ronald
Duncan and Norman Nicholson, and the whole religious drama movement was bound up
with the Anglo Catholic wing of the Anglican Church.
Here is a speech from The Dark is Light Enough by Fry written in 1954. It is spoken
by the Countess, played by Edith Evans:
COUNTESS
I have no weapons to prevent you, Colonel.
The house will go down before you like matchwood.
Your victory will be complete, if not glorious.
Though I wonder you should think
So unhopefully of your own argument
That you meekly and unmanfully give in
To violence, when I am ready
To be persuaded to your opinion
By any truth which in God’s world
You can put before me.3
Compare this to Antigone’s speech to Creon:
ANTIGONE
For me it was not Zeus who made that order
Nor did that Justice who lives with the gods below
mark out such laws to hold among mankind.
Nor did I think your orders were so strong
that you, a mortal man, could over-run
the gods’ unwritten and unfailing laws.
Now now, nor yesterday’s, they always live.4
It is the verse form of Fry and the like that Wyckoff aspires to, and this is the context
of her translation. Verse Drama was a very powerful influence at the time. However T. S.
Eliot is a great poet and Fry is a fine writer whose language sits more easily on the tongue
and can be spoken in a reasonably natural way.
Without wishing to impose a concept on the scene but mainly in order to find a more
natural form of communication we began to explore the scene in the political context of
the early fifties. With the simple addition of props—a table and a chair, the place became
an Interrogation Room in some unnamed totalitarian state in eastern Europe. I was
reminded of another play written in 1954 called The Prisoner by Bridget Boland. Alec
Guiness starred in the London production (and also in the film) as a Cardinal imprisoned
by the State. He is interrogated by a very plausible Inquisitor who is trying to make him
confess to unspecified crimes in order to discredit him to the faithful. The story is based
on the case of Cardinal Mindsenty, a Hungarian priest who was given asylum in the
42
McConnochie
British Embassy in Budapest for many years and became an icon for the anti-communist
movement of the time.
So this is the world of this version of the play, which should perhaps be retitled
Antigone-1954. It is the height of the Cold War, and images of George Orwell’s 1984
also spring to mind.
But the scene had to become a private scene to work and the Chorus could not fulfil
their usual function in the scene. The third figure in the scene, who spoke the Chorus’ line,
became a functionary assistant to Creon the Interrogator, who sent him away in order to
be alone with the terrified Antigone. She was a driven religious zealot frightened of the
possibility of torture. This endowed Creon with such power that he had no need to accent
it. He was a methodical bureaucrat intent on getting the job done as cleanly as possible.
And the Guard became more of a Robot, efficient and disinterested and intent on getting
himself off the hook. Quite often in the scene the actors felt the need to know who wins the
argument between the two. Brecht loads it all on Antigone’s side but in this concept it was
clear that Creon will win and Antigone will go down, like thousands of nameless others.
So, now to fit the Chorus into this world. We decided to make them a group of
nameless refugees outside the prison. But because of the Fourth Wall assumed by this
approach the Stasimon had to become introspective, and this was a problem even though
the actors committed themselves to it. Individuals who are suffering trying to work out
‘The Nature of Man’ didn’t really ring true to me.
Brecht
The Antigone of Sophocles by Brecht has always had an air of mystery about it. I’d read of
it but no translation in English appeared until this one by Judith Malina in 1984.5 It was not
included in the John Willett/Ralph Mannheim series published in the US and Britain in the
1970s and was usually only a footnote in books on Brecht. But it does seem to me an important
if transitional work in the Brecht canon and I was pleased to be given a chance to work on it.
A quick résumé: Bertolt Brecht was born in 1898. He went into exile in 1933 when the
Nazis came to power. He went first to Austria, Switzerland and France. He then settled
in Denmark until 1939. As war approached he went to Sweden, Finland and travelled the
length of the Soviet Union to get a boat to the US which he entered via California in 1941.
He lived in Los Angeles for the next six years and it was here that he wrote his greatest
plays, Mother Courage, The Good Person of Setzuan, The Caucasian Chalk Circle and
The Life of Galileo. This last was previewed in Hollywood starring Charles Laughton,
who collaborated with Brecht on the English text. It later went to Broadway for a season
but by this time Brecht had returned to Europe. He planned to return to Europe after the
war but his last month in the US was dominated by a tragic farce known as HCUAC—the
House Committee on Un-American Activities, a committee of the US Congress.
From the 20th to 30th October, the Committee had subpoenaed a group of writers
and directors who were known to have leftist sympathies. There were ten of them who
were known as the Unfriendly Ten because they were unwilling to co-operate with the
Committee. Instead they claimed the right to stand on the First Amendment to the Bill of
Rights which allows for Freedom of Religion and Political Belief. As a result they were
cited for contempt and later went to jail.
Brecht was Number 11 of the group subpoenaed to appear before the Committee. The
difference was that he was not a US citizen and therefore could not claim protection under the
Constitution. The irony is that the Constitution was no protection to the US citizens either.
43
On Thursday, 30th October at 10:30 am the Committee saw two other witnesses, Ring
Lardner Jr and Lester Cole, and when they refused to answer the question, ‘Are you now
or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?’ they were dismissed. In fact
Ring Lardner was forcibly ejected from the chamber. The Chairman of the Committee
was J. Parnell Thomas, a notorious Red basher who was later jailed for fraud. He was
under pressure to get through the hearings as quickly as possible, so decided to see another
witness before lunch. Neither he or anybody else had ever heard of the neat looking
German gentleman who was the next on the list. Brecht was given an interpreter but the
Chairman complained that the interpreter was less comprehensible than Brecht himself.
The next day, 31st October 1947, Brecht and his family flew to Switzerland. He had
been writing Antigone since March of that year and finished it in Zürich in December.
It became one of the many plays he wished to stage now that he was back in Germanspeaking Europe. He was looking for a role for his wife Helene Weigel who had not acted
for nearly 15 years. He had written Mother Courage for her but that would have to wait
until 1951, by which time they were installed at the Schiffbauerdamm Theater in East
Berlin. In the meantime he needed someone to put on Antigone and when it was turned
down by the companies in Basel and Zürich, he accepted the offer to present it in Chur at
the Stadttheater. It only ran for 5 performances in February 1948 but the presentation and
design by his old friend Caspar Neher was the model for all future productions. Brecht’s
collaborator and mistress Ruth Berlau took photographs of the performance and Brecht
wrote a foreword to the printed edition of the ‘Modellbuch’, the first of many such which
became standard with each new play.6
Brecht’s version started as a translation of Friedrich Hölderlin’s translation. The
stylistic problems of this version were much more familiar territory to me. I’ve been
involved in a number of the plays and I’ve run workshops on Brecht. Some problems
were due to the Malina translation which was sometimes shown to be incorrect. But I
had no qualms about changing some of the language to make it clearer, and in one case
cutting part of a speech because it seemed impossible to translate correctly into English
which could be spoken. The most interesting thing became the argument between Creon
and Antigone. She became a fiery revolutionary who beats Creon by argument, forcing
him to shut her up. I thought the scene played well and it was the easiest for the actors
once the argument was made clear.
Brecht used the Chorus to teach the audience and that function seemed quite natural
too, although the danger of the harangue is that the audience might cower under the
weight of such aggressive acting.
I have spent some time exploring the events leading up to the first performance of
Brecht’s play in order to create that world. It amazed me to realize that less than five
months after appearing before the Committee in Washington DC, he was presenting a
play in which Creon calls on the audience to condemn Antigone for lack of patriotism.
The biographer Michael Holroyd said recently that the object of the biographer was
to make ‘imaginative leaps’ between the life and the work. I feel as though, by accident,
I’ve found one of these leaps in the work of Brecht.
I would like to thank the actors, Angie Milliken, Jamie Jackson and Justin Monjo, for
their daring and commitment to the work. Without this, the exercise would have been a
great deal less exciting. The videotapes of the work process reveal an amazing progress during the five days, a progress perhaps not so evident to those following the workshops. It is
the sort of work which can easily be taken for granted and I would like to pay tribute to it.
44
McConnochie
NOTES
1
2
3
4
5
6
Sophocles, Antigone, trans. Lewis Campbell, London, Blackwood, 1873.
Max Beerbohm, Seven Men, London, William Heinemann, 1932, p. 186.
Christopher Fry, The Dark is Light Enough, London, Oxford University Press,
1954, p. 29.
Sophocles, Antigone, trans. Elizabeth Wyckoff, in David Grene and Richmond
Lattimore, eds, The Complete Greek Tragedies, Chicago, Chicago University
Press, 1954, p. 174, lines 450-6.
Bertolt Brecht,The Antigone of Sophocles, trans. Judith Malina, New York,
Applause, 1984.
John Willett, Brecht on Theatre, London, Eyre Methuen, 1973, pp. 210-15
45
LAUGHING AT THE
DIFFERENCE:
THEORIES OF TRANSLATION
IN REHEARSAL
Jonathan Bollen
University of Western Sydney, Nepean
Through the foreign language we renew our love-hate intimacy with our mother tongue. We tear
at her syntactic joints and semantic flesh and resent her for not providing all the words we need. In
translation, the everyday frustrations of writing assume an explicit, externally projected form. If we
are impotent, it is because Mother is inadequate. In the process of translation from one language
to another, the scene of linguistic castration—which is nothing other than a scene of impossible but
unavoidable translation and normally takes place out of sight, behind the conscious stage—is played
on center stage. (Johnson, 1985, pp. 143-4)
Much discussion about translation is organised around a set of questions which could
be summarised: ‘How to translate?’ These theories of translation provide a discursive
environment in which translated texts are produced (see Schulte & Bigunet 1992). They
also, however, continue to frame the translated text after its production. They provide
resources for understanding the nature of the translated text. They come to regulate its use.
Here I will investigate not the translation process, but the process a translated text
underwent during a performance research project. What is the status of a translated text?
What is the impact of its translated status on its use as a performance text? I will address
these questions in reference to the Antigone Project held at the Centre for Performance
Studies, University of Sydney as part of its Theatre and Translation program in 1993.
In the Antigone Project, one director and three actors rehearsed Stasimon 1 and
Episode 2 of Sophocles’ Antigone in English translations by Lewis Campbell (1873),
Elizabeth Wyckoff (1954) and Judith Malina (1984). Unlike the other two translators
who worked directly from the Greek, Malina’s text is a translation of Brecht’s adaptation
of Hölderlin’s translation of Sophocles’ play. It was written and continuously revised for
a Living Theatre production during the 1960s (Biner 1968, p.154). Her ‘distance’ from
Sophocles’ text and her engagement with the canonical Brecht made the practitioner’s work
with Malina’s text interestingly problematic. Analysis of the rehearsal documentation
reveals that the project participants engaged with theories of translation in the course of
their work.
Of the three translations used in the project, Malina’s text sustained the most damage
in terms of textual alterations inflicted upon it. Five separate alterations were made
during the rehearsal of Malina’s text. All except the last were discussed at significant
length (at least ten minutes) and almost everyone in the rehearsal room was involved in
the discussions. The first three alterations were made as the result of difficulties the actors
were having in working with the text.
In the first alteration, a line of Antigone’s was changed because the actor playing
Kreon had trouble making sense of his line which follows (Antigone Project, Tape One,
11:13:30-). The lines are
ANTIGONE
KREON
He who was not your slave is dearer to me than a brother.
Of course, if good and evil are the same as one another.
After puzzling about this line as it is in Malina’s translation, the discussion turned
to the three texts which preceded Malina’s and the project participants embarked on an
archaeological paperchase to sort out the problem. Those with access to the two German
texts and the Greek text offered readings, explanations and translations, and basically
settled on
ANTIGONE
He who was not your slave is still a brother.
But these were not the only source of input. The actors offered their own ideas based
on their understanding of the plot and its logic (derived from a potentially limitless
intertextual reading in which Malina’s translation and the other two were only the primary
sources) and at certain points, everyone in the room offered a suggestion.
just as dear
more dear
as dear
He who was not your slave is my brother
He was not a slave of yours but is still my brother
He was not your slave but he is still my brother
During the discussion, responsibility for the problem of ‘making sense’ was shifted
from Brecht who was represented as having ‘gone back to following the original’, ‘made
a shift’, ‘replaced that reference’ to Malina who was not represented as doing anything but
whose text was called ‘a mistranslation’, ‘incorrect’, her ‘invention’. At one point one of
the actors suggested that ‘Brecht had given a totally personal political weight to [the line]’.
The director responded quickly: ‘But ‘dearer to me than a brother’ is Malina’. Some of the
discussion had been in terms of the way public/private and political/personal were operating
between Kreon and Antigone. These discursive resources were incorporated into discussion
of the translators so that Brecht was represented as actively engaged in recreating the
Hölderlin for political reasons, whilst Malina was represented as responsible for mistakes
resulting from her personal inadequacies as a translator. In spite of all the discussion, it was
the actors playing Antigone and Kreon who decided how the lines should read
ANTIGONE
KREON
He who was not your slave is more of a brother.
Only if good and evil are the same.
The second alteration was less complex. It was discovered that Malina had reorganised
some of Brecht’s lines (Antigone Project, Tape One, 12:22:57-). The lines are
48
Bollen
Laughing at the Difference
ANTIGONE
KREON
ELDER
How stupid you are!
When have I ever concealed the sacrifice made for the victory?
Pity her. Don’t hold her words against her. But you in your ravings,
don’t let your tragedy make you disparage Thebes’ glorious victory.
The actor playing the Elder had trouble with the lines because there seemed to be
two people with contradictory views speaking. The director suggested a solution which
would involve the actor playing Kreon directing his line to the audience. Before this was
tried however, one of the project academics said
GM
Actually it does seem if Brecht has organised those lines differently.
And the director responded
RM
Ah, I wonder why she did that?
He then directed the actors to rearrange their lines according to Brecht’s ordering.
The third alteration was the simple substitution of a word (Antigone Project, Tape Five,
10:40:50-), so that the lines
KREON
ANTIGONE
Not the country’s?
A strange country
KREON
ANTIGONE
Not the country’s war?
A foreign country’s war.
became
One of the actors suggested using a change in direction of address to make sense of
the line.
JM
I just wonder if I could help you to make sense of that if I just maybe
got into the crowd and said you know...
But the director preferred to change the word to ‘foreign’. Interestingly, this did not
immediately solve the problem and further discussion ensued (Antigone Project, Tape
Five, 11:52:20-). The actor playing Antigone still had trouble with the line so the director
then explained exactly what he intended by his retranslation.
RM
...I think it’s exactly what happens when Republicans talk about the
First World War and the Second World War. It’s Great Britain’s war
it had nothing to do with us. You say wasn’t there a war on between
1939 and 1945 and you say yeah it was England’s war a foreign
country’s war that’s what you say that’s what that distinction’s about
that’s all.
In both this and the second alteration two solutions were offered to the problems
encountered in working with the text: one involving a new direction for action and one
involving a textual alteration. In both cases the textual alteration was chosen.
For the fourth alteration, the problem did not arise during rehearsal but after a quiet
and private discussion between the director and one of the project participants (Antigone
Project, Tape Seven, 10:30:00-). Two lines in Malina’s text were announced to be ‘just
wrong’. They are from the chorus section
He always has advice.
Nothing is inadvisable for him.
49
Another archaeological paper chase was embarked upon, similar to the discussion for
the first alteration. The second line was described as
sort of nonsense
a funny line
and the director said
RM
It has an air of profundity about it which doesn’t actually deliver.
Interesting in this discussion is the use of the word ‘literally’ which seemed to have
the dual function of enabling the person offering a translation to establish the meaning of
their translation as accurate whilst apologising for the form in which the meaning is cast
in order to gain time to reformulate it. The lines were altered to read
He is always armed with reason
He is never caught unprepared
In the fifth and final alteration, the actor playing Antigone asked the director if she could
make a small alteration (Antigone Project, Tape Seven, 12:40:05-). She wanted to change
ANTIGONE
and, because of this weakness, the city falls and is devoured by
invaders.
ANTIGONE
and, it’s because of this weakness, the city falls and is devoured by
invaders.
to
By this stage, the director’s attitude towards Malina’s text was clearly evident. He
simply answered
RM
I don’t feel strongly enough to object to changes in Judith Malina’s
verse.
and the alteration was admitted without discussion. In fact, the director offered the actor
a further alteration (changing ‘and’ to ‘but’) if it ‘would help’.
Impetus for the textual alterations on Malina’s text was conceived in terms of ‘making
sense’. In this way, rehearsal can be thought of as a collaborative reading project, a way
of working with a text to produce meaning. It is a specifically local project: what makes
sense, makes sense here and now. If, at certain points, Malina’s text was nonsensical it
was nonsensical for the purposes of the project, for these practitioners, for this space,
for this time. I stress this to distance myself from absolutist claims of what is sense and
nonsense, right and wrong, correct and incorrect, faithful and licentious in translations.
What these discussions do evidence, however, is that in working with translations
what is unavoidable is a negotiation of difference: nested within cultural and linguistic
differences, is the irreducible difference of the translated text from its source text.
Roman Jakobson’s (1992) ‘On linguistic aspects of translation’ is useful in starting to
articulate questions of difference in translation. He states ‘equivalence in difference is
the cardinal problem of language’. But if it is a cardinal problem his understanding of it
is strangely unproblematised. For Jakobson, difference is different signs, different ‘codeunits’; equivalence is interpretation which is more or less synonymous, more or less
developed, more or less explicit, and ordinarily not full or complete. For him, ‘translation
50
Bollen
involves two equivalent messages in two different codes’. For him, there is always a way
to translate: ‘all cognitive experience and its classification is conveyable in any existing
language’. What Jakobson does not address is difference in equivalence. If there is
always a way, is it not possible that there are a multitude of ways? He gives no indication
of being interested in the effects of choosing one way and not another (pp.146-147).
If Jakobson is not interested in difference in equivalence, it seems that many other
theorists are. Susan Bassnett-McGuire (1981) writes
...nothing has been so hotly debated as the question of the ‘freedom’ and/or ‘responsibility’ of the
translator. Reams of paper have been used to state what the translator may or may not do, questions
have been raised as to whether the translator is a ‘creator’ or a ‘servant of the original’, and the greatest
insult that can be hurled at a translator is the cry of inaccuracy which presupposes an ideally accurate
text somewhere that someone ought to be able to produce. (p. 37)
What makes these sorts of debates possible is a specific problematic of difference in
equivalence: of all the possible (equivalent) choices to be made in translating some are
more ‘equivalent’ than others; that the differences between equivalent possibilities can be
hierarchised, adjudicated, according to certain ordained authorities. The realm of options
opened by Jakobson’s equivalence in difference needs to be patrolled.
The project participants, in their various incarnations as expert ‘readers’ (director,
actors, academics, students) were acutely aware that there are different ways of translating
the same text: hence the proliferation of alternative translations offered in the discussions.
However, what was assumed, within this local project of sense-making, is something
like Bassnett-Maguire’s ‘ideally accurate text’. The archaeological paperchases used to
question the validity of Malina’s text and the operation of a form/content split in the use
of the word ‘literally’ demonstrate a faith in what Johnson (1985) identifies as ‘classical’
translation theory.
Presiding over classical notions of philosophy and translation are thus the separability of style and
thought and the priority of the signified over the signifier, whose only legitimate role is to create order
and sequence. (p. 145)
What is in evidence in the rehearsal discussions is a belief in the story of Babel and the
Utopian possibilities of translation: a belief suffused with ‘glass window’ (Evans 1993)
and ‘refurbishing’ (Nietzsche 1992) metaphors which facilitate the separability of content
from form, message from code, signified from signifier. Such a separation provides
the basis for Benjamin’s (1992), Jakobson’s (1992) and Schogt’s (1992) analyses of
translation. It is a belief which is Utopian because it posits that approachable ideal where
a translation is the same as the original, simply what someone said (or wrote or thought),
self-justified by its own validity.
Derrida’s (1992) invocation of the Utopian story of Babel confirms BassnettMaguire’s suggestion that such a translation is unlocatable: it is nowhere. But if these
theories of translation provide the foundational possibility of translation desires, they
do not help to explain the specificities of local translation activities. In the local context
of the performance research project, what were the resources mobilised to negotiate
the problematic of difference in equivalence? Why were textual alterations chosen in
preference to staging solutions? How were the various textual alterations justified?
Central to the problematic of difference is that translation is always anecdotal. In
between the glorious ideal of a transparent translation faithful and dutiful to the original
and the fear of unbridled infidelity, irresponsibility and licentiousness there is the translator
writing what someone else wrote. To understand translation as anecdotal is to recognise the
51
paradox which traps translators when the texts they produce are put into use. The peculiar
quirk of translation theory which allows a translation to still be ‘by’ the original author
when at the same time everyone knows it was written ‘by’ the translator can allow a charge
of fraudulence to be laid. Then the translator is left with nothing to counter such a charge
but the permission they were given to say something they wrote is by another author and at
the same time to say something by another author was written by them.
The discussions which resulted in alterations to Malina’s text positioned Malina
as author in relation to the authors of the other texts, in particular to Brecht. The
archaeological paperchases compared ‘what Malina wrote’ with ‘what Brecht and the
other translators wrote’. Indeed, the discussions demonstrate that the authorial figure
remains a powerful influence on the way a text is used, in spite of theories which have
undermined it. In other words, part of the theories of translation which were utilised in
the project was a belief in the relevance of the authorial figure in negotiating a use of their
text. Of relevance here are relations of gendered canonicity.
What I have found striking in analysing the rehearsal documentation is the
unconscious ease with which discussions of Malina’s translation of Brecht was marked
by the aggressive/passive, public/private, political/personal violence that structures
contemporary gender relations. Her text was not attacked because she was a woman.
One of the other texts, Elizabeth Wyckoff’s 1954 translation, used during the project
was written by a woman and did not suffer any alterations. But, it appears that Malina’s
gender compounded the way her translation of Brecht’s text was discussed, utilised
and altered. One of the actors consistently discredited the logic of Malina’s text by
claiming that ‘it doesn’t make sense’. Malina’s interventions upon Brecht’s text (her
‘mistakes’) were dismissed as personal inconsequentialities. And all of this disregarded
the political program in which Malina’s text was written and performed. It is perhaps not
inconsequential that three of the five alterations surround concepts related to Malina’s
situationist-anarchist politics: brotherhood in the first alteration, nationhood in the third,
and manhood in metaphors of war in the fourth.
Brecht’s theoretical writings, his theatre texts and the history of his artistic practices
have had an enormous impact on contemporary theatrical practices, training and theorising.
In the Antigone Project, Brecht’s presence was specifically invoked. The director brought
to the first rehearsal a bundle of books about Brecht’s theatre practices and the history
of his Antigone. He announced that they would begin ‘work on the Brecht’ and some
time was spent discussing Brecht’s theatre and acting style. The director observed that
Brecht’s ‘classic epic staging’ has become common place in contemporary theatre but
that it was important to remember that at the time it was quite shocking. He actualised
Brecht’s alienation effect by having the actors preface their lines during rehearsal with
‘And then he says...’, ‘And then she says...’ And, at a morning rehearsal session when
the process was observed by performance studies students and classics academics, he
made the elision of Malina as translator explicit (Antigone Project, Tape Five, 10:08:40-).
Introducing their work, he said
RM
...and the third one is Brecht’s version of the Hölderlin translation.
Ah Brecht is translated by Judith Malina but we regard it as Brecht,
improperly.
This statement was met with laughter amongst those present and I have often found
the occurrence of laughter a particularly fruitful site for investigation. Laughter is a
52
Bollen
physiological reaction, a bodily response. It marks the presence of the body in discourse: when you’re laughing you can’t speak. It is normally excluded in the context
of serious academic research. But at crucial and critical moments, often at moments
when the discursive fabric is at its weakest, laughter (the body and pleasure) erupt onto
the academic stage. In a culture in which the body is alien to discourse, I have come
to understand laughter as a marker of difference. It runs along the boundaries marking
difference, like lightning sparking between opposite electrical polarities: it evidences the
presence and tensioned relations of difference.
Obviously, the performance research context is very different from the context of
‘serious academic research’ and laughter has a rather different function in the rehearsal
room. The differential occasioning the laughter is partly a confrontation of academic
research with theatrical rehearsal, of academics with theatre practitioners. But precisely
what this confrontation makes evident is the anecdotal paradox in the theories of
translation regulating the use of Malina’s text in the project.
In ‘Taking fidelity philosophically’, Johnson (1985) attempts to take seriously the
problematic of difference which is disavowed in ‘classical’ translation theory. She wants
to know what is at stake when two differently encoded messages can be said to mean
the same: how can a translation still be said to be ‘by’ the original author? Johnson
introduces Derrida’s work as ‘always already ... (about) translation’. For Johnson (and
Derrida), ‘the original text is always already an impossible translation that renders
translation impossible’.
Derrida’s entire philosophic enterprise, indeed, can be seen as an analysis of the translation process at
work in every text. In studying the différance of signification, Derrida follows the misfires, losses, and
infelicities that prevent any given language from being one. (Johnson,1985, pp. 145-6)
It is this recognition of the materiality of the text and the problem it poses for the
translator, a problem posed even before the translator begins, that is important; that
Jakobson’s message is not separable from the code, nor is it even decidable on the basis of
the code. It is this materiality, this excessiveness, this foreignness which constitutes the
repressed in Western philosophy, the academic context and ‘classical’ translation theory.
This is what leads me to suggest that the laughter, with which the director’s statement
was nervously received, was a corporeal reaction to the problematic of difference in the
theories of translation in use.
The bottom line of difference in translation is the materiality of language. If,
according to Johnson, translation stages the unconscious in language (i.e. its materiality),
then rehearsing and performing translation makes a spectacle of it. Writing for the stage
is writing to make people move. Different languages are different ways of moving. A
target text makes people move in different ways to the source text. Thus the rehearsal
process, its emphasis on spatialisation and embodiment, forces the materiality of the text
to the fore.
In altering Malina’s text, the project participants were engaging directly with this
materiality. Indeed, I chose the quote from Johnson precisely because it has come to
stand as a metaphor for what happened in the project. In calling Malina’s text ‘the
Brecht’, the project participants denied the material difference between her text and
Brecht’s. Malina’s text was attacked because it did not (and could never) deliver
‘Brecht’, pure and unmediated. The decisions to alter Malina’s text were justified as
a ‘return’ to Brecht’s text. The canonical status and marked presence of the figure of
Brecht ensures that such a ‘return’ should be desirable. But the disavowal of the material
53
impossibility of such a ‘return’ may have passed unnoticed but for its residual corporeal
trace as nervous laughter.
The embodiment, the staging, the spectacularised materialisation of a text is what
makes the rehearsal and performance of a translation so revealing. One can no longer
pretend that the materiality of language is unimportant. If one doesn’t want to or can’t
speak about it, one can always laugh. But laughter will never erase—indeed, it stands as
marker for—the material presence of difference in translation.
Project Information
The Antigone Project was held at the Centre for Performance Studies, University of Sydney as part of
its Theatre and Translation Program for 1993. References are to video documentation of the project which
is held at the Centre for Performance Studies.
Participants in the Antigone Project:
RM
AM
JM
JJ
GM
CA
Rhys McConnochie, director
Angie Milliken, actor playing Antigone
Justin Monjo, actor playing Kreon
Jamie Jackson, actor playing Elder
Gay McAuley, Director, Centre for Performance Studies
Christopher Allen, Projects Coordinator, Centre for Performance
Studies
Other academics and Performance Studies students.
Texts used in the Antigone Project:
Antigone, in Three Plays of Sophocles, trans. Lewis Campbell. London: Blackwood (1873).
Antigone, in David Grene and Richmond Lattimore, eds, The Complete Greek Tragedies, trans. Elizabeth
Wyckoff. Chicago: Chicago University Press (1954).
Antigone, in a version by Bertolt Brecht, trans. Judith Malina. New York: Applause (1984).
I would like to thank Gay McAuley and Jason Saltearn for their useful comments on
earlier versions of the material presented here.
54
Bollen
REFERENCES
Bassnett-McGuire, Susan. (1981). The translator in the theatre. In New Theatre
Quarterly , 10 (40), pp. 37-48.
Benjamin, Walter. (1992). The task of the translator. In Schulte, R. and J. Biguenet
(Eds.). (1992). Theories of Translation. (pp. 71-82).
Biner, Pierre. (1968). Le Living Theatre: histoire sans légende. Lausanne: La CitéEditeur.
Derrida, Jacques. (1985). Des tours de Babel. In Graham, Joseph F. (Ed.). Difference in
Translation. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Evans, Bob. (1993, 26 June) For now we see through a glass, with clarity. In Sydney
Morning Herald, p. 48.
Homel, David and Simon Sherry (Eds.). (1988) Mapping literature: the art and politics
of translation. Montréal: Véhicule Press.
Jakobson, Roman. (1992). On linguistic aspects of translation. In Schulte, R. and J.
Biguenet (Eds.). Theories of Translation. (pp. 144-151). Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Johnson, Barbara. (1985). Taking fidelity philosophically. In Graham, Joseph F. (Ed.).
Difference in Translation. (pp. 142-148). Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. (1992). On the problem of the translator. In Schulte, R. and J.
Biguenet (Eds.). Theories of Translation. (pp. 68-70). Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Ortega y Gassett, José. (1992). The misery and splendour of translation. In Schulte, R.
and J. Biguenet (Eds.). Theories of Translation. (pp. 93-112). Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Paz, Octavio. (1992). Translation: literature and letters. In Schulte, R. and J. Biguenet
(Eds.). Theories of Translation. (pp. 152-62). Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Schogt, Henry. (1992). Semantic theory and translation theory. In Schulte, R. and
J. Biguenet (Eds.). (1992). Theories of Translation. (pp.193-203). Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Schulte, R. and J. Biguenet (Eds.). (1992). Theories of Translation. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
55
SHAKESPEARE
IN TRANSLATION:
THE TRIAL SCENE IN
THE MERCHANT
OF VENICE
Penny Gay
In July-August 1993 the Centre for Performance Studies undertook a project in its ‘Year
of Translation’ series which posed the question, ‘What happens to “Shakespeare” when
his words are translated into another language?’ The major plays have in fact been part of
European cultural history since at least the eighteenth century: there is German Shakespeare,
French Shakespeare, Polish, Russian, etc. Received wisdom is that each culture/historical
period gives its own ‘meaning’ to the plays. The project was an attempt to investigate, in
little, whether such meaning can be mapped at the level of the specificities of language
itself?
The Merchant of Venice is peculiarly interesting in the European context, as it embodies
one of the most persistent anxieties of Western culture: anxiety about the treatment of the
alien and disenfranchised Jewish race by the dominant Christian society and culture. The
Trial Scene (as it is commonly known: the first scene of Act 4) is Shakespeare’s climactic
dramatisation of this confrontation between Jew and Christians, Old Testament and New
Testament, ideals of Justice and of Mercy (not simplistically opposed, I hasten to add). It
is particularly resonant because it also utilises folk-tale motifs: the old versus the young,
the father versus the daughter, the ogre outwitted by the heroine. And it is not only a
verbal, but a visual confrontation—the young doctor of law in his androgynous robe,
supported by the panoply of the court, opposing the Jew in his ‘gaberdine’ wielding his
knife and scales as a ghastly parody of the figure of Justice.
We took three translations each in French and German, ranging in date from the early
nineteenth century to the 1980s, of the Trial Scene, cut them so that only the dialogues
between Portia and Shylock remained, and gave them to native-speaking French and
German actors and directors. The performers had a day and a half to work on these scripts
(the cut scene lasted 6-8 minutes); they then gave a public showing, describing their
processes and discoveries in English, and performing the translated texts.
The translations
German:
a) August Wilhelm von Schlegel, 1797-1801. Unrhymed iambic pentameter —i.e.
blank verse. Classic German translation.
b) Hans Rothe, 1920s-30s (published 1963). Blank verse freely modified.
c) Barbara Puschmann-Nalenz, 1975. Prose.1
French:
a) François-Victor Hugo, 1859-65. Prose. The ‘invisible’ French translation that
is read at school, etc.
b) F.C. Danchin, 1938. Prose: intended for study rather than performance.
c) Jean-Michel Déprats, 1987. Vers libre, including an occasional alexandrine.
Translated for a Comédie Française production by Ronconi.2
The following questions immediately suggested themselves in examining the text
in translation: How important is Shakespeare’s poetry to the effect of the scene? Can
‘The quality of mercy’, for example, be translated? Does the history of anti-semitism in
France and Germany make any difference to the translated text, or to its performance? In
the English text,3 in the sections that we were working on (ll. 172-328), the word ‘Jew’
is used nine times—even Portia uses it as a vocative: ‘Therefore, Jew, though justice be
thy plea...’. ‘Shylock’ is used only twice, and that is arguably for the metre (ll. 223, 253).
Shakespeare’s text insists on the Jewishness of Shylock in this crucial scene. Do the
modes and tones of address differ significantly from English when French and German
still use tu/vous and du/Ihr to indicate the speaker’s attitude and relation to the person
addressed? Does the rhythm and texture of the language in each translation dictate to
the actors different body language and proxemics? What difference does the archaism or
modernity of the translation make to the performance?
We began by looking at the translated texts with the assistance of academics from the French
and German departments at the University of Sydney (Assoc. Prof. Gay McAuley and Dr Udo
Borgert). They pointed out significant differences in the connotations of certain key words,
which would suggest slightly different cultural perspectives. Take ‘mercy’, for instance. In
all three German translations it is Gnade, which has theological connotations—appropriately
enough, considering the imagery of Portia’s speech. Later in the scene Portia says ‘sei
barmherzig’ to Shylock, a less theological term. In the French translations the word is clémence,
which has political and judicial connotations: ‘La clémence ne se commande pas’. But Déprats
thought this inappropriate and substituted miséricorde—the more theological term—for all
mercys after Hugo’s famous opening line to the speech. English mercy, carrying theological,
legal, and affective connotations, has no one French or German equivalent.
On the question of polite and familiar you, most French and German translators on the
whole slavishly followed Shakespeare’s text. Thus is preserved for French and German
performers and audiences a distinction which was already beginning to disappear in
Shakespearean English, and has certainly disappeared in modern English: thees and
thous simply make the text sound archaic. Rothe is an exception, using ‘du’ throughout,
following German classical theatre practice; but, because of the increasing informality of
modern spoken German, for the actors this made the text sound familiar, modern, ‘matey’
even, allowing them to work in a naturalistic idiom. A similar nicety affects the word Jew,
which is rendered, even in the post-World War Two translations, exactly as the sixteenth58
Gay
Shakespeare in Translation
century Shakespeare had it, a depersonalising stereotype for a man who began the scene
believing that he was equal before the law: ‘Shylock is my name.’
Larger cultural differences became evident between the French and the German versions.
For the German-speaking performers (they were in fact all Austrian) Shakespeare has been
‘unser Shakespeare’ since early in the nineteenth century, and the Schlegel translation is
‘in the blood’ in the same way as the English text is for educated English speakers. In the
1930s, despite their success, Goebbels banned the Rothe translations (Rothe was a Jew)
and insisted that only Schlegel be played. Our actors were consequently most at home
with the Schlegel translation, and commented that its use of blank verse and ‘high style’
appropriately distanced the situation from the present.4 Schlegel, writing consciously so
as to imitate Shakespearean style, has a better ear for dramatic word-order, giving the
actors assistance with gesture and emphasis. For example, the crucial line ‘Tarry a little,
there is something else’ is rendered by Schlegel ‘Wart noch ein wenig: eins ist noch zu
merken’; by Rothe much less forcefully, without an imperative verb, ‘Etwas geduld, noch
eine Kleinigkeit’—an undramatic mouthful, according to the actors. The two twentiethcentury texts were in their different ways considered ‘too naturalistic’, and the actors on
occasion automatically reverted to Schlegel’s phrasing.
The director, Florian Messner, and the actors Gertraud Ingeborg and Hannes Streck,
had understood the brief given them by CPS to mean that the blocking of all three
versions should be the same, any variations in interpretation arising from the nuances of
the text. The blocking was set by the director after early rehearsals at which, in fact, each
translation was treated differently. The actors thus had very narrow parameters within
which to present the three versions (they later in discussion expressed dissatisfaction with
this, but said that they did not protest because they were used to the authoritarian methods
of the Burgtheater). Nevertheless subtle differences were evident to a watchful observer.
The Schlegel translation was played with panache, a ‘situation’ in which both performers
were game-playing, aided by the rhythmic and metaphorical high style of the text. The
Rothe translation was hampered, according to the actors, by its unexpected stops and
starts; it was difficult to speak naturally despite being technically more idiomatic than
the Schlegel. The actors opted for a chatty style of delivery in an attempt to counteract
this—Rothe had provided a clue to this in translating ‘Shylock is my name’ as ‘Ja, ich
bin der Scheilock’. The modern Puschmann-Nalenz prose translation had the ‘coldest’
language, according to Gertraud Ingeborg, and it dictated a ‘quieter’ performance, with
both actors arguing like lawyers who believe they had reason on their side; Ingeborg felt
that her more powerful Portia ‘wanted to punish Shylock’.
The French performers, by contrast, in each case took into account the historical
context of the given translation—that is, there is no paradigmatic translation which
imposes its authority on later texts. Shakespeare was always the exotic foreigner to
the French with their strong tradition of classical theatre. The popular Hugo translation
was played in the style of nineteenth-century melodrama, with a self-consciously comic
touch to both villain and heroine. The director, Rénald Navarro, commented that the
text was littered with full-stops, a rhythm which suggested farce—not that the scene
became farcical, but it remained at all points an unthreatening entertainment. Portia,
as befitted a nineteenth-century heroine, was uncertain of her position, and attempted to
win Shylock over with a conciliatory ‘mercy’ speech. The actress, Véronique Bernard,
also commented that Hugo’s text was ‘wordy’, which gave her the sense that Portia was
bluffing; she spent a frantic few minutes leafing through the law-book before finding the
59
saving quibble. By contrast, in the modern acting version by Déprats, both Shylock and
Portia were very strong. Portia, a modern young female lawyer, tried to show Shylock
the enormity of his proposed deed by giving Shylock the knife, and by herself handling
it emphatically. Danchin’s prose translation of 1938 gave the actors less to work with,
its simplistic ‘key’ being the ‘arrogance’ that the actor François Bocquet found in the line
that cues ‘The quality of mercy’: ‘“Il faut”, mais qui m’y forcera, dites-moi?’ The actors
preferred the ‘direct’ quality of Déprats’ modern acting translation, underpinned by a
subtle poetic awareness. They also remarked that they enjoyed the comic potential of the
Hugo version: it is interesting that it seems to be difficult for late-twentieth-century actors
to play nineteenth-century high style as anything other than comic.
Conclusions
There are undoubtedly many subtle variations in the translation of any text that affect
the choices made by the actor when creating a character, but as I watched the scenes in
rehearsal it became clear that there was another, overriding factor at work, what David
Ritchie (in discussion during the project) called ‘the relentless anthropomorphism of
theatre’: the near-impossibility of getting an actor to abandon the notion of ‘character’.
The nuances of text, in short, took a subordinate place to the language of the body and the
syntax of the situation.
The syntax of the situation
In discussion with the performers after the showings one outstanding phenomenon
emerged, and I suggest it is endemic to virtually all readers, audiences, and players of
Shakespeare: they know the situation. By this I don’t necessarily mean they know this
precise embodiment of it, but the minute Shylock and Portia walk onto the stage a familiar,
indeed archetypal situation is recognisable. We are about to be engaged by the enactment of
the defeat of an alien threat by the young hero/heroine (androgynous Portia is both). For the
actors, this meant that basic decisions about the characters had been made before they began to
examine the subtleties of the language; already their bodies had adopted certain postures and
positions, and these contain and control the line-readings (in the case of the French ‘comic’
reading, a decision had been taken about style as well). A striking example is the line ‘Soft,
the Jew shall have all justice, soft no haste, he shall have nothing but the penalty.’ [316, Q1’s
punctuation.] This presents a translation problem because of its idiomatic use of soft. The
French translators are happy to use ‘Doucement’; but in German Schlegel and Rothe opt for
‘Halt!’ (Schlegel in fact substitutes ‘Still!’ for the second ‘Soft’). Puschmann-Nalenz offers
the subtler disyllabic ‘Langsam!’ These choices would suggest a distinct effect on the actor’s
delivery at this point—but in all six performances the phrase was shouted imperiously: Portia
by this stage in the syntax of the scene scents victory.
It takes a director and/or actor of genius to deconstruct these ‘natural’ assumptions about
archetypal roles and situations. A relevant example is the opening encounter between Portia
and Shylock in Peter Zadek’s recent production for the Vienna Burgtheater. Shylock (Gert
Voss) was tall, blond, handsome, the image of an Aryan hero; Antonio was small, neurotic,
and plain, with vaguely semitic features. When Portia entered the courtroom, she looked at
this cowering figure and said ‘Ist Ihr Name Shylock?’—at which Voss grandly interposed,
‘Shylock ist mein Name.’
Michael Billington speaks with high praise of this revolutionary production in his
essay ‘Shakespeare in Europe’5 where he also argues that
60
Gay
Shakespeare in Translation
there is gain as well as loss in freeing Shakespeare from the rigorous explicitness of the English tongue.
There is a mythical quality in his work which transcends language and may even be liberated by a
foreign perspective .... something strange happens when you lose the English language and context: you
release the play’s metaphorical power. (pp. 356-7)
As I watched the rehearsed readings and discussions, I found myself coming to the
same conclusion.
The language of the body
Ultimately, probably the most important aspect of any translation is its rhythm—whether
it’s in verse or prose, and what further rhythmical qualities are added by lexical choice and
syntax. Rhythm is closely connected to the body and the voice which utter the speech, and
the basic quality of bodily utterance is dictated by the historical period, sex, age, and ethnicity
of the speaker (film and audio documentation have demonstrated the truth of this within this
century). It follows that the performers in our 1993 experiment, however conscientiously
they may have tried to be ‘blank surfaces’ on which the words of the various translations
were inscribed, could not avoid the condition of being 1990s subjects playing in Australia to
a 1990s academic audience. The rhythm of the text speaks to the rhythm of the performer’s
body, and if we are lucky, they make sweet music together: the body adapts the rhythms
of the text so as to communicate with the specific audience. For these actors, ‘playing the
Jew’ was not the problem that it would presumably be in France and Germany with their
history of antisemitism; nor was ‘playing the woman lawyer’ an issue to these post-feminist
performers. The actors saw all the translations in terms of the basic scenario—the syntax of
the situation—and automatically gave it a contemporary gloss. One actor described it as an
attempt to get the audience—both on and off stage—to accept their character’s view as the
‘right’ one.
At the end of the project I found myself coming to the conclusion that the fine details
of ‘Shakespeare’s poetry’ don’t matter nearly as much to actors and audiences as do
characters and situation and the dramatic syntax of the situation. Of course I wouldn’t
want to see Shakespeare in ‘modern English’, because I relish the additional pleasure
that I as an educated English speaker gain from his superb manipulation of Elizabethan
English—imagery and word-play particularly that seem to offer infinite riches as I read,
listen to, or speak the lines. But I think we must accept that directors and actors always
translate the text into their contemporary tongue —and I use this word deliberately to
foreground the mediating bodies of the actors and listeners. For them, Shakespeare is
either our contemporary or he is nothing.
61
NOTES
1
2
3
4
5
Der Kaufmann von Venedig, tr. A.W. von Schlegel, in Shakespeare: Dramatische
Werke, tr. Schlegel and Tieck, vol. 3 (Berlin, 1844); Der Kaufmann von Venedig,
tr. H. Rothe, in Dramen, Bd 2 (Munich, 1963); Der Kaufmann von Venedig, tr. B.
Puschmann-Nalenz (Stuttgart, 1975).
Le Marchand de Venise, tr. F-V. Hugo, in Shakespeare: Œuvres complètes (Paris,
1859-65); Le Marchand de Venise, tr. F.C. Danchin (Paris, 1938); Le Marchand
de Venise, tr. J-M. Déprats (Paris, 1987). This last also contains a very interesting
essay ‘La Traduction: Le tissu des mots’ by Déprats.
The edition used was the Arden Shakespeare, ed. John Russell Brown (London
and New York, 1959, 1991).
Professor Roger Paulin, in a lecture given at Sydney University in March 1995,
argued that the Schlegel translation is based on a model of blank verse derived
from the neo-classicism of eighteenth-century English writers such as James
Thomson and Aaron Hill—far removed from the ‘robustness’ of Elizabethan
blank verse, particularly as regards the irregular stressing of the latter. Thus
actors speaking a Schlegel translation will find it easy because of the regularity of
Schlegel’s blank verse.
Michael Billington, One Night Stands (London, 1993).
62
TRANSLATION FOR THE
NON-TRANSLATOR/
PERFORMER
David Attrill
University of Western Sydney, Nepean
If Hamlet had been asked ‘What do you perform, my lord?’ instead of ‘What do you
read...’ he would not have replied ‘Words, words, words’ but ‘Actions, actions, actions’.
Yet verbal text is often the basis of a translated play. Translation, especially for the theatre,
is not merely a question of substituting words. The injudicious use of a thesaurus can, for
example transform the simple everyday phrase ‘Good morning everybody’ into the pseudoreligious ‘Pious dawning catholicity’ or the pseudo-scientific ‘Palatable premier crepuscule
all aggregated’ or the ghoulish pun ‘Proper morning each corpse’. This is obviously nontranslation—but who is a ‘non-translator’?There is probably no such being: from infancy
one is structuring one’s own language and mental processes by accommodation and assimilation, redefining and translating external stimuli, expressing the sense of something in, or
into, one’s own language and making inferences from or interpreting signs, etc. All of this
is essentially a structuring process based on aspects of translation, a structuring that will
also have national, religious and patriarchal (or matriarchal) overtones.
Even a monoglot like myself is capable of translating jargon and disparate linguistic
strands in my one language or of translating American or Australian into my native
English. As an actor or director I can also convey or introduce an idea or principle from
one art to another (another aspect of translation). However, for the purposes of the 1993
Performance Studies project on The Merchant of Venice I was unable to understand the
target languages of spoken French and German. While, with the help of critical apparatus
such as footnotes, I can follow written French and a few words of written German, in
this project I was essentially an observer of a vaguely familiar scene with no ability
to understand what was actually being said since spoken language and theatre when
performed live are transitory—unlike written language, tape, film or video that can be
accessed a multiplicity of times. I was thus part of an audience and yet not part of the
translations’ target audience/s.
How valid are the thoughts of a mono-lingual person regarding translation for the
theatre? These are my basic premises for the purposes of this paper.
(1) The basis of theatre is action.
(2) In the past play translations have been regarded as literature.
(3) In the past a particular translation could be accepted into that culture’s hierarchy as an
original, but this is no longer the case for modern translations.
(4) Translation for theatre is very different from literary translation.
(5) It covers all three types of translation: translation proper, transmutation and rewording (I
have never rehearsed a translated play without some rewording).
(6) Canonisation in the source culture has meant that often a reasonable translation has been
subverted by direction (i.e. methods of playing Pirandello, Chekhov etc.).
(7) Each playtext has inbuilt paralinguistic aspects—sometimes inaccessible in another
language (Bassnett 1980, p. 132).
(8) Each playtext has inbuilt undertexts. Bassnett terms this ‘gestural text’ (Bassnett 1980,
p. 132).
(9) A translated text only becomes theatre when performed.
(10)
The idea of an author’s intention in theatre is dead.
(11)
It is impossible to produce a definitive translation.
(12)
Translation has only recently been accepted by British audiences (Polish ITI
Centre 1985, session 2), who were regarded as insufficiently interested in other cultures—
(although this might now be affected by EEC membership) and who gave their translators
scant regard.
(13)
Whether this is also the case in Australia is more debatable but translation is still
in its infancy when compared to middle European countries.
It is evident that it is impossible to produce a completely satisfactory translation but
there are also three differing opinions, apparently all valid, as to what a theatre translation
should produce. Pavis cites all three: Vitez says that a great translation contains its
own mise en scène as the ‘...art of selection among the hierarchy of signs’ (Vitez 1982,
cited Pavis 1992, p. 32); Sallenave disagrees, saying that the text should ‘...maintain its
mystery...yet to hear speaking voices, to anticipate acting bodies’ (Sallenave 1982, cited
Pavis 1992, p. 32); Deprats (whose 1987 French translation was used in the project)
suggests a mid point ‘...animated by a specific rhythm without imposing it’ (Deprats
1985, cited Pavis 1992, p. 32).
Multiple translations provide the director with textual choices not available to a
director in the source language—but all directors are at liberty to do whatever they like
with the texts to make them ‘playable’. The first part of the Merchant of Venice project
was concerned with research. As an actor I know the apparent paradox that when dealing
with a text one often feels one needs to research a role—but when the crunch comes in
performance one cannot play historical research. Consequently, although the breadth
of this initial research was fascinating for me, the performances could only be judged
by the mise en scène, not the maze behind the scene. As Pavis intimates, ‘...translation
reaches the audience by means of the actors’ bodies’. Translation will ‘...confront and
communicate heterogenous cultures and situations of enunciation that are separated in
space and time’ (1992, p. 25).
Further, it was evident from comments from the movement-orientated Frenchspeaking rehearsal process (and I use that term advisedly, as they hated being called
French) that any preconceived ideas based upon written text were a hindrance rather
than an advantage. Nevertheless the basic stimulus for each of their three performances
did appear to stem from differences that could only be attributed to differences in the
written texts. For example, although both groups felt the need for costume and props and
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Attrill
Translation and the Non-Translator
these were not physically changed in their three translated performances, they were used
differently as a result of slight differences in the text.
My recent thoughts have been concerned with texts translated into English, American
and Australian and whether they contain national characteristics based upon the three quite
different ‘target audiences’. There is evidence that rewrites have been deemed necessary
when taking British Plays like Churchill’s Cloud Nine to America (Moritz 1985), or, at
a less sublime level, in bringing Nunsense from America to Australia. Susan Bassnett
reminds us of the following obvious points—firstly, that no two cultures or languages are
exactly the same (Bassnett-McGuire 1981, p. 39). I would maintain that in performance
this should be extended to no two directors, actors or audience members are the same
and that every live performance is different. Thus the translated written text cannot be
the same as the original. Moreover, and this is where the subjectivity of Translation
Studies begins, some translations are easier and more fluent to read than others, some are
‘actable’ and others, though supposedly produced for the stage, are wooden and unusable
(Bassnett-McGuire 1981, p. 39). One culture’s hero becomes another country’s drudge.
Pirandello was assessed in Britain by Barker as ‘tediously slow and arid, shot through
with splurges of emotional outbursts...a long time spent over little’ (Bassnett-McGuire
1983, pp. 5-6). As we know, Shakespeare in many countries is regarded as a romantic.
As a non-translator, may I put forward a heresy—if the resulting performance is at odds
with the original text, does it matter? A set of audacious greetings like ‘pious dawning
catholicity’, or a transliteration with specious footnotes such as that provided by John
Hulme (1981)—included below as an appendix—can make amusing performance pieces
in their own right.
I have seen three productions recently at the University of Western Sydney which I
feel relevant to this topic—a beautifully truncated version of Hamlet (dir. Keith-Kay M.,
1993) an apparently very Spanish production of Lorca’s Blood Wedding (dir. Davis M.,
1993) and the Durang romp The Idiots Karamazov (Durang C., dir. Keith-Kay M., 1993).
These, together with many partly related snippets of research, form the basis for the rest
of this paper.
The production of Hamlet began with an eerie, essentially monophonic, vocal
soundscape from all the cast onstage. Hamlet was in a wheelchair, presumably in a
mental hospital, as he acknowledged three Gertrudes, three Ophelias and four nurses
(actually two pairs of female Rozencrantzes and Guildensterns). Next he uttered ‘To be
or not to be, that is the question’, and then Act 1 began. As a student production with
only six males and eleven females available, obviously there had to be some subversion
or adaptation but, interestingly enough, despite the numbers of females on the stage, there
was an incredibly strong adherence, whether conscious or not, to patriarchal values in the
staging, even in the positioning of the women on the periphery of the stage. Was this an
invalid adaptation of Hamlet? Would it have been more or less invalid if it had been a
translation/adaptation? (Hamlet did leave the wheelchair; was this less invalid?).
Jerzy Sito stated at a Colloquium on Translation in 1985 that there were three main
periods of translation of Shakespeare into Polish—two echoing those of France and
Germany, being 18th Century rewrites with bowdlerisation and 19th Century romanticism,
together with a third resurgence after the second world war as Shakespeare became a
source in a search for order at a time of shattered values and crippled words and ideas. In
all there were seventeen different translations of Hamlet into Polish by 1985. Sito also
spoke of the ‘demons of language’ and stated he supported the sacrifice of the ‘literal’ for
65
the ‘meaningful’ whenever faced with this dilemma (Polish ITI 1985, session 1). Once
again we have the problem of translation. What does ‘meaningful’ mean literally?
Lauri Sapari noted that in Finland, although the language lends itself to strong lines
and violent emotion rather than bright and sharp wits, the first translations of Shakespeare
were expressionist, colourful and energetic. They also badly distorted the original.
Between the wars insipid and pale imagery in previous translations was flavoured by
strong political overtones and after the Second World War translations were influenced by
Brecht, then Kott and Sixties’ new Radicalism—all with serious distortions. He admitted
to introducing a non-existent scene into Hamlet with heavy political overtones in his own
translation, raising the question of whether Shakespeare should be translated or adapted
(Polish ITI 1985, session 1).
Avi Oz outlined the difficulties in translating Shakespeare into either classical
Hebrew, ‘dead’ long before Shakespeare’s time, or the late 19th Century ‘New’ Hebrew
which, although mainly bi-syllabic, is full of ‘artificially minted neologisms’ and has
no class-inspired modes of speech or tradition of poetic drama. The usual solution, Oz
noted, was to use ‘New’ Hebrew, but from the previous generation of poets to evoke a
feeling of archaism. These translations required additional lines, however, lengthening
Shakespeare’s plays even further (Polish ITI 1985, session 1).
After a comparison of tapes of English, Finnish and Hebrew translations and a
dramatised reading from Mr Sito’s Polish translation of snippets from Romeo and Juliet,
a lively debate followed. Opinions ranged from denouncing the possibility of translating
classics to those advocating that the ‘spirit’ of the original should have precedence over
the ‘letter’ (Polish ITI 1985, session 1). When does a literal translation become an
adaptation? Which is closer to the ‘spirit’ of Shakespeare, a postmodern or subverted
adaptation in English or any one of the seventeen Polish translations? Does it really
matter for any audience?
This session on translating the classics was followed by heated controversy over
‘literal’ translation versus ‘adaptation’ or ‘version’. The key speaker for this was Dusty
Hughes, a British theatre critic, director and playwright/translator (in other words a writer
from another’s literal translation). Admitting that British insularity had virtually excluded
foreign plays (except Chekhov’s) from the British stage until the early ’60s, his premise
was that the translator ‘stands in’ for the author in the rehearsal room, guarding the text
against directorial ravages (many agree with Stanislavski, preferring authors to be dead!)
while providing the actor with enough material to build a role without overburdening the
speech patterns with an embarassment of riches. He noted that what eludes translation
is the relationship of drama to the specific place, time and circumstance of the original
production. He also stated that a playwright has an advantage over the ‘academic’
translator in that s/he knows the capacities of actors in the rehearsal room. This point
was queried by representatives of countries with a history of translation going back
somewhat further than 1960, objecting to the word ‘academic’. Possibly this objection
was academic. There was heated debate over whether situations and contexts should be
translated as well as dialogue and as to the ability of a non-linguist to echo the specific
speech patterns, rhythms and actual sound of the original language. Hughes responded
that any attempt to reproduce this is doomed to failure and, moreover, denies the playwright/translator the flexibility of his/her own language. To be accurate is not necessarily
to be dramatic (Polish ITI 1985, session 2), although it must be said at this point that
inaccuracy doesn’t guarantee drama either.
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This emphasis on target language (and by implication target culture) contrasted with
the director’s approach to Blood Wedding. Her process was a variation on the ‘collage’
method of producing a performance text by combining aspects from previous translations.
Reference was made to three different translations and the original Spanish. Lorca’s own
music was used and on many occasions his original Spanish was used, especially in the
songs and the marriage celebrations. From the time the audience was confronted by the
two factions performing a flamenco dance as a prologue, the actors worked with very
clear motivation, encouraged to immerse themselves in the source culture. As an audience
member I felt alienated, but that is not necessarily a negative aspect of the production.
Kruger notes that the meaning of a translated text arises from what one does to it,
not what one can take over from it (Kruger, cited Pavis 1992, p. 27) or, in Pavis’s words
(translated by Kruger), translation is ‘...interpreting the source text...in order to pull the
foreign text towards the target culture and language, so to separate it from its source and
origin’ (Pavis 1992, p. 26). In this case the director chose to pull the translated text back
towards the foreign text. As Terry Threadgold implied recently in a paper for the Centre
for Performance Studies at Sydney University, the trouble with models of translation or
rehearsal is that they are never completely adequate (Threadgold, 1993). Although I am
not over-enthusiastic about Pavis’s model for the translation of mise en jou, I do see value
in the way that he sees some five ‘concretisations’ (sic) on the way to a translated text.
Firstly, there is the source text T(0). The subsequent stages can be accomplished by one
or more people. T is the first ‘literal’ translation, usually of the written text, not of the
mise en scène. Next, this is analysed by the translator—the source text is bombarded with
questions from the target language’s point of view, becoming the initial concretisation
of a workable text in the target language or T(1). Analysed by a dramaturg or director
this becomes text T(2) which during the rehearsal process becomes text T(3). When it is
finally received by the audience, it becomes text T(4) and, I would suggest, possibly T(5)
after running (Pavis 1992, pp. 29-33).
Hughes probably agrees with Mounin (cited Pavis 1992, p. 28) that a playable theatre
translation is the product of a dramaturgical rather than a literary act. Yet, as Pavis notes,
the majority of translations of drama are only the written text. Actors know that almost
anything can be brought to life by the neglected actor and not quite so neglected director
and Durang plays on this in The Idiots Karamazov where a multitude of twisted literary
references and pseudo-translations are the basis for what can be a hilarious spiking of
literary canons. Once again, does it matter if T(3) or (4) is far removed from T(0)?
Back in 1981 Susan Bassnett highlighted problems of translation in the theatre
(Bassnett-McGuire 1981). This included a summary of responses to a questionnaire
designed to find out the opinions and work methods of contemporary translators in
Europe. She also noted the results of a conference at Riverside Studios in 1980. What
did she find?
That translators had lower status in Britain and the USA than anywhere else. That,
unlike originals, translations do not have fixed positions in the literary hierarchy. That
language is dynamic and that translators translate with the target culture in mind, therefore
the lifespans of translations are short and consequently there is always a demand for new
translations to replace these period pieces. That there were long lists of ‘bad’ translation
practices but vague ideas as to what were ‘good’ ones. That at Riverside not only could
the differences between the terms ‘TRANSLATION’, ‘VERSION’ and ‘ADAPTATION’
not be clarified but that there was a case for ‘INTERPRETATION’ to be added and that
67
oversimplistic attempts at definitions were misguided. That there were almost equal
attacks on ‘The National Theatre translation policy’ as exemplifed by Dusty Hughes
and on the ‘collage’ method including rewriting and possibly adding new text (BassnettMcGuire, 1981). Bassnett quotes from Acosta’s paper at the conference:
Translation is no fancy dress foolery. Freedom in adaptation and the subjective interpretation of the text
will inevitably produce very different versions; even conflicting ones (Bassnett-McGuire 1981, p. 40).
This used totally confused terminology but implying very neatly the impossibility of
control over a theatre text. Bassnett continued in her own words:
The question of the original Author’s intention is just a red-herring...that the shaping process of theatre,
together with the right of every reader to own the ‘text’ read, negates the notion of a single intended
reading (Bassnett-McGuire 1981, p. 40).
We know what this implies but what did translators think albeit twelve years ago?
Reference to four of her many questions follows. Of course no clear picture emerges.
The answers to Question 25 in her questionnaire were mixed:
When assessing a good translation which of the following would you rank most highly:
(a)
(b)
(c)
(d)
(e)
Fidelity to the original in language and structure
Performability
Success in reproducing the rhythms of the original
Reproduction of the ‘Spirit’ of the original
The creation of a ‘new’ form and /or language
The participants’ answers ranked in that order, slightly more ranking (a) fidelity, first
(but hedging bets by continuing the ranking with (b) performability, (c) rhythms and
an occasional (d) spirit to follow). What was interesting was that those who ranked (b)
performability first usually omitted to note (a) fidelity at all (Bassnett-McGuire 1981, p.
45). Regarding footnotes, Question 13 was interesting:
Where the original text involves reference to laws, customs, traditions, individuals, places, events, etc.
that have no meaning without extensive explanation do you:
(a)
(b)
(c)
(d)
(e)
Remove all such references in the final version
Leave them intact with footnotes
Attempt to find equivalents
Assess each case on its relevance to the text as a whole and use any/all the above methods
Use any other devices
The majority opted for (d) any or all the above methods with only one opting for
footnotes. One-fifth would remove them all, whereas another one-fifth opted to find analogues (not equivalents—‘analogue’ was obviously the in-word in 1981). Some would
add further dialogue and some would discuss the matter with directors or actors. English
translators pointed out the inadequacies of audiences who need everything simplified
whereas Eastern European translators suggested the sophistication of an intellectually
mixed audience would make obscurantism less of a problem (Bassnett-McGuire 1981,
pp. 42-3).Whether the comments about English audiences were due to lack of experience
with translation or British insularity or a mixture of both is a moot point. It would also
be premature to equate Britain of 1981 with Australia in 1993/4 but there appears to have
been little research into audience responses to translation here.
Another split between the British and Europeans was in answer to Question 23: Do you
believe that there is such a thing as the ‘spirit’ of an original text that defies description?
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Three-quarters said ‘yes’, one said ‘sometimes’, whereas the rest (including most of the
European translators) said ‘no’. Many said this ‘spirit’ should be defined or should be
able to be described (Bassnett-McGuire 1981 pp. 44-5), but presumably did not attempt
to do so themselves. Question 7 was also of interest:
Do you translate with any of the following in mind:
(a)
(b)
Particular actors
A particular company
(c)
A particular theatre
(d)
A particular audience
(e)
A particular occasion
Thirty-five per cent said NONE of these—presumably translating ‘on spec’ or as a
purely literary work! Thankfully, over half said they translated for a company and about
half for a particular audience. Lower on the list were translations for particular actors
or theatres with German and Italian translators giving these a higher priority (BassnettMcGuire 1981, p. 41).
Once again translation is about differences in the perceptions of cultures (including
their perceptions of theatre) and their languages. If we accept evidence from the
participants in the Merchant of Venice project, why do French productions move faster
than German ones? (Is it because they had an extra foot—or did they have an extra foot
because they move faster? Have I now put my foot in it?)
My conclusions from these considerations are the following:
(1)
That, for the mono-linguist, all aspects of accuracy and the original cease to exist and that each
translation can be regarded as a separate play in its own right.
(2)
That there is no such thing as an actual target audience or even target language—these are
approximations—although, as Von Ledebur noted, Speer’s translation of Bond’s Saved into
Bavarian Dialect for a Munich audience would come close (Von Ledebur 1992).
(3)
That all translation is subjective, hit and miss for a particular audience.
(4)
That if given a choice the director will pick a translation that appears best suited to her/his intellect/
intellectualisation of a multitude of factors—the director’s poetic. This assessment is culturebound and will result in convergence towards, or divergence from, a ‘target audience’ and/or
source culture.
(5)
Finally, it is impossible to try to define the degrees of difference between ‘translation’, ‘version’,
‘adaptation’, ‘interpretation’, ‘after’, ‘loosely based on’, etc. or the degree of collage or subversion
by the director and how to acknowledge this. I have also omitted to mention the roles of props,
design, finance, lighting, music and sound etc. etc. etc...
So what is the bottom line? To quote another actor/artisan: ‘Bless thee Bottom! Bless
thee! Thou art translated.’ (Translation is occasionally a blessing in disguise!)
69
APPENDIX
To highlight the problems created for an unsuspecting reader by the extensive use of
footnotes, when I delivered this paper at the Centre for Performance Studies in 1993 I
had one of the participants read aloud the following exquisite transliteration from Hulme
while I interspersed vocally the accompanying footnotes. Requests that it be read aloud
several more times without the footnotes demonstrated that the audience, without the text
in front of them, realised very quickly that this was in fact a transliteration of a nursery
rhyme—much more quickly, in fact, than the actual reader who was still looking at words
in another language. Actions can speak louder than text!
Liesel Bopp hieb es Schloss der schieb
An Dutzend Noor, wer zu Feind dem,
Lief dem aal ohn’ an Tee willkomm Ohm;
Brenken der Teil Spee ein dem.
1
2
3
4
5
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REFERENCES
Akerholt, M-B. (1993) unrecorded interview with Attrill, D. at the Writers Centre Sydney.
Bassnett-McGuire, S. (1980) Translation Studies. London: Methuen.
Bassnett-McGuire, S. (1981) The translator in the Theatre. In New Theatre Quarterly, 10 (40), pp. 3748.
Bassnett-McGuire, S. (1983) Luigi Pirandello. London: MacMillan.
Durang, C. dir. Keith-Kay, M. (1993) The Idiots Karamasov. Performances observed at UWS Nepean,
Sydney with sufficient variations in each performance to justify non-reference to the original
script.
Glaap, A-R. (1992) Whose life is it anyway? in London and on Broadway: a contrastive analysis of the
British and American versions of Brian Clark’s play. In Scolnicov, H. and Holland, P. (Eds) The play
out of context: transferring plays from culture to culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hulme, J. (1981) Morder guss reims. London: Angus and Robertson.
Kelly, L. (1979) The true interpreter: a history of translation theory and practice in the west. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Lorca, F. dir. Davis, M. (1993) Blood Wedding. Performances observed at UWS Nepean, Sydney based
on a collage of translations from other sources.
Martin, R. (1990) Performance as a political act—the embodied self. New York: Bergin and Garvey.
Moritz, C. (Ed) (1985) Current biography yearbook. New York: H.Wilson and Co.
Pavis, P. (1992) Problems of translation for the stage. In Scolnicov, H. and Holland, P. (Eds) The play
out of context: transferring plays from culture to culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Polish ITI Centre (1985) Unpublished notes/translation of the report on the colloquium held at Jablonna
palace 26-29 March.
Szeps, H. (1993) unrecorded interview with Attrill, D. at Q Theatre Penrith.
Shakespeare, W. Hamlet, dir. Keith-Kay, M. music Parry, R. (1993). Performances observed at UWS
Nepean, Sydney loosely based on the original.
Yon Ledebur, R. (1992) The adaptation and reception in Germany of Edward Bond’s Saved. In
Scolnicov, H. and Holland, P. (Eds) The play out of context: transferring plays from culture to
culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
NOTES
1
She may have been a relative of Franz Bopp (1791-1867), a linguist who demonstrated the relationship
between the Indo-Germanic languages. His main work was A Comparative Grammar (1833-1852)
2
A stretch of shallow water connected to the sea by canals. Liesel had evidently been locked up by her enemy
in a castle surrounded by a dozen of these lakes. She beat and shoved—against the door, presumably—but
there were eels running around the castle and she did not even have a welcome cup of tea to cheer her up.
3
The eels were electric.
4
Wooden containers. It seems that Liesel tried to escape in part of one.
5
Possibly Friedrich von Spee (1591-1635), a Baroque poet; but in the view of the watery setting it is more
likely that Liesel was inspired by the example of Admiral Graf Maximilian von Spee (1861-1914) who went
down with his flagship.
71
SITUATION VACANT:
LINES OF FLIGHT AND THE
SCHIZO-POTENTIAL FOR
REVOLUTION
Peter Snow
Monash University
This paper is a report on the project to translate, workshop and produce La Demande
d’Emploi by Michel Vinaver,1 undertaken jointly by the Centre for Performance Studies
and the Sydney based performing company, Public Works.2 The translation/workshop
took place at the University of Sydney and the production of Situation Vacant was
mounted at Belvoir St. Downstairs in July 1993.
In the 1992 text, Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture, the French performance theorist
Patrice Pavis advances what he calls an ‘hourglass’ model of translation to account for
the intercultural transposition of theatre works from one cultural context to another.3 His
polemic is to propose that cutting edge contemporary theatre practices are those which
deal with intercultural exchange.4 And his model of the hourglass filtering of source
culture into target culture, mediated by no less than eleven separate filters, is an attempt
to theorise this transfer. The eleven filters are grouped into three: firstly, the processes
by which the source culture is modelled into a theatre text; secondly, the processes of
theatrical production, anticipating reception in the target culture; and thirdly, the processes
of reception by the audiences of the target culture.
The mise en scène then, for Pavis, is the laboratory of this intercultural mix. Rather
than simply being a material process, an empirical object, that which is made and
therefore seen, the mise en scène for him is ‘the bringing together or confrontation, in a
given space and time, of different signifying systems, for an audience.’5 In other words
it is the interaction of the processes of production and reception, within the performance
event. This interaction then is a theoretical construct, an object of knowledge, it bears the
traces of all its constituent processes, and thus can be discerned only by reflection on, and
analysis of, all the filters of the hourglass transfer.
For the purposes of this paper I would like to focus only on the middle group of
filters (numbers three to seven) concerning the processes of theatre production; those
of the adapter’s perspective, the work of adaptation, the preparatory work by actors, the
choice of theatrical form, and the theatrical representation/performance of culture.6 For
it is largely these processes that Public Works found itself engaged upon in transposing
(translating) the text La Demande d’Emploi into the performance event, Situation
Vacant. In particular I will concentrate on the processes of spatialising the work, and
of embodying the characters, partly because, as Pavis says, ‘translation reaches the
audience by way of the actors bodies,’7 and partly because, as he also says, ‘access to this
exceptional laboratory remains difficult,’ for ‘the artists do not like to talk much about
their creations.’8
Situation Vacant
The text, Situation Vacant, is a translation into English of the playtext La Demande
d’Emploi by the French writer Michel Vinaver. Written in 1971, La Demande d’Emploi
has received productions in France9 and in England (in another translation)10 but this was
its first rendition into an Australian performance context. Vinaver’s work, while widely
read and produced in France,11 is relatively unknown in the English speaking world and
aside from a public rehearsed reading by Public Works of another of his playtexts, Portrait
of a Woman12 in Sydney in 1992, this project is believed to be the first production of a
Vinaver play in Australia.
The playtext was suggested to Public Works13 as being not only appropriate for our
times—it deals with the politics of unemployment and desire in a montage-like structure
of thirty overlapping tableaux or scenes each composed of multiple lines of intertwining
conversations—but also ideally suited to the company and its aesthetic. That is, we
are a performer-based ensemble which works collectively inviting a multiplicity of
viewpoints in the working process. Tackling difficult and complex texts in ways inspired
by contemporary performance theory and practice, some of the company’s lines of
investigation are to ‘problematise’ the character/ performer relationship, to displace text
in relation to movement and to mount works which in performance emphasise montage,
simultaneity and a shifting viewpoint.
The project, in its draft translation and workshop phases, consisted in a collaboration
between Public Works and fourth year students in French and Performance Studies.14
Each PS student was paired with a student from French, and each such group produced a
working translation of one or more of the thirty tableaux/scenes of the playtext.
The company would spend half a day working one pair’s submitted material in
order to ‘put it on its feet’ in front of the students. There would be a critique, several
reworkings, and then a cold read of the next group’s translated scene(s) which in turn
became the material to be workshopped the following week. Each pair chose their own
scene(s) for their own reasons—sometimes they were consecutive, sometimes not—and
occasionally there were two or more versions of the same scene. Needless to say there
was an enormous variety, ranging from one version left partially in French15 to one in the
Aussie vernacular set on a verandah out the back of Bourke.16 Clearly Pavis’ filter seven,
the theatrical representation of culture, was alive and filtering in the CPS; not to mention
number three, the adapter’s perspective. One ‘scenario’ came complete with directions
for settings, props, movements, pauses and even outlines of characterisations.
After these phases were completed the process was taken into part-time and then
full-time rehearsal17 with the translator’s text18 and the company performed the work
at Belvoir St. Downstairs for a two week run in July/August 1993. Two points are
worth making straightaway about this process. Firstly, from the company’s point of
view, the slow gestation19 with multiple input allowed plenty of time and scope for the
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‘filtering’ to occur; that is of the source cultural context(s) through the development of
the working mise(s)-en-scene and on into the local performance context(s). From the
students’ perspective, they were both privy to and participants in the making of a fulllength professional theatre work;20 further, if they chose, they could see many of the
production processes—conceptualisations, (re)compositions, final shapings and public
performances—right through from ‘go to whoa’, as it were, and observe the traces of their
own work in the modelling.
Desire/Why Deleuze?
Immediately after finishing the production, rather coincidentally I suppose, I began
reading the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, in particular Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism
and Schizophrenia.21 And as often happens in the cool-down period after a production,
when the jangling thoughts, feelings, and sensations of performing start to cool, sift
and separate, reading the text illuminated (in this case very unusually, in ways that will
become clear) many aspects of the performance process, and vice versa. One coincidence
immediately appears to be that both texts were written in France and published/performed
shortly after the ’68 Paris student riots, clearly an important cultural context for Situation
Vacant (La Demande) and I am assuming no less important also as a background event
for the philosophical text. Clearly then the translation of this ‘social world’ was a major
factor in the project.
According to Pavis, grains from filters one and two, the cultural and artistic modellings
which operate in the writing of the text in the source culture, are sifting down through
subsequent filters, and thus operating in the perspective and work of the adapters/
performers. Although the transposition of the source culture is an aspect I will not deal
with in depth in this paper, we could note that the production made use of contemporary
French magazines, replete with photo upon photo of the riots, to function indexically in
pointing towards one possible temporal setting of the work; though it was probably the
case that the photos acted more upon the sensibilities, and thus the bodies, of the actors as
characters22 than they did on any spectators who were fortunate enough to grab a glance.
Needless to say, when it came time to read out from the contemporary, revolutionary
pamphlets, as one segment of the dramatic action, the texts had of course been translated,
and if they signified the social world of Paris ’68 it could only have been through the
symbolic signification of textual utterances. Another common signifier of social context,
costume, was in this production used more to represent the social class and age of the
characters than to foreground an unmistakably Parisian setting.23
One of the critical significances of the 1968 ‘revolution’, according to Michel
Foucault, is that it brought into question the relations between State apparatuses and
revolutionary movements via an analysis of ‘the materiality of power operating on the
very bodies of individuals.’24 That is, if the mechanisms of State power were not simply
to be recapitulated by the structures which might take their place there needed to be a
change in ‘the mechanics of power that function outside, below and alongside the State
apparatuses, on a much more minute and everyday level.’25 Now not only has Vinaver’s
project been dubbed ‘Theatre of the Everyday,’26 one reading of Situation Vacant is that
it does in fact provide an account, albeit an artistic/aesthetic one, of the effects of the
changing dynamics of power relations at the everyday level of individuals, (occasioned
by the revolutionary impact of unimpeded flows of desire that course through the bodies
of the characters). Similarly, this report itself could be read as a description and analysis
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of selected day-to-day practices exemplifying changed power relations, viz., those ‘nonhierarchical’ processes utilised by (Public Works) theatre practitioners in their desire to
co-make a production also, as it happens, called Situation Vacant.
Now if, as Foucault asserts, changes in the relations of ‘power...produce effects at the
level of desire,’27 one could argue that it is precisely a minute critique of the productivity
of desire, at the subindividual, individual and social levels, that is provided by Deleuze
and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus and the succeeding volume, A Thousand Plateaus.28 And,
significantly, this critique is offered via a new politics of the body. It is not my intention
to provide a detailed analysis of Deleuze’s argument(s).29 Suffice to say here that the main
thrust of the texts, as I read them, is to displace Oedipus as the familial metaphor, and
to replace the Freudian account of desire, predicated as it is on lack, with a productive,
positive account; productive in that desire can be seen to produce both persons’ bodies
and the ‘socius’ (as society). Further, in its attempt to provide a materialist, rather than
Freudian, psychiatry, a theory of body emerges which is based on emphasising what a
body can do and what it might become, not what it is or what it lacks.
Now if bodies are to be seen not as fixed, bounded, organised substances but as
fragmentary capabilities, as multiplicities of flows, speeds, intensities and so on, then
desire could be theorised as producing alliances of these capacities. And because desire
is nomadic, proceeding by experiment, almost by chance, then each assembly and
reassembly that results would not be stable and organised in a hierarchical fashion, but
rather be provisional, temporary, discontinuous and dis-organised, in Deleuze’s terms a
Body without Organs. Further, the trajectories that bodies would follow in their journeys
of becoming, from identity to beyond, could be described as lines of flight. Importantly
then, for what follows, the Deleuzian account of body/becoming will allow us not only
to reflect on the processes of embodying the central character, Fage, but also to theorise
almost the entire process of rehearsing/making the working mise en scène30 for the
production of Situation Vacant.
Lines of flight
Situation Vacant revolves around the world(s) of four characters who remain on
stage throughout the entire play. They are Fage, a 40 year old businessman (in upper
management), recently unemployed and now unable to find a job; Louise, his wife,
who doesn’t work and is trying to hold the family together; Nathalie, their 16 year old
daughter, a student activist/revolutionary who claims to be pregnant to a black man doing
a PhD on jokes; and Wallace, a trans-Atlantic headhunter who is interviewing Fage for
a position with the multinational, leisure organisation, SHIVA. (‘Desire to travel and
become more than yourself’ could be the company motto.) Ultimately Louise finds a job
herself, Nathalie is arrested for breaking and entering, and Wallace decides to offer the
position to Fage, only Fage...Fage has embarked on a journey down the river.
The dramatic action develops as an interview between Wallace and Fage with intervening
interactions between family members. What purports to be a job interview becomes in
effect a kind of (psychoanalytic?) interrogation,31 as Fage is led through memories of: his
father and their colonial past in Madagascar; his son killed in a car accident when Fage
was driving and perhaps responsible; his previous boss who he imagines in one scene tied
to a stake and ritually torn apart—‘rip off his cheeks...sew up his mouth;’32 his ‘incestual’
desire for his daughter, exposed when he takes her to London for an (aborted) abortion for
the supposed pregnancy, only to buy her a sexy, see-through nightdress; his public giving
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away of his prized possessions, a set of his father’s pipes; and ultimately his floating,
presumed drowned, in the river while the police beat up Nathalie in her cell and Wallace
informs Louise that Fage has in fact got the job. Not only the plot, but also the fabula is
constructed through this interlacing of recollection and present action. In fact many of
these ‘happenings’ are not only talked about in response to Wallace’s questioning, they
are also reenacted/acted out as part of the familial interactions.
The structure of the playtext then is highly unusual and very complex. It is, according
to Vinaver, musical in form,33 with the thirty scenes (or tableaux)34 operating like a theme
and variations. Motifs are introduced, perhaps developed or abandoned, only to be picked
up later to be redeveloped, inverted, transformed and so on. The plot structure is also like
a spiral; narrative and thematic lines overlap, intertwine and circle around each other in
a kind of multiple helix; scenes do not necessarily follow in a linear narrative (though
there is clearly some narrative progression in the play as a whole). Further, in each scene
many conversations are interwoven, and often resonances of one line are taken into a new
interaction. This last feature, which we termed ‘springboarding’,35 was discovered during
the company’s work on Portrait of A Woman, and is a good example of the operation of
Pavis’ filters five and six, viz., a company aesthetic, in the sense of an established working
methodology, being taken into a rehearsal process.
Structural analysis therefore proved difficult; Vinaver apparently likes his playtexts to
resist easy interpretation, to be in a sense ‘indissoluble’, and thus to repay imaginative
investigations at the hands of companies who are brave enough to attempt them.36 Early
on in the workshop phase, faced with the complexity of the text, brief rehearsal time, and
the variety of submitted translated material (and before we knew of Vinaver’s musical
metaphor) we adopted the following practice. In working on any particular scene, each
actor/character would go on his/her own ‘journey’; that is, each person would choose their
own starting point, their own image/action/movement, their own tempo, who they would
talk to if anyone, and the scene was allowed to run. We thus ended up with four diachronic
lines of action,37 running relatively independently of one another, each consisting of
many differing physical (and vocal) images, the only significant constraints being the
order in which the lines were written (though even that proved negotiable) and that we
were all working within the same four walls. Synchronic ‘connections’ (proxemics,
shared images, dynamics, tempos) were thus fortuitous, so in a sense ‘chance’ was
‘institutionalised’ as a working methodology.38 This process is perhaps not so unusual in
companies making new, non-text based works, though as a way of working on a complex
playtext it is possibly quite rare. Eventually then, each performer ends up with a ‘journey’
for their character, a performance score,39 in the sense of a phrased sequence of ‘notes’,
where each note is a physical and/or vocal image. When the journeys, or lines, are all
combined and represented diagrammatically, we have what could be said to resemble a
musical score, viz., a notation of the embodied motifs of the performance scores of the
actor/characters.
Later in the rehearsal period we adopted another method of analysis which consisted
in giving each new motif, or interaction,40 a new number, e.g. Fage and Nathalie’s skiing
trips had their own number. This allowed narrative/thematic ‘lines’ to be joined, in
the sense that recapitulated motifs could be embodied in similar ways. For example,
the skiing motif was often played on or near the sloping platform we nicknamed the
‘ski-jump’. Sometimes there would be one ‘interaction’ on its own in a scene and this
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would often prove to be the ‘key’ motif in the scene, aiding in establishing the dominant
‘thematic image’ and dynamic of that scene. Always there was more than one motif in
a scene, in one case as many as seven, with more than twenty changes of interaction in
that scene. The numbering then also allowed the shifting dynamics of the action to be
(re)shaped; the general principle being: new number, new dynamic. Essentially then, this
process was one of reworking the performers’ scores, the diachronic lines of action, while
at the same time reshaping and intensifying the synchronic connections, established by
chance in the earlier workshop process.
And then reading Deleuze, after the production had finished, I came across this delightful
metaphor, ‘line of flight’, as being that ‘journey’, that creative line of desire which crosses
and recrosses boundaries, that becoming which is revolutionary, which potentially, unless
constrained, might wing its way to Mars. There is a partial sense in which the company
processes of analysis and composition, as already intimated, are ‘lines of flight’. From
unitary, fixed monolith the text becomes ‘open’ and multiple, multiple threads, multiple
capacities for action. The company destabilises, imagined possibilities are embodied in
temporary alliances, the performers split, join, re-join, making and remaking working
lines of action, as the improvised mise en scène takes shape. However there is also a
sense in which Fage, in his own becoming, traces a line of flight throughout the play (and
here I speak of the life of the fictional character, not the particular process(es) of the actor
in composing the role, though as will become clear both of these ‘journeys’ could also be
described as ‘lines of flight’). Unwilling to be thwarted by organisation, his creative line
is revolutionary, it respects neither individual nor social boundaries—dressed in nothing
but an old raincoat, giving away his pipes in the street, he asks a female passerby if she
would care to ‘suck on his pipe’, and the police who come to arrest him if they would care
to come for a drink—it has done with money, with social position, with certitude.
And as his desire (to change? to become what? his daughter? another life? the
Deleuzian ‘little girl’?) intensifies it becomes revolutionary; that is, flows of desire are
revolutionary, not in that they necessarily want revolution, but in that they simply want
what they want, unimpeded by structure. Unpredictably, they unfix, they decentre, they
deterritorialise. But Fage’s impassioned speech out of the blue to his daughter that he
understands her politics, that he too cares about (the proliferation of) nuclear missiles,
the destruction of the inner city, ‘the difficulties facing working-class kids’41 leaves her
cold. He doesn’t (only) want ‘revolution’, he wants her, ‘I’d like to see you in that
(night) dress,’42 and he (also) desperately wants her to want him. The blocked line of
flight merges with the repressed (line of flight of) desire; Fage prepares to fire an arrow
from his bow, at (the object of his desire) Nathalie, and muses (in a classically Oedipal
and non-Deleuzian metaphor!) on the impending erotic release.43 But this is to reinstate
Freud; Nathalie as forbidden target. A Deleuzian analysis, on the other hand, theorising
subindividual, individual, familial, and social splitting through a new politics of the body,
based on a new conception of desire, as productive of new capacities, (which is also,
incidentally, a way of theorising improvisation44) might envisage Nathalie as ‘the little
girl’ which Fage desires to become, and it is only one of the delicious ironies of Situation
Vacant that these destabilising, dis-organising, ‘revolutionary’ desires are flighted
towards an assembly (embodied by Nathalie) who is herself a social anarchist, a also also
revolutionary determined on change and/or destruction.
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Schizo-potential for revolution
As we have seen, the dramatic development of Situation Vacant could be characterised
as changing power relations bringing about effects at the level of desire, where these
changes are initiated by the unfixing of the economic structure (through company
restructuring which in Fage’s case leads to unemployment), the de-centering of the social
structure (by means of revolutionary/anarchist movements to which Nathalie belongs),
the destabilising of the family structure (through ‘incestual’ desire and interracial,
sexual activity) and the fragmenting of the unity of the individual (through a process of
interrogation). While all these flows fracture previously ‘organised’ bodies, in particular
dis-organise and provisionally re-organise the body of the fictional character, Fage, it is
important to remember that at all levels, social to subindividual, deterritorialisation can
be seen to be creative, producing new capacities.
Here I would like to continue to concentrate on Fage,45 and to begin to sketch out some
of the processes of spatial embodiment in the developing mise en scène. Firstly, Fage
starts out as a capitalist and ends up as something of a revolutionary. In what sense? As
intimated previously, to trace the line of flight of (your own) desire is already revolutionary;
it transgresses boundaries/prohibitions (incest), it unsettles certainty (the stability of work)
and it subverts fixity in favour of becoming. However there is another resonance and it
is tied up with bodies. Any going beyond identity, in the sense of psychological or social
organisation is, according to Deleuze, a kind of deterritorialisation. Now for Deleuze
and Guattari capitalism is close to the endpoint of a developing deterritorialisation, from
a system based on the body of the land through one based on the body of the ruler until
capitalism, relying on capital and credit (which is not even tied to money in the sense
of gold or silver), becomes effectively a (social) Body without Organs. That is, there is
little substance, in the sense of hierarchy and organisation, but rather, as before, flows and
intensities.
Now there are progressive ‘deterritorialisations’ throughout Situation Vacant and they
occur in at least three ways. In the interview/interrogation, one of the earliest moments
recollected in the fabula is Fage leaving the colonial outpost of Madagascar to pursue a
career in business in France, ‘it was real life I was into biting off a great big chunk in
one go,’46 he says as he confidently swings himself into centre stage; while describing his
sacking (in scene 11), moving towards the outer, he tells Wallace ‘you could have blown
me over with a feather,’ and then, near the end of the play,47 humiliated and in the dole
queue, he is found leaning on one of the outer walls. That is, the iconic embodiment of
this deterritorialisation in the mise en scène is signified spatially by the movement from
centre to periphery. Running parallel (or plaited perhaps) is another iconic signification,
this time proxemically, as the body of Fage goes from on-high to the floor, to ‘absent’,
floating: early on, bragging of his sales successes, he climbs the stairs set in the back wall
and hovers high over Wallace; towards the middle we see him following a speck of dust
as it floats downwards in the light, musing on a return to the island where he would set
himself up as a mechanic, trap snails and swim with the fish; and the very last embodied
image is Fage ‘floating in mid-air’ as he wafts drowning in the river.48 There is also a kind
of deterritorialisation in the home,49 where Fage goes from being a ruler, through wanting
(pleading with his daughter to allow him) to be a revolutionary, to giving away his prized
pipes in the street, embodied in the mise en scène by all the axes already indicated, high
to low, centre to periphery and present to absent.
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To the extent that capital is indifferent to content, it is irrelevant to capital what it
is invested in, as Fage finds out to his cost when he is made redundant; the Americans,
indifferent to the local wholesaler/retailer network ‘rationalise’ the sales firm where Fage
is a senior manager and he is no longer required (‘downsizing’ I believe is the current
euphemism for such activity). The (im)potency of money, as expected, runs right through
this play.50 Early on, Louise, clearly in charge of home finances, warns her husband of
the ‘cost’ of going to London with Nathalie; later, Nathalie, faced with her father’s
interrogation over where she obtained the money to buy the new belt she is wearing, cuts
the belt in two, throws it away, and defiantly declares, ‘money, it’s for the birds!’; and
Fage, obsessed with his daughter’s ‘relationship’ with a black man, continually asks, ‘yes,
but what does he do for a living, your Mulawa?’51
According to Deleuze, capital produces an accumulation of energies, a schizoid-like
accumulation of intensities, which eventually may simply burst out, explode or fracture.
Which leads to the second point. Fage, at the hands of a merciless inquisition by Wallace
into the circumstances of his present and past, undergoes progressively as the action
develops what can only be termed a breakdown;52 in Deleuzian terms, a sub-individual
deterritorialisation. It is not that Fage is or becomes a schizophrenic, nor that Deleuze
and Guattari are talking of actual schizophrenics either (or if they are, it is irrelevant to the
point at hand). Rather that Fage exhibits greater and greater ‘intensity’ of schizoid-like
tendencies or symptoms; as already stated in one scene he follows specks of dust, while
in another he dreams of cannibalising his wife (after pickling her dead body and locking it
away in a Bluebeard-like castle), fantasises torturing and murdering his former boss, and
ultimately calls out in erotic desire for/to become his daughter ‘Nathalie’.53 These states
are moments of great intensity—for Deleuze schizo-intensities are states of almost pure,
naked intensity—and the question arises how to embody these moments.
A body becoming
A mode of performance practice this writer has been involved in for some time is the
form of Japanese Buto54 known as Body Weather, and it was techniques derived from this
practice that were used in Situation Vacant to embody the character of Fage. One of these
techniques, called by its practitioners ‘omni-central imaging’, consists in placing several
images (or sensations) simultaneously in different parts of the body and allowing the body
surfaces thus affected to move relatively independently of one another in response to these
multiple sites of sensation. Such a collection of images might be for example, to have
ants running up and down the spine, to have the hair on fire, to have the legs of a chicken
and to have the tongue licking the stars in the heavens. Indeed these multiple imageprocesses can lead to a performing body which to Western eyes may appear psychotic, or
at the very least deeply disturbing with its manic, fractured bodies, capturing impressions
of the ‘inchoate’, of darkness, and many observers have been deceived into interpreting
such performances as expressions of madness, breakdown, post-Hiroshima psychosis and
so on, when in fact they are the result of highly sophisticated, very difficult training and
performing techniques exploiting the resonances of bodies with the physical world.55
For Body Weather practitioners bodies are seen to be multiple, receptive and changing.
They are also seen as permeable and relatively unbounded, and thus open to the multiple
influences of weather; where weather is conceived as a multivalent, capricious, cyclic
and unpredictable pattern of resonances occurring inside and outside the body. Bodies
and the world (as weather) therefore are claimed to be interpenetrable, capable of infinite
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difference and endless change. For Min Tanaka, the founder of this dance-performance
practice, the metaphor to describe such a body is ‘raw’; where ‘rawness’ to them, I believe,
is constructed as the ‘natural’ as opposed to cultural body. Of course, ‘rawness’ could
be seen as deconstructing the natural/cultural (body) binary, just as incest, in Situation
Vacant, could be interpreted as deconstructing the same (social) boundary/prohibition.
Now these Body Weather images—zones of intensity for Deleuze, schizo-potentials on
the body surface—were used in the process of ‘becoming the body’ of Fage; where not only
was the technique useful in embodying the moments of heightened intensity (mentioned
earlier) but also enabled a laying down in the body of the multiple conversations the
character was carrying on at any one time. To illustrate the former process, when Fage has
just hurled away his birthday cake(!), screaming,56 and is being harangued by his wife for
love, by Nathalie for money for a revolutionary group and by Wallace over the intricacies
of interviewing, the actor lay on his back on the ‘ski ramp’ and allowed his body to stretch
slowly outward through its extremities using the following images: the back was freezing
to ice and the spine contracting, causing the back to arch upwards and the head to drop; the
fingers were being pulled individually outwards, resulting in the arms being stretched rigid
until the shoulder sockets appeared to ‘dislocate’; the eyeballs were turning to white light
and the legs were being crushed and stretched, causing them to flatten, tighten and quiver.
The overall image was, I suppose, intended to signify iconically a kind of crucifixion; Fage
being torn apart by the myriad forces pulling him in all directions.
Another example, of similar intensity but quite different dynamic, was the embodying
of the penultimate image of Fage,57 floating down the river, drowning and mumbling
fragments of remembered conversations with his son, his daughter, his boss: here the
actor employed the technique, derived indirectly from another Buto company, Sankai
Juku, of allowing all the joints in the body to turn to water, only at different rates, such
that the body, lyrically weightless and wavering, slowly sinks in a spiral to the floor; the
image not only signifying (iconically) the drowning man, but also recapitulating (and
signifying indexically) the structure of the plot as spiral, as well as embodying (and
signifying symbolically) the release of the body of Fage from the surface intensities of
his fractured life.
With respect to the multiple dialogues, ‘omni-central imaging’ allowed the actor to
embody these also, as the following example will illustrate. Early in the play58 Fage,
in overlapping sequence, is being told by his daughter Nathalie that she is pregnant to
a black man—this image is placed in the stomach causing the abdomen to tighten—by
his wife Louise of the many letters of job rejections he has just received—this image is
placed in the soles of the feet causing the legs to appear to move towards her—and is
being asked by Wallace if he really did resign from his previous job, as he claims, or was
sacked—this image is placed in the scalp causing the head to repeatedly turn towards the
interviewer. Overall the image was intended to convey, iconically, the impression of a
character confused and indecisive, but also beginning to compact with fear and nausea,
while indexically the image was to point to the character’s future disintegration, and
symbolically to capture, early on in the mise en scène, the multiple, fragmented threads at
play in the world(s) of Situation Vacant.
For Deleuze, sensations can be seen to be ‘moments of capture’, intensities on the
recording surface; which in the case of this performer has been interpreted as the body’s
skin.59 The body of the Body Weather practitioner, (multiple, permeable, receptive and
subject to ceaseless change) is thus strangely similar to the body theorised by Deleuze.
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In both cases, bodies are seen not as unified, fixed substances, but as founded on multiple
processes of continual subindividual change, subordinate to differences and composed of
ceaseless becomings.
An interweaving re-opening
At the end of Situation Vacant what might purport to be a closing is in effect a reopening, a re-viewing, as several of the questions with which Wallace opened Fage’s
interview/interrogation are re-posed and interwoven with fragments of earlier answers,
introducing the possibility for lives to be revisited, for journeys to be reseen, in the light of
what each has (later) become. However, this destabilising of memory through interrogation,
creating new capacities for new becomings, is operating not only on the lives of the fictional
characters. (As we recall, it functions to set in motion the dramatic action at the outset, as
Fage is led to reconsider his ‘fictional’ past, and to reset in motion..). Such questioning also
provokes the spectator (reader) who at the ‘end’ of the theatre event (text) is asked to revisit
earlier lines of action in the artistic work. And of course there is the investigation of/by the
performance theorist who, in revisiting the creative lines of action of rehearsal, attempts to
describe and analyse the processes of becoming of the production itself.
And so to finish this report, a number of interrelated questionings, raising overlapping
issues of interculturalism, intertextuality and intercorporeality...and concerning some of the
methodologies of performance theory itself. If the making of the production Situation Vacant
intertwined the following practices: a 1971 playtext, La Demande d’Emploi, by Michel
Vinaver; the translating of this text, via a workshop format, into the text Situation Vacant;
the aesthetic of a contemporary performing company, Public Works, determining specific
processes of analysis and construction; and the performing practice of Body Weather, used
specifically to work on and embody one of the characters, Fage, (and all this within the
constraints of time and space in which the company was working)60 what form(s) should
a report of this activity take? The short answer, already implicated, is part description and
part analysis. Which of course begs the further question, which descriptions, and of which
processes? In other words who determines significance?61 And, given the descriptions, what
kind of analysis is to be undertaken, on whose behalf, and to what end?
The two clear candidates for position of performance theorist are: on the one hand,
an observer of the production process, where the ethnographies of rehearsal suffer the
problems well known to anthropologists, viz., a paucity of ‘local’ or ‘inside’ knowledge,
and so on; and on the other, one of the makers of the production itself, as in the case of this
report. Yet here too there is a serious problem. Who corroborates the evidence? After all
it is relatively easy to ‘dignify’ a production through a report; written accounts rarely do
harm, they often embellish. Is it too far-fetched to imagine a production being reported as
enormously sophisticated and of great impact, when in fact there was no audience there as
part of the event at all? Who would know? Further, it is not clear at all whether the status
of a third possible candidate, viz., a part participant/part observer, would obviate these
problems.62 In any case, are other forms of documentation also easily manipulated?
The writing of this report or article, as a practice of performance theory, has sought
to describe and analyse the processes of production within the context of an explanatory
framework of recent French theory, in particular the writings of Gilles Deleuze and
Patrice Pavis. Pavis’ model of intercultural transposition of theatre works from one
cultural context to another has been used to delineate stages in the transfer, enabling a
focus on selected ‘filters’. While Deleuze’s account of the productivity of desire through
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a new politics of social, individual and subindividual bodies, has been utilised to theorise
not only the ‘filters’ themselves as productive of new capacities, but also the model of
translation as itself a process of becoming: firstly, to contextualise the ‘source’ culture in
which Vinaver’s playtext was written, viz., the destabilisation of social structure that was
the revolution of Paris 1968; secondly, to hint at an account of the form of the playtext,
that of the dis-organising and deterritorialising role of interrogation in motivating dramatic
action; thirdly, to theorise the creative lines of analysis and of construction of the mise en
scène as trajectories of becoming, as ‘lines of flight’; and fourthly, to account for the embodiment of the character Fage (and by implication one of the practices of Body Weather) as
temporary alliances of multiple intensities, as schizo-potentials for revolution.
The methodological issue here, of course, as in any such analytical practice, is how
to theorise the rehearsal processes without making it look as if the whole affair was
generated by the analyst’s theory in the first place—which of course it may have been,
albeit ‘unconsciously’.
Performers, in my experience, are keen to preserve ‘intuition’, the spark of creative
insight, of sudden, inspired decision-making. And who’s to blame them? Quite apart
from which, many practitioners fear the diminution of their creative powers if they spill
the beans and/or analyse their process too deeply. Some, feeling the capacity to produce
or create resides in the body, feel quite simply unable to talk about what is after all body
memory generated by practice; or they feel it just to be pointless. Others retain the
‘alchemical’ perspective, reluctant to give out their secrets for fear that uninitiated others
may then also have the power to make gold from base metal. Analysts, on the other hand,
seem keen to divulge performers’ practices and to make the processes appear rational,
or at least to use theory to ‘explain’ them. Is there a way forward? In this case the
writer has gone from participant to analyst, from the forms of analysis that practitioners
practice, questioning themselves, their bodies, the texts, each other, asking how (perhaps)
to embody what they take to be at issue in the work, whether the aesthetic of the company
to which they belong is appropriate to the task at hand, whether the chosen means of
signification(s) will in fact do their job, how much to leave to chance, (how much is left
to chance?), and all in a desire to move beyond, beyond the fixity of identity, to become,
to become fluid, to become multiple, to become characters, to become a performance—to
the forms of the performance theorist, questioning theatre practices, interrogating the
processes of signification, translating into a graphic ‘narrative’ the practices of bodies and
all the while striving to do justice to the complexities of the rehearsal processes, all in a
desire to become, what? Perhaps in its phenomenology of a creative journey it is a line
of flight. Utilising as it does the dis-organising of structure through interrogation could
it be that a report is a field for the immanence of desire; opening as it does the bodies of
practice and discourse might it also be a movement beyond identity, for both work and
theorist?...a provisional alliance...? of multiple intensities, of plaited, coursing threads...
So I ask how the intertwining of recent French theory, a Japanese dance/ performance
practice and the aesthetic of a contemporary Australian performing company can
conspire to describe/illuminate/ theorise the utilisation of a 1971 French playtext in the
Australian performing context of Sydney, 1993? One possible answer is that the report
(and reporter?) become in effect a re-capitulation of (the forms of) the playtext and also
of the processes of making the production; viz., a field of multiple intensities, a spiral of
many threads. And so to end the question remains, how to cut without tying into a knot
the multiple threads?
83
REFERENCES
Bradby, David, (1991), ‘A Theatre of the Everyday: the Plays of Michel Vinaver’, New Theatre
Quarterly.
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix, (1983), Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, (trans. Robert
Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
—(1987), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, (trans. Brian Massumi), Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Dwyer, Paul, (1993), Situation Vacant, Unpublished translation.
Foucault, Michel, (1980), ‘Body/Power’, in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings
1972-1977, (edit. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon, Loe Marshall, John Mepham, Kate Soper),
Brighton, Sussex: The Harvester Press.
Grosz, Elizabeth, (1994), Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism, Bloomington, Indiana:
Indiana University Press.
Grotowski, Jerzy, (1969), Towards a Poor Theatre, (edit. Eugenio Barba), London: Methuen.
Levi-Strauss, Claude (1970),The Raw and the Cooked, London: Jonathan Cape
Pavis, Patrice, (1992), Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture, (trans. Loren Kruger), London:
Routledge.
Stein, Bonnie-Sue, (1986), ‘When we were crazy, dirty and mad..’, The Drama Review, Vol. 110.
Vinaver, Michel, (1986), La Demande d’Emploi, in Theatre Complet, Vol.I, Arles: Actes Sud.
—(1989), Portrait of a Woman, (trans. Donald Watson), in New French Plays, London: Methuen.
84
Snow
Situation Vacant
NOTES
1
Vinaver, Michel, (1986), La Demande d’Emploi, in Théâtre Complet, Vol. I, Arles: Actes Sud. .A
first version of this paper was presented as part of the Forum on Translation, Centre for Performance
Studies, University of Sydney, November 1993.
2
Public Works, in 1993, comprised Carla Aquilia, Daniel Dinnen, Lynette Campbell, Paul Dwyer,
Christopher John, Marta Kiez-Gubala, Chris Murphy and Peter Snow. For the Situation Vacant
project, Aquilia, Kiez-Gubala, John and Snow were performers, Dwyer was the translator, Dinnen
composed and performed the music and Campbell was the stage manager. At the time of the production Murphy was performing with another company.
3
4
Pavis, P. (1992), Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture, London: Routledge. See Chapters 1 and 8.
Pavis, rather expectedly, cites Barba, Mnouchkine, Brook, Robert Wilson and Heiner Muller as
exemplary exponents of interculturalist theatre. (He forgets, eurocentrically, to mention the likes
of Tadashi Suzuki.) Somewhat unexpectedly he also cites Artaud; unexpectedly, in that if he had
wanted examples of ‘historical interculturalism’ he could also have noted Stanislavski, Brecht,
Grotowski....almost anyone of significance in twentieth century theatre practice.
5
6
7
8
Pavis (1992, p. 24). For a fuller description see Chapter 2.
9
10
11
Firstly in 1973.
12
Vinaver, Michel (1989), Portrait of a Woman, trans. Donald Watson, in New French Plays, London:
For a fuller description of these filters see Pavis, (1992, pp. 14-16).
Pavis (1992, p. 1).
Pavis (1992, p. 136). He adds that neither do the spectators, ‘faced with a
phenomenon as complex and inexpressible as intercultural exchange’!
1989, Orange Tree Theatre, London, trans. John Burgess, dir. Sam Walters.
See Bradby, David, (1991), ‘A Theatre of the Everyday: the Plays of Michel Vinaver’, in New
Theatre Quarterly, pp. 256-7, for: ‘Michel Vinaver: A Brief Chronology’.
Methuen.
13
14
By one of the company members, Paul Dwyer, who was also responsible for the final translation.
Under the supervision of Associate Professor Gay McAuley, Director of the Centre for Perform-
ance Studies.
15
The students responsible claimed that since audiences don’t pay attention to productions full of words
these days why not give them something a little different (not to pay attention to) as well as
acknowledge the ‘translation process’ in the product.
16
From this version, interestingly enough, several of the intonation dynamics stayed right through
into the public performances.
17
Part-time rehearsal consisted of 4 half-day sessions for 5 weeks, following which full-time
rehearsal lasted for 2 weeks.
18
While Paul Dwyer utilised several of the suggestions of the students’ material in his text, he also
made many alterations due to the working dynamics of the actors, and even incorporated some
of Michel Vinaver’s own suggestions in an annotated copy of a draft translation he returned to us
during the rehearsal period. Naturally this process of textual (re)shaping (part of Pavis’ filter four,
the work of adaptation, influenced, he says, by the operation of a cipher of ‘high culture’ (Bourdieu),
continued throughout the entire production process.
19
20
Though this was not slow enough; we’d have liked twelve rather than six months.
They could see their efforts on the floor and often this was remarked upon as being very exciting
for them.
85
21
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix, (1983), Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, (trans.
Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane), Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press.
22
Thus, of course, an act of translation (Pavis’ filter six). See the later section here, ‘A body becoming’.
23
The ‘problem’ of setting was unresolved in this production. Some signifiers pointed to Paris and
1968, others to Sydney and 1993. (Some might say the ambiguity was deliberate and in any case
inevitable in any intercultural transfer. That is, any translated work will always bear traces of the
modellings of both source and target culture; clearly one of the central points of Pavis’ ‘hourglass’
model.)
24
Foucault, Michel, (1980), Body/Power in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other
Writings 1972-1977, (edit. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, Kate
Soper), Sussex: The Harvester Press, p. 55.
25
26
27
28
Foucault (1980, p. 60).
29
See Elizabeth Grosz (1994), Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism, Bloomington, Indiana:
See Bradby (1991).
Foucault (1980, p. 59).
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix, (1987), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,
(trans. Brian Massumi), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
University of Indiana Press, for a fuller reading of Deleuze’s account of body.
30
I say ‘working’ mise en scène to indicate that I will be concentrating on the work of the theatre
artists, and thus providing only a partial description of the mise en scène in Pavis’ sense. A
‘complete’ description would also require, of course, an account of the work of the spectators in
co-making the meanings of the performance event.
31
32
33
Vinaver acknowledges the interrogation of Oedipus by the sphinx as one of his sources.
Dwyer, Paul (1993), Situation Vacant, unpublished translation, ‘scene’ 23.
Bradby (1991, p. 282). Apparently Situation Vacant is structured after the manner of Beethoven’s
Variations on a Theme by Diabelli. See also Levi-Strauss, Claude, (1970), The Raw and The
Cooked, ‘The structure of myths can be revealed through a musical score’. (The title of this text
is quoted in the play; Mulawa asked Nathalie when they first met if she had read it, she tells her
father proudly!)
34
In the playtext the segmentation into ‘scenes’ or ‘tableau’ is indicated only by numbers. There is no
segmentation (e.g. into sentence structure) of the characters’ dialogue.
35
‘Springboarding’, as so defined, is using the effect of participating in one interaction as the stimulus, or circumstance, for participating in the following, completely new, interaction. See note 24.
36
‘I would not give a play to a (company) unless I could sense a certain complicity between us’,
Michel Vinaver, in Bradby, (1991, p. 280).
37
Mindful of the difficulties of capturing any complex rehearsal strategy in words, I was tempted to
include a diagram, which worked quite well when a version of the paper was presented in conference. However, in print, I decided the obfuscation of translation into sentences to be quite sufficient.
38
39
I discuss chance further in the section on embodiment of character, ‘A body becoming’.
40
An interaction was defined, for the purpose of this analysis, as a line (or lines) of dialogue on the
same topic e.g. Fage and Nathalie’s trip to London. See also Bradby (1991, p. 271).
41
42
Situation Vacant, ‘scene’ 25.
Grotowski of course, made current this notion of ‘performance score’ in contemporary Western
theatre practice. See p181 of his (1969), Towards a Poor Theatre, London: Methuen.
86
Snow
Situation Vacant
Situation Vacant, ‘scene’ 17. The nightdress, incidentally, also has fur-lined cuffs.
43
Situation Vacant, ‘scene’ 29. ‘Finding out the soft spots where you can penetrate’ remarks Wallace,
contemporaneously, on one of the finer points of marketing technique.
44
45
46
47
48
49
See the following sections for a development of this thread.
50
Vinaver was for 7 years a managing director of Gillette, during which time he suffered ‘writer’s
block’.
51
52
Situation Vacant, ‘scenes’ 6, 9, and 24 (among others) respectively.
53
54
55
Such a technique quite obviously demands unbelievable levels of concentration, heightened
sensitivity to the images concerned, extraordinary stamina, and control over ‘nearly all’ the
voluntary, movable muscles of the body.
56
This is the only stage direction in the playtext; Situation Vacant, ‘scene’ 12. The subsequent
image occurred as an embodiment of ‘scene’ 13. (The performer’s score did exhibit ‘progression’
between scenes, at times, even if there was no obvious narrative progression in those scenes in the
playtext.)
57
58
59
60
If this all seems a lot, it is perhaps only (minimally more than) what is at play in any rehearsal
process; particularly in Australia, given that our cultural ‘identity’ is only partially rooted here and
partly in other places and that any theatrical work made here therefore will ‘perform’ many cultural
backgrounds.
61
This aside from the fact that all descriptions are pre-theorised anyway; there is no unmediated
access to ‘reality’.
62
For all standpoints, observer, participant and observer-participant, there is also obviously the ethical issue of whether to divulge information about processes which have been undertaken in trust.
Fage was the character played by the writer in this production.
Situation Vacant ‘scene’ 28.
Situation Vacant, ‘scenes’ 8, 21 and 30 respectively.
Along with the interview office, the home was the main onstage fictional space in this production,
though the spatialisation was very fluid, with many fictional spaces from the fabula being re-enacted/re-embodied throughout the family/interview. Fluidity, or permeability, of boundaries is
recapitulated at every moment in this playtext/production.
‘I try...to establish connections...between the fullness of a past in which everything held together,
and the derision of the present, laid waste through the loss of the sacred’, Vinaver acknowledging
the influence of T.S.Eliot, in Auto-Interrogation: Vinaver interviewed by Vinaver, in Bradby, (1991,
p. 282).
For an introduction to some of the concepts and practices of Buto see Stein, Bonnie-Sue, (1986),
‘When we were crazy, dirty and mad...’, The Drama Review, Vol. 110, and other articles in the
same vol.
It is important to realise that this way of working is not only ‘technical’, as it were, dry and devoid
of affect. On the contrary, such precise pinpointing and holding of intense body sensations invariably leads effortlessly to deep and powerful feelings; (a point recognised long ago by such diverse
practitioner/theorists of Acting as the Japanese No master, Zeami and the Russian director and
teacher, Constantin Stanislavski); it is not for nothing that images of ‘darkness’ emerge in Body
Weather work.
87
FROM GEORG BÜCHNER’S
DANTONS TOD
TO SUDS’
DANTON’S DEATH
Laura Ginters
Introduction
Many of the theoretical issues raised for consideration at the Seminar to introduce the Year
of Translation at the Centre for Performance Studies become concrete problems when faced
with a production of a play in translation. Such issues include how translations serve the
needs of theatre practitioners, what those needs are and how different practitioners read
texts in different ways (directors, designers and actors all look for different things in the
same text) and, of course, the lifespan of a translation—whether it can survive a particular
production for which it was done and conversely, whether ‘neutral’ translations are
longer-lived. In 1993, Chris Mead and Jeremy Rice decided to mount Georg Büchner’s
Dantons Tod as the major second semester production of the Sydney University Dramatic
Society (SUDS), and in the following pages I would like to discuss some of the issues that
arose in the process from page to stage via various translations.
Georg Büchner and Dantons Tod
Dantons Tod is Büchner’s first play, written in only five weeks when he was twenty-one.
It was written in part to help finance his flight from Germany as he was in imminent
danger of being arrested for his own revolutionary activities—he later commented that
‘the Darmstadt police were my muses’. The play depicts the events of five days at the
height of the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution, culminating in the execution of
Danton and his supporters at the order of the radical Robespierre.
Büchner had had little experience in the theatre of his day; certainly he had never
worked in the theatre and never saw his own plays produced1—in fact no proof exists
that he actually ever visited a theatre in his short life. Nonetheless, he had very clear
ideas about his function as a dramatist and the purpose of Dantons Tod. Although the
play had been cut to get past the strict censors, it still provoked strong criticism for its
blasphemy, immorality and obscenity and the following is part of a letter he wrote to his
family in defence of his work following its publication. Although the author is commonly
supposed to be dead—both literally and figuratively speaking!—I believe it is relevant to
let the author speak for himself.
As to the so-called immorality of my book, by the way, my reply is as follows: the dramatist is in my
view nothing other than a historian, but is superior to the latter in that he re-creates history: instead
of offering us a bare narrative, he transports us directly into the life of an age; he gives us characters
instead of character portrayals; full-bodies figures instead of mere descriptions. His supreme task is to
get as close as possible to history as it actually happened. His play must be neither more moral nor more
immoral than history itself; but history was not created by the good Lord to serve as reading material for
young ladies, so no one should take it amiss if my drama is just as ill suited for such a purpose. I can’t
possibly turn Danton and the bandits of the Revolution into heroes of virtue! If I wanted to convey their
depravity, then I had to let them be depraved; if I wanted to show their godlessness, then I clearly has to
let them speak like atheists. [...] If incidentally anyone wanted to tell me that a writer should show the
world not as it is, but as it ought to be, then my answer is that I don’t want to make it any better than the
good Lord did, who no doubt made the world just as He meant it to be.2
We can see that Büchner clearly intended his work to be distinguished from mere
historical writing (although his play is for the most part historically accurate: over one
sixth of the dialogue is direct quotation from the speeches of the Revolutionaries); he
wants his characters brought to life upon the stage. He goes on in the same letter to
proclaim his admiration for Goethe and Shakespeare’s dramatic achievements, while
deploring those of Schiller. These are all enticing hints as to his dramatic sense and
capabilities, and while there are few explicit indications as to staging in the play text,
(there are few stage directions, for example), I would argue that much of his ‘instruction’
as to thematic content and even staging is firmly encoded in the text itself—and thus
susceptible to distortion and elimination by insensitive translations.
The SUDS production
In their production concept, Mead and Rice made clear that their production was ‘no
period drama’. They underlined that their production was to combine philosophy, terror
and spectacle and deal with ‘Büchner’s obsessions—revolution, violence, love and
art’. They stressed the political aspect of the play, basing this on Büchner’s language
(‘colloquial, tough, and infused with the visceral and the political’) and drawing parallels
with their own political beliefs:
Dantons’s Death is a neglected, radical classic, demanding great human resources, which SUDS has,
and throwing up and questioning the political, which we believe SUDS should do. While Hewson and
our tabloid press lionise the individual, Büchner presents an anti-hero who questions the notion that one
man or woman can control or defy a world in chaos. While students organise themselves to protest the
GST and changes to education, Büchner demonstrates the commitment and violence required to effect
a revolution. Büchner was a 21 year old student when he wrote this play, a raw play of exuberance and
innovation.
Thus clearly, they do not see it as their task to ‘recreate history’ and ‘transport us directly
into the life of an age’, but to create student political theatre in the 1990s. However, they
did not choose to devise their own script, but to use Büchner’s play as a vehicle for this
purpose. As such, they needed a English text to work with and it is relevant to examine
the material on which they have based their assumptions and choices. Neither director
reads German, so their impression of the play was gained from three different translations
of the German text by James Maxwell,3 Victor Price4 and Howard Brenton/Jane Fry.5
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Ginters
From Dantons Tod to Danton’s Death
The translations of the play
To begin with, all three translations are British English translations. May-Brit Akerholt
has pointed out that while a British director would not consider using an American
translation of Brecht, Ibsen, Strindberg or Chekhov, for example, Australian productions
take British translations on board as a matter of course—although British, American and
Australian audiences expect and accept different kinds of language and ‘what might seem
pompous or insincere to an Australian audience does not necessarily have the same effect
on a British audience’.6 She notes that
We continue to reach Moscow, Oslo or Berlin via London or New York, and thus the plays become
twice removed from the originals; even thrice removed if we take into the consideration the director’s
interpretation of a foreign text through a usually much older non-Australian version.7
Thus, before even considering the age, purposes and agendas of the translations, we
must be aware that there is already a significant barrier of cultural interference between
the Australian reception of the text and its German original.
Further, we have two translations done for different productions separated by over
twenty years,8 with the second referring with great disparagement to the first: and then a
third made by someone with great respect for the text, but not specifically done for the
stage. This lack of unanimity of purpose and even attitude to the merits of the text may
be discerned by the comments of the translators themselves and is also apparent in their
work.
Victor Price, on the one hand, goes into raptures about Büchner’s achievement:
Büchner was a born dramatist. He has the Shakespearean ear for dialogue and the Shakespearean
objectivity: he never judges his characters. He creates striking dramatic pictures. He is a master of
language. But his special quality [...] is his total, uncompromising honesty of emotion and intellect
[...] Büchner gives us in his play precisely the reality that Lenz advocates: life raw and unadorned; it
required supreme artistry to do so [...] Danton’s Death has been called, with justification, the best first
play in world literature...9
The translators for the theatre, on the other hand, feel themselves less constrained to
render a completely ‘faithful’ translation. ‘The best first play in world literature’ is, in
Maxwell’s eyes, the work of an amateur and thus susceptible to substantial attack:
It was clear both to me and to the producer [...] that it was impossible to produce Büchner’s play,
which we both loved and believed in as a unique dramatic masterpiece, without considerable alteration,
compression and even some additions. Why was this?
[...] I may be suspected of simply having followed age-old and arrogant theatrical practice, which has
recently produced doctored versions of plays by Ibsen [...] and even of Much Ado About Nothing,
presumably in the expectation that they would work on stage better than the originals. I don’t know
that they did, for Ibsen and Shakespeare were complete theatre professionals as well as men of genius.
Büchner was, divinely, an amateur.10
The third and most recent translation is by Howard Brenton (and Jane Fry). It was
specifically commissioned for a production, is by an experienced dramatist and was
particularly favoured by the two directors of the SUDS production. The text appears in
an edition of Büchner’s complete works edited by Michael Patterson11 who says of the
Brenton’s translation:
We are fortunate indeed that the task was given to one of our foremost contemporary playwrights whose
own work shares with Büchner acute political concern combined with powerful poetic and theatrical
expression...
91
I wonder however, if Büchner would have approved of some of his efforts, especially
his censorship and sanitising of the text, given Büchner’s vociferous objections to this
treatment of his play upon its first publication. This may, of course, simply be an instance
of the tendency Akerholt noticed in translations of Ibsen and Strindberg plays that
the language and tone of the British versions are much more polite, the American versions a little more
polite and the Australian version a little less polite that that of the original texts.12
It seems to me, however, that the Brenton is deliberately refraining from rendering the
full obscenity of the original, perhaps from some inappropriate notion of political correctness. In II.ii for example, there is an exchange between two prostitutes and the soldiers
they are propositioning because ‘We’ve had nothing hot in us since yesterday’—the pun
works as well in English as it does in German. After some sexually-laden banter, the
soldier propositions them in song which Brenton translates as:
Am I hurtin’ ya Christina?
Do you want ’a shed a tear?
Am I hurtin’ ya Christina
Do you feel me right in ’ere?
In the German, the prostitute responds avidly, also in song, in the affirmative, but this
is lacking in Brenton’s translation. The notes to the scene explain:
Do you feel me right in ’ere? In the original Rosalie responds to the brutal proposal of the Soldier with
the following song:
No, no my soldier lads,
I’d like to have it more,
Have it more, have it more!
Brenton quite properly omits from his text for modern performance the suggestion that a woman is
eager to receive the violent attentions of the Soldier.
This was reinstated by the Mead and Rice for the SUDS production.
Incidentally, although Jane Fry is listed equally as translator in Patterson’s edition, no
reference is made to her contribution in his introduction, and I have not otherwise heard
her name in connection with this reasonably well known production of the play. From
the way in which Patterson writes of Brenton’s work, I am led to wonder whether Brenton
actually does read and speak German. Was it perhaps his task to render a performance
text from a raw, possibly quite academic translation? Should he perhaps be labelled
‘adaptor’, rather than ‘translator’ of the work?
So to recap: our non-German speaking directors have compiled a translation from three
different foreign translations, done by translators with very different views of Büchner’s
abilities and distinct agendas, where one of the accredited translators is possibly also
non-German speaking... and then they deleted all stage directions, rearranged scenes, cut
scenes and characters and cast across gender!13
Rearrangements, cuts, additions to the performance text
That the performance text is a compilation made from several difference translations is
in itself somewhat problematic. It is not uncommon for practitioners to have recourse to
other translations of a text to solve problems in its staging. This, however, shows neither
respect for the unity of the original text, nor for the work of the translator in a given
translation. Each translation that is not merely a ‘crib’ or parallel text designed to give
cues to the original is a work in itself, has its own structures and functions as a whole.
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Ginters
Given this fact, however, there were discernible reasons for the elimination or addition
of text. As I have noted above, the directors were particularly interested in the political
relevance of the play. Much of the play itself is made up speeches quoted verbatim from
the original revolutionaries and Mead and Rice added further lines which were historically
accurate, as well as including quotations from other, frequently very political, plays by
Barker,14 Mayakovsky,15 Shakespeare,16 Peter Weiß17 and Heiner Müller.18 Müller’s The Task,
for example, is a contemporary play dealing also with aspects of the Revolution, and one
which has been frequently performed as a double bill with Dantons Tod in recent years.
Of the cuts made to the play, some were typical of nearly every recent production of
the play: it contains many obscure Classical references which modern audiences would
not comprehend. Other cuts were, in my opinion, less justifiable. For example, all stage
directions were cut—perhaps to exclude any authorial ‘intervention’ in the development of
the production? The stage directions, although few in number, certainly bear considerable
meaning; their elimination deprives actors (and designers) of valuable information
regarding meanings and structures in the play in general and about their characters in
particular. For example, I.i and I.v are clearly linked, thematically and visually by a stage
direction missing in the SUDS performance text. In I.i there is a stage direction to the
effect that Danton is seated at the feet of his wife Julie while they debate the nature of
their love for one another and he questions her firm belief that they can truly know one
another through their love. In I.v (the next scene in which he appears) Danton plays out a
scene with the prostitute Marion seated at his feet, expounding her own theory of love and
desire to Danton—who again despairs at her unknowability. Danton’s conflict, where he
is caught between his spiritual and physical sides (represented by Julie and Marion) with
a dim sensation that love in one/all of its many guises may be his salvation—but is unable
at this point in the play to reconcile them—is clearly depicted not only through his words
but reinforced through a stage ‘picture’.
There were other rearrangements made to the text, only one of which I will discuss
here. In their performance text, Rice and Mead decided to reverse the order of the first
two scenes, thus beginning the play proper (after a five minute interlude of the entire cast
gathered on stage, shouting fragments from the other play texts mentioned above) with
the street scene amongst the rabble of the people who want to string up a young man
suspected of being a ‘gentleman’ (because he has a handkerchief!). They are supported
by Robespierre encouraging their violence and proclaiming the power of the people.
This then introduces and stresses the revolutionary setting and themes of the play at the
expense of the more personal aspects of the play. There are precedents for this (a televised
East German production, not surprisingly, also chose this approach, as did Maxwell in his
‘version’ of the play), but I would argue that it is central to the overall meaning of the text
that the play ‘about’ the Revolution both opens and closes with the scenes with primarily
private scenes in which the events of the Revolution are peripheral to the personal.
The first and last scenes feature respectively Julie and Lucile, the wives of the Danton
and Camille Desmoulins. The female characters in the play have, from the point of view of
number of scenes and lines, very small roles indeed, but the play is literally encompassed
by their presence and influence. The first scene gives us our first clue that this is not
merely a battle between the leaders of two rival political factions for power. Danton has
in fact already abandoned the political for the personal, horrified and discouraged by the
bloodthirsty turn of the Revolution, but he is not yet aware that Julie can offer him the
peace he seeks. The play depicts his struggle to find this inner peace. Once he finally
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recognises it he dies affirming his love for his friend Camille and in the knowledge that
Julie’s love will accompany him beyond the grave itself. The play’s final scene (cut
from the SUDS version) involves Lucile who, given that Camille has been guillotined,
makes a conscious decision to die too. In a very powerful last two lines, she cries ‘long
live the King’, to which the response by a patrol is ‘In the name of the Republic’ and she
is led away, presumably to be executed. Hers is by no means a political action; it is her
response to an unbearable personal situation. This last scene reiterates the importance of
the political is, in this play, really only in so far as it affects the personal.
Role of the author in the performance text
Whilst it is fashionable to dismiss authorial intention as ‘unknowable’, I think that
in the case of text-based dramatic texts one ought not to deny the author a role in the
creative process of bringing a play to the stage. I do not believe that the text and what the
director (and actors) do with it are discrete entities. I think instead that if one chooses to
use the text, then one has a certain responsibility towards it—one is completing a process
which the writer set in motion. A director and actors bring into three dimensions a twodimensional plan where stage directions, the way the text is broken into acts and scenes
and the ordering of those acts and scenes, the repetition of certain words, phrases and
images and so on all bear witness to the author’s intentions.
These intentions inscribed into the text may well be obscured by a translation which
may not have recognised what the author was doing—or give him or her credit for
knowing what he or she was doing. Akerholt recognised precisely this phenomenon in
her translation of Miss Julie for the Sydney Theatre Company:
Other English translations often use about twice as many words as the original Swedish. It’s as if they
don’t trust that the original is good enough. They tend to substitute words that are repeated too often
instead of realising that this character has an obsession, and that the same word or combination of words
shows an inner life and/or a sense of irony. If you lose that, of course you get a text which is wordy,
which has no specific tone, and it becomes an academic text.
It’s terrible exciting to discover small links which had totally disappeared in other translations. These
little links and specific rhythms in the language open new worlds for the actors. They determine the
attitude that the actors have to each other on the stage, and actors suddenly realise that one speech
is actually linked to something else further on. It may not be clear to the audience because it’s not
hammering it in, but linguistically and rhythmically the link is there, and the actor will know it and will
convey it to you.19
That is, when working with a translated text, the role and continued importance of
the author of the dramatic text in realising a performance text may become even more
apparent than is usually allowed to be the case. Where actors have difficulties in making
theatrical sense of their lines, interaction with other characters and the development of the
play itself, this may in some cases be traced back to a faulty translation of a text which
did contain the material the actors needed for their role as communicators of meaning to
the audience.
In the letter quoted above, Büchner deplored the liberties taken by the publishers
of Dantons Tod and their carelessness. He could almost be speaking of some of the
‘translations’ of his work available today.
I must say a few words about my drama. First, I must mention that the permission I gave for some
changes to be made was gravely abused. Omissions and additions on almost every page, and almost
always extremely detrimental to the overall effect. Sometimes the meaning is seriously distorted or
even completely lost, with sheer nonsense in its place.20
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An analysis of just two instances in the first scene of the play will reveal how much can
be lost by translations which are insensitive to the subtle use of language by the author to
reinforce the thematic content of his or her work.
Example: the first scene of the play
The first scene of any play is obviously going to play an important role in structuring
the play for the audience viewing it, as it is their introduction into the fictional world of
the play. We have seen that for this reason some productions have chosen to begin with
the second scene, a scene which features the People and Robespierre full of revolutionary
fervour. I have also explained why, in my opinion, the play quite deliberately begins (and
concludes) with a private scene featuring the wife of a revolutionary. If we look closely at
the language of the first scene, I think we can detect further evidence for this being the first
scene in Büchner’s clever use of imagery. So many of the important issues are raised in
the play—love, death, (disenchantment with) politics, religion, Epicureanism—are raised
in this scene, and all are connected by the recurrent use of a single image, the fingers.
In the German text, there are, in this one short scene, seven references to fingers, and
they occur in each of the three segments of the scene. In the first it is part of a sexually
charged conversation between Hérault and a lady, full of innuendo and accompanied by
gestures. The next reference occurs in the discussion among the Dantonists as to the state
of the Revolution as Camille’s describes his ideal Epicurean state, and in the third is a set
of references in which Danton deflates all this elevated declaiming by his refusal to take
part in political action and his simultaneous fear that it might engulf him anyway. Such
references to the recurrent and important themes in the play are there, embedded in the
text, and as Akerholt notes above, this is something that actors can seize upon and subtly
convey to the audience—if they know it is there. Two of the translators of this scene have
completely missed what I feel must be intentional repetition of the same word in different
contexts: both Price and Brenton come up with a similar mixture of fingers, knuckles
and hands. James Maxwell (for whom this is the second scene) does consistently use
‘fingers’, but leaves out two references altogether. In the first SUDS compilation version
there was one reference to ‘fingers’, three omitted, one ‘knuckles’ and two ‘hands’. At my
suggestion, two of the omitted references were reinserted and translated with ‘fingers’,
and one of the references to ‘hands’ was also changed back (a compromise!).
Another example of inconsistencies in translation is in the exchange between Julie and
Danton which hinges on what ‘knowing’ someone means. In German there is a difference
between wissen (to know a fact) and kennen (to be familiar, acquainted with). Julie is
prompting Danton to admit intimate, personal knowledge and understanding of her (she
has just asked Danton if he believes in her)—kennen—in response to his claim that they
know (wissen) little of one another. Danton, however, will not be drawn and promptly
reduces his Kennen of her to mere Wissen of her physical characteristics (‘You’ve dark
eyes and curly hair and a delicate complexion...’). While English does not make the
semantic difference between types of ‘knowing’ this can certainly be made clear by its
context—but again only if it is there in the text. In the case of Price and Brenton, one of
the ‘knowings’ disappears to be replaced by ‘tell’, which has none of the same echo or
resonance of meaning.
By way of brief contrast to the translations discussed above, I would like to note the
most recent translation of the play by John Reddick. Reddick is an academic, but one
who has had experience in staging Büchner’s plays and translating them specifically for
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the stage. He is thus well aware of the complexities of the text (both as a literary text and
a performance text) and his stated aim was to capture
as much as possible of the richness of meaning and mood in Büchner’s original, while also
retaining its spectacular verve and crispness [...] and in the case of the plays [yield] texts that
actors find easy to speak.21
His is consequently perhaps the most satisfactory translation of those examined—he
passes my ‘finger’ and ‘knowing’ test of scene one with flying colours!
Conclusion
When a play moves from page to stage it takes on a whole new life, dependent on
where, when and how it is produced and by whom. When it also makes the journey from
one culture and language to another this process is further complicated as the levels of
interference between the original text and its current users are increased. As we have seen,
there is a fine line for a translator to tread if he or she wishes to create a performable text
which is also sensitive to the subtleties of structure, image and language of the original.
Here at last is perhaps the perfect common meeting ground for practitioner and academic!
Finally, one must not forget that ultimately, in performance, the spoken text is just one of
the many things which communicate meaning to us and structure our understanding of the
play: for all my difficulties with and criticisms here of the text ultimately used by SUDS,
they did create a performance that was full or colour, light, drama, energy and boundless
enthusiasm—and that is an end in itself.
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REFERENCES
‘A Talk with the Director, Designer and Dramaturg on Miss Julie’, STC Materials for Teachers
Akerholt, May-Brit, ‘Translation and the Australian Theatre’, in Australasian Drama Studies, No.8,
1986.
Georg Büchner. Werke und Briefe. Carl Hanser Verlag, München & Wien, 1980.
Brenton, Howard and Jane Fry (translators) Danton’s Death in: Michael Patterson (ed) Büchner. The
Complete Plays. Methuen Drama, London, 1982 (1987).
Maxwell, James (translator) Danton’s Death. An English Version. Eyre Methuen, London, 1968/1979.
Price, Victor (translator) Georg Büchner. Danton’s Death, Leonce and Lena, Woyzeck. Oxford University
Press, Oxford & New York, 1988.
Reddick, John (translator) Georg Büchner. Complete Plays, Lenz and Other Writings. Penguin, London,
1993.
NOTES
(Endnotes)
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
Dantons Tod was the only one of his plays published in his lifetime (he died
eighteen months after its publication), and none was produced until over 60 years
after his death.
To his family, Strasbourg, 28 July 1835. In: John Reddick (translator), Georg
Büchner. Complete Plays, Lenz and Other Writings. Penguin, London, 1993, pp.
201-2.
James Maxwell (translator), Danton’s Death. An English Version, Eyre Methuen,
London, 1961.
Victor Price (translator), Danton’s Death, Leonce and Lena, Woyzeck, Oxford
University Press, Oxford & New York, 1988.
Howard Brenton and Jane Fry (translators), ‘Danton’s Death’ in: Michael
Patterson (ed), Georg Büchner. The Complete Plays, Methuen Drama, London,
1991.
May-Brit Akerholt, ‘Translation and the Australian Theatre’, in: Australasian
Drama Studies, No.8, 1986, p. 10.
ibid., p. 8.
Maxwell’s ‘version’ was written in 1959 for a production of the 59 Theatre
Company at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith and was later filmed for the BBC.
The Brenton/Fry translation was done for Peter Gill’s 1982 production at the
National Theatre.
Price, ‘Introduction’, p. xiii.
Maxwell, ‘Translator’s Note’, p. 12.
Patterson claims in his introduction to Danton’s Death that
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This translation, like Mackendrick’s of Woyzeck, is the first English translation to be based on the
authoritative Lehmann text instead of the slightly corrupt text by Bergemann, upon which previous
translations are based.
They may well be based on the more authoritative German text, but it is questionable just how authoritative the
English translations are. The status of both Mackendrick and Brenton and these particular translations may
be ascertained by the fact that they are the only two cited on the cover of this edition of his works, and yet I
have serious questions about the methods of these translators. I cannot deal with Mackendrick’s translation
of Woyzeck here—suffice to say, perhaps, that his version of the play includes the invention of whole scenes
(nearly all of the last three scenes of the play) and other interpolations into Büchner’s work.
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
Akerholt, cit. p. 11.
The roles of St Just, Billaud-Varennes, Lacroix, Legendre, Philippeau and
Fouquier-Tinville, among others, were played by women.
A Passion in Six Days, Downchild, Fair Slaughter, That Good Between Us, Birth
on a Hard Shoulder, The Hang of the Gaol.
Mystery-Bouffe, Who has Lef got its teeth into.
King Richard II.
Marat/Sade.
Quartet, The Task, Mauser, Cement.
‘A Talk with the Director, Designer and Dramaturg on Miss Julie,’ STC Materials
for Teachers, pp. 22-22A
Reddick, p. 201.
ibid., Preface, p. ix.
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PLUIE OBLIQUE:
A CASE STUDY
Kristine Cala
Introduction
I have long been fascinated by the following statement by Stuart Seide, an American
theatre director resident in France who in the last twenty years or so has translated many
English-language dramatic texts and put them on stage:
...comme je suis le traducteur, je peux me permettre, sans la moindre contrainte, de faire évoluer la
traduction durant les répétitions avec l’apport inestimable du comédien...Les répétitions sont le banc
d’essai de ma propre traduction. Souvent le texte shakespearien propose une multiplicité de sens
que je ne peux préserver au niveau de la traduction, car il faut choisir parfois un seul sens. Par la
direction d’acteur, vu que je sais pertinemment ce que j’ai perdu du texte original, je tente de restituer
la multiplicité de sens initiale. Le jeu redonne au texte ce que je n’ai pu capter sur le papier, et ainsi le
metteur en scène que je suis pallie parfois les pertes de richesse au niveau de la traduction.1
I find Seide’s comment intriguing because at the same time as the literature on theatre
translation broadly recognises the need to take into account the performance orientation
of the dramatic text,2 it seems to me that it also demonstrates relatively little interest
about what actually happens when actors work with a translated dramatic text. Seide’s
reference to rehearsals as the testing ground for translation is only logical, given that
theatre is above all a pratique scenique; and yet it seems to me that few studies to date
have addressed the issue of how the actor works with a translated text.3 In this paper,
I will examine this issue in the light of a bilingual (French/English) rehearsal process
which I observed for five weeks in January and February 1993.
Pluie Oblique: a Case Study
Between 30 January and 18 April 1993 the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes, in France,
exhibited around one hundred paintings of the Russian avant-garde dating from between
1905 and 1925. To coincide with the exhibition, the French theatre company Casus Belli
proposed that three performances of a work entitled Pluie Oblique take place at the base
of the Musée’s imposing marble staircase.
The work, dealing as it did with the relationship between the poet Vladimir
Mayakovsky, his longtime companion Lili Brik and the painter David Bourliouk (two
of whose paintings were in the exhibition) and the implications for them of Stalin’s
increasing totalitarianism, was felt to complement very well the subject matter of the
exhibition. The management of the exhibition agreed to the proposal and the performance
dates were set for 18, 19 and 20 February 1993.
I was in France at the time doing research on theatre translation, and I was interested
in the project because the text of Pluie Oblique (which I will refer to here as T(T)) was
in fact a translation into French of a modified version (which I will refer to as T(O)) of
a text called Selling Ourselves for Dinner by the Australian poet, playwright and actor
Christopher Barnett.4 When I heard about the project, I contacted Marie Massiot (the
translator of T(O)) to ask about the possibility of observing the rehearsal period. Massiot
discussed my proposal with Barnett (also present in France at the time and planning to
direct the production), who agreed.
In mid-January 1993, I went to Nantes along with Massiot, Barnett and Claudine Hunault
and Eric Piederriere, two French actors who were to take the roles of Lili Brik and David
Bourliouk respectively. As well as directing, Barnett would also take the role of Mayakovsky
- the reasons for this will be explained presently. Marie Massiot would act as dramaturg, and
was also going to rework the translation as required. Given the importance the actors placed
on improvisation, they considered it a certainty that reworking would be necessary.
A bilingual process
Speaking at the Sixième assises de la traduction littéraire at Arles in 1989, Michel
Bataillon remarked that ‘...en fin de compte c’est la traduction qui est mise en scène. Que
ce soit très clair: seule la traduction est mise en scène.’5 And indeed, Bataillon’s assertion
holds true for the majority of cases. Translations are used in the theatre where a given
dramatic source text is incomprehensible; in order for that text to be useable by actors, it
must be translated. Of course, in the eyes of the practitioners the translation effectively
replaces the source text and becomes ‘the text’.
However, Bataillon’s comment is not applicable in the case of Pluie Oblique which was
in fact a bilingual (French/English) process. Although the translated text T(T) had originally
been produced by Marie Massiot for use by a group of francophone actors, there had been
problems associated with finding a suitable French-speaking actor for the role of Mayakovsky.
In the end, Barnett took the role himself even though this solution posed its own difficulties,
not the least being Barnett’s rudimentary knowledge of French. Although Barnett had hoped
to make sufficient progress to be able to deliver Mayakovsky’s part in French, it soon became
clear that this would not be possible in the time before rehearsals started.
For a short period of time, the group toyed with the possibility of having Barnett learn
his lines phonetically, but this idea was quickly abandoned because it was felt it would
hamper improvisation. By the end of December 1992, it had been decided that Barnett
would deliver Mayakovsky’s lines in English using T(O), while Hunault and Piederriere
would deliver the lines of Lili Brik and Bourliouk in French using T(T).
As opposed to the generally-encountered situation, then, the actors had to deal
constantly with the simultaneous presence of the source text and its translation. This
meant that it was impossible for them to regard T(T) as ‘the text’, since they were always
in the presence of two languages and two sets of meaning, sound and rhythm.
The rehearsals
The importance of improvisation
The rehearsal sessions were based on improvisation. For at least three and a half weeks,
there was no blocking, no fixing of gestures and no fixing of the text. The actors spent most
of their time intensively researching possibilities for movement, gesture, enunciation and
the interaction6 of T(O) and T(T). I will now discuss the main features of their approach.
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Pluie Oblique: A Case Study
Preliminary readings—investigating sound, gesture and rhythm
During the first three days of rehearsals, the actors read their texts together while seated
on chairs arranged in a triangle in the centre of the rehearsal space.7 This was in fact the
first time that all three had worked together; although Claudine Hunault had participated
in two readings of the text with Christopher Barnett in Paris, Eric Piederriere had joined
the project at the last moment and had not participated in any of those readings.
To start off, the actors read their lines in turn and in order. At this stage, it was only by
listening to the ‘other-language text’ (ie this was T(T) for Christopher Barnett and T(O)
for the French-speaking actors) and by referring simultaneously to their own-language
text that the actors could begin to get a preliminary idea of the structure (ie the points
where one speech finished and another began) and of the content of the other-language
text. And yet at the same time, establishing meaning appeared to be much less important
for the actors than investigating the sounds and rhythms of the texts. In other words,
at the same time as the actors were forced to accept a large degree of loss on the level
of meaning (since they were not capable of understanding the French or English words
they were hearing), they gained a great deal of freedom to explore tones of voice and
preliminary gestures.
In fact, before long the actors’ bodies entered into the reading process. They began to
stare into each others’ eyes, rock backwards and forwards on their chairs and make small
gestures with their hands, head and the pages of their text. For example, Eric Piederriere
(when speaking as the Stalinist bureaucrat and enemy of Mayakovsky, Alexander
Fadeyev) violently shook the pages of his text as if it were offensive paperwork. Even
though Christopher Barnett (who as Mayakovsky was the object of Fadeyev’s wrath) was
unable to understand Fadeyev’s French words, he could understand the annoyed gestures
and expressions which animated Piederriere’s voice and body.
These ‘dynamic readings’ were the site of preliminary interactions between the actors,
who entered into a state of profound listening and observation which functioned beyond
words and meaning. On one hand, they were using their native language to discover in
their own text dramaturgical indications (of emotion and motivation, for example) and
to react to those indications. At the same time, they started to listen to, and observe, the
sounds and gestures of the other actors (and essentially to use their lack of understanding
of the meaning of other-language text) to try and perceive in the others the same early
emotions and motivations, and to feed their interaction. These readings were intensely
interesting, based simultaneously on the linguistic and the paralinguistic; it was as much
the body which was ‘speaking’ as the mouth.
It was also notable at this stage that when interacting directly as Lili Brik and David
Bourliouk, the francophone actors also used rhythm and sound in preference to meaning.
Although there was no reason for them not to rely on their common understanding of
the meaning of the French text when speaking to each other directly, it seemed that their
interaction was very quickly affected by the context of their work with Christopher
Barnett. This suggested to me that by listening to the English-language T(O), they were
discovering new ways of reading (and feeling) their own-language text.
I would like to consider two further examples from this phase of the rehearsals. Firstly
(as I mentioned above), during the first three days the actors were seated together on chairs
in the middle of the rehearsal space. Christopher Barnett had proposed that the actors
remain seated while reading, unless they had ‘a very good reason’ for moving away from
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their position. It was Eric Piederriere, speaking as Alexander Fadeyev, who was in fact
the first to stand and move away from his chair, saying as he did so the line ‘Mayakovsky
va chier dans son froc’.8 He then started to circulate around Barnett (who was still sitting
on his chair), repeating this line. Barnett could not understand the meaning of the line
in French, and had to rely on the fact that Piederriere’s tone and facial expression were
no longer consistent with those he been using up to that point as David Bourliouk and
corresponded instead to the tone and expression used in the earlier reading session when
Piederriere had been shaking his text violently and speaking as Fadeyev.
The second example concerns a line in T(O) which Mayakovsky throws out
provocatively to Bourliouk (whom he accuses of cowardice because he wants to leave
the USSR and go to the United States): ‘Eat your turkey, drink your wine, your days
are numbered, bourgeois swine’. Immediately before this line, Mayakovsky says to
Bourliouk, ‘It seems now that you are afraid of a few bureaucrats, a few bedbugs. We
once sang a song...’ Immediately after, he asks Bourliouk ‘Are your days numbered,
David?’ In this way, Mayakovsky puts into the same category the ‘bourgeois swine’
and Bourliouk, a comparison which is insulting and unthinkable (given Bourliouk’s
friendship with Mayakovsky, their role in Russian futurism and their support for, and
participation in, the Revolution). When speaking these lines, Barnett fixed Piederriere
with a very piercing expression and a very menacing tone to his voice. Later, when the
group decided that direct eye contact between Mayakovsky and Bourliouk be avoided,
this means of interaction had to be suppressed. It was very telling, therefore, that towards
the end of the rehearsal period, this moment became a moment of very strong interaction
between Mayakovsky and Lili Brik; Claudine Hunault, as Lili Brik, began to repeat, in
English and virtually simultaneously, Mayakovsky’s words, looking him directly in the
eye. Although the actors did not actively discuss this development and it took some time
for the change to occur, the original intensity between Mayakovsky and Bourliouk was
eventually transferred to Mayakovsky and Lili Brik.
What, then, was the function of the translated text during these first few days when
dynamic reading was the principal activity? Perhaps our first reaction would be to assign
a negligeable role to the translation, since for roughly one third of the time (ie when
Barnett was speaking) it wasn’t even being used or said. However, it seems to me that
such an evaluation would be partial and misleading; a translated dramatic text doesn’t
simply provide words to be said in the language of translation, but also the starting point
for the pratique scénique of the actors. I think that the following comment by JeanMichel Déprats is very apt:
La traduction doit rester ouverte, permettre le jeu, mais ne pas en dicter un, être animé par un rythme,
mais ne pas en imposer un. Traduire pour la scène, ce n’est pas tordre le texte en vue de ce qu’on espère
montrer, de comment on jouera ou qui jouera. Ce n’est pas devancer, prévoir ou proposer une mise en
scène, c’est rendre celle-ci possible.9
On the linguistic level, the actors were not capable of understanding everything at
each and every moment. They were forced to use their voice and body to try to make
themselves ‘understood’ (and post-rehearsal discussions showed that they weren’t always
successful). Naturally, over the course of the rehearsals they did learn to better recognise
the words and rhythm of the other-language text and increasingly to see the T(O) and
T(T) as two parts of an ensemble, rather than as entirely separate (I will discuss this
development further). Above all, the translated text T(O) served to foster interaction on
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the level of sound, tone and rhythm which proved to be indispensable to the continuing
development of the project.
‘Deconstructing the texts’
After the initial reading sessions, the actors continued on with the use of improvisation
in the rehearsals.
As part of their improvisations, the actors engaged in a process which they called
‘deconstructing the texts’. This comprised five main activities:
(i)
ceasing to respect the written order of the lines in T(O) and T(T) (the actors were free to
take their lines from any point in the text);
(ii)
manipulating the order of the words in any given speech or sentence;
(iii)
simultaneous enunciation by more than one actor at a time (this feature of the
improvisations was to carry over to the performances);
(iv)
introducing texts other than T(O) and T(T) into the rehearsal process; and
(v)
‘static’ enunciation of the texts in which all emotion and intonation was removed (ie the
opposite approach to that used in the dynamic reading sessions).
A translator other than Marie Massiot would perhaps have felt quite threatened by
these developments. For one thing, Barnett’s participation as an actor meant that a
sizeable proportion of the translation was never enunciated. For another, those parts of
T(T) which were used in the improvisations were manipulated by the francophone actors
as they wished; many times during the second week, Massiot’s ordered translation more
or less disappeared. Although the elements of T(T) were present, they were constantly
rearranged and manipulated; although Massiot’s text existed on paper, it was always
treated by the actors as a possible set of elements to use rather than as a set text. The
interaction of French and English during the rehearsals also meant that the elements of
T(T) were above all placed in relation to the elements of T(O), and vice versa; in other
words, these texts were never really seen as complete in themselves.
It was refreshing to note, however, that Massiot was not threatened by the actors’
work and did not consider the improvisations as meaning that she, as a translator, had
‘disappeared’. Rather than defend ‘her’ translation against such deconstructing activities,
Massiot encouraged the actors to engage in them and to see T(T) as the written trace of
possible enunciation and not as a set of elements to be followed.
Key improvisation
During the second week of rehearsals, there was a key improvisation session as far
as the texts were concerned. The improvisation led to the establishment of a physical
relationship between Mayakovsky and Lili Brik; at the same time, Bourliouk was
effectively excluded from that relationship and began to investigate possibilities for
establishing his own presence by means of music (Piederriere’s piano accordion) and
song. It was fascinating to observe how, during the improvisation, the actors first rejected
use of their texts and then later took them up again with just as much conviction.
Barnett began the session by using some poems which at that stage were still in draft
form. A little later, Piederriere took up his accordion and began to play. At this point,
neither T(O) not T(T) were being used. Gradually, the rhythm and the resonance of the
poems and the accordion grew. Claudine Hunault then began to say some of Lili Brik’s
lines. Soon, Barnett began to make use of Hunault’s upstretched legs as if they were a
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rostrum, leaning on them as if speaking at a political rally. Later, Hunault began to climb
on Barnett’s body as if it were a monument.
To begin with, when the accent was put on the actors’ bodily and musical work, they
worked more or less without their text; I mean by this that they had discarded their text
at the edge of the rehearsal space and were saying only some small sections that they
were able to remember and which came to mind at any given moment. It was telling that
soon after Barnett used Hunault’s upstretched legs as a rostrum, the two French-speaking
actors picked up their discarded texts. Piederriere began to speak once again as Fadeyev
as he climbed up on to a chair, and Claudine Hunault came back to her opening line
‘Que cette soirée soit l’éloge de Vladimir Mayakovsky...’ (‘Let us use this night to praise
Mayakovsky...’).
It was only when the actors had come to a moment of complete stillness and silence
that they retrieved their texts from the edge of the space and used them to inspire further
physical work. In other words, they had literally had to ‘lose’ their text in order to
concentrate on the physical side of the rehearsals. To put this another way, the actors had
to accept a considerable degree of loss on the level of meaning in order to get a sense of
the ‘physicality’ of the texts: it was very interesting to me that they often talked about the
texts as ‘sculpting material’.
Deciding on a final text
The third week of rehearsals brought a development which the actors met with
ambivalence; during that week, the group decided upon a ‘final’ French/English text (ie
an agreed selection of speeches from T(O) and T(T) and an agreed order of speeches).
Given that the actors had already engaged in a number of ‘deconstructing’ activities which
were aimed at ensuring that the texts did not become too familiar, it is not surprising
that they weren’t enthusiastic about determining, and repeating, a final set text. At the
same time, however, they felt they had reached a point where a set text was needed in
order for them to be able to continue effectively with their physical improvisations. For
example, on a number of occasions during the previous week, the actors had been forced
either to break, or abandon, an improvisation because they had gone completely blank
on the text. Some of these lapses had occurred at crucial moments (for example, when
they were trying to establish the elements of a particular set of movements, or when
they were trying to accomplish a particularly demanding move like lifting or carrying
another actor or climbing on their body). In order to re-establish their rhythm, the actors
had been forced to recommence a sequence of an improvisation, or sometimes an entire
improvisation session, which meant that valuable time was wasted and led to intense
frustration. It is true, of course, that having taken a very free approach to T(O) and T(T)
during the first fortnight, the actors had themselves helped to create this problem; at the
same time, however, that freedom had become extremely important to them and they
were disappointed that in order to make further progress, they felt that they had no choice
but to decide on a complete text.
Moving into the performance space
In the fourth week, the actors set themselves the task of memorising not only their own
lines but also the overall shape of the text (ie at what points the lines of all three actors
started and ended). In doing so, they aimed to be able to manage any blanks between
themselves and to become independent of outside prompting.
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Carla
Feeling relatively confident about the complete text (even if they weren’t completely
satisfied about using it), the actors moved the rehearsals for the first time into the
performance space. As I mentioned, this was a square at the base of two marble staircases
leading the to Musée main gallery; they would also use the space at the top of one of the
staircases (it was here that Bourliouk would stand). Unlike the vastness of the original
rehearsal space, the square measured roughly four metres by four metres; unlike the
rehearsal space, the performance space was very brightly lit, very stark because of its
marble and white stone and very open because of its function as an area linking foyer to
galleries.
The change of venue was not a complete success. For while the text was now decided
and therefore more manageable, the actors found that there was a significant echo in the
performance space which meant that unless they modified their way of enunciating, they
would not be heard by a fair proportion of the audience. Even more importantly, there
was the problem that Christopher Barnett and Claudine Hunault (who would remain at
the base of the staircases during the performance) began to experience great difficulty in
hearing Eric Piederriere (who would be speaking from the top of one of the staircases). In
fact, given the angle of the staircases, they had trouble even seeing him; they had to raise
their heads and interrupt their lines in order to look at him.
As a result of this essentially architectural problem, the actors began to lose confidence
about how their work would be received by the spectators. Previously, they had been
determined to improvise as much as possible in the performances; having set the complete
text, they still intended to do this. However, once they started working in the performance
space it because clear that the spectators were almost certainly not going to hear each and
every word and may as a result become disoriented. In the end, they decided that they
would not make any concessions about this and in fact, they began more and more to
emphasise the loss of clarity of sound which had been imposed upon them.
Most striking was the degree to which the actors began ‘interlacing’ their lines; by
this I mean a number of things. Firstly, the actors often started to speak their lines before
the ‘previous’ actor was due (at least at the level of the written text) to finish speaking.
Secondly, Claudine Hunault began to intersperse with Christopher Barnett’s English lines,
the French version of those lines (which she had obtained by consulting the full version
of T(T)). Thirdly, even at this relatively late stage the actors were still working on textual
deconstruction by means of a new exercise which aimed to extract as many ambiguities
of meaning as possible from the complete text. For example Mayakovsky, when speaking
about his childhood in Georgia, says in T(O):
MAYAKOVSKY. Yes I was...Yes I was. I was where I was born. Georgia. There I had my first dreams
of a New Russia. I wanted to come here. I was just a baby or at least a young man. I
used to follow my father around when he worked. We got caught in a fog. I couldn’t see
anything. I couldn’t see father...
As a result of this exercise, subtle shifts of meaning were introduced and it eventually
became:
MAYAKOVSKY. Yes I was...Yes I was there. Where I was born. I was born in Georgia. In Georgia I
had my first dreams of a New Russia. A New Russia I wanted. I wanted to come here.
Here I was just a baby or at least a young man. A young man, I used to follow my father
around when he worked. When he worked, we got caught in a fog. I couldn’t see. I
couldn’t see father.
105
In undertaking this exercise, the actors had to employ their knowledge of the particularities (above all grammatical and lexical) of their native language. In that sense,
this exercise re-iterated the linguistic ‘distance’ between them. Even though they had
together already agreed upon a complete and ‘integrated’ text, the actors had once again
to recognise the differences between French and English.
As a result of these ‘interlacing’ activities, the final text (decided upon only the week
before) was further modified. No longer was it a relatively ordered selection of lines from
T(O) and T(T); once again, the boundaries between French and English were obscured.
Conclusion: Loss and gain
The fact that no two languages are completely the ‘same’, even when they share many
features (eg grammatical and lexical) means that at some point every translator is faced
with the phenomenon of choice. So often, there are many different ways to render even
a single source language word or sentence in the target language (leaving aside for the
moment the complexity of translating a whole text), and the translator will be faced with
competing choices of vocabulary, rhythm, register and structure, to name only a few.
It is also frequently the case that a single source language word or sentence conveys
multiple shades of meaning which it is impossible to render in the target language.
Antoine Vitez gives a good example of this in relation to the translation of a three-word
title of a novel by Pasternak, Sestra moia jizn’:
On le traduit par Ma soeur la vie. Mais ça ne veut pas seulement dire Ma soeur la vie. On peut
entendre en dessous: Ma soeur, c’est la vie ou La Vie m’est une soeur, ou bien...Le russe entend tout
cela, le comprend, le contient. En français, il faut choisir. On ne peut pas traduire et pourtant on y est
obligé.10
In dealing with the phenomenon of choice which is inherent to their work, translators must inevitably deal with loss: loss of shades of meaning (as in the Vitez example
above), loss of the style of the source text, loss of the ‘flavour’ which comes from the use
of vernacular language, loss of the rhythm or the cultural context of the original, among
countless other possibilities.
Almost by definition, we see this phenomenon in a negative light because we generally
associate loss with regret, insufficiency and inadequacy. And yet in the context of theatre
translation, I think we need to recognise that this is a false assumption. Stuart Seide,
when describing the rehearsal process as ‘le banc d’essai de ma propre traduction’ reminds
us that although theatre translation (like any type of translation) provides many readily
identifiable examples of ‘loss’ on paper, the work of the actor at the same time provides
unlimited possibilities for gain.
This was abundantly clear in Pluie Oblique. Firstly, the bilingual nature of the
process helped to foster work which was oriented towards listening to sounds, not the
comprehension of words. Secondly, the process emphasised the presence of T(O) when,
in most cases, T(O) is effectively lost to the actors completely (and in fact, rather than
being lost it is usually not even at issue). Thirdly (and paradoxically), the actors gained
new perspectives on the text(s) as a direct result of the loss of clarity which they had to
confront when they moved into the performance space. Having accepted the problems
of resonance and limited space, the actors searched for ways to make this work to their
advantage and to communicate to the spectators the fact that they should not try to depend
on words in order to interpret the performance. In other words, to communicate to the
spectators that they needed to accept the loss of immediate linguistic comprehension in
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Carla
order to listen to, and feel, the paralinguistic aspects of the performance. (And indeed,
it was interesting to note the comments of the spectators as they left the Musée after the
performances; they seemed to be divided into two schools of thought. On one hand, there
were people who made comments like ‘I couldn’t hear a thing from start to finish and
so I don’t see how I could be expected to know what was going on’; on the other, I also
overheard remarks such as ‘Well, I couldn’t really hear what they were saying very well,
but I didn’t really need the words to understand and appreciate the performances’. )
As to Marie Massiot’s role as translator, it is clear that she was forced to accept the
limits of her own translation and of her input to the process. She provided a translation
which lent itself to very rich and varied interpretation, even to the point where her
translation was itself more or less lost...but surely this is a risk that translators must
be prepared to take if they are truly interested in translating for the stage. At the same
time, however, it is my opinion that most accounts of theatre translation concentrate on
the production phase of the translation process and not on the way it is used by actors
on stage. I readily acknowledge that the process I observed is only one among many;
however, it was a real process and the fact that it departed from what are perhaps more
‘mainstream’ rehearsal processes makes it no less valid. The translated text in the Pluie
Oblique process functioned both as subject and object. Subject, in the sense that it helped
to stimulate the work of three actors even when it wasn’t used in its entirety. Object, in
the sense that the actors brought changes to it in the course of the rehearsals which, at the
extreme, envisaged its disappearance.
Another important result of the process was to show how it can be dangerous to
conceive of theatre translation as a linear process which moves inexorably forwards.
Pluie Oblique gave many examples of detours and doubling back. The pratique scénique
of the stage is experimental in nature and should not be seen as a series of discrete
problems to be ‘solved’ in a given order. (It is unfortunate that (to my mind at least)
Patrice Pavis, in describing theatre translation by means of a ‘series of concretizations’,11
suggests (perhaps unintentionally) that this is the case.) Rehearsal processes such as
Pluie Oblique show how the translated text can represent a means of liberation for the
actors, in the sense that they are not required to see the translated text as something which,
at the level of ‘meaning’, is relatively clear and unambiguous (but which can also run the
risk of being relatively unexciting as a result).
107
NOTES
1
Stuart Seide (interview with Georges Banu), ‘La traduction complétée par le jeu’, Théâtre/Public, no 44,
mars-avril 1982, p. 60: ‘...as I am the translator, I can allow myself, without limitation, to let the translation
evolve during the rehearsals, with the actor’s invaluable contribution...The rehearsals are the testing-ground
for my own translation. Often the shakespearean text provides for a multiplicity of meaning which I am
unable to render in the translation, because you sometimes have to opt for a single meaning. By directing the
actor, and given that I know exactly what was lost from the original text, I try to reinstate that multiplicity
of initial meaning. The actor’s work gives back to the text what I was unable to capture on paper, and as a
director I can sometimes make up for the loss of richness of meaning at the level of translation.’
2
Such recognition is evident in (for example) the round table discussion entitled ‘Texte et théâtralité’ in
Sixième assises de la traduction littéraire (Arles) 1989, Traduire le théâtre, Arles, Actes Sud, 1990, pp. 69-93.
3
Accounts of real rehearsal processes, such as Gay McAuley’s ‘Body, Space and Language: The Actor’s Work
on/with Text’, Degrés, no 63, automne 1990, pp. 1-29, are unfortunately all too rare.
4
Selling Ourselves for Dinner was commissioned for the Adelaide Festival in 1982. The Festival text was
considerably longer than the re-worked (1992) version T(O) (the latter was basically a modification of only
the first scene of the 1982 text).
5
Michel Bataillon, in the round table discussion ‘Texte et théâtralité’ in Sixième assises de la traduction
littéraire (Arles 1989), Traduire le théâtre, Arles, Actes Sud, 1990, p. 83: ‘...in the end, it’s the translation
which is staged. Let’s be very clear about that: only the translation is staged.’
6
By ‘interaction’, I mean the process by which T(O) and T(T) were progressively intermingled with each other.
The details are explained in the descriptions of the improvisations.
7
During the first four weeks, the rehearsals took place in a building called the Chapelle de l’Oratoire. This was
a building owned by the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes, and situated just around the corner from it.
8
‘Mayakovsky will shit his pants.’
9
Jean-Michel Déprats, ‘Traduire Shakespeare pour le théâtre’, Théâtre/Public, no 44, mars-avril 1982, p. 48:
‘The translation must remain open, allow for the actor’s work but not dictate any particular interpretation,
be animated by a rhythm but not impose any particular one. Translating for the stage does not mean twisting
the text to make it show what you want to show, how to stage it or who should interpret it. It does not mean
running ahead, predicting or proposing a particular staging, it means making it possible.’
10
Antoine Vitez, ‘Le devoir de traduire’, Théâtre/Public, no 44, mars-avril 1982, p. 6: ‘They translate it as Life
my sister. But it doesn’t just mean ‘my sister/life’. You can also understand from it My sister is life, or Life is a
sister to me, or...The Russian means all of that, encapsulates it and contains it. In French, you have to choose.
You can’t translate, and yet you have to.’ Of course, in English you also have to choose.
11
See Patrice Pavis, ‘Problems of translation for the stage: interculturalism and post-modern theatre’, in Peter
Holland and Hanna Scolnicov (eds.), The Play out of Context : Transferring Plays from Culture to Culture,
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989, pp. 25-44.
108
TRANSLATION IN
THE PERFORMANCE
PROCESS
Gay McAuley
Theatre exists at the interface of the oral and the literate, and it engages with both more
intensively and in more complex ways than any other art form. The text as such is absent from
performance, transformed by the actors and the mise en scène into lived event, yet as Walter
J. Ong has shown,1 drama was the first narrative genre to be written down, and the nexus
between the written and the performed reaches back thousands of years to the very beginning
of theatre history. The relationship between written text and performance event is a complex
one, as might be expected in the circumstances, and the place of the written in the genesis of
performance, and of performance in the genesis of the written have undergone many changes
as acting and production styles have evolved over the centuries and from culture to culture.
Translation has been an important factor in the production process ever since the Romans
began to borrow from Greek culture, but it is only in recent years that the widespread
practice has begun to attract attention from theorists in either theatre or translation studies.
There are many reasons for this, not least the marginalised position of theatre in nearly all
contemporary social and critical theory, yet the theatre has a great deal to offer translation
theorists and, conversely, translation provides an excellent means of opening to scrutiny the
ways in which written text functions in the dynamic process of making theatrical meaning.
Translation for the theatre poses all the problems of interlingual and intercultural
translation as they are currently being articulated,2 as well as others which derive from
the particular nature of play texts and of theatre writing more generally. Writing for the
theatre is writing which is subjected to extraordinary pressures; it does not exist, like
other writing, in order to be read, but in order to be transformed through the corporeal,
vocal and spatial practices of actors, directors and designers. It is writing which is
necessarily going to spatialise and be spatialised, in a process which Maurice Blanchot
sees as constitutive of theatre itself: ‘Le théâtre est l’art de jouer avec la division en
l’introduisant dans l’espace par le dialogue.’3
It is writing which must be embodied and spoken, filtered through the always
contemporary subjectivity of the actor, and it functions first and foremost in relation to the
practitioners’ creative processes. Theatre writing contains triggers for the actors who are the
primary authors of the performance, and these triggers assist them in their work of creating
the characters and the meaningful spatial relations and bodily behaviours that will articulate
emotions and ideas and tell a particular story. Contrary to the beliefs of some playwrights
and literary critics, the story and characters are not already present in the playwright’s
words, but have to be constructed with those words and other things by the actors and by
the mise en scène, for the same words can tell many different stories in the theatre.
This paper is based on observations emerging from two of the comparative translation
projects sponsored by the Centre for Performance Studies in 1993: in the first, actors Angie
Milliken, Justin Monjo and Jamie Jackson worked with director Rhys McConnachie on
three different English translations of a scene from Sophocles’ Antigone, and in the
second French speaking actors Véronique Bernard and François Bocquet and director
Rénald Navarro worked on a fragment of the trial scene from The Merchant of Venice
in three French translations. An earlier project of a similar type involving work by Rex
Cramphorn and a group of actors on four English translations of a scene from Phèdre, and
the Dom Juan project in 1990 in which two different groups of actors with two different
directors (Rex Cramphorn and Beverley Blankenship) worked on the same scene in
the same translation have also fed into my thinking about translation and the theatre.4
Comparative projects of both these types have proved to be a fertile terrain not only for
exploration of the translator’s role in the theatrical meaning making process but also for
observation of theatre practice more generally. They are particularly revealing in relation
to the text/ performance nexus, providing insights into the ways in which contemporary
actors use the text in their creation of performance, the kinds of textual detail that make
a difference in the meaning making process, the kinds of writing that feed actors in their
creative process, as well as those that seem to resist or block these processes.
The paper is also concerned with the way the translator in the theatre writes of necessity
from within the theatre culture of his/her own day and with the impact of this upon
theatre practitioners attempting to make performances with translated play texts. It has
frequently been observed that translations have a circumscribed life span, even those that
have entered the target culture as fully as the Authorised Version of the Bible, for example.
Theatre translations seem to have an even shorter life span than other translations, which
Jean-Claude Carrière puts at about ten years for the Shakespeare translations he has made
for Peter Brook’s company in Paris.5 It is interesting to explore the reasons for this as
they reveal a good deal about the nature of the work process to which texts are subjected,
and about the situation of enunciation in the theatre.
Comments about translations that feed or resist the actors’ creative processes should
not necessarily be taken as value judgements about the quality of the translations, nor
even of their quality as theatre texts, for it must be recognised that the actors’ processes
are not fixed and immutable. On the contrary they are continually changing and evolving,
meaning that ideas about the kinds of writing that best feed the actor are continually
changing and evolving along with the processes themselves.
It is not simply that the cultural and political context of the performance changes as the
society evolves. This does of course happen and it has an important impact on the way a
given text may be interpreted, but the production process itself also changes, in part due to
the other changes that are taking place in the culture. New practitioners have come to the
fore in the twentieth century, such as the director or, more recently, the designer; acting
and speaking styles evolve all the time, even though it is only with the advent of recording
that we have become aware of how quickly this occurs; our understanding of the causes
of human behaviour has been modified by new psychoanalytical and sociological theories
and these have radically transformed actors’ ideas about characters’ motivation or even
110
McAuley
Translation/Performance
about the very idea of character. Developments such as these mean that the questions
asked of the play text in rehearsal and the ways in which texts are used in the production
process have been continually changing too. It has become evident over the ten years
that I have been observing and documenting rehearsal process that, even within this short
period, rehearsal strategies, the shared terminology, the common buzz words and the
preoccupations they denote have undergone significant changes.
Performance triggers in the text
The rehearsal processes observed in the projects mentioned above provided numerous
examples of the way actors mine the text for the information they require to construct
character and motivation and to create the story they are going to tell. Very significant
performance decisions were frequently the result of an actor’s response to a small detail
in the text, and the comparative process threw into relief the role of these textual triggers.
It was one sentence in F.C. Danchin’s translation of Le Marchand de Venise that led
François Bocquet to see this Shylock as proud, even arrogant, in contrast to the character
indicated in the other two translations of the same line. The sentence in question, and the
three versions are as follows:
Shakespeare
Portia: Then must the
Jew be merciful.
F-V. Hugo (1865)
Portia: Il faut donc que
le juif soit clément.
Shylock: On what
compulsion must I?
Tell me that.
Shylock: En vertu de
quelle obligation?
Dites-le-moi.
F.C. Danchin (1938)
Portia: Alors, il faut
que le juif se montre
clément.
Shylock: ‘Il faut’, mais
qui m’y forcera,
dites-moi?
J-M. Déprats (1987)
Portia: Alors le juif doit
être miséricordieux.
Shylock: En vertu de
quoi le devrais-je?
Dites-le-moi.
Danchin’s Shylock picks up and turns back on Portia her phrase ‘il faut’, he
personalises and turns into a question of force what the other two leave as a generalised
moral obligation, and he omits the ‘le’ from ‘dites-le-moi’. This omission does not make
the phrase ungrammatical, but it is certainly more direct, more colloquial, and it demands
an answer more insistently.
François Bocquet has a background in mime and corporeal expression rather than in the
psychologically based character acting derived from Stanislavsky that is still dominant in
Australia. This meant that his perception was immediately physicalised in a very strongly
marked stance, gesture and facial expression, as can be seen in the illustration. He
placed himself firmly up stage centre on his entrance, his head held high, his demeanour
uncowed. Bocquet’s physicalisation of the character trait he found in those words had
clear implications for Véronique Bernard as Portia in terms of the proxemic relations it
set up between the two characters, the physical distance she was obliged to maintain, and
the resulting aggressivity of her attitude to him.
111
The physicalisation also had implications for the delivery of other lines in the scene
that in themselves were not so marked, so it can be seen that the first perception, triggered
by some small points of grammar and syntax, affected the whole scene. It is important
to note that there is a two way process involved: actors search the text for hints, clues,
triggers to the performance they are creating, but equally they impose interpretations
on the text. In this case, the starting point was a verbal clue, but the performance
consequences washed over the rest of the scene, colouring many phrases that were not so
obviously marked in themselves.
My second example involves similarly small details of syntax and vocabulary. One
or two sentences from Elizabeth Wyckoff’s translation of Antigone led Justin Monjo to
see this Creon as a military man, and this came as something of a surprise to the director
and the other actors. Once again, the perception was rooted in a few small textual details,
and it had a profound impact on the way the actors interpreted the scene and the fictional
world they created with it. Here are the lines in question:
Lewis Campbell (1873)
How came she in thy charge?
Where didst thou find her?
Wyckoff (1954)
Explain the circumstance of the
arrest.
Campbell
Hast thou thy wits, and knowest
what thou sayest?
Wyckoff
Is this the truth? And do you
grasp its meaning?
Campbell
And how was she detected,
caught and taken?
Wyckoff
How was she caught and taken
in the act?
Malina (1966)
What are you bringing her here
for? Where did you catch her?
Malina6
Malina
Give me the story.
The actors had trouble finding an appropriate performance style for Wyckoff’s verse,
a very loose form of iambic pentameter which provided neither the rigour of a regular
beat nor the freedom of prose, and the rather ‘chatty’ or ‘conversational’ feel7 of the
language led to problems in determining the role of the Chorus in the scene. As Justin
Monjo said, in the Brecht/Malina translation it is obvious that the Chorus represents
everyone, including the audience, and in Campbell the language is public, but Wyckoff’s
conversational language suggested to director and actors that the scene was occurring in
a private space. Indeed, it was suggested at one point that Creon could even be talking
to himself. Comparing the lines that follow the Chorus’s intervention in Campbell and
Wyckoff, it is clear that Campbell’s Creon is speaking directly to the Chorus while in
Wyckoff there is no necessary interaction:
Campbell
Ay, but the stubborn spirit first doth fall.
Oft ye shall see the strongest bar of steel,
That fire hath hardened to extremity,
Shattered to pieces.
Wyckoff
Those rigid spirits are the first to fall.
The strongest iron, hardened in the fire,
most often ends in scraps and shatterings.
Rhys McConnachie thought that Wyckoff had attempted to turn the play into a
domestic tragedy and all felt that ‘the scene should just be a conversation between the
two of them’. When Justin Monjo reiterated his perception that this Creon was a military
leader ‘or a cop’, the idea of a military dictatorship or police state was introduced. The
context of the 1950s (the period of the translation) was evoked, the director referred to
The Prisoner by Bridget Boland, furniture and props were brought in (these would have
been totally incongruous in the context of the Campbell translation) and the scene was set
112
McAuley
as an interrogation room. The Chorus was a simple soldier, like the Guard, unquestioning
in his support for the Leader. In the private space Antigone’s rebellion became personal
rather than political, contrasting with the public stand they saw her taking in Campbell’s
version and the exemplary individual putting the cowardly crowd to shame in Malina’s
translation of Brecht. There were clearly many factors contributing to the Wyckoff scene
as it developed in rehearsal, and the actor’s response to the three lines quoted is only one,
but it is nevertheless a good example of the intensity with which actors scrutinise the text,
and of the chain reaction that one perception can precipitate.
Punctuation can also serve as a trigger for the actor, indicating in subtle ways the
articulation of a thought process, speed of delivery, phrasing and even breathing. It
is a means whereby the playwright maintains a certain control over the rhythm of a
speech or an exchange, and hence over the rhythm of the whole scene. In the absence
of uncorrupted manuscripts or even universally accepted rules or consistent practice
in relation to punctuation in 16th century English, the punctuation of Shakespeare’s
plays has been left to editors and publishers, and they have varied considerably in their
decisions. Translators of Shakespeare have taken similar liberties, and it is doubtless in
recognition of the power such decisions can have on actors that Jean-Claude Carrière
does not provide punctuation in the Shakespeare translations that he gives to the actors
in Peter Brook’s company. They are free to punctuate their own lines in terms of the
meanings and rhythms that evolve during the rehearsal process and, as Carrière states,
‘cela favorise leur travail car une virgule ou un point d’exclamation indiquent, d’une
façon quasi inconsciente, un jeu’.8
Véronique Bernard noted that F-V. Hugo’s translation of the Merchant of Venice scene
was, in her words, ‘peppered with full stops’. Compared with the Déprats translation,
it is evident that Hugo has divided and marked the thought process of all the characters
far more obviously, while Déprats allows thoughts to flow together, and the forward
thrust of his verse favours a certain speed of delivery and greater emotional energy. The
‘quality of mercy’ speech, for example, is divided into nine sentences in Hugo’s prose
translation, as opposed to only three in Déprats’ verse translation. The actor may thus
be led insensibly to use the speech to make either a more intellectual (Hugo) or a more
emotional (Déprats) appeal. The actors working on the three different translations of the
same scene referred to the Hugo, as it developed in rehearsal, as their ‘comic’ version and,
indeed, the Shylock in this version was more buffoon than villain or victim, and when
Portia physically propelled him across the stage towards Antonio on ‘Ainsi, prépare-toi à
couper la chair’, thrusting the knife into his unwilling hands, the moment veered towards
slapstick. How much this was due to the more fragmented rhythms of Hugo’s language
and how much to other factors is not entirely clear but, in discussing the genesis of this
version with spectators immediately after the performance, the director and the actors
stressed the impact the punctuation had had on them.
The following speech is a good example of different punctuation through which it seems
that the translator has envisaged, and is possibly encouraging, a different physical moment.
Hugo
Déprats
Portia: Doucement! Le juif aura justice complète... Portia: Doucement! Le juif aura toute justice
Doucement!... Pas de hâte! Il n’aura rien que la
- doucement, pas de hâte! Il n’aura rien que la
pénalité prévue.
pénalité.
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Hugo has five exclamation marks, full stops and suspension points, while Déprats
has only three in this short speech, which suggests that Hugo saw the moment as a very
physical one and he has, as it were, inserted the space for this action via the punctuation.
Déprats’ version is less fevered and ‘doucement, pas de hâte!’ certainly points to a less
physically charged moment than ‘Doucement!... Pas de hâte!’ despite the fact that the
words are identical.
Even the decision to use a particular prop in this version was attributed by the director
to Hugo’s punctuation. Portia carried a large book, the book of the law, in which she
searches for a solution to the problem posed by Shylock’s ‘billet’ (bond). When asked
about this choice, Rénald Navarro said
It came because of the full stops which gave us the idea ... of going from one step to another to
another, of not knowing what the next step should be. This gave us the sense that there is a looking for
something, so we introduced the physical thing of the book.9
While actors can, and often do, ignore the punctuation or override it in their vocalisation, it is incontrovertible that it can work, even at an unconscious level as Carrière
claims, to affect their interpretation of a line, to suggest an energy level or to open a space
for physical action.
These examples involve very minor textual details: choice of vocabulary, syntax,
punctuation, and yet in each case a minor textual feature had major consequences in
terms of the scene as a whole, as it developed in rehearsal. The textual details can be seen
to serve as a trigger to the actor’s imagination in the search for character and motivation,
and the translator’s choices in what might seem relatively unimportant matters led the
actors to interpretive decisions not available in the other versions of the same scene. It
is surprising how often important performance decisions are in fact triggered by a minor
detail in the text, although the physical manifestation (paralinguistic features, gesture,
movement, use of a particular prop, etc.) may be the dominant effect in performance. In
the two-way process already mentioned, it is equally the case that many other less marked,
or unmarked utterances may have a particular meaning imposed upon them as there is a
dynamic process of meaning making going on. Even here, however, this imposition is not
the result of factors totally exterior to the text but is usually to be traced back to an earlier
textual detail of the sort described above.
The resistance of the text
The text provides clues, triggers, useful hints for the actors, but it can also create
difficulties. These may be overcome in different ways, most brutally by changing or
cutting the line, more frequently by changing its apparent meaning through gesture or
intonation or by creating a new subtext. A text that resists the actors can lead to brilliantly
inventive performance solutions, and indeed Anne Ubersfeld has suggested that genuine
creativity in the theatre may depend upon a kind of struggle between the ‘voices’ of
playwright and director:
Peut-être la création du metteur en scène a-t-elle besoin de la résistance d’une voix, peut-être le
pluralisme inhérent à la création théâtrale a-t-il besoin de cette bataille entre les deux ‘sujets de
l’écriture...’10
Not all resistance is of this sort, however, and the Wyckoff translation of Antigone
is an example of a text that seems to create difficulties for the actors in their attempt to
find a performance. On the face of it this may seem curious: Wyckoff’s English is fairly
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neutral, it is less archaic than Campbell’s pseudo-Shakespearian style, and her translation
is highly regarded by scholars for its accuracy. Why then was it so difficult for the actors
to work with it?
The following comments made by the actors during rehearsals of the Wyckoff text
indicate the kind of difficulties they were experiencing and the extent to which these were
to be traced to the nature of the language itself and the verse form adopted by Wyckoff:
‘The verse feels more casual, so you can make it more casual’
‘Rhythmically it is verse, but the imagery is literal’
‘It’s heightened language but still conversational’
‘I’m much less clear about the Wyckoff and the ways to do it. We’ll have to do it to find the way’ (the
director at end of first afternoon’s work)
‘This one is very hard’
‘The language isn’t enough’
‘The ideas don’t connect in the stychomythia’
One of the lines already quoted from this translation provides an example of the
difficulties mentioned by the actors. Campbell and Wyckoff are both using iambic
pentameter but Campbell uses the stress pattern of the verse to emphasise the
loaded words while Wyckoff’s verse often results in the stress being placed on purely
auxiliary words :
/
/
/
/
/
And how was she detected, caught and taken? (Campbell)
/
/
/
/
/
How was she caught and taken in the act? (Wyckoff)
There are many other lines in this scene in which the metre creates an awkward effect, and the actor is virtually obliged to ignore the metre and treat the line as prose. For
example:
/
/
/
/
/
We poked at each other with growling threats
/
/
/
/
/
We saw this and surged down. We trapped her fast;
/
/
/
/
/
None of these others see the case this way
/
/
/
/
It was not your brother who died against him, then?
The actor has, as it were, to work against the grammar and sometimes even against
normal pronunciation in order to use the stress or else must ignore the stress pattern to
get the meaning. The actors involved here felt a kind of absence in the verse, a lack of
direction, an openness that left them floundering. In the event they filled the gaps with
meanings of their own, as they are used to doing when exploring the subtext in naturalistic prose dialogue. The use of props and set and the construction of an additional
narrative (police state/military dictatorship, interrogation room, Eastern Europe in the
1950s) through these means may seem to be purely performance decisions but they were
in reality a response to this style of writing.
The director, Rhys McConnachie, commented very perceptively after the first reading,
that Wyckoff’s verse was reminiscent of the verse drama of Eliot and Fry that was popular
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in the late 1940s early 1950s. This was perhaps one factor which led the actors to the
1950s for the fictional situation, but that decision was certainly also affected by the work
they had already done on Brecht’s 1948 adaptation which overtly uses Sophocles’ play
to reflect on the situation of Berlin in 1945. The spectators seemed to accept the 1950s
setting as an interesting and effective performance solution, although the limitations
of the project did not permit exploration of how far it would have been viable for a
production of the whole play, but the actors clearly felt uneasy about the extent to which
this solution had been, in Rhys McConnachie’s words, ‘imposed on the scene’. Their
discomfort was also revealing about the ways in which actors and directors like to work
with text to construct meaning in performance and the place of the text in a work process
that is profoundly satisfying to actors.
The problems posed by this text reminded me of the difficulties caused by the
John Cairncross translation of Phèdre in the comparative project undertaken by Rex
Cramphorn in 1985. Cairncross has made a line for line translation that is basically very
accurate, extraordinary for the way it manages to pack so much of Racine’s meaning into
lines which are two syllables shorter than the French, and yet the actors found it to be
virtually unusable in a performance context. They even found it very hard to memorise.
The actors’ solution in the case of Cairncross’s Phèdre was similar to that adopted for
Wyckoff’s Antigone: their frustration led them to impose an interpretation on the text, to
furnish the space and introduce props with which to create a fictional world that would
give the text meaning rather than finding a fictional world through the language.
The text in the performance / the performance in the text
It may seem from these observations that I am saying the mise en scène or the
performance is somehow inscribed in the text, and that the actors are engaged in a search
for the clues that will enable them to reconstruct this originary mise en scène. This would
be a serious distortion of the creative process as I have observed it, for it is my experience
that actors are not concerned with re-constructing anything, even if there were such a
thing as an originary mise en scène, even if it were possible to inscribe this in the play
text, but rather with constructing performance meanings in the here and now.
It is nevertheless true that a lot of performance possibilities are suggested by the play
text, for that is indeed one of the distinguishing characteristics of dramatic writing, and
actors skilled in this kind of work do scrutinise the text minutely for suggestions of the
sort I have described in the Antigone and Merchant of Venice projects. They use these,
however, to create their own performance and their own meanings. It is equally true
that certain performance options may seem to be blocked by a given play text but, if
director and actors desire to take those options they are free do so and, given sufficient
skill, can make a success of it, as the ‘director’s theatre’ of the last 15 years has shown on
numerous occasions. Performance always has primacy over the text for it is only through
the performance that the words have meaning.
When Antoine Vitez remarked to a gathering of theatre critics ‘De Molière il ne nous
reste qu’une trace: pneumatique’,11 he was referring in his own inimitable way to the
fact that actors performing in Molière’s plays breathe as Molière did, and experience in
their own bodies his consumptive breathing and shattered lungs. This observation, while
controversial to academics who see the written word in more abstract terms, opens a
fascinating area of speculation about the physicality of the play text, the performativity
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that has been written into it, indeed about the function of the text in the actor’s process.
It cannot be denied that certain play texts do seem to possess qualities that fascinate
practitioners: these plays are not exhausted by one production but continually demand to
be re-explored, reworked, remounted, and it also has to be acknowledged that many of
these were written by people such as Molière, Racine, Shakespeare or Chekhov who had
a close involvement with the actors who originally performed them. The potency of these
texts in suggesting elements of mise en scène, elements of performance cannot be denied,
and it can be speculated that the close involvement with working actors led the writers
to incorporate into their texts a kind of performativity that continues to be effective with
subsequent generations of actors.
The textual features that feed actors in their work process are not, in our current state
of knowledge, precisely definable, and perhaps they never will be. It is, however, evident
that they are not normally to be found in the stage directions which might, on the face of
it, have seemed an obvious place to find performance indicators. On the contrary, stage
directions seem peripheral to the practitioners in their work process, despite the fact
that playwrights have been trying since the 19th century to write the mise en scène they
have imagined into their plays in the form of stage directions. In practice directions are
frequently ignored and it is perhaps even true that a play with very precise and binding
stage directions (such as Beckett’s Play, for example) will have less of an afterlife than
other plays. The very precision of the mise en scène that is incorporated leaves less
space for the practitioners and the play is, therefore, perhaps a less potent vehicle for new
thoughts and new meanings.
The question of authorship in the theatre is a complex one. The primacy accorded to the
written in the past has been subjected to a great deal of criticism from both practitioners
and theorists in the 20th century, but the result to date has largely been to replace the
playwright by the director (or, in some cases, the principal actor) as the ‘author’ of the
production: we refer to Olivier’s Henry V, Planchon’s Tartuffe, Liubimov’s Hamlet. We
do not yet seem comfortable with the notion of the group as author, with authorship as a
collaborative process, yet from the work processes I have observed it is evident that, even
in text based theatre, authorship is always multiple, always multi-factorial. The actors
in such theatre are clearly the authors of their performances, and they must be seen as
co-creators, co-authors of the work as a whole, together with the playwright, the director
and the designers.
It has become fashionable in recent years to decry the role of the text and even to query
the creativity of actors working in text/character/narrative based theatre.12 I would claim
that actors in text based theatre are skilled in a particular form of close reading, and that
they possess this skill in addition to the performance skills that enable their ‘reading’ to
be embodied and expressed, the ability to imagine what it is like to be another person, and
the ability to work as part of a collaborative group, responding to what others are doing
and expressing, perceiving the implications of each detail in the whole as it develops.
It is clearly absurd to claim that actors in this kind of theatre are somehow less creative
than other performance artists, or that they are engaged in interpretation rather than artistic
creation. As our projects have demonstrated over and over again, actors work with text
in extremely subtle ways to make meaning, they do not find meaning ready-made in
the text. As Justin Monjo said of his work in the Antigone, ‘you play all the words you
are given’, and it is through this ‘play’ that the words begin to mean. Indeed, the actors’
process has much in common with the deconstructive reading practices so much admired
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by poststructuralists and theorists of the postmodern and I would claim that the theatre,
and text-based theatre in particular, provides a revealing paradigm for the reading process
as we are coming to understand it.
The translator’s genotext
In the comparative projects sponsored this year and in the earlier project on Phèdre,
the translations chosen for production came from widely different periods (1706, 1961,
1963 and 1975 for Phèdre; 1865, 1938 and 1987 for Le Marchand de Venise; 1873, 1954
and 1966 for Antigone), and it was perhaps the sweep of translation and theatre history
involved on each occasion that made so noticeable the fact that the translators have
written into their translations in various ways their own idea of theatre, and that this idea
is always rooted in the theatre practices of their own day. It seems that even if translators
are intending simply to translate the performativity and the indications of performance
practice that are present in the source text, they inevitably incorporate features of the
theatricality of their own day.
Any text necessarily bears the imprint of the time and place of its writing but playtexts,
because they are written to be part of a further creative process, also contain evidence
of the staging conventions in force at the time they were written, and of the production
process they were designed to serve. The problem for theatre translators is that current
conventions and work processes in the target culture may be more or less different from,
even radically opposed to, those inscribed in the source text. The problem for theatre
practitioners attempting to put on a play in translation is even more complex, in that the
text may incorporate performance indicators from both the original and the translator’s
period, and that both may differ significantly from the practices and conventions in force
in their own period.
Kristeva’s notion of the ‘genotext’ is useful in this context in that it provides theoretical
underpinning for the idea that any text necessarily bears the traces of its own genesis. For
Kristeva any linguistic utterance consists of two levels, the phenotext (‘le phénomène
linguistique (la structure) relevant du signe’) and the genotext (‘l’engendrement signifiant
(la germination) qui n’est plus subsumable par le signe’), and neither can be read or
understood without the other.13 While in her later work it seems that this genesis is
seen in fairly rigidly psychoanalytic terms,14 Anne Ubersfeld adapts her term for use in
discussing the relation between play text and performance. She suggests that no play
text can be written without ‘la présence d’une théâtralité antérieure’, that the playwright
writes for, with or against pre-existing theatrical codes, and she uses Kristeva’s term to
posit the existence of
un géno-texte antérieur à la fois au texte écrit et à la première représentation, et où le code théâtral
du temps, les conditions d’émission du message, c’est-à-dire le canal prévu, jouent le rôle de matrice
textuelle ‘informant’ le texte.15
Such a theatrical genotext includes experience of the kind of theatre building and stage
arrangements that are the norm, the acting conventions in force, and an understanding of
the social functions of theatre at the time.
The translator is not simply translating into the target language the playwright’s idea of
theatre, the traces of the playwright’s theatrical genotext insofar as they can be perceived
in the source text. A good translator will certainly be doing that, but the translator is a
creative writer like any other and is necessarily situated in time and place; the linguistic
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choices a translator makes ensure that the target text bears the traces of its own genesis,
of its author’s subjectivity and of its historical/geographical/social moment. I would
argue further that the translated theatre text necessarily reflects the theatre culture of
the translator, whatever that translator thinks he or she has done. That is to say that
translators necessarily translate through the filter16 of their own theatrical genotext, and
the more closely they are associated with the production process (as is increasingly the
case in recent years), the more detailed their knowledge of actor’s rehearsal techniques,
the more likely it is that their translations will reflect the needs and perceptions of the
theatre culture in which they are operating.
Jean-Michel Déprats has argued, in relation to Shakespeare at least, that
Une traduction impraticable sur une scène, régie par une poétique de l’écrit, méconnaît une dimension
essentielle du texte shakespearien, tout entier tendu vers la représentation.17
It is likely that many translators would similarly claim to be translating the theatricality (however they might define this) that is present in the source text, and they would see a
failure to capture this as a failure to translate accurately and fully what is there. However,
the actors’ comments on the task involved in ‘playing the words’ in the comparative
projects that I have observed, suggest that it is practically impossible for theatre translators to ignore the theatre conventions of their own day, their own genotext is strongly
present in their translations whatever they may claim to have done, and this genotext
may to a greater or lesser extent replace the playwright’s genotext, it may be more or less
compatible with this, and indeed more or less compatible with the conventions in force
in the practitioners’ culture. These are the factors which lead practitioners to say that a
particular translation ‘works’ or ‘does not work’.
Monique Nemer has pointed out that François-Victor Hugo translates Shakespeare into
French in the context of the proscenium arch stage of his day and that this has extremely
serious consequences for the spatialisation of the action which Shakespeare situates in
terms of levels and an inner/outer axis made possible by the existence of the ‘inner stage’.
She points out, in a very subtle reading of Hugo’s translation of Hamlet, that the shifts in
prepositional phrases consequent upon the different spatial organisation of the stage, present
as part of Hugo’s genotext, lead to a fundamentally different perception of the action.
On peut se demander si une des conséquences lointaines n’en est pas de ‘psychologiser’ le texte
shakespearien: en effet, l’impossibilité de proposer une lecture symbolique de l’espace conduit à ne prendre
en compte que l’échange verbal - en d’autres termes, à s’intéresser à des mobiles plus qu’à des enjeux.18
The dominant acting style is clearly as much a determinant for the translator as the
organisation of the stage space. Contemporary translators, working often for a specific
director and a specific production, may know which actors have been cast for which
roles before they begin to translate. This knowledge may have a decisive effect on their
choices, as MayBrit Akerholt has indicated.19 Even without this degree of specificity, it is
evident that acting styles do change significantly even over a relatively short period. One
has only to listen to the voices of newsreaders on radio or television of just a decade ago
to realise how quickly fashions in speech styles change, and the fact that this comes as a
surprise is evidence of the orality of these modes of communication. One of the dominant
features of orality is that it exists only in the present20 and it unobtrusively jettisons that
which the culture no longer wishes to retain, but the advent of recording has meant that
even orality can be made to live in the past, that orality has a history.
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Theatrical performance is very much an oral form, and listening to sound recordings
of English actors like Lewis Waller and John Gielgud made between the wars can be very
instructive in the context of thinking about the translator’s work. In these performances,
language is used as a physical event in itself, the long drawn out, modulated vowels and
strongly marked metre move speech nearer to song, and one can imagine that actors and
audience together could succumb to the power, rhythm and sway of language as vocal
event. Laurence Olivier broke with that tradition of verse speaking because he wanted
the audience to know what he was talking about. As he says of his own performance in
Henry V, the audience ‘weren’t listening to someone singing an aria; they were hearing
a man’s thoughts set before them as clearly as I could’.21 The implications of all this for
translators are extremely important, and it is evident that a translator whose experience of
the theatre was that of the ‘aria’ style of acting would translate very differently from one
who had contemporary rehearsal practice in mind. Actors seeking to ‘play the words’,
exploring ‘what action to play on that line’, acknowledging that ‘there are two thoughts
there and you have to commit yourself to both’ (all phrases noted during the Antigone
rehearsals) need translations that nurture such a process.
One of the dominant phrases used in the rehearsals I observed in 1993 was the
metaphor of the journey. Actors referred to the emotional journey travelled by a character
in a single speech, and in their exploration of the language would pounce on the elements
that enabled them to construct such ‘journeys’. This, too, has implications for translators,
as can be illustrated in the following anecdote, recounted by director Michel Bataillon at
the Actes Sud colloquium that has already been mentioned.22 Bataillon was attempting to
explain why he had taken the rather controversial decision to commission a new translation
of Chekhov’s Platonov rather than using the greatly revered translation by Elsa Triolet.
Her translations date from the 1940’s and 50s and have played a very important role in
French culture due to her skill as a writer, her knowledge of the two languages and her
position between and within the two cultures. The essence of Bataillon’s critique was that
her translation tends to smooth into an elegant flow what in the source text may be two or
three rather disconcertingly juxtaposed notions. The example he gave was a speech by
the General’s wife to the young doctor in which she complains about his behaviour. The
speech ends with the words:
Svintsvo, galoubtchik, khoditié
which Elsa Triolet translates as ‘C’est dégoûtant, cher ami’. According to Bataillon
the literal meaning of the three words is ‘C’est une cochonnerie’ (svintsvo), ‘mon petit
pigeon’ (galoubtchik), ‘à toi de jouer’ (khoditié), a reference to the fact that they are
playing chess while talking.
Bataillon points out that Elsa Triolet’s translations bear the hallmarks of the kind
of playwriting that was in vogue in the 1950s, by which I presume he actually means
the earlier generation of Cocteau and Giraudoux rather than Beckett and Ionesco, but
this comment indicates the working of the genotext. The thing that most interested me
about the anecdote was what it reveals about the importance of the actors’ process. For
Bataillon’s actors in 1989, as for the Sydney actors in 1993, it is certain that their focus
on the character’s ‘journey’ means that they value writing that leaves in the asperities, that
gives two or three disconcertingly juxtaposed thoughts rather than smoothing these into
one elegant phrase, writing that leaves room for the actor to make the journey required in
moving from one to the other.
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Elsa Triolet’s polished, refined, elegant translation might be seen nowadays as tending
to reduce Chekhov’s play to a bland, bourgeois comedy. What is involved here is not a
question of linguistic accuracy or fidelity to the original, although that is usually the way
people express a preference for one translation over another. It is rather that translators
necessarily make choices that reflect their theatrical genotext, which may be conditioned
by their experience of current rehearsal practice or perhaps only by experience of theatre
going (in which case the genotext will probably be that of the preceding generation). This
makes it much more evident why theatre translations seem so quickly to become dated
or to be judged by actors to be unworkable. The current practice of commissioning a
translation for each new production will ensure that it meets the requirements of present
day practitioners, but it is also possible that such translations may not have an effective
stage life very long after the production: they will be as implicated in the processual
construction of local meaning as the mise en scène itself.
It thus becomes more understandable why the effective life of a translation in the theatre
is so short compared with that of other literary translations. It should also be pointed out
that it may be fairly restricted geographically as well. To speakers of languages such
as Dutch or Swedish where the language community is small, the situation of English
must seem enviable in that the pool of native speakers is so vast and translations of a
huge range of texts are readily available. In the theatre, however, this is not an unmixed
blessing: there are significant differences between the varieties of English spoken in
Britain, America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, not to mention the
many other multilingual countries where English is the common second language used
for certain activities in preference to any of the national languages. Frequently, however,
the rights to an English translation are accorded to only one translator, usually British or
American, and other English speaking countries have to make do with that translation.
In the theatre this may pose very serious problems, and indeed may be a factor in a given
play getting to performance or not. Publishers and copyright agents do not seem to
recognise the desirability of having many English translations to reflect the situation of the
many national varieties of English and to meet the needs of the very different production
processes in vogue across this huge spectrum of the world’s population. Actors and
directors may evade the problem by simply amending the most alienating aspects of the
authorised translation they are obliged to use, but this does nothing for the standing and
reputation of the translator. It means that we still do not recognise the role played by the
translator in the theatrical process, and that we are far from providing institutional support
for the work practices that will lead to the most effective theatre.
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NOTES
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
‘...Greek drama, though orally performed, was composed as a written text and in
the west was the first verbal genre, and for centuries was the only verbal genre, to
be controlled completely by writing.’ Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy, London
& New York, Routledge, 1982, p. 142. Performance analysts might query the
confidence with which Ong asserts that the drama is completely controlled by
writing, but the major point is that drama exists necessarily and essentially in both
the oral and the literate regimes.
See for example Joseph F. Graham (Ed), Difference in Translation, Cornell
University Press, 1985; Theo Hermans (Ed), The Manipulations of Literature,
London, Croom & Helm, 1985; J. Holmes, J. Lambert & R. van den Broek,
Literature and Translation, Louvain, ACCO, 1978; D. Homel & S. Simon (Eds),
Mapping Literature: the Art and Politics of Translation, Montreal, Vehicule Press,
1988.
(Theatre is the art of playing with division, introducing it into space by means of
dialogue) Maurice Blanchot, L’Entretien infini, Paris, Gallimard, 1969, p. 528.
I have written about the translation in both these projects: ‘Body, space and
language: the actor’s work on/with text’, Kodikas/Code, 12:1-2, 1989, pp. 57-79
(on the Phèdre project); ‘Performance indicators in playtext and translation: who
‘writes’ theatrical performance?’, in M. Sankey (Ed), Mediations, Department of
French Studies, University of Sydney, 1994 (on the Dom Juan work).
‘Ce que nous pensons, c’est qu’il s’agit d’adaptations qui vont durer une dizaine
d’années et qu’ensuite il faudra repartir à zéro car tout texte qu’on joue est lié
à l’actualité, aux conditions sociales et économiques. Il faut recommencer
constamment, de la même manière qu’il faut recommencer la mise en scène de
Shakespeare.’ (The way we see it is that they are adaptations which will last for
ten years or so, and that after that it will be necessary to begin again from scratch,
as any text that is performed is linked to the present, to the social and economic
conditions of the day. You have to begin again constantly just as you have to keep
on doing new productions of Shakespeare.) Jean-Claude Carrière interviewed by
Georges Banu in Théâtre/Public No. 44 (special issue entitled ‘Traduire’), March
1982, p. 43.
Judith Malina is translating Brecht’s adaptation of Sophocles’ play, and Brecht
omits this line.
These comments are taken from the video recording of the rehearsal, Centre for
Performance Studies, 1993.
Jean-Claude Carrière, cit., p. 43. (This enhances their work process, because a
comma or an exclamation mark can suggest, even in a quasi subliminal way, how
to perform the line.)
Transcribed from video recording of performance and discussion, Centre for
Performance Studies, 1993.
Anne Ubersfeld, L’Ecole du spectateur, Paris, Eds. Sociales, 1981, p. 18. (Maybe
the director’s creativity needs the resistance of a voice, maybe the pluralism
inherent in theatrical creativity needs this battle between the two ‘subjects of the
writing’...)
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11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
Anecdote recounted by Michel Bataillon in a symposium entitled ‘Traduire le
Théâtre’ in 1989, the proceedings of which were published by Actes Sud/Atlas,
Paris, 1990, p. 70.
In the closing session of the Bleedlines conference in 1993 at the University
of Sydney, subtitled ‘The Limits of Performance’, a number of performance
practitioners claimed that they felt themselves to be artists only when performing
in group or self devised work. When working with a pre-existing text they felt
themselves to be simply technicians.
Julia Kristeva, Semiotike: recherches pour une sémanalyse, Paris, Eds du Seuil,
1969, p. 284. (Phenotext - the linguistic phenomenon (structure) which is
dependent on the sign; Genotext - the engendering of meaning (germination)
which cannot be subsumed into the sign.)
Michael Payne provides a glossary of key terms in Kristeva’s theory in his
book Reading Theory: an Introduction to Lacan, Derrida and Kristeva, Oxford,
Blackwell, 1993; for Genotext his definition reads: ‘a process that forms articulate
structures out of instinctual dyads, family structure, psychic structures, and related
forms; the underlying foundation of language.’
(A genotext that predates both the written text and the first performance, in which
the theatrical code of the time, the conditions of utterance of the message, serve as
a textual matrix which ‘informs’ the text.) Anne Ubersfeld, L’Ecole du spectateur,
Paris, Eds. Sociales, 1981, p. 15.
Sandor Hervey and Ian Higgins, in their Thinking Translation (London,
Routledge, 1992) propose the notion of a filter made up of six levels of textual
variables ‘through which the translator can pass a text to determine what levels
and formal properties are important in it and most need to be respected in the TT’
(p. 46). While the notion as described is a tool for working translators, it seems to
me that it provides the basis for a theoretical formulation of the translation process
and I think that both filter and theatrical genotext are extremely useful concepts in
any attempt to discuss translation in the theatre.
Quoted by Leanore Lieblein, ‘Translation and mise-en-scène: the example of
French translation of Shakespeare’, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism,
V:1,1990, p.81. (A translation which does not work on stage, one governed
by the poetics of the written, has failed to capture an essential quality of the
Shakespearian text, oriented in its entirety towards performance.)
Monique Nemer, ‘Traduire l’espace’, Théâtre/Public, No. 44, March 1982, pp.
57-8. (We can speculate that one possible result of this is to ‘psychologise’
Shakespeare’s text: if a symbolic reading of the space is blocked, we tend to
concentrate exclusively on the verbal exchange, in other words we focus on
motives rather than on what is at stake.)
May-Brit Akerholt, ‘“I had not better return with you to the croft then, Nils, had
I?” The Text, the Whole Text, and Nothing but the Text in Translation’, p. 10.
W.J. Ong, see chapter on ‘Psychodynamics of Orality’ in Orality and Literacy, op.
cit., pp. 31-78.
Laurence Olivier, On Acting, London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1987, p. 49.
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