Faithfulness and Drama: A Theater of Shifting Meaning

Translation is never simply a mechanical act of transferring meaning from one language to another. In theater, this complexity deepens—should a director or translator remain faithful to the original text, or does the act of staging necessitate a reinterpretation? Patrice Pavis’ essay, On Faithfulness in Theater Translation, explores this ongoing debate, questioning whether fidelity to a text is even possible, let alone desirable.

Pavis challenges the assumption that there exists a singular, "correct" interpretation of a play. They argue that directors and translators often operate between two extremes: striving for a so-called “restitutive” approach, which attempts to preserve the original text as closely as possible, or a “projective” approach, where the text serves as a foundation for contemporary reinterpretation. Yet, as they point out, even the most careful attempts at faithful translation are filtered through cultural, historical, and personal lenses—meaning that complete fidelity remains an illusion. This kind of conflict exists in basically any form of translation, but in theater, this tension is heightened because translation is not just linguistic—it is performative, involving actors, staging, and audience perception. A play does not exist solely in words but in the embodied experience of performance.

Jeremy Tiang’s presentation adds further challenges to this issue, noting that in translating and retranslating the same canonical works in theatre, we severely limit access to newer plays, as well as ending up allowing the same celebrity playwrights to make the translation properly artistic. This reminded me a lot of some of the discussions we’ve had in the Friday seminars so far about the challenge of publishing translated works, with Nicholas Glastonbury for example. They’ve commented on how difficult it can be to find a publisher and an audience for translated works, and I can only imagine the challenge is twofold with translated plays because it doesn’t need just an audience to read it, but an audience to pay to watch it, and actors who need to be paid to perform it. Having read and performed some translated plays in high school, especially old Greek tragedies, I hadn’t thought about this issue before, but this talk was very interesting.

 

                                                                                                                    Kamryn