Serial Translation for the Stage

 

The practice of having an underknown writer produce a literal translation in order to supply a celebrity playwright with material to create their own “translation” troubles me as a labor arrangement and as a translation practice. The implication seems to be that we want to see playwright y’s version of play x, where the problem is that the priority of the translator to not obstruct the action of the original (as much as possible) is tipped on its head; instead, there is an idea that we want playwright y to be as conspicuous as possible in the final version of the translation. At the same time, this arrangement reinforces an elite circle of playwrights with something worth listening to and leaves out anyone else, relegating perfectly good writers to the perfunctory job of producing a literal.

What I see, in both the lecture and the article, is a lack of agreement about the count and priority of voices within theater as an art form. Although there may be many actors in a play, one point of view could be that the play is a single speech act by a single voice. This interpretation would seem to be text-oriented and privilege the writer over the actors. It calls to mind some tyrants playwrights who imagine that, at best, a performance could live up to the ever-perfect script, and otherwise disappoint it; never could such a playwright imagine an actual performance enhancing or going beyond the script. On the other hand, theater can be imagined as the community art form that it is: where the playwright might indeed author the script, but the actor authors the gait of the character, the inflection of their voice, the pronunciation of their words, etc. in a legitimate act of generative creative collaboration. The extreme of this viewpoint seems to be encompassed by Michael Vinaver’s idea that the theater could liberate itself from the script and the playwright all together—the script and the playwright become vestigial as the curtain opens, the lines already memorized, the set already built. Why not do away with them entirely? After all, the audience members aren’t provided with copies of the script for read-along.  

For me, the point of irresponsibility has to do with trying to say something out of someone else’s mouth—a condemnation of both the single voice model of theater as well as the serial translation by famous playwrights that completely change elements of the style or the substance of the original. Deferring to famous playwrights to produce translations of foreign language plays outside of their language ability is to assume that they are the absolute authority on theater, that although it is beyond their knowledge basis to bring across what the original was aiming for, they must be the people with the best things to say. But, like all art, I think plays are fundamentally pointed toward the basic questions of being a person in a world of things and other people. In fact, this personhood is the artist’s only authority at the end of the day and although it is true that they have this authority, it is also true that every other person does too. If you are aware that your voice is strong in the new text to the point of competing with the original voice, whether or not you are a well-known writer, have the decency to call it an adaptation (and no matter what give some credit to whoever provided you the literal), then take whatever liberties you want.  

-Elijah Frydman