Translation, Adaptation

    These materials spoke, to me, to the question we have been tossing around this semester about the line between translation and adaptation. Poetry, in particular widely translated poetry, feels adaptable to me because the lyric/ images used within a poem to get an idea cross are not always universal ones, while translating prose (especially someone like Proust for this week) requires a more faithful, “accurate” line to line translation from one language to another. Theater, as a script on the page, exists in some other, mysterious place. Pavis clarifies a distinction that is helping me organize my thoughts on the idea of translating a play: the ideas that “text-dominated” theater and “performance-focused” theater are two categorical theatrical goals that can be used to determine the type of translation/ adaptation to engage in. I almost feel like fiction is akin to text-dominated theater and poetry is akin to performance-focused theater, which sounds backwards in that poetry is so rooted in sound while prose is so rooted in narrative, but a performance-focus implies a prioritizing of technical elements to create feeling, while text-domination implies a reliance on the narrative structure to create feeling. Ideally the “perfect” translation of anything would somehow perfectly encapsulate the essence of the source material (but what is the essence? The plot? The “meaning,” which is a living and breathing aspect?) in another language or genre while simultaneously making a ghost of the translator and being a feat of writing for the translator. This is obviously impossible, and reminds me of a comment made by one of our Friday lecturers (I think it was Nicholas Glastonbury, but could be wrong) about how the practice of translation is not binary, or static, but a living/ changing organism.

Samantha Long