Microclima

The assumption that there is parity between playtexts and other narrative texts further obscures what is already a complex undertaking in the translation of theatre texts. There are significant differences between written and spoken texts, and between those intended to be read and those which will culminate in a performance. These textual differences are loosely termed ‘page’ and

‘stage’ respectively, but as the following discussion will reveal, unravelling the tangled web of considerations, and even the terminology of drama and theatre translation is not as straightfor- ward as this simple dichotomy may suggest.

Ownership and Fidelity

The assimilation of material from a variety of sources may have been common practice in the theatre for centuries, but it has never been as widespread or accepted in the case of other literary texts, especially since the emergence of the notion of the ownership of the text. This arose in Europe in the 18th century when copyright was introduced.18 _{Thus a novel ‘belongs to’} its author,19_{and this principle has been applied to playtexts as well, despite drama’s historical} position as an eclectic genre. Modern literary translation honours the author’s ownership of the text by applying the fidelity principle, whereby theSTis viewed as ‘sacred’. The traditional metaphor of the ideal translational act as an invisible pane of glass is implied. The resultingTT is posited as a true representation of the original, the only change being that it is now expressed in theTL.

A strict application of and adherence to this principle is misguided, as even the most faithful translation can never be an flawlessTLrepresentation of anST: aTTcan only ever be a record of the translator’s encounter with and interpretation of theSTas a reader. As playtexts considered to be cultural capital have begun to be treated as literature,20_{it follows that foreign playtexts and} their translation into aTLare subject to the same scrutiny as translations of narrative fiction and are produced according to similar principles. However, although this may work in the limited number of closet drama cases, a blanket application of such criteria of faithfulness to all theatre

18_{Copyright was first granted to authors in the English Statute of Anne in 1710. Victor Hugo instigated the Berne} Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works in 1886 to ensure authors’ rights were automatically respected beyond the borders of their native country (“copyright”, 2005).

19_{The concept of ownership as used here refers to holding authorial rights to a work in terms of the controversial} notion of the author’s intended meaning.

20_{The term ‘literature’ is too often taken for granted and its definition is vague. TheOxford English Dictionary} defines it as “written works, especially those considered of superior or lasting artistic merit.” However, this is subjective and open to debate. When I refer to drama as literature, this refers to a playtext which is available to be read rather than drama available for consumption by the public only as performance on stage.

texts arguably does theatre translation a disservice, as it fails to take into account the numerous differences between the performance text and texts in other literary genres.21

These differences will be illustrated in the following section as we navigate the relationship between text and performance. Translating a drama text is less problematic than translating a performance text, as couching theSTin aTLis a similar process to the translation of narrative texts. Translating performance, on the other hand, is a complex and subjective undertaking, whose realisation and examination are both demanding and circumstantial. Therefore, issues concerning the tension between page and stage and the complexity inherent in translating for the stage overlap to a certain degree. This discussion will begin by outlining the origins of theatre translation viewed from a literary perspective and judged using literary criteria, before moving on to an examination of first text and then performance in translation, concluding with an overview of the difference in aims and intentions of the literary and theatre translation project.

The Language Dimension

Before the comparative field of translation studies emerged, playtexts were examined as part of literary or performance studies: philologists concerned themselves with text, and performance specialists with the realisation of text on the stage. Thus, the evaluative background of trans- lated playtexts as material for examination originates in literary criticism. For many reasons, the discussion of theatre translation from a literary standpoint is likely to result in critical conclu- sions. Proponents of translation theory tend to be scholars by profession, and scholars, if they translate playtexts themselves, tend to produce drama texts rather than performance texts (there are of course, exceptions to this, such as David Johnston and Joseph Farrell, although Johnston (2004, 25) himself notes that “the translator’s ambition . . . is guided philologically” and urges translators to see themselves as writers for the stage). Theatre practitioners translate differently:

A script written by someone who customarily sees things written down, and a script by someone who sees things spoken and moved, are very dissimilar [. . . ]. A literary scriptwriter (and I will include academic translators in this title) looks at the visual impact the words make on the page, the rhythm of the commas, the fullness and clarity of the sentences, and – possibly – the inclusion of visual word puns or witty side-references to other famous classical plays.

A theatrical scriptwriter is thinking in three dimensions, not two. How long does it take to speak a sentence out loud? [. . . ] Is there a vocal rhythm to the language that is effective in the mouth, rather than the eye? (McCormack, 2004, 266)

Many scholars would question whether the approach taken by playwrights with no direct access to the foreign original can be called translation at all, and thus a scholarly assessment of a theatre practitioner’s approach from the perspective of the criteria normally applied to literary

2.2 Translating Playtexts

translation is bound to be problematic. This is compounded by the fact that the standard discourse of translation studies is a negative one of loss, distortion and betrayal, whereas the theatre thrives on the creative principle (Hale and Upton, 2000, 9), which is at odds with the precepts of fidelity and the sacred nature of the owned text.

It is not merely the application of the fidelity principle to theatre translation where there is a discrepancy between traditional translation studies and the theatre. Literary translation stud- ies deals with immutable and complete texts, whereas in theatre translation, the translator and scholar still work predominantly with the playtext, yet the target audience receives and evalu- ates the text as performance. The published narrative text has a permanent form, whereas the playtext as performed may be modified after rehearsal and even after performance, depending on the actors’ and audience’s reactions (Zuber-Skerritt, 1988). Brecht frequently made changes to his works precipitated by critical evaluation of performances: for example, he rewrote pas- sages ofMutter Courageafter the premiere in Zurich when it became clear that the audience’s reaction to Courage was more emotional than he intended.22 _{Freedom to amend and improve} is inherent in the theatrical genre and this proteanism is evident also in the fact that no two performances, let alone productions, are ever exactly the same. Thus the TTin the case of a literary text is fixed, and once published, as immutable as itsST, whereas the source and product of the translation of a performance text remain flexible and open to change.

Comparative ST – TT textual analysis as applied to narrative texts is appropriate to their immutable form, but the same measures of fidelity cannot universally apply to performance texts. Nevertheless, the textual faithfulness vs. creativity approach has often been applied. Even though the dialogue is only one of a number of semiotic layers in a play, it is still generally per- ceived as the central one. The logocentric tradition in British theatre dates back to Elizabethan times, when the play moved away from its improvisational origins. As soon as theatre texts were written down and classed as literature, they became subject to similar treatment to other narrative forms as regards the principles of ownership and fidelity. This further compounds the idea of the supremacy of text over performance, as the former can be ‘owned’, whereas the latter cannot. Quite how firmly the ethos of ownership has become established in the field can be seen in the literary estate, which exercises control over the ownership of an œuvre. In Brecht’s case, theErben(heirs) continue to exert a significant and usually restrictive influence on treatment of his works, and the Samuel Beckett estate has a similar reputation for conservatism. The text is a concrete, material object, whereas performance, or even theories of performance, are not, thus a text can be more easily ‘owned’. Brecht’s heirs may be able to refuse permission for a particular treatment of one of his texts, but they have no influence over a theatre’s use of his performance theory and the application, for example, of epic theatre principles to any other play, or even other genres, even though some elements of epic theatre are just as much a result of Brecht’s originality as his plays. Such control is not only exercised posthumously: it could be

argued that Brecht’sModellbücher were an attempt to extend his ‘ownership’ to performance as well, and if so, he would not be alone in this desire. Luigi Pirandello resisted any interpretation of his works, believing that even an actor’s performance of his play was a betrayal of his original meaning (see Bassnett, 1998, 91).

Despite a tendency to treat the textual level of a performance text in a similar way to other narrative forms, the differences between the two are manifold. Not only must the performance text be held in a different regard concerning its position within a complex whole, but the lan-

guage of the text itself is different to that of a narrative. Spoken language operates according to different conventions from written language, which is more stable and less likely to be lo- cally coloured. The rhythm of the language must also be different. Anthony Vivis (2004, 470)

identifies dramatic rhythm as: direct, immediate and arresting. Spoken language involves re- dundancy and is accompanied by visual elements such as gesture (Aaltonen, 2000b), and thus its translation demands the application of different methods to the translation of narrative texts.

Johnston (1996c), for example, warns against too much caution in translating dialogue. In- stead, the translator should commit violence on the language,23_{just as the original author did;} after all, “[e]quivalence [. . . ] is based on theatrical re-enactment rather than simple linguistic accuracy” (63).

Local colouring and the degree of national and cultural linguistic markers present even in standard spoken language should also not be underestimated, as Bassnett-McGuire exemplifies:

One might look, for example, at John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger in Italian, where the class conflict that is so carefully delineated in the language of the original is completely lost as we end up with four hysterical young people screaming at each other for two hours and a quarter in an extended cliché of the Mediterranean comic play. (1978, 162)

Unlike the translator of narrative fiction, the drama translator’s text must be speakable and im- mediate. He cannot compensate for culture-specific nuances by inserting descriptive adjectives or explanatory footnotes. The dialogue is all the translator has. Stage dialogue is a stylised form of spoken language, which is problematic to translate for numerous reasons. First, it dates much faster than written language. Archaisms, outdated connotations and topical references must be handled with care.24 _{Second, the subtleties of dialect and idiolect are more pervasive} than in other literary forms. If the STis written in a local dialect, the translator is often left in a lose–lose situation. A correspondingTLdialect may help retain some connotations of theST but would possibly distort meaning in doing so, as associated cultural and social markers are

23_{This phrase has been adopted from Roman Jakobson (1976).}

24_{A good example of how language dates can be seen in the use and force of expletives. In a discussion at the} Salzburg conference on drama translation and theatre practice, October 2002, Anthony Vivis observed that in a play he had recently translated, he rendered “die Stadt ist eine Sau” as “the city is a cunt”, as he felt that the standard translations for ‘Sau’ did not carry the force which the original would have had and would thus have sounded anomalous to modern ears. For further comment on translating expletives across cultures, see also Eivor Martinus (1996, 110) and, for interesting anecdotes on how to deal with archaisms, J-A. George (2004).

2.2 Translating Playtexts

unlikely to be parallel in the two cultures, whereas using the standardTLwould neutralise the cultural texture of the characters and action.25

Even if spoken language is translated successfully, dialogue alone does not theatre make. As Laurence Boswell, Artistic Director of the Gate Theatre commented in a round table discussion on translation in December 1994, “[t]heatre isn’t language; language is an important part of it, but words are only half of it; they’re neither the beginning or (sic) the end” (Various, 291). Likewise, John Clifford, referring to Lorca, notes that:

For here, more than any other medium, we are not just translating words. Words in a dramatic text are not an end in themselves; they are a kind of scaffolding on which the actor constructs his or her performance. And what counts are not just the words themselves, but the gaps between the words. The feeling behind the words. What is left unsaid matters as much as what is said: and as translators we have to be sensitive to both. (1996, 263-4)

Theatre translation should take into consideration paralinguistic features of the spoken text in order that the non-verbal elements of the ST be best recorded in the TT for portrayal in performance. Bassnett identifies a series of features including deictic units, speech rhythms, pauses and silences, shifts in tone and register, and intonation patterns, which she defines as “the linguistic and paralinguistic aspects of the written text that are decodable and reencodable” (1998, 107). If a translator is to detect all of these and their intended effects on the stage from

the written ST alone and reproduce the full package faithfully in the TT, judicious use of a dictionary or even fluency in the SL and TLis not sufficient. The drama translator must be ‘fluent’ in both cultures and be attuned to performance conventions in theSCand theTC; in other words he needs to be a bi-lingual and bi-cultural playwright.

Focussing on paralinguistic elements is one way in which translation scholars have attempted to identify a concrete connection between text and movement, if not text and performance. In performance, the dialogue is merely one of a range of semiotic layers which convey meaning to the audience; if the dialogue could stand alone, the audience would be watching a recital and not a performance. In narrative texts, the text itself is the only level of communication and thus is inevitably of core significance. Accordingly, we may expect to encounter a higher degree of precise linguistic correspondence betweenSTandTTthan may be the case with a playtext. However, in practice, this depends upon the aim of the translation project and reminds us of the tension between text and performance once more: in performanceTTs, issues of linguistic equivalence should ideally be granted no greater attention than all other semiotic layers of performance.

25_{See Franz Link (1980) for a detailed discussion on the features of dramatic language and Martin Esslin (1966, 67)} for an illustration of how ‘equivalent’ dialects in the Mermaid’s 1963 production ofShveyk in the Second World Warfailed to replicate the language of the original.

The Performance Dimension

Pirandello’s lament that “the translation into material reality (which, perforce, is someone else’s) does not correspond to the ideal conception and execution that had begun with him [the play- wright] and belonged to him alone” (Pirandello, 1908, quoted in Bassnett, 1998, 91), leads us to a discussion of the performance of theatre texts. Pirandello felt he could control the world he created on the page, but knew it would have to pass through the interpretative filters of the other agents in the production process before it reached his audience as performance. The per- formance dimension is multifaceted and the earliest work on the analysis and definition of the semantic layers of theatre performance was undertaken by members of the Prague Linguistic Circle in the 1930s. In analysing the complexity of the theatrical structure, they concluded that “not only the reciter’s, but also the actor’s voice performance and, through its intermediary, all the other components of the theatrical structure are more or less predetermined by the sound structure and semantic qualities of the text” (Veltrusky, 1981, 227-8). This indicates the cen- trality of the text in the dramatic process, but more recent work by semioticians such as Tadeusz Kowzan and Anne Ubersfeld builds on the work of the Prague School and clarifies that the text is merely one element of the whole experience where there is no hierarchy of levels (see Niko- larea, 2002, for a detailed comparison of their views). Ubersfeld comments that the written text is incomplete without performance and that the two cannot be separated (Nikolarea, 2002, I.4).

The fact that a drama text is considered incomplete until performed is one of the main factors which distinguishes drama translation from other forms of literary translation and the role of performance in the translation process has generated a heated debate on what can realistically be expected of the theatre translator. There has been criticism, not without a hint of sceptical incredulity, of the fact that he is expected to sit at his desk and imagine a hypothetical per- formance of the TThe is writing. If we add to this the fact that some translators claim that their aim is to “produce the same effect on the English-speaking audience as the play would