Theatre and Translation 9781350363656, 9781137611611

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For Eva and Elena, with all my love

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series editors’ preface

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he theatre is everywhere, from entertainment districts to the fringes, from the rituals of government to the ceremony of the courtroom, from the spectacle of the sporting arena to the theatres of war. Across these many forms stretches a theatrical continuum through which cultures both assert and question themselves. Theatre has been around for thousands of years, and the ways we study it have changed decisively. It’s no longer enough to limit our attention to the canon of Western dramatic literature. Theatre has taken its place within a broad spectrum of performance, connecting it with the wider forces of ritual and revolt that thread through so many spheres of human culture. In turn, this has helped make connections across disciplines; over the past 50 years, theatre and performance have been deployed as key metaphors and practices with which to rethink gender, economics, war, language, the fine arts, culture and one’s sense of self. ix

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Theatre & is a long series of short books which hopes to capture the restless interdisciplinary energy of theatre and performance. Each book explores connections between theatre and some aspect of the wider world, asking how the theatre might illuminate the world and how the world might illuminate the theatre. Each book is written by a leading theatre scholar and represents the cutting edge of critical thinking in the discipline. We have been mindful, however, that the philosophical and theoretical complexity of much contemporary academic writing can act as a barrier to a wider readership. A key aim for these books is that they should all be readable in one sitting by anyone with a curiosity about the subject. The books are challenging, pugnacious, visionary sometimes and, above all, clear. We hope you enjoy them. Jen Harvie and Dan Rebellato

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Foreword by Caridad Svich

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l mundo es un pañuelo, my mother would often say in lilting Spanish. In the English, the rough translation is ‘The world is a handkerchief’. One could say that the metaphor and its meaning are to some extent the same: a world that can feel sometimes as if it were meeting between or among the folded corners of a handkerchief and, by so doing, the fabric of global interconnectedness becomes a palpable and very real thing.Yet if we contrast this phrase with the more ubiquitous and quotidian ‘It’s a small world’, the meaning, whilst ostensibly the same in theory, changes in the image it evokes in the mind. A small world is not at all the same as one in which interconnectivity is implied. In this book, Margherita Laera will walk you through the complex, radiant and necessary paths involved in the art of translation and theatrical production. Laera demonstrates, with sensitivity, skill and passion for this wide-ranging xi

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subject, the political, artistic and aesthetic frameworks that mitigate the difficult and ever-evolving negotiations that are part and parcel in acts of translation on the page and stage. At a time in geopolitics where increasing far-right nationalist, fascist-leaning movements are on the rise, and xenophobic ideologies are finding favour once again, to speak of translation as an important artistic instrument of empathy is no small matter. Laera shows us that without translation, in its multiple and myriad facets, there would be precious little understanding between and among cultures. Laera is right to posit that theatre and performance as art forms are uniquely positioned to serve as models for the practice of empathy and also as tools for the examination of situations where empathy is lacking or absent. Laera’s book illuminates the threads that make theatre and translation vital to the cultural work of progressive societies. Caridad Svich ∗ Caridad Svich received the 2012 OBIE for Lifetime Achievement and the 2018 Ellen Stewart Award for Career Achievement in Professional Theatre from the Association of Theatre in Higher Education. She is a playwright and translator and has authored and edited several books on theatre and performance. She also serves as associate editor at Contemporary Theatre Review, and drama editor at the literary translation journal Asymptote. xii

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Introduction: For/On Behalf Of

On a scorching summer day in July 2018, I walked from Woolwich Arsenal Station in south-east London to Artillery Square. The latter is now a large public space surrounded by residential developments, but from the eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries, the British Armed Forces’ Royal Arsenal used to be housed here, along the southern banks of the river Thames. The thought that bombs and guns that killed so many lives in the name of the British Empire were made here chilled my spine as I took my standing place on an outdoor platform to see This Is Not For You, a performance devised by the British theatre company Graeae to commemorate the centenary of the end of World War I. As I took my place, I was offered instructions on how to hear audio descriptions and visualize captions for the performance through my mobile phone. In front of us, on a makeshift parade ground, 30 limbless veterans who served in various 1

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conflicts – Northern Ireland, the Balkans, Iraq, Kuwait and Afghanistan, to name a few – marched, walked or wheeled their chairs and introduced themselves to the audience with their name, rank and impairment. Speaking into a standing microphone, a performer read out these words from the script by Mike Kenny, while two actors doubling up as sign language interpreters – positioned right in the middle of the stage – translated them into British Sign Language (BSL) for the deaf and hard of hearing: They’re doing it for all of us Now is not the time for hateful Now’s the time for grateful There’s nothing like a war To separate the men from the boys The men from the boys The men from the women And everyone else as well This is not for you. They said This was not for any of us Up to them to keep us safe Up to us to keep the faith It was all on our behalf Keep things safe We won’t be long. They said We won’t be long (14–15) These sentences resonated in my head. What could be not for you – or not for me? And conversely, what could be for you – or for me? The war is certainly not for me, I thought, it’s not for 2

those who are left at home, untrained to cope with its unspeakable brutality. And yet the war, any war, fought by the army swearing allegiance to the country of my birth, and to any other country who might have granted me citizenship thereafter is – technically, theoretically, arguably – fought for me too. It is fought on my behalf, whether I like it or not. In Artillery Square, I was looking and being looked at in the eyes by people whose limbs were amputated following wars they thought they were fighting for me too. That was quite a shocking thought: they lost their limbs on my behalf. I didn’t think I could bear that thought any longer. Now the war, any war, was no longer for them either. They could no longer fight for me for real, for their country, anywhere other than in a theatre. They could only be on stage now, performing for me, for us, for themselves, for others. The veterans in Artillery Square performed themselves, telling the audience about fighting at the front and facing life after war, confronting post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and coming to terms with their new bodies, routines, dreams and nightmares. But by virtue of theatrical convention, as well as performing (for) themselves, the limbless ex-soldiers before us also embodied World War I veterans and spoke for them – on their behalf – because those being spoken on behalf of did not have a chance to take part in the performance and tell their own stories, or because they were no longer with us and could no longer speak for themselves. I have used ‘for’ and ‘on behalf of’ several times already: but what do these actually mean? What are the ethical and political implications of doing something for/on behalf of 3

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somebody else? Who exactly do/should performers perform for/on behalf of in the theatre? Is it everybody, or only some people? For starters, they speak for those who are able to turn up and understand. According to the 22nd edition of Ethnologue, a database of all languages, there are 7111 living languages in the world (Simons 2019), and not everyone can equally talk, see and hear – hence humans’ reliance on various types of languages and forms of translation to connect to and understand one another. Graeae’s Artistic Director Jenny Sealey calls her approach to theatre ‘the aesthetics of access’: by this she means that her company consistently cater for the widest possible variety of spectating styles by creatively weaving captions, audio description and BSL interpretation into each of their performances and offering a relaxed space in the auditorium for those that would benefit from less strict standards on audience etiquette. Graeae’s productions are therefore always at least bilingual, in English and BSL, and include various forms of translation so as to make sure the company are performing for you too. Too often theatre can be exclusive, because it addresses and represents only certain kinds of people, but it is the theatre community’s duty to rise to the challenge of making sure the theatre speaks for, addresses and represents the largest possible number of people by using various forms of translation, even if there are inevitable cost implications. Make no mistake, though: someone’s always inevitably being left out as, for instance, it is customary to assume that those attending the theatre in a certain country can understand the local spoken and/or sign language. But those theatre-goers who 4

don’t – such as, potentially, migrants or tourists – are mostly not specifically catered for. I for one have often found myself attending theatre productions in countries where I didn’t speak the language, wishing that a translation fairy could whisper the translation in my ear during the show without disturbing others. But how can one actually speak for, or on behalf of, another – in other words, how does representation work? How can we make sure that the theatre becomes a truly inclusive art form, whereas many people as possible feel adequately represented and catered for? Like an actor speaks on behalf of a character – she stands there on stage in lieu of the character, taking their place, becoming (an)other by uttering their words  – a translator speaks on behalf of an author – she writes in their place, often trying to imagine how the author would have phrased a particular word or sentence, had they been native speakers in the target language, or else trying to insert her voice in the target text. Taking theatre and translation at face value, one might think that acting, speaking, writing, staging or interpreting on behalf of someone else is not only possible, but fundamental to the very nature of these practices, which few people question as structurally unethical. For instance, we hardly ever hear the argument that actors playing historical characters do not have the right to portray them because they are too distant from them. But ethical problems arise when someone in a position of power is seen to seize the right to represent or speak for someone who has less power than them, for instance when a straight actor plays an 5

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LGBT+ character, because homosexuality has been routinely marginalized by heteronormative discourses. So should people only be allowed to speak for themselves – or maybe just for the groups of which they are a member? On the one hand, speaking on behalf of others can be seen as an act of violence given the potential to misrepresent and appropriate an identity that isn’t yours. Some stage artists have chosen the realm of presentational performance to avoid this ethical conundrum and to question the very notion of representation  – Antonin Artaud was one of the first. Feminist translators, such as Nicole Brossard and Barbara Godard, have challenged the requirement to faithfully represent their source by embracing conscious manipulation of the text. On the other hand, for much current theatre and translation practice, representation of the (cultural and linguistic) other is a central concern, therefore it seems essential that we find an ethically sound base for the act of speaking for/on behalf of others. Linda Martín Alcoff (1991) examined whether and how scholars can ethically speak for others and concluded that retreating into only speaking for one’s self denies the very fact that each of us is always already made of other people’s stories. But Alcoff rightly recommends that the privileged who find themselves in a position to speak for the less privileged must speak with, not only for them. This book explores the intersections between theatre and translation by proposing that the two practices have something fundamental in common. By attending a live performance and/or reading a text originally conceived in a 6

language other than the one in which they are accessing it, audiences and readers encounter stories written/spoken/ performed on behalf of others, such as people from other cultures, but also people from our own culture that are different from us, or even the other in ourselves. As users of theatre and translation, we are given the task to interpret someone else’s interpretation of an other, and, in so doing, we become translators too. This book aims to support you, the reader, in taking on this delicate yet key role, that of the interpreter of the stories (told on behalf) of others – no matter if you are a theatre-maker, spectator, scholar, student or anything in between. Theatre and translation share questions about ethics, politics and aesthetics, which I will examine in this volume. Chapter 1 will explore the ‘what’ of theatre and translation: what do we mean when we talk about translation in relation to theatre? Defining the field will be my aim here. Chapter 2 is concerned with the ‘how’ of theatre and translation. I will focus on how practice is informed by political and ethical paradigms, and formulate ideas about challenging the status quo. In Chapter 3 I will tackle the ‘why’ of theatre and translation and argue that more (types of) translations are needed to support a culture of equity, diversity and inclusion. The point of this book is not to prescribe but to interrogate, critique and propose a series of points for further discussion. My arguments will inevitably be informed by my position of privilege as a white, middle-class European and a full-time member of staff at a British university, but they will also filter my sensibility as a feminist scholar, a practicing 7

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theatre translator, and an Italian migrant who writes and lives her daily life in a language/culture other than her native one, and has consequently developed a mixed identity. This book also reflects the views of someone who has recently had some experience of what it means to be part of an unwelcome minority – EU nationals in the UK – who woke up on 24 June 2016 feeling like the country they had decided to call home wanted them out. Chapter 1: What? Defining Translation Etymological Labyrinths

Definitions first. What do we mean by ‘theatre’ and ‘translation’? It has become customary for scholarly investigations into specific concepts to start with etymological musings, almost in search of a word’s ‘essential’ meaning, but, of course, etymologies can only tell the relative point of view of one language/culture, and they encapsulate the relics of past – if sometimes persistent – ways of conceptualizing the world. I want to propose that, rather than using etymology to find the definitive meaning of a concept through the limited perspective of a single language, investigating how words are made of smaller units of meaning, and how those units have been used in the past to construct more complex concepts, can tell us a great deal about the cultural history of an idea as it develops through, for instance, Latin and ancient Greek and into Romance and other European contexts. This activity can in turn help us relativize, destabilize and unlearn some of our own linguistic-cultural biases. 8

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theatre translator, and an Italian migrant who writes and lives her daily life in a language/culture other than her native one, and has consequently developed a mixed identity. This book also reflects the views of someone who has recently had some experience of what it means to be part of an unwelcome minority – EU nationals in the UK – who woke up on 24 June 2016 feeling like the country they had decided to call home wanted them out. Chapter 1: What? Defining Translation Etymological Labyrinths

Definitions first. What do we mean by ‘theatre’ and ‘translation’? It has become customary for scholarly investigations into specific concepts to start with etymological musings, almost in search of a word’s ‘essential’ meaning, but, of course, etymologies can only tell the relative point of view of one language/culture, and they encapsulate the relics of past – if sometimes persistent – ways of conceptualizing the world. I want to propose that, rather than using etymology to find the definitive meaning of a concept through the limited perspective of a single language, investigating how words are made of smaller units of meaning, and how those units have been used in the past to construct more complex concepts, can tell us a great deal about the cultural history of an idea as it develops through, for instance, Latin and ancient Greek and into Romance and other European contexts. This activity can in turn help us relativize, destabilize and unlearn some of our own linguistic-cultural biases. 8

For instance, we know that ‘theatre’ comes from the ancient Greek noun θέατρον, theatron, literally ‘the place of seeing/watching’, and originally it only referred to the seating area of an open-air amphitheatre, not to theatre as an art form. The Greek verb θεάομαι, theaomai, meant to behold and to contemplate both literally – I see through my eyes – and metaphorically – I understand. Noting the emphasis on seeing is crucial to grasp the cultural history of theatre as visual spectacle in ancient Greece and its influence on the western world. This etymology helps us understand how, in the many western languages/cultures that have inherited the word ‘theatron’, theatre tends to be understood as something that one accesses mainly with one’s sight. This might permit us to critique the understanding of theatre as a place where vision is the master of our experience, and instead propose one in which each of our senses, such as hearing, touching, smelling and tasting, should be considered. How do the blind or partially sighted fit into this visual definition of theatre? Similarly, the etymology of ‘translation’ allows us to illuminate a key aspect of the complex cultural history of translation in the western world. We know that it comes from the Latin translatio, a compound of ‘trans-’ (across) and the root lat-, associated with the irregular verb ferre (to carry), so that we may say that to translate means ‘to carry across’. Translation could be considered, then, a metaphorical acceptation of translatio, which in a literal sense means to transport something from one place to another. According to the Romans, translating was something comparable to shipping 9

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meaning across to a different location.This etymology brings us face to face with a deep-seated western understanding of translation as a matter of relocating content from one language to another, whereby the parcel’s content would remain unchanged in the process of delivery. Searching further afield within etymological connections, we also know that the Latin transferre is a calque – a linguistic process also known as ‘loan translation’, whereby a word construction in one language is the translation of a word in another – of the Greek verb μεταφέρειν, metaphérein (to transfer, to change, where ‘meta-’  =  ‘trans-’, and ferre  =  phérein), so this makes the Latin-derived word ‘translation’ cross-­ linguistically connected to the Greek-derived word ‘metaphor’. In modern Greek, a removals van may actually have the word μεταφορά, metaphorá (‘transport’), painted over it – but moving houses has nothing to do with metaphors, or has it? As with the image of delivering goods across to a different place, western conceptualizations of translation have been haunted by the metaphors that have been used through the ages to define it, which often operate across linguistic barriers. For instance, the influential trope that the best translations are ‘faithful’ evokes patriarchal ideals of femininity (a translation is faithful, passive, derivative) versus masculinity (the original is active, masterly, unique) and works across many European languages. A ‘good’ translator, like a ‘good’ wife/servant, should stand behind their original/master/husband. But as is pointed out by the well-­ known Italian idiom traduttore traditore (translator traitor) 10

and the French expression belle infidèle (literally, ‘beautiful and unfaithful woman’, which refer to translations that, despite their aesthetic quality, supposedly depart too much from the original), the popular imagination both demands faithfulness and denies its very possibility. The take-home message of these metaphors is that translators and women can hardly be trusted. Post-colonial and feminist metaphors of translation have tried to subvert these traditional images: in his 1928 Manifesto Antropófago, Brazilian writer Oswald de Andrade proposed a new way of understanding translation as a form of cannibalism, an attempt at liberating Brazilian culture from mental colonialism whereby, following native rituals, the colonizer’s blood could be transformed into new energy by the digestive system of the colonized. The expressions ‘re-belle et infidèle’ (literally, rebellious and unfaithful’, a pun on the ‘belle infidèle’ image), ‘reécriture au féminin’ (feminine rewriting) and ‘womanhandling’ (a wordplay on ‘manhandling’) are used by feminist writers and translators Susanne de Lobitinère-Harwood (1982), Nicole Brossard and Barbara Godard to refer to the process of translation as a creative endeavour, refuting the hierarchic binary of original vs copy. In the western popular imagination, translation has been (and still is) understood as the task of moving units of meaning across to different places. But to think of translation as factual transportation of content is, at best, reductive and, at worst, misleading – it can lead one to think that there are such things as ‘literal’ or ‘exact’ translations, and that they are distinct from ‘free’ translations.The fact is that a translation 11

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is never about simple and unproblematic ‘transfers’; and ‘literal’ translation, understood as an accurate and indisputable version of a text in another language, is never actually possible. Translators, like actors with their characters and directors with their scripts, will always have to make choices that highlight this or that aspect of the source text (namely, the entity previously known as the ‘original’), and their choices will solicit different associations in the spectators/ readers of the target text, precisely because no two languages segment the world in the same way. Perhaps exploring the etymology of ‘translation’ in other languages/cultures could help us further redress the cultural associations explored so far through English. Many modern languages use loan translations of the Latin transferre and of the ancient Greek metaphérein  – for instance, the German übersetzen and the Russian ηереводить, perevodit, which both mean ‘to carry across’. But in other languages, like for instance Japanese, the word used to refer to the process of translation does not suggest spatial metaphors. In Japanese, the verb/noun 翻訳, hon’yaku, is formed of hon – ‘to turn around’, ‘to change’ – and yaku, a character with many possible meanings – such as ‘reasoning’, ‘meaning’, ‘situation’, but also ‘translation’ – which are qualified by the context (in this case the association with ‘hon’). Therefore, you could say that in Japanese, to translate suggests ‘to change one’s reasoning’, ‘to change one’s mind’ or ‘to change meaning’, but also ‘to change situation’ Can. As Judy Wakabayashi argues, ‘the notion underlying hon’yaku is one of change (including 12

intralingual change) rather than intralingual transfer or carrying across identical meaning’ (2009: 183). In Chinese – which by the way is somewhat ‘etymologically’ linked to Japanese via the practice of kambun kundoku, the translation of written Chinese into written Japanese – to translate is 翻譯, fānyi.The first character, which is the same as in Japanese, but is pronounced fān, again signifies ‘to turn over’, ‘to flip’. The second character, yi, also means ‘to interpret’ but is a homonym of the character meaning ‘exchange’. According to Maria Tymoczko (2014: 72), the etymology of fānyi is linked to the practices of embroidery and turning pages of a book, which suggests the image of the reverse of an embroidered work, with loose ends and hanging threads. By letting ourselves get lost in the maze of etymological quests, we have encountered semantic chains linking translation with notions apparently distant from it.What we should take home from this is how the cultural history of words can shed light on established assumptions within languages/cultures, but also prompt reflections for how to subvert them. What’s in a Cup of Tea? The Mirage of Equivalence

If translation is understood as delivering a fixed meaning unchanged to a different context, it is clear that we will always have a problem in fulfilling that goal and that translation will be understood as a paradoxical endeavour. Even the simplest sentence, for instance, the English, ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’, does not easily map on to other language/ culture combinations and could be translated in many different ways, none of which fully reflect the associations that 13

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such a sentence suggests in a British English context (because, of course, that same sentence means different things in South African, Nigerian, Jamaican, Australian or US English). Tea has such a rich cultural history in China, Japan and Korea, where it has been consumed for thousands of years, but also a very different one in India – where it was introduced as a crop by British colonialists  – and in the West  – where it became popular following the British Empire’s successful attempt to challenge China’s trade monopoly. Back in the 1800s, plantations in India and Brazil were looked after by slaves or badly paid labourers. Imagine the context of the sentence is a British parent talking to their child who is feeling down, where ‘a nice cup of tea’ is that thing that is supposed to always make one feel better, an ailment for the soul’s ills – something that French scholar Roland Barthes might have called a ‘mythology’, whereby tea is transformed into a pre-­ideological fact and deprived of its history, concealing its association with colonialism and exploitation (see Barthes 2000). The history of tea and tea-drinking habits alone is enough to change the meaning of this beverage for different people in different places. It is certainly not offered to cheer people up in Northern Brazil, Peru or Croatia, where you would only drink it if you had a temperature or an upset tummy. So if that mother offered that cup of tea to her child on a stage, a spectator in São Paulo might infer that the child is physically unwell, or the whole notion of the British ‘cuppa’ might be lost on her. What should a Brazilian translator do then? One of the possible interpretations of the sentence is, ‘Can I comfort you 14

with something that will make you feel better?’ But if in the target culture tea is not commonly drunk, or if it is considered an expensive luxury of the upper or colonial classes, a translator wishing to communicate ‘equivalent meaning’ and elicit an ‘equivalent effect’ in the target audience may decide to swap the cup of tea with the local panacea of choice. For instance, my Southern Italian granny would never have dreamt of offering me tea (an entirely alien drink to her) and would have cooked me spaghetti with tomato sauce instead. If I were looking pale, for an extra shot of positive energy, she would have made me an uovo sbattuto (a whisked raw egg yolk with tons of sugar). However, what tea means to an English person will never exactly map on to what pasta or uovo sbattuto mean for an Italian (and they mean different things to different people in different Italian regions too): there is no real cultural equivalence available there, as with most other cases of culturally-specific notions. At this point you might ask, ‘Are you really telling me that an exact equivalent can never be found in translation – even for concrete things like, say, “carbon dioxide”?’ Yes, I am telling you just that, because a word’s meaning is never reducible to its referent (here, CO2), but it consists of the sum of all its possible uses and associations, and its definition shifts with context. Mind you, in Italian, you have two possible translations of ‘carbon dioxide’: biossido di carbonio in a more technical register and anidride carbonica in a more popular one. Even if both seem like exact, literal translations of ‘carbon dioxide’ without ‘loss’, you need to take into account that cultural associations and use patterns of this 15

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notion will vary widely in different contexts: a Guardianreading middle-class Londoner in 2020 might typically associate any mention of ‘carbon dioxide’ with climate change and one’s carbon footprint; the same phrase in Barbados will have a different meaning. A Southern Italian cattle farmer or coal plant worker, or indeed anyone living in a context in which fighting climate change is not considered a priority, might be more inclined to associate anidride carbonica with sparkling water or photosynthesis than with the greenhouse effect. One can never entirely replicate how a notion in one language/culture is linked, semantically, socially or ideologically, with other notions, and the maps these associations create in people’s minds. I hope you can see now that the notion of equivalence is little more than a fantasy. And yet translation is far from impossible, it just needs to be reframed and reimagined: from the relocation of invariable pieces of content to the creation of interpretative possibilities for constantly shifting meanings (see Venuti 2013: 2–5). People think, segment and name the world differently through different languages: we need to learn to accept and value that difference, rather than silence it, through the practice of translation. This is why more people need to become aware of the processes and complexities of translation. In Algerian playwright Mohamed Kacimi’s French-­ language play Terre Sainte (Holy Land, 2006), two characters we can presume to be from a Palestinian context converse about the ongoing war while drinking arak – an aniseed-flavoured distilled spirit typical of the Eastern Mediterranean 16

and Western Asia. In Colin Teevan’s English translation of this play, the characters drink whisky (a decision taken in agreement with Kacimi, but the script warns the reader that the director can choose to switch back to arak). If the characters drink whisky, what will remain of the specifically Middle-Eastern context – assuming it was relevant? If arak is kept, what would spectators of the English-language production make of this ‘alien’ spirit? Will they read it as ‘particular’ or ‘universal’? It is a small decision that could have big repercussions on the production’s reception. Neither of the two translation approaches will give the audience unmediated access to the ‘original’. They will only give them access to the theatre-makers’ subjective rendition of the source. So far, I’ve touched on single word choices. But translation is also about things like the use of sounds, figures of speech, the structure of sentences, style, genre, discourse, intertextuality and much more. And the complications don’t end here. If we have now established that there are many possible translations of the same source, each highlighting different aspects and evoking different associations, what can we say of the other element in the pair, the entity formerly known as the ‘masterly original’? Since at least Barthes’ 1967 essay ‘The Death of the Author’, which postulates the ‘Birth of the Reader’, critics have questioned the stability of texts, foregrounding instead how porous, indeterminate and open they are to interpretation, not only in different times, places and cultures, but to different people in the same historical and cultural context. 17

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Barthes argued that oppressive western notions of authorship led literary critics to tie their readings to authorial intention and that we must instead learn to separate the ‘scriptor’ (the author-figure, now deprived of authority) from the text (1977: 145). Literary critics are now more likely to stress that each reader is entitled to a different interpretation of a text, no matter the author’s intention (that elusive notion) – hence the nature of a ‘work’ is intrinsically unstable and no single interpretation can ever claim superiority. If, then, textual sources are not repositories of fixed, unquestionable meanings, then it is only obvious that translation is all the more one interpretation of an entity that will keep changing depending on the time, culture and point of view from which it is approached. If there is no single, valid, authoritative meaning of a text, then there can be no single, valid, authoritative translation of it. Both elements in the pair – the source and the target text, or the ‘original’ and its ‘copy’ – are unstable, shifting, indeterminate. Suddenly, it all seems a little bit more complex than just shipping a parcel across from one place to another. Translation as Performance, Performance as Translation

We have seen how staging a play can be considered a kind of translation, whereby a director or ensemble/collective transfer a performance script from page to stage  – or, more accurately, author an ‘intermedial adaptation’, from the medium of writing to the medium of performance (Laera 2014: 6). One of the most outspoken people to 18

make the connection between staging and translating was French theatre director and translator Antoine Vitez, who famously said in the 1980s that ‘mise en scène and translation are the same activity: they are the art of selecting among a hierarchy of signs’ (Vitez in Déprats: 32). Drawing on Vitez, director and performer Simon McBurney said in a public lecture that ‘all theatre is a process of translation’ and that, in the context of the theatre, ‘translation demands a return to the pre-­verbal’, meaning that body language can narrow the gap between the source text and the target language rendition (2017). The relation between a translation and its source is a bit like the one between a theatre performance and its script. In this sense, the translator is like a theatre-maker creating a performance of the source, one of many possible (re)presentations of it. Much western theatre prides itself on being able to reflect reality, holding a mirror up to the spectators so they can recognise themselves. The realist and naturalist movements became invested in the ‘fidelity’ and ‘authenticity’ of their stagings, a bit as if they were trying to be ‘faithful translators’ of life on the stage. But the fact is that theatre’s mirror is always a distorted one – the theatre gives audiences as much access to ‘real life’ as a translation gives reader access to the ‘original’. Performances, play scripts and translations are interpretations of a reality/source, they don’t embody that reality/source itself in any presumed ‘essence’.

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In western traditions, both theatre and translation have been thought of as practices that ought to be subservient to the written text. While the dominant continental European view of mise en scène (the French term for ‘putting on stage’) has already largely emancipated directors from the duty of serving the text and granted them the status of ‘auteurs’, the understanding of mise en scène as secondary to playwriting still survives today in certain pockets of British theatre, where the role of the director is conceived as subordinate to the playwright’s intentions, and therefore not acknowledged as a legitimate form of authorship (see Billington 2007). Equally, traditional western thinking wants translations to reflect the original author’s intended meaning and style by searching for ‘equivalence’ in the target context. This understanding of translation demands that translators take all necessary steps to efface themselves and become transparent, giving the impression that translation never actually happened, and that the source was magically transformed into a new original in the target language. According to Judy Wakabayashi, the issue of originality vs derivativeness in Asian translation traditions is not entirely relevant. Notions such as reverence towards the authority of a written text were only introduced in Japanese, Chinese and Indian thinking on translation as a consequence of cultural contact with the West. Wakabayashi points out that concepts of ownership derived from western capitalism create sharp divisions between public and private, original and copy, which are less pertinent in places like India and South-­ East Asia where written stories were shared on palm leaves 20

(very different from the permanence of printing) and retelling with variation have long been a crucial part of oral storytelling traditions (2011: 27). With its obsessive recycling of old stories, performance in many cultural contexts is an inherently repetitive art. But ask any theatre-maker, and they will tell you that no two performances are exactly identical. Changes in performers’ energy levels can affect the audience deeply, and the timing of a joke can make or break the comic effect. Repetition with variance is essential to both translation and performance in many cultures – it often lies at the core of theatre’s aesthetic models and forms the basis for its creative processes (rehearsals in French are called répétitions). For instance, Japanese Noh’s classical repertoire is composed of roughly 240 canonical plays which consist of a set combination of music, script and choreography, amongst other elements. While inevitably there are subtle variations in each classical Noh performance that expert spectators can spot, painstaking reproduction is key to this art form. Interpretive practices often lie at the heart of experimental, devised performance too, even if this stage genre does not rely on or start with a predefined text. Many theatre-­devising techniques and physical performer training exercises draw on ideas of translation to spark the imagination of practitioners and audiences. French theatre educator Jacques Lecoq took inspiration from translation for his actor-training exercises: for instance, in his basic improvisation classes he taught students how to express the emotion (or the ‘movement’) of a colour, concept, poem or work of 21

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art through what he called ‘mimodynamic’ processes, or mimetic movements. According to Lecoq, the task is not for an actor to mime these external prompts figuratively (for instance, by hugging somebody to mime ‘love’), but to embody the ‘internal movement’ that they make the performer feel, thus communicating the notions’ ‘spirit’ through gestures that have no reference in the real world (for instance, creating a non-descriptive movement embodying the essence of ‘love’) (48). Lecoq wanted his actors to learn how to instinctively ‘be’ a concept, colour, poem or painting, rather than to describe them – he wanted his actors to be like translators so transparent and exact that they would be able to embody the so-­ called ‘spirit of the original’. We have seen how such an instrumental conception of translation is problematic because of how it is based on the idea that the source is an invariant and only one possible interpretation of it is correct. But Lecoq went even further with his thinking on translation, reflecting on the various languages spoken by his students and arguing that the way each language leads to specific bodily expressions has no direct equivalents in other languages. He argued that, unlike the fallible practice of translating poetry from one language to another, only transferring poetic writing into mimodynamics reaches the true ‘essence’ of a text: With the word ‘prendre’ [to take], for example, the French students embody the thing they are taking, closing their arms around the upper part 22

of their bodies. They are not trying to take this or that object, but to take in a general way, to take everything […]. Germans, with ‘Ich nehme’, pick something up. The English, with ‘I take’, snatch. Of course, this raises the problem of translating poetry. ‘I take my mother by the arm’ cannot be translated as ‘I pick up my mother by the arm’, nor by ‘I snatch my mother by the arm’. The best way to translate poetry thus seems to be through mimodynamics, truly putting the poem into motion in a way that verbal translation can never attain. (51) Lecoq here seems to elevate performance, or rather mimodynamics, to the only form of communication that is truly universal. According to him, if we translate a sentence into mimodynamics, we no longer need to translate it into any other language as it will be accessible in its ‘essence’ to everyone – an argument that problematically assumes bodily movement to be transhistorical and transcultural. On the other hand, the view of translation that emerges from Brazilian theatre practitioner Augusto Boal’s exercises understands performance as one language among many others, rather than a universal one. Boal posits that each person interprets a message differently; accordingly, in order to make sure that a message is understood, it must be delivered in various different languages, meaning that translation and multilingualism are seen as the bases for true communication. Boal’s starting point was the realization that traditional 23

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theatre practices oppressed spectators because they did not give them a chance to be active participants, so his aim was to empower audiences by turning them into ‘spect-actors’. Boal devised translation-inspired exercises that would support his vision for a participatory Theatre of the Oppressed, especially in the techniques for Image Theatre. Stressing the idea that translations of notions into bodily languages are crucial to creating a common ground between performers and spectators because they multiply meaning-making through translation, Boal introduced the function of Image Theatre in these terms: We must not forget that words are only vehicles which convey meanings, emotions, memories, ideas… which are not necessarily the same for everyone: the word spoken is never the word heard. […] If I say [a] phrase to a hundred people, it will be understood in a hundred different ways: who is each of my listeners? What am I for each of them? That’s why, in order to really understand a message, it is important to receive and to send it in different languages. An image is one of those many possible languages, and not the least of them. (174; 176, emphasis in the original) Boal then describes an exercise called ‘Image of the world: illustrating a subject with your body’. In this game, workshop participants are asked by a Joker (the workshop leader) to create ‘models’ – still images that represent, express or 24

visualize a given theme – and ‘dynamizations’ – moving versions of the still images that connect each participant to others in the group. In his practice, themes that are translated into Image Theatre are generally about various forms of oppression in society, such as family, violence, unemployment or religion, and how these can be overcome. Boal’s initial Image Theatre exercise is the building block of a series of over ten games that become ever more complex and interactive: the second exercise involves a sculptor using other people’s bodies to ‘translate’ a theme into an image, and the third, called ‘Image of transition’, requires a group representing both the image of an oppression and of the ideal state of affairs (in which the oppression has been eliminated), then figuring out how to transition from one to the other. Lecoq’s and Boal’s influential actor training and theatre-­ making practices have shaped generations of performers through translation-inspired exercises, but while the former ultimately sought to eliminate the need for translation through what he conceived as the ‘universal language of performance’, the latter sought to multiply interpretations through multilingualism and the empowerment of ‘spect-actors’. Translation as Adaptation

We have seen how both the source text and the translation are not fixed, but shifting entities, both depending on culturally, socially and subjectively determined interpretation, 25

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which turns ‘fidelity’ into a questionable notion. Translation cannot be ‘faithful’, but neither should it be characterized as ‘unfaithful’. We cannot reproduce a word, a sentence or a whole play in another language and assume nothing has changed in the process. Therefore, a translation is always already what we now call an adaptation. What is crucial to realize is that accessing a performance/translation of a foreign source in your language might not give you an accurate idea of the source text as it signifies, or used to signify, in its own context. Crucially, this realization exposes us to the fact that the translator’s subjective point of view, her ideology, her every word choice, have extremely impactful consequences that can affect how end-­ users of her translations view culturally and linguistically distant others. It is no longer possible to keep the translator’s work invisible, unacknowledged, untheorized and relegated to the attic. The translator’s work is not secondary, derivative or passive: it is creative and active, like that of a theatre-maker who contributes to a performance in a collaborative context. But the realization that translation cannot give immediate access to source texts and cultures can also feel disempowering. How are we going to communicate across cultural and linguistic differences, if the only tool we have, translation, cannot open all doors for us? And why is this book arguing that translation is a way to communicate across cultures, if what one gets through translation is not the other culture at all? It’s an interesting conundrum. Despite the fact that translation does not provide direct access, without 26

intermediaries, to other languages, texts or cultures, as a critical practice translation can bring us closer to them. It can spark much-needed conversations about different cultural values, linguistic identities and how individuals negotiate their place in the world.That is why more people need to become aware of the processes, ethical implications and politics of translation from the perspective of someone who negotiates the impossible position of speaking on behalf of someone else that they are not. I would argue that citizens of increasingly multicultural societies have a duty to engage with culturally/linguistically distant others through investigations, experiences, encounters, exchanges, apprehensions and inevitably also misapprehensions, so that it may be possible to respect and empathize with one another. Maybe the realization that a translation does not or cannot equal the ‘original’ will encourage some of us to start learning other languages and experience other ways to subdivide up the world, seeing it through other people’s metaphors, idioms and etymologies. No one can learn every language in the world, but one can try to learn one or two, and by doing that one might begin to discover the arbitrariness of how any language is structured, how it links sounds with meanings, and meanings with material or immaterial entities, leading us to see the world in a certain way. Having said that, there are always going to be thousands of languages – past and present – that will remain inaccessible to any one of us at any given time, and we are going to have to rely on translation at some point or other in our lives. Language-learning alone does not necessarily teach us to respect others, but it can teach 27

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us to relativize our own perspectives and train us in becoming better guests and hosts of others. Linda Hutcheon defined adaptation as an ‘extended intertextual engagement with the adapted text’ (2006: 8), which also seems like an appropriate definition for interlingual translation. In my book Theatre and Adaptation, I proposed to classify adaptation practices on the basis of six variables: language, medium, genre, culture, time and ideology (4–10). All translations and adaptations are interpretations, and interpreting is what we do, every day, when we communicate with one another, read a text or a performance and understand, for instance, the content of an advertising campaign or a news item. Translation and adaptation practices essentially rest on the same process of intertextual interpretation, but their definition and differentiation vary according to historical and social contexts. Current western definitions of translation prescribe that the translator should not rewrite, add or subtract elements of plot; however, this was not the case in seventeenth-century France where, if chunks of the story were removed or added, the target text would still have been called a ‘translation’ (Baker and Saldanha 2011: 406–09). In the twenty-first century, adaptations tend to be defined as those texts that, like Ola Rotimi’s The Gods are Not to Blame or Derek Walcott’s The Odyssey: A StageVersion, do not set out to be accurate and complete renditions of their sources but programmatically take elements of the source into an entirely different shape, overlooking others. However, this description is also true of translation, that it ‘takes some elements of the source into an entirely 28

different shape, overlooking others’. This is why I see the difference between translation and adaptation as historically and socially determined, not as structural. Translating/Adapting Cultures in Performance

A striking example of translation/adaptation processes in performance can be found in the puppetry traditions of the Indonesian archipelago. For the contemporary Javanese shadow puppet master (dalang) Enthus Susmono, translating traditional scripts from literary Javanese – the conventional local language used in wayang performances, but increasingly difficult to understand for young Indonesians across the archipelago – into standard Bahasa Indonesia – the official national language, spoken by most people in Indonesia  – was a matter of relevance and accessibility when on national tours. In his view, in trying to keep up with the times and in order to be able to reach out to all Indonesians and educate them to the message of spirituality that is embedded in the genre, wayang kulit needed to modernize and adapt. Enthus was known as dalang edan (crazy dalang) for his innovative brand of wayang kontemporer (contemporary wayang) and for the controversial nature of his personal involvement in politics. In his work, he combined the traditional elements of Javanese wayang  – namely, the stories form the fourth-century BCE Hindu epics Mahabharata and Ramayana, the religious teachings of Islam and reference to current affairs – with contemporary global politics and popular culture figures, such as Barack Obama, Osama Bin Laden, Batman and Harry Potter. 29

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Wayang kontemporer artists are known to have brought about innovations to the traditional elements of puppet design, music, use of lights and storylines of wayang kulit. According to Miguel Escobar, however, using a language other than Javanese in wayang is the single most radical innovation that kontemporer dalangs have made, ahead of changes proposed in other areas (135). This is because in Indonesia – where bilingualism and code-­switching are part of everyday life – the national language is used in the sphere of officiality/objectivity and local languages are used in the intimate sphere of family life and religion, of which wayang is part. Therefore, a wayang in Indonesian ‘transgresses these categories: it compels the audiences to interpret personal lifeworlds in the language of objectivity’ (135). In addition to this, the version of the Mahabharata traditionally read in Java was translated from Sanskrit into Javanese in the eleventh century and differs from the source on several counts, including elements of the plot (for instance, it censors instances of polyandry in the original, reflecting historical Javanese attitudes to this practice). The translation from Sanskrit into Javanese formed the basis for Hinduism to spread in Java, where a characteristically syncretic culture combined the latter with Buddhism until the Islamic expansion in the sixteenth century (Sumarsam 2011: 46). Dalangs essentially improvised (and still do) the stories for wayang characters based on the Mahabharata and (less often) the Ramayana following a set of strict principles called pakem. With the Islamization of Indonesia, wayang puppets and stories underwent subtle changes to fit with the 30

new religion (54–55). To complicate things, wayang traditions during the colonial period were deeply influenced by Dutch taste and the colonizers’ attempts to systematize, ‘upgrade’ and ‘clean up’ the stories and overall aesthetics of the genre. The publication of printed books of what for centuries had been improvised scripts and the establishment of a Dutch school system in Java, in which some dalangs were educated, resulted in a split between the ‘court’ tradition (aimed at Dutch and Dutch-educated Javanese) and the ‘village’ tradition (aimed at peasants). Nowadays, wayang versions of Hindu epic stories have come to be conceived as deeply entrenched in local cultural identities, so that performances of wayang feel and sound deeply Javanese to Indonesian audiences. And yet, their origins are linked to imported Indian legends that were domesticated through translation, appropriated by Islam and subsequently ‘rearranged’ by Dutch colonizers. Such is the complexity of cultural ‘authenticity’. Enthus’ multilingual performance, Dewa Ruci, presented in Bali in 2006  – mixing standard Indonesian with the Banyumasan dialect of Javanese and some English sentences – combined the mythical story of Bima, who goes in search for the meaning of life under the deep seas, with a comic scene referencing contemporary local politics. The main narrative, drawn from the Mahabharata and performed in Indonesian, was interrupted by a comic interlude, delivered in Indonesian, Javanese and some English, directly praising the open-mindedness of the Balinese people who had recently been targeted by Islamic fundamentalists with 31

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attacks in 2002 and 2005 (Susmono 2008). The production was specifically designed for national touring and therefore Enthus decided to deliver the main narrative in the national language, while retaining Javanese for the comical interlude. Enthus’ message urged his (mostly Hindu in Bali, but generally Muslim elsewhere in Indonesia) audiences to practice inter-religious tolerance and presented Islam as exhorting peace among peoples (Escobar 2014: 343). A breakdown of the translative chain embedded in Dewa Ruci is particularly impressive: it encompasses interlinguistic translation (from Sanskrit to old Javanese, to contemporary Javanese, Indonesian, and even English), intermedia adaptation (from the page to the puppetry stage), intergeneric adaptation (from epic narrative to the genre of improvised wayang puppetry), intercultural/interideological adaptation (from Hindu to Javanese/Indonesian, to Islamic/Javanese, to Islamic/Javanese/Dutch, to ­ Islamic/Indonesian) and intertemporal adaptation (from the fourth century BCE through various stages of history up to the twenty-first century). The overlapping among translation, adaptation and appropriation is particularly evident when distant time periods are at stake, like with Dewa Ruci. But think, for instance, of staging a play text written a long time ago in what can be classed as essentially the same language as the source. Even if the language is still intelligible, the social context may have shifted so much that the same word could have assumed a completely different meaning or connotation, a cultural reference may now evoke an entirely new set of associations 32

and feelings, and a widespread performance convention could have become wholly controversial. This is precisely what happened in American playwright Branden JacobsJenkins’ play An Octoroon (first staged in 2014), adapted from Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon (1859), a melodrama set in a Louisiana plantation. For starters, in Boucicault’s play, the n-word was used throughout by both white and black folk.The plot – in which black characters have little agency – was ambivalent about slavery and colonialism. In its original performances, its mixed-race and native American roles were played by white actors and the casting of ‘real’ black performers was marketed as an attraction. These characteristics presumably did not cause much concern among white middle-class audiences at the time of the play’s original performance at New York’s Winter Garden Theatre, as derogatory vocabulary and performance conventions were part of endemic racism in the US at the time. While Boucicault wrote the play, debates about abolition were very high on the American political agenda. The British Empire had abolished slavery in 1833 and Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was to follow in 1863, but the road to equality was, and still is, very long. Today, structural racism still contaminates personal, social and political spheres throughout the western world, as highlighted by the #BlackLivesMatter activist movement, founded in the US in 2013, a few months before Jacobs-­ Jenkins’ play was first performed. In An Octoroon, Jacobs-Jenkins decided to shape more rounded black and mixed-race characters and inscribe a 33

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critique of racism through the introduction of an external narrative frame. However, he opted for keeping the n-word, so that contemporary audiences are made acutely aware and uncomfortable by the continued use of the now wholly unacceptable term, which has rightly been excluded from current vocabulary. In this sense, Jacobs-Jenkins practices a form of anti-racist ‘reverse discourse’ (Weaver 2010) re-­ appropriating racist sign-systems in order to develop an opposite semantic effect, that is, to disempower racism. Some audiences in the 2017 and 2018 London runs of An Octoroon could understandably be seen squirming at each iteration of the n-word, and some even left the theatre: perhaps this was the desired effect of Jacobs-Jenkins’ adaptation. Similarly, instead of removing blackface as a racist performance convention, Jacobs-Jenkins added whiteface and redface to the mix, using cross-colour casting and exhibiting face make-up, perhaps to question, relativize and theatricalize the notion of race and its performances. His was a controversial aesthetic choice that finds its political efficacy precisely in the act of adapting/translating its historical ‘source’  – the racist practice of blacking up in minstrelsy shows. Meditations on the problematic act of appropriating – be it ethnicity, history, culture, aesthetic or linguistic conventions, and so on – can be found throughout An Octoroon. In Act 3, Jacobs-Jenkins’ self-reflexive re-writing technique includes a discussion of Boucicault’s coup de théâtre – namely his use of photographic evidence to solve the murder case of an innocent black boy. A dialogue between the characters of 34

BJJ (partly coinciding with the author) and Playwright (reimagining Boucicault) highlights the issue that photography would have been seen as exciting new technology in 1859, but that it is perceived as no longer novel or shocking today because, in our era of smartphones and social media, we see photos as entirely mundane. The plot of both plays revolves around George, a young photographer and the new inheritor of the Terrebone plantation, which was mismanaged by the previous owner – George’s uncle – and is now up for sale. George decides to marry the rich heiress Dora in the hope that her fortune might resolve Terrebone’s financial situation, moved by his concern for the fate of the property slaves, who are also set to be sold and relocated, and particularly by his love for Zoe, his uncle’s illegitimate daughter (also known as the octoroon, or one-eighth black, an exslave whose free papers are now missing). But George does not act swiftly enough and the evil Mr M’Closky, who is also in love with Zoe, buys the property and many of its slaves, including the octoroon. Nevertheless, George begins suspecting that M’Closky has lied and committed crimes in order to buy the land and its slaves. In a previous scene, a camera had been set up to take a portrait, but inadvertently captured the murder of a young slave, Paul, at the hands of M’Closky. When George fortuitously checks his camera towards the end of the play, he finds that one of the pictures taken serendipitously in his absence was of Paul, who had been delivering important correspondence about Terrebone’s debt to its new owner, being murdered by M’Closky. This revelation 35

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represented the height of the plot in Boucicault’s melodrama and was meant to shock and thrill the audience, because it would have meant that M’Closky’s claim on the property and its slaves would have been revoked. JacobsJenkins’ characters BJJ and Playwright discuss the conundrum of conjuring an ‘equivalent effect’ on contemporary audiences as follows: PLAYWRIGHT. But part of the thrill, part of the Sensation of the scene, was giving people back then a sense of having really witnessed something new and novel. BJJ. And that’s basically impossible for us to do now. If anything, the theater is no longer a place of novelty. The fact is we can more or less experience anything nowadays. So I think the actual frontier, awkwardly enough, is probably just an actual experience of finality, I think. PLAYWRIGHT. Like – death, basically? BJJ. So for a while I was thinking maybe I could actually just set this place on fire with you inside – […] But that would be crazy […] Anyway, I thought I’d try something. I hope it isn’t too disappointing. ASSISTANT has wheeled out an overhead projector. He projects a lynching photograph on to the back wall. (67–68)

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Jacobs-Jenkins’ choice here is to replace the outdated ‘sensation’ of a fictional photographic evidence of a racial murder with a real photograph of a historical lynching of black slaves by white Americans. While Boucicault would have hoped to overwhelm his audience in a positive way with his ‘theatre trick’, revealing the evil Mr M’Closky as the murderer of a black boy and therefore finding closure for the plot, JacobsJenkins’ real photograph – which is framed in the play as his search for an effect ‘equivalent’ to the nineteenth-­century sensation around the fictional photograph – is intended to cause horror in his audience by piercing the fictional plot and reminding us of the unspeakable crimes committed against black people. A recent string of white-on-black murders in the US attests that there is still a long way to go to eradicate systemic racism (see, for instance, the killing of Trayvon Martin by a white vigilante in February 2012 and the killing of Eric Garner by white policemen in July 2014, to mention but a few violent episodes that happened just before and after Jacobs-Jenkins’ adaptation opened in April 2014). As we have seen with An Octoroon, the process of relocating a play from one context to another requires a reframing and renegotiation of language and performance practices. In Caridad Svich’s 2009 Spanish-language adaptation of Isabel Allende’s The House of The Spirits for the Repertorio Español in New  York, the playwright took inspiration from the Chilean author’s choice of setting the novel in an unnamed Latin American country, even though it is well known that the book refers to Chile and the rise of Pinochet. Svich 37

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decided to mix idioms from different Latin American countries because in her view Allende writes ‘about larger legacies of colonialism and economic neo-­liberal policies that led to the rise of dictators in the Americas’ (2018). Svich also knew that the Spanish spoken by the New York-based actors would carry accents from various Latin American countries. Instead of aiming for a standard Spanish that would erase these different cadences, she opted for a more heterogeneous mix of jargon from across Latin America. But when the play was performed in Santiago de Chile, the local cast insisted on reflecting a Chilean context and parlance. Change of context in translation often unleashes what one may call a misleading transparency, which needs to be questioned. This is what happened with Dalia Taha’s Keffyeh/ Made in China, a play written in Palestinian Arabic portraying everyday life in the occupied Palestinian territories, which was staged at the Flemish Royal Theatre in Brussels in 2012, at Shubbak Festival in London in 2013, at the Théâtre Ouvert in Paris in 2014 and at Beit Zatoun in Toronto in 2016.While Taha’s play placed the violence of an unending war in the background in order to highlight the humanity and resilience of her characters, does the word ‘war’ or ‘bomb’ really mean the same thing for a Flemish, British, French, Canadian and Palestinian audience? For European and North American spectators, ‘war’ and ‘bomb’ are something you read about and see on the news, but for Palestinians these concepts are not abstract or remote – ‘war’ is something one wakes up to, day in, day out, and ‘bombs’ may be heard or seen flying over one’s head, killing loved ones at any point. So while 38

translators will inevitably use the words available in their languages, these will not conjure up the same sentiments in different contexts (similarly to the argument I made for carbon dioxide earlier). While this misleading transparency complicates translation even further and highlights how communication is hardly ever a smooth process, it is important to remind ourselves that, despite all the obstacles discussed so far, translation remains an ethical imperative. How, then, can we practice translation? And how can we practice it fairly? The following sections will explore how translation for the theatre happens by examining practical approaches in contemporary theatre, along with their political contexts and ethical underpinning.  hapter 2: How? The Practice and Politics C of Translation Power Differentials: The RSC in China

Even if translation is often conceptualized as a practice that can further a democratic agenda and lead to a world more open to cultural differences, translation is not essentially ‘good’. In fact, translation can equally be a force of oppression, colonization and plunder because of its link to the exercise of power through knowledge. Translation has been one of the main instruments of empire as colonizers can only truly subjugate the colonized when they can communicate with them, thus extending their oppression to the realm of the mind. Power differentials between the dominant language/culture and the dominated ones severely affected, and continue to affect, the lives of people living in former 39

translators will inevitably use the words available in their languages, these will not conjure up the same sentiments in different contexts (similarly to the argument I made for carbon dioxide earlier). While this misleading transparency complicates translation even further and highlights how communication is hardly ever a smooth process, it is important to remind ourselves that, despite all the obstacles discussed so far, translation remains an ethical imperative. How, then, can we practice translation? And how can we practice it fairly? The following sections will explore how translation for the theatre happens by examining practical approaches in contemporary theatre, along with their political contexts and ethical underpinning.  hapter 2: How? The Practice and Politics C of Translation Power Differentials: The RSC in China

Even if translation is often conceptualized as a practice that can further a democratic agenda and lead to a world more open to cultural differences, translation is not essentially ‘good’. In fact, translation can equally be a force of oppression, colonization and plunder because of its link to the exercise of power through knowledge. Translation has been one of the main instruments of empire as colonizers can only truly subjugate the colonized when they can communicate with them, thus extending their oppression to the realm of the mind. Power differentials between the dominant language/culture and the dominated ones severely affected, and continue to affect, the lives of people living in former 39

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colonies in ways that have only recently begun to be fully uncovered by post-colonial studies and decolonial theory. For instance, the colonial othering of eastern identities, that Edward Said so lucidly denounced in his study Orientalism, are based entirely on linguistic/cultural processes of domestication of the foreign. The image that the white colonizers built of the colonized as childish, effeminate and irrational subjects relies on the work of western translators and cultural interpreters trying to dominate the cultures they pillaged and enslaved in the East and South. How could such an unequal exchange ever lead to fair representation of, or unmediated access to, Asian, African and Australian native cultures? One of the most significant repercussions of colonialism that is still difficult to overcome is the international dominance of English as the global lingua franca, backed by the combined economic, political, diplomatic and cultural capital of both the United States and the United Kingdom, where English is the first language: in other words, the Anglo-American world still benefits from colonialism through the so-called ‘soft power’ of language. For instance, in the contemporary literary translation market, English has the privilege of being translated into other languages much more often than other languages have the chance of being translated into English. Why is that? The argument (or the perception of gatekeepers) is still that appetite for Anglo-­ American cultural products around the globe is greater than the Anglo-American demand for foreign books, plays, films and other language-based artefacts: but is it really so? Part of 40

the problem may actually be the reinforcement of inward-­ looking taste produced by the conservative choices made by theatre programmers, book publishers, TV and film commissioning editors, and other gatekeepers, whose perceptions of their target audiences’ tastes are limited, and who have little incentive in questioning the status quo by expanding their audiences’ horizons of expectations. Because, of course, opening up cultural borders also means giving up a proportion of one’s own soft power, heading instead in the direction of cultural equality and reciprocity. It would mean ‘provincializing the west’. While there may be very little money invested in foreign-­ language play translations worldwide, one exception to this rule saw the geopolitical sphere intervene in the field of artistic practice. In 2015, the then British Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, unveiled plans to make China Britain’s second-biggest trade partner within ten years. This move was branded by officials in both countries as a ‘Golden Era’ of diplomatic, political and economic relations between the two superpowers. In 2016, Osborne announced in his Budget that he was to allocate £1.8 million funding for the Royal Shakespeare Company to embark upon a major cultural exchange programme with China. The project, which is still ongoing as I write this book – featuring translations from and into English and Mandarin – aims to ‘foster deeper understanding between cultures by sharing and telling each other our stories’, in the words of the RSC’s artistic director Gregory Doran (Royal Shakespeare Company 2015). In other words, Britain and China will not only trade more 41

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goods and services, but the Chinese will have more Shakespeare plays on their stages, and the British will see more stories adapted from early-modern Chinese plays in their playhouses. To this day, China’s soft power has not been able to penetrate the snobbish, often xenophobic Anglo-American world, but as the crisis-struck western economies struggle to find ways to keep afloat, using theatre translation to build cultural bridges with the Chinese – whose economy continues to grow at much higher rates than that of any western country  – seems like a sensible way forward. However, while the exchange programme positions the two trading partners as equal cultural players whose stories deserve to be heard by the other, it is interesting that the status of cultural icon is still granted to Shakespeare alone, not to any specific Chinese classic. In a world dominated by brands, this gives Britain the upper hand. The first element of the RSC’s cultural exchange programme with China  – known as the Shakespeare Folio Translation Project – aims to instigate stage-friendly translations and performances of all Shakespeare plays into Chinese in partnership with Chinese theatre companies. The second element of the exchange – known as the Chinese Classics project – consists in translating and staging English versions of Chinese canonical plays from the early-modern period adapted for the British stage and performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company in Britain. The translation of every Shakespeare play into Mandarin is driven by what the company sees as the current lack of ‘theatrically-viable’ (2015) 42

and accessible versions in the Chinese market and the consequent difficulties in understanding, studying, reading or performing Shakespeare ‘accurately’ throughout the country. Headed by creative producer, cultural advisor and editor Shihui Weng, the project began in 2016 with Henry V and King Lear, which were translated and performed through a collaborative process drawn from standard theatre translation practices in the UK, featuring a literal translator and an adaptor with playwriting credentials, and by inviting the Chinese makers to take part in RSC rehearsals for the same productions in English. The translation process is now different for each play, and the project has departed from using a literal translation, engaging instead translators who are also dramaturgs or playwrights to create the new versions. The translation process generally involves four to five people in different roles, all relying on the experience of watching directors and actors in action. The team usually includes an official Mandarin translator with experience of literary translation and/or contemporary stage practices in China (but not necessarily an expert in Shakespeare); a British theatre director with first-hand experience of the specific play to be translated, whose knowledge of the script is stage-­specific rather than scholarly; the Chinese theatre director who will direct the play; a Chinese dramaturg with expertise in stage practice; and an editor, usually Weng herself. The final draft is the product of multiple negotiations between theatre-makers, translators working both at their desk and with actors in rehearsal rooms. All translators are credited as part of the 43

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translating team, but only one, the official translator, retains the copyright of the translation, while the others receive a buyout fee. The RSC translation process acknowledges that theatre translation is not just about producing a script in the target language. The journey starts when a selected team from the partner Chinese theatre company visits the UK during RSC rehearsals of the play in question (each Mandarin translation immediately follows an RSC production of it so as to maximize possible synergies). The Chinese creatives discuss the play with the British director and attend RSC rehearsals. After this visit, the first Mandarin draft is produced. The following stage consists in a workshop held in China with creatives from the partner company, involving a provisional cast to test the first Mandarin draft. At the end of this rehearsal workshop, a second draft is produced. What ensues then is a desk-based phase, with several people involved in painstaking, line-by-line translations and back-translations (namely, translating the target text back into the source text to check it still makes sense), editing and refashioning as they go along, at the end of which a third draft will emerge, having been influenced by its practical application in the rehearsal room. The last stage is a five-to-seven-week rehearsal workshop with the final Chinese cast, the first two weeks of which are aimed at finalizing the third draft to arrive at the fourth and final draft. After the first two/three weeks of rehearsals, in which the translation is still in flux, the linguists leave the room so that the performers can get on with learning their lines for the opening. This collaborative process is 44

remarkable because it shows the extent of the skillset required to translate theatre and it draws attention to the fact that theatre translation is always a matter of collaboration between several parties involved, while it is not often acknowledged as such in western culture (see Frigau Manning 2016). The Chinese Classics project, on the other hand, brings a range of outputs such as plot summaries, play translations and RSC productions of old Chinese canonical work to English-speaking audiences. The translation processes in this case draw on different paradigms, with the British model of a ‘literal’ translation adapted by a commissioned playwright featuring prominently. According to the RSC, ‘every translation will demand collaboration, rigorous discussion and cultural exchange, as we investigate both the possibilities of these classical texts for our times, and of a range of translation and playwriting practices’ (RSC website, n.d.). But the RSC model, especially that of the Shakespeare Folio Translation Project, is hardly reproducible in small-scale, cash-strapped theatre productions. And even if the theatre-­ makers have enough money to fund translation, they hardly ever choose to spend it on getting the translation scrupulously checked and re-checked by several collaborators. A large portion of makers in western theatre agree that it is best practice to produce a stage translation in a rehearsal context (retranslating a text anew each time, tailoring the version to a specific staging project) and, where this is not possible, that it is good to invite the translators/linguists in rehearsals to discuss their approach to the text or elements 45

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of the source culture. However, that is not always the case and many Europe-based companies rely on pre-existing translations, only ‘adjusting’ minor elements of the text if they can get away with it and if literary agents or estate managers do not intervene. If not handled carefully and with respect for, and involvement of, representatives from source cultures, these intercultural negotiations can lead to damaging forms of appropriation. ‘Performability’ and the Ethics of Theatre Translation

According to Weng, the register aimed by the Shakespeare Folio Translation Project is neither everyday nor archaic, but ‘heightened language’. The primary goal is ‘to locate a clear through-line for actors and create distinct, vivid characters and voices with their own momentum and drive’, principles which, the RSC hopes, will give rise to more accessible and engaging stagings of Shakespeare in China (Weng). You might have detected in this characterization of the project’s mission a certain attitude against so-called ‘stage-unfriendly’ translations. This presupposes the idea that certain translated texts are more performable than others, referring to translations that are too ‘literary’ or that use a written, rather than an oral register. According to this line of argument, the best stage translations are those achieved through a process of collaboration with the theatremakers who are going to stage it, ensuring scripts conform to their ideas for the production, but also so that the target text can come across as relevant, agile and of-its-time, wiping off any of the dust or stuffiness that comes with aging 46

language. This may be a sensible approach for some contemporary audiences, but it is important to point out that the distinction between translations that can and those that cannot be performed is entirely ideological, based on taste and cultural/subjective conceptions of theatricality. For instance, in Romeo Castellucci’s Oedipus der Tyrann (2015), an adaptation of Oedipus Rex performed in German, the Italian theatre director chose Hölderlin’s translation of Sophocles’ tragedy (1804) out of all possible German translations, precisely because of its highly literary, cryptic, mysterious images – which many before him had branded ‘unperformable’ – to build a remote, dream-like, symbolic world on stage. Similarly, Robert Wilson’s Oedipus Rex (2018) – which premiered in Pompeii and was performed in Italian, English, Greek, French, German and Latin – picked the most literary and old-fashioned Italian translations of Sophocles carried out in the 1920s by classical scholar Ettore Romagnoli  – whose contemporary credentials as a ‘performable’ theatre translator were near zero – to envelop stage actions with a sense of extraordinariness. This is because both Castellucci’s and Wilson’s theatres tend to rely on distancing and estrangement effects, not on familiarity or proximity with the spectator.Their highly stylized, anti-naturalist aesthetics – though very different from one another – are supported by scripts featuring higher, more archaic or literary registers, which aim to create an atmosphere of otherworldliness, unfamiliarity, and even awkwardness. This is clearly in contrast with the actualizing agenda that the notion of ‘performability’ tends to endorse. 47

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The debate on the concept of ‘performability’ erupted in academia in the 1990s and, back then, the main players were Susan Bassnett (1991)  – who argued that the notion was undefinable and therefore to be dropped in order to avoid marginalizing translators any further  – and Patrice Pavis (1992: 131–54) – who related performability to the practice of mise en scène, arguing that to translate is already to envision a staging through interpretation. In my view, the notion of ‘performability’ has been instrumental in the development of normative practices around the translation of plays, such as the demand for performance texts to be ‘fluent’ and fully inscribed within standard dialects and spoken registers in the target language, avoiding not only ‘translatese’, ‘academicese’ and page-focused scripts for ease of pronunciation, but also actively reproducing the perceived taste of the receiving audience, favouring cultural assimilation. The proponents of ‘performable’ translations should acknowledge that, especially when translating into a major language like English or Chinese, ‘performability’ is a relative concept, and that there usually is a power differential involved in the process of translation, whereby the target culture is effectively licensed to adapt, appropriate, if not even ‘colonize’, the source language/culture (in this sense, one could say that the RSC’s method seeks to retain control in order to minimize the appropriation of Shakespeare by Chinese theatre-makers, who would have had the upper hand, if the translations were not being funded by the UK government). With the excuse of ‘performability’, the inevitable degree of domestication that is inherent in every 48

act of translation can find an allegedly indisputable justification fuelling a wholesale eradication of otherness from the target text. Upon closer inspection, the notion of ‘performability’ can be used conservatively to prevent innovation and theatre’s potential to challenge social, cultural and ideological norms in the receiving context, including power stratifications at work in current uses of the standard dialect. But how, then, can translation communicate linguistic and cultural difference? What strategies can be adopted by translators driven by a desire to create ethical encounters with other languages/cultures that do not sweep difference under the carpet? And how does the specificity of performance complicate the matter for theatre translators? This question has tormented me in the past few years. In order to begin to answer it, I want to tell you about Lawrence Venuti’s powerful critique of ethnocentrism in translation practice. According to traditional views, which Venuti critiques, translations must read like originals and the translator should make herself ‘invisible’ behind the original author. She should achieve this by conforming to the standard dialect, expectations and norms in the target language, giving the illusion that there were no dissimilarities between discourses in the source and target languages/contexts, and that the equivalence of original and translation has been ensured. This cultural discourse is captured by the Italian word simpatico – meaning ‘likeable’, ‘congenial’ and ‘possessing an underlying sympathy’ (2008: 237) – which Venuti analyses in an illuminating chapter of the same name. The traditional view presupposes that there should be an intrinsic 49

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consonance of ‘spirit’ between the author and the translator, otherwise mimicry will not work (incidentally, this is a bit like the principle behind traditional casting for stage and screen, whereby actors are only cast if they ‘resemble’ their characters, to avoid coming across as ‘fake’). The translating ideology encapsulated by the word simpatico ‘seeks an identity, a self-recognition, and finds only the same culture in foreign writing, only the same self in the cultural other’ but ‘this is always a misrecognition as well, yet fluency ensures that this point is lost in the translating’ (2008: 264). Pursued by the Anglo-American publishing industries, ‘fluency’ and ‘readability’ boost sales while busting difference. Might ‘performability’ be the theatrical equivalent of the transparency/simpatico discourse? Instead, Venuti put forward the notion of ‘foreignization’. Developed as part of his re-examinations of the theories and practices of writers and translators such as Friedrich Schleiermacher, Antoine Berman, Philip Lewis and others, foreignization is a translation ethics that aims to pay respect to cultural otherness ‘in an indirect way by questioning and upsetting the hierarchy of cultural values in the receiving situation, where dominant values tend to suppress differences through assimilation or to marginalize them through neglect’ (2013: 2). In other words, Venuti believes that translators need to reconfigure cultural difference within the target language/culture by challenging its (the target’s) hegemonic discourses – hence translation should be understood as inherently contextual and relative to its intended audience. For instance, if the standard literary language 50

prescribes the use of a formal register that is geographically consistent and homogeneous, Venuti suggests carefully inserting colloquialisms and localisms in the target text to subvert the culturally constructed discourse of ‘fluency’ in the dominant dialect; in the US, that would be the standard American English that readers would expect in literary publications. While Venuti sees every translation as an act of ‘domesticating inscription’ of the foreign, ‘never quite cross-cultural communication’ (2013: 11), he strives to conceive of a practice that would limit this inherent violence of translation and supplement the loss of source-language difference with target-­ language difference. Venuti’s two main suggested ways of achieving foreignizing effects are: first, a non-­ discursive strategy, namely the selection of source texts that subvert the corpus of translated literature from the source into the target language, and the canon of target literature of the same genre in the specific target context; and second, a discursive strategy: the adoption of a translation method that ‘cultivates experimentalism’ by pursuing an aesthetics of heterogeneity and discontinuity, rather than homogeneity or narrowly defined ‘fluency’ and ‘readability’ (2013: 2). Venuti takes as an example the work of nineteenth-­ century Italian writer I. U. Tarchetti, who translated Mary Shelley’s 1833 fantastical/Gothic short story ‘The Mortal Immortal’ into Italian. The most important of Tarchetti’s achievements is, according to Venuti, the fact that by introducing a new genre and discourse, the fantastical, to Italian readers, he challenged the dominant realism of Italian novels 51

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and their link to bourgeois ideology – a gesture that Venuti argues ‘initiated a change in literary taste that culminated in a significant canon reformation’ (2008: 152–53). Examining Tarchetti’s practice leads Venuti to argue that in order to achieve a foreignizing effect, such as introducing a new genre that upsets dominant norms in the receiving context, it may be more important to choose the right text – one that subverts dominant literary canons – than to find the right words to translate it. Rather than being the opposite of domestication, foreignizing translation ‘challenges the receiving culture even as it enacts its own ethnocentric violence on the foreign text’ (2008: 18). Stressing that a foreignizing effect may be achieved differently in different contexts, Venuti highlights that otherness, when translated, cannot be carried across as an essence, so it has to be reconfigured as a ‘strategic construction’ by playing with non-standard forms in the target language/culture (2008: 15). However, ‘fluency is not to be simply abandoned, completely and irrevocably, but rather reinvented in innovative ways. The foreignizing translator seeks to expand the range of translation practices not to frustrate or impede reading, certainly not to incur a judgement of translationese, but to create new conditions of readability’ (2008: 19). Venuti’s theories have been very influential, despite attracting many criticisms and misreadings. But how can they be useful to a theatre translator, director or collective devising ensemble? Because of the added layer of staging and embodied knowledge in performance, these theories and strategies have to be  – guess 52

what?  – translated into a theatrical language that theatre-­ makers can understand. I’ll try to do this in the next section, alongside examining models of cultural encounters on stage.  e My Guest? Practising Reciprocal Hospitality B Through Theatre Translation

In a discussion of intercultural theatre practices, Marvin Carlson categorized the ways in which theatre can forge relationships between the culturally familiar and the culturally foreign in seven stages. In his formulation, the first step is ‘the totally familiar tradition of regular performance’, such as the Japanese Noh theatre tradition. In the second step, ‘[f]oreign elements are assimilated into the tradition and absorbed by it. The audience can be interested, entertained or stimulated by these elements, but they are not challenged by them. Often they do not even recognize them as foreign.’ Carlson sees Peter Brook’s Mahabharata as located here. With the third step, ‘[e]ntire foreign structures are assimilated into the tradition instead of isolated elements’. For instance,Yeats wrote English-language plays in the manner of Japanese Noh, modelling his composition on a genre foreign to him; Japanese director Yukio Ninagawa staged his version of Macbeth in the 1980s, transporting the Elizabethan play set in Scotland into sixteenth-century samurai culture for Japanese audiences. The fourth step sees the foreign and the familiar create ‘a new blend, which is then assimilated into the tradition. Molière’s absorption of the Italian commedia dell’arte into his new comic style might be an example of this.’ In step five, an entire foreign tradition is imported 53

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and becomes familiar, such as Italian opera in England. Stage six sees the use of the foreign as an exotic inscription, whereby it remains foreign for ‘shock value’, such as the use of a whole foreign dance sequence within David Henry Hwang’s adaptation of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly. In the seventh step, an entire foreign performance is imported, ‘with no attempt to accommodate it to the familiar’ (Carlson in Pavis 1996: 82–83). Carlson’s classification is useful to begin to think of theatre in translation as a kind of intercultural theatre. In this sense, the performance of foreign-language theatre in translation can be located in any of Carlson’s stages, depending on how much the theatre-makers decide to engage with the foreign/source theatrical culture. The whole field of intercultural theatre, particularly reflections on ethical modes of making theatre interculturally, might help us find ways to manage this encounter – and maybe this is the time to re-­ read Ric Knowles’ Theatre & Interculturalism. Carlson’s classification, however, leaves the paradigm of assimilation unquestioned, assuming that any foreign practice is either forcibly assimilated to target conventions or becomes familiar at some point in time. But let’s imagine for one moment that we can compare plays to people. If a play travels to other places, like people, it might need to find a host willing to offer hospitality in their home, or it might need to build a new home of its own. I know – earlier I said that metaphors of physical movement are not ideal to think about what translation does (translation does not transfer meaning from one place to another), 54

but maybe we can use this anthropomorphic image to think about the ethics of reciprocal hospitality in theatre practice. On the one hand, through theatre translation we receive the stories of others in our home, welcoming them as their hosts, and on the other we inhabit them, becoming their guests. So who is hosting whom in this intercultural and interlingual exchange – and how can we ensure it is a fair and inclusive one? Many translators and theatre-makers believe that only those foreign-language plays that already conform to target norms should be allowed to visit and that the best way to welcome them into a new theatre milieu is to assimilate them as much as possible to the receiving context’s expectations and norms. The pre-selected guest, so to speak, will not only be required to learn the language of the host (and not the other way around), but will also be expected to adopt the customs of its host in all other respects in order to have the best chance to be welcomed, and not rejected, by the owners of the house. For instance, it will be required to conform to the hosts’ stage conventions in relation to ‘performability’, acting styles, visual aesthetics, conceptions of humour, genre, discourse and ideology. Only then, they argue, can the guest have a decent chance to be understood and appreciated as much as it would have been in its original context. According to this conception, exposing theatre-­ going audiences to a guest that is unfamiliar to them (for instance, a guest with different conceptions of politeness) is to be avoided at all cost. This attitude is the reason why, for example, the majority of foreign plays translated into English 55

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are of western ‘classics’, such as works by Brecht and Chekhov, which to a degree already ‘belong’ to dominant, white Anglo-American culture. Of course, translation always means reconfiguring an unintelligible message into an intelligible one within target-language values, forms and practices in a way that necessarily has to inscribe the foreign into a new context – but isn’t theatre’s role much more than reiterating the familiar? Isn’t theatre, like Brecht would put it, about recognising the familiar in the foreign, and the foreign in the familiar? Assimilation has been one of the most persistent models of cultural interaction between immigrants and their host countries. It has been enforced by nations, such as France, eager to assert and protect their cultural identities against the perceived threat of foreigners. ‘You can only come here if you stop being different and become the same as us’, the assimilationist state apparatus tells the immigrant, in a typically hostile fashion. But is the same approach for plays ethically sustainable? As respectful hosts and guests, shouldn’t we learn different ways to practise reciprocal hospitality? The British multiculturalist approach, which is often contrasted with French assimilationism, hardly offers a way forward.The latter seeks to impose less of an identity framework from above, granting immigrants more freedom to practise their customs and retain their belief system, but treating them instead as ‘ethnic minorities’ who are different and will remain marginal within the nation’s dominant cultural blueprint. Such an approach to translation would lead to the exoticization and othering of difference, another instance of 56

what Sara Ahmed calls ‘stranger fetishism’ (2000: 1–17). For instance, as highlighted in a recent panel discussion featuring playwrights from the Arab world as part of Shubbak Festival at the Gate Theatre in London in 2019, entitled ‘Writing in Europe: Opportunities, Challenges, Risks’, this kind of approach tends to select for translation plays that already represent pre-conceived, western-centric ideas of ‘Arab-ness’, or that only deal, for instance, with the themes of war, violence and terrorism. Texts in Arabic or about the Arab world are only welcome for the pre-codified foreignness they carry. Whether the paradigm is assimilating cultural others or isolating them as exotic, it is clear that contemporary state policies construe foreign immigrants as dangerous and do much to discourage, regulate and delimit their existence to containable numbers. The issue is that migration (or hospitality) is too often perceived to be at odds with the mode of being together that we call ‘nation’ and its fantasies of homogeneity. But as Ahmed puts it, ‘the definition of the nation as a space, body, or house requires the proximity of ‘strangers’ within that space, whether or not that proximity is deemed threatening (monoculturalism) or is welcomed (multiculturalism)’ (2000: 100, emphasis in the original). The very survival of the national paradigm depends on there being a majority of national subjects who identify with it and perpetuate its values and belief system, but also on the assumption that there are others, ‘strangers’, who do not conform. If that majority becomes a minority  – if, for instance, African refugees alighting on 57

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southern Italian shores one day became the majority of people living in Italy – then the nation in question would cease to exist – or so think many Italians. Self-preservation and self-definition through exclusion may be unsurprising pulsions of the nation state, but what are we to do with plays wishing to visit our stages from abroad? How can we be good guests, and good hosts, of them? How can we avoid framing them as exotic, delimiting their action range, and marginalizing them? An assimilationist theatre, by definition insular and inward-­looking, can contribute to the dissemination of misleading conceptions about migration and cultural difference, furthering inequalities and the exclusion of the already underserved and marginalized in our societies. An exoticizing theatre that positions the foreign as ‘other’ similarly excludes more than it includes. Part of the theatre’s role may be precisely to point to an alternative to assimilation and exoticization. So where can we look for models that will help us be better hosts and guests? Two Paradigms: Cosmopolitanism and Creolization

The question of what models of cultural interaction should drive our translation strategies has potentially far-reaching consequences. Perhaps we should be prepared to ask how theatre/translation might expose the oppressive, othering machinery of nation and use the stage to rehearse the demise of the arbitrary borders it enforces and the imaginary communities it wants us to feel part of. Perhaps we should also ask how theatre/translation might enable and produce 58

different, ethical modes of encountering and hosting others, or being hosted by them. Perhaps we should let translation reconfigure the theatre as a permanent border zone in which identity is neither here nor there, but eternally heterogeneous, porous and open. In any case, it is clear that the host – not only the guest – will need to change in the process, and be ready to unlearn some of her most deep-seated ways of conceptualizing the world. I want to introduce two possible paradigms, cosmopolitanism and creolization, that might help us think through the ethics of hospitality beyond the assimilationist and exoticizing models offered by nation states. They are by no means the only two options available, but the ones I wish to examine here. Both cosmopolitanism and creolization present some problems, while they solve others. However, they are worth discussing to at least begin to shake the hegemonic ‘common sense’ of assimilation and exoticization and start the search for ethical ways of encountering others and telling their stories, of speaking with and for them. Saying ‘welcome to my home’ is a complex and contradictory gesture. For Jacques Derrida, hospitality is an undecidable concept, an aporia: on the one hand, Derrida writes, true hospitality is unconditional hospitality, and has no limits; on the other, one can only welcome guests when one is the owner of the house and in a certain sense in control of the guests, restricting their actions and behaviours with various degrees of violence. There is no hospitality if there is no ownership. Therefore, one could say that true hospitality deconstructs the relation of self and other, making it 59

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impossible to host any guest at all; at the same time, a kind of hospitality that still relies on borders and ownership easily turns inhospitable, imposing exclusions on those who come to visit us. It is within this paradoxical tension that Derrida considers the notion of ethics and hospitality as co-­extensive. In an essay entitled ‘On Cosmopolitanism’, he writes: Hospitality is culture itself and not simply an ethics amongst others. Insofar as it has to do with the ethos, that is, the residence, one’s home, the familiar place of dwelling, inasmuch as it is a manner of being there, the manner in which we relate to others and to ourselves, to others as our own or as foreigners, ethics is hospitality: ethics is so thoroughly coextensive with the experience of hospitality. (17) Living together on this planet will necessarily mean finding ways to integrate the mentality of the local with that of the global, but the idea of cosmopolitanism has been dividing theorists into proponents, opponents and everything in between for centuries. A ‘cosmopolitan’ can be broadly defined as someone who thinks their ‘home’ is not a specific nation or region, but the whole world. This might come across as an elitist way of thinking fit for jet-setters and globe-trotters, yet it needn’t be so: in our globally interconnected world, the choices one makes on one side of the globe can directly affect people on the opposite side, and vice versa. So, in a sense, we are all cosmopolitans, although 60

we might not identify as such, or we may not like the word itself, or because the national paradigm is imposed on us since birth and it is hard to think outside of it. A cosmopolitan, then, is someone who is able to see the irrelevance of nationalisms, without necessarily embracing a universal or homogeneous global culture. Kwame-Anthony Appiah stresses that in a cosmopolitan view of ethics, ‘no local loyalty can ever justify forgetting that every human being has responsibilities to every other’ (xiv). Appiah developed a theory for how we might learn to co-exist by having conversations with one another cross-­ culturally, a project which requires translation and the discarding of current models of thought. Appiah believes we should all learn to care for one another in a globalized world, but locates the current issue with implementing true cosmopolitanism as that of transitioning from a national to a global ethical paradigm: Each person you know about and can affect is someone to whom you have responsibilities: to say this is just to affirm the very idea of morality. The challenge, then, is to take minds and hearts formed over the long millennia of living in local troops and equip them with ideas and institutions that will allow us to live together as the global tribe we have become. (xi) Appiah suggests mindsets need to change – so what role do stories, and specifically stories in translation, have in this 61

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transition? Paul Ricoeur grappled with this conundrum in his essay entitled ‘Reflections on a New Ethos for Europe’ (1996: 3–13). There, he argued that it would be impossible for the European Union to build support for its new supranational structures without a change of ethical paradigm in the minds of its peoples, who are used to think in national terms. How can changes in the imagination, asked Ricoeur, support unrealized changes at institutional level? Ricoeur proposed three ‘models for the integration of identity and alterity’ (4): first, ‘the model of translation’, understood as ‘really a matter of living with the other in order to take that other home as a guest’ leading to a new ‘translation ethos whose goal would be to repeat at the cultural and spiritual level the gesture of linguistic hospitality’ (5, emphasis in the original). Second, ‘the model of the exchange of memories’, as ‘a further step: that of taking responsibility, in imagination and in sympathy, for the story of the other through the life narratives that concern that other. This is what we learn to do in our dealings with fictional characters with whom we provisionally identify through reading’ (6–7). And third, Ricoeur analyses ‘the model of forgiveness’, as ‘the exchange of the memories of sufferings inflicted and sustained’ in order to avoid the horror of ‘the perverse recourse to a narrative identity which is devoid of the important correctives already noted, namely the examination of one’s own stories and the entanglement of our stories with the stories of others’ (9–10). Ricoeur’s model of a supranational ethics is based on an idea of identity as a receptacle of the stories of 62

others, and translation as the mechanism that allows us to practice the hospitality of others’ stories. Derrida also discussed cosmopolitanism and hospitality through the existing notion of the medieval ‘city of refuge’, a historical institution balancing between the unconditional, universal Law of Hospitality ‘which ordered that the borders be open to each and every one, to every other, to all who might come, without question’ (18) and the conditional laws of a right to hospitality, which could be contingent and specific. Theatre could strive to be that city, a city of refuge for artists and their stories from across the globe, whoever they may be. Theatre could strive to offer unconditional hospitality to all newcomers, welcoming their linguistic, racial, religious and cultural difference. In practice, this would require challenging existing taste and exposing audiences to substantially different ways of conceptualizing theatre and the world. Creolization, on the other hand, is a decolonizing concept put forward by cultural theorists of the Caribbean world in the second half of the twentieth century, such as Kamau Brathwaite, initially with nationalist connotations. Current uses are linked to Créolité, a literary movement founded in the 1990s by Martinican authors Édouard Glissant, Patrick Chamoiseau, Jean Bernabé and Raphaël Confiant in direct opposition to what they saw as the inadequacy of Negritude, a concept developed by diasporic African writers of the 1930s, such as the Martinican writer, playwright and politician Aimé Césaire, who stressed that diasporic black identities emerged from their African roots. Creolization refers to a specific 63

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phenomenon of cultural hybridization that took place in the Caribbean islands as a result of colonization, whereby crosscultural and cross-­linguistic identities began to emerge, and creole people began to identify with their distinctively mixed creole heritage. Mimi Sheller stresses that the notion was initially developed to account for a culture of resistance within diasporic communities of slaves. She argues that creolization is ‘a conflictual process of re-homing or re-­grounding, rather than simply a playful uprooting and re-­mixing of dislocated cultures’ (Sheller in Ahmed et al. 2003: 282). But according to many writers and thinkers who have adopted the term as a ‘master metaphor’ beyond the Caribbean region, such as Ulf Hannerz and Glissant himself, the whole world is now in creolization (Cohen and Toninato 2010: 5). While this semantic expansion of the word ‘creolization’ does not please every critic because of the fear that generalizing it may devalue its specificity (see Sheller in Ahmed et al. 2003: 273–94), many scholars, including Stuart Hall, have applied it to other contexts. Hall acknowledged the potentially subversive consequences of creolization, especially in challenging nationalism and its narratives of purity. He wrote: Translation always bears the traces of the original, but in such a way that the original is impossible to restore. Indeed, ‘translation’ is suspicious of the language of the return to origins and originary roots as a narrative of culture. […]

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Translation is an important way of thinking about creolization, because it always retains the traces of those elements which resist translation, which remain left-over, so to speak, in lack or excess, and which constantly return to trouble any effort to achieve total cultural closure. (29) Hall stressed how out of the three main cultures involved in the process of Caribbean creolization – African, European and American – emerged many other distinctive identities and languages (known as creole or patois languages), formed of fragments of all three but irreducible to any one of them. Hierarchies and forms of oppression were, of course, at play in this process of cultural interweaving and translation, but none of the three initial national/linguistic/cultural identities can claim exclusive ownership of the resulting creolized languages/cultures. This process, then, can perhaps inspire a decolonial model for cultural encounters in which the world of the translated play is fairly negotiated in a spirit of reciprocal hospitality, of talking for/on behalf of/with others, without having to assume the existence of a single host and an owner of the house. Creolization, reconfigured as a decolonial process, can support an ethics of difference based on a conception of identity as always already made of the stories of others, pursuing an aesthetics that complicates the category of hospitality by establishing reciprocal practices of hosting and guesting.

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theatre & translation Staging an Alien Spectating Experience

In my research project Translating Theatre (www.translatingtheatre.com), I took inspiration from the debate on foreignization and attempted to rethink this from a theatre studies perspective, at times consciously departing from Venuti’s arguments and recommendations, which aim to ‘stage an alien reading experience’ (2008: 16) but do not consider how the medium of performance complicates the reception of a translated text. Encompassing unwritten rules that are different in every culture yet codify expectations – concerning textual poetics, visual aesthetics, directing, casting, acting styles, accents, gestures, costumes, lights, music and so on – theatre adds further interpretive layers that need to be specifically examined. The live dimension of performance requires the translator and the director/devising collective to strategically construct difference for the target audience and speak on behalf of the writer. If the choice of text and painstaking work of the interlingual translator is not accompanied by similar ethical, aesthetic and political considerations in performance, the translated text’s experimental potential may be neutralized by an entirely conventional staging. Crucially, I am interested in how non-­ standard performance forms and practices can be used to reconfigure linguistic and cultural difference in the staging of translations; how non-standard performance forms and practices can support discursive and non-discursive strategies in the pursuit of an ethics of difference in theatre translation. 66

Translating Theatre was designed to address the lack of foreign-language plays in the British theatre repertoire (3.8% of all plays in the UK in 2013 were translations, and 2.2% of all performances according to the British Theatre Repertoire 2013). These figures are even more disappointing if we compare them with the number of foreign-born Britons and foreign citizens legally residing in the UK.  In Britain, the population is 14.4% foreignborn and 9.5% foreign citizens, while in London the percentage rises to 41% foreign-born and 28% foreign citizens (Migration Observatory 2018). Some of the most represented migrant languages/cultures in the UK are, in order of size: Polish, Punjabi, Urdu, Bengali, Gujarati, Arabic, French, All Other Chinese (not Mandarin or Cantonese), Portuguese and Spanish (ONS 2013). Why should you care if migrant and/or foreign-language authors don’t get a chance to be visible and audible in countries other than their so-called ‘country of origin’? Because monolingual/monocultural audiences have a duty to learn to care about other languages/cultures that live shoulder to shoulder to them. And because these demographic figures, read against the percentage of foreignlanguage plays staged in British theatre, point to an issue of social justice. The lack of translations on AngloAmerican stages could be seen as a form of discrimination on the basis of cultural and linguistic difference, but the issue is not yet perceived as such by public opinion.

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As Rustom Bharucha writes, ‘[h]ow can one presume to talk about interculturalism … if one hasn’t begun to encounter the diverse social and ethnic communities inhabiting one’s own public space?’ (2000: 2). The Translating Theatre project aimed to raise public awareness of translation as an ethical imperative in a multicultural society: the arts need to reflect the society they serve by translating more stories from other corners of the world, even if translation does not give us unmediated access to other cultures or languages. This is why, at a time when the UK’s relationship to Europe was (and still is as I write) being collectively examined in the political arena, we decided to translate from three of the four most spoken European immigrant languages in the UK.  Another key objective of the project was to experiment with an approach to translation for the stage that would be modelled on a kind of cultural encounter in which both the guest and the host practise reciprocal hospitality and must change in order to meet one another. In this light, we set out to test performative strategies that would challenge certain norms of British theatre practice from within. In the summer of 2016, a team of scholar-translators, directors and performers came together in London under my leadership to translate and perform in English three continental European plays written in Polish, Spanish and French by Europe-based writers with a family history of migration. We translated Denise Despeyroux’s Black

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Tenderness: The Passion of Mary Stuart, a magical realist comedy about history and our relationship with its vestiges; Marie NDiaye’s The Snakes, a symbolic drama about three women – the mother, the wife and the ex-wife of a man we never get to see – which keeps spectators hanging with its motionless, suffocated atmosphere; and Piotr Peter Lachmann’s Gliwice Hamlet, an autobiographical, anti-realist rewriting of Shakespeare in which the author’s experience of displacement during World War II brings up issues of memory and identity, written in Polish with hints of German, English and other languages. These plays were presented as staged readings at the Gate Theatre in Notting Hill, London, immediately following the Brexit referendum vote. The project was developed to resist, and offer theatrical counternarratives to, the anti-immigration rhetoric gaining more and more purchase in British political discourses. Dominant theatre translation practices in the UK tend to assimilate foreign-language plays by following the conventions of transparency and performability. The project asked how translation might be able to highlight, rather than silence, linguistic and cultural difference, without falling into the traps of assimilation or exoticization. Every effort was made to select outstanding plays that would challenge the perceived taste of British audiences and the conventions of British theatre, questioning assumptions about what should be translated and how it should be staged. Using translation as an intervention in the existing ecology of UK theatre – namely, as an opportunity to subvert existing discourses that tend to exclude forms of theatre considered 69

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capable of confronting audiences with unfamiliarity  – the project sought to make UK theatre more inclusive and representative. The research teams  – comprising scholars and theatre-­ makers – came together for one week each to rehearse the plays by Despeyroux, NDiaye and Lachmann, exploring how the desired effect – to stage an alien spectating experience – could work in performance terms. Each team put forward different strategies to subvert existing expectations regarding how foreign plays are translated and staged in the UK, but for all three, at a discursive level, the desire to reproduce aspects of the foreign-language syntax emerged strongly. Syntactical borrowing was practiced as a pretext to shift the conventional, standard dialect most commonly used on British stages and create new conditions of ‘performability’. At a performance level, all three teams experimented with accents and one in particular, the team working on Lachmann, opted for non-traditional casting practices (i.e. we did not seek to match the actors’ ethnicity, age and accents with those of the characters). After each rehearsed reading, post-graduate students carried out audience feedback interviews. Examining these, I began to evaluate the effects that the choice of text, combined with discursive and performative strategies, had provoked in our audiences (Laera 2018). What I noticed from the interviews was that by far the most perplexing practice had been that of casting two black British actors to play the two parts in the Polish play, Gliwice Hamlet, which explores how the ghosts of history haunt personal identities. Here, the two characters were interpreted 70

by regular and trusted collaborators of the director, one of whom spoke in an idiosyncratic Zimbabwean-inflected accent, and who could both draw on their own life stories to connect to Lachmann’s themes. Lachmann’s play is a poetic meditation on history and memory in which identity is conceived as fluid and performers shift roles between those of Hamlet and Gertrude, actors rehearsing a play, and the author and his mother.The title encapsulates the play’s interweaving of ‘particularity’, the author’s life story and the link to his native village of Gliwice  – a Silesian town which turned from Polish to German in post-war border reconfigurations – and the perceived ‘universality’ par excellence of the story of Hamlet. Many respondents were concerned that the representational gap between the Polish characters and the actors on stage was too wide. Was it ethically and/or aesthetically sound for these performers, who embody a different history and heritage, to be given the task to speak on behalf of a white Polish-German author whose play investigated his own childhood memories of displacement in the German–Polish border region of Silesia during World War II? On the one hand, many of our audience members – a self-selecting group of (mostly white) drama students, academics and theatre-makers  – felt that this proposition was not convincing, or that the production needed to be framed as an African adaptation of Lachmann’s script in order to fully embrace the performers’ African identity without ambiguity yet were not prepared to see how the actors’ ethnicity enhanced the story we were trying to tell. The actors, on the other hand, spoke about their excitement 71

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at playing Lachmann’s story of displacement, which partly mapped onto their own personal experiences and complex mixed identities. We knew that on British stages, performers of colour are only offered parts that could ‘realistically’ be non-white, and those parts are few and far between. Casting according to ‘realist’ concerns, however, often results in the reinforcement of stereotypes: while Arab or Middle Eastern actors are cast as terrorists or criminals (and, thankfully, many plays have also been written to parody the industry for this), black actors are selected for marginal or marginalized characters of low social status. We need different stories that empower people of colour and other marginalized constituencies, but we also need casting practices that are consciously challenging racism and society’s exclusions. What if, say, social and geographical variations of English from outside the British Isles and the US, or even English spoken as a foreign language, were not only allowed on stage to portray characters that ‘plausibly owned’ that accent? What if these non-standard accents were allowed to share what Quiara Alegría Hudes calls the ‘luxury of neutrality’ (Hudes and Sanchez 2019: 3) with standard Estuary English? Could we conceive of an accent-conscious casting? The conclusion I drew from this small-scale experiment was that non-traditional and colour-conscious casts, along with non-standard accents, which are seldom seen and heard in British theatre – hence generated the most perplexity in the audience – could be used as part of a set of performative approaches aimed at strategically constructing cultural and 72

linguistic difference in a foreign-language play on a British stage today. Strategically re-constructing (rather than transporting) difference for us meant working towards building a more world on our stages, offering more opportunities to those that have been underserved by dominant practices. Our aim to respect the source text’s difference drove us towards challenging target-context ‘common sense’ approaches not only with regards to the selection of texts and their textual translation, but also with their performance. What other strategies would you use? How would you practise translation in the theatre as an opportunity to hold society to account? I believe those working on the casting, performance and mise en scène of plays in translation need to think of themselves as guests, not only hosts, of that play. Their practices, codes, norms and expectations need to change too in order to respect their host’s difference – that is the basic principle of reciprocal hospitality. Chapter 3: Why? The Case for More Translations

In this last chapter I am going to argue that we need more, and more types of, theatre translation, on the basis of three main arguments.We need translations to: (1) expose theatregoing audiences to the stories of others; (2) offer a voice/ visibility to those who are rarely heard/seen in the theatre; (3) give access to those who rarely have access to the theatre.

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linguistic difference in a foreign-language play on a British stage today. Strategically re-constructing (rather than transporting) difference for us meant working towards building a more world on our stages, offering more opportunities to those that have been underserved by dominant practices. Our aim to respect the source text’s difference drove us towards challenging target-context ‘common sense’ approaches not only with regards to the selection of texts and their textual translation, but also with their performance. What other strategies would you use? How would you practise translation in the theatre as an opportunity to hold society to account? I believe those working on the casting, performance and mise en scène of plays in translation need to think of themselves as guests, not only hosts, of that play. Their practices, codes, norms and expectations need to change too in order to respect their host’s difference – that is the basic principle of reciprocal hospitality. Chapter 3: Why? The Case for More Translations

In this last chapter I am going to argue that we need more, and more types of, theatre translation, on the basis of three main arguments.We need translations to: (1) expose theatregoing audiences to the stories of others; (2) offer a voice/ visibility to those who are rarely heard/seen in the theatre; (3) give access to those who rarely have access to the theatre.

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theatre & translation The Stories of Others

In support of argument 1 above – that more translations are needed to expose more spectators to the stories of others – I maintain that the scarcity of stage translations in the repertoires of any cultural context is damaging because it supports an insular and autarchic understanding of identity: ‘We don’t need to look beyond our language to know the world’, the reluctant-to-translation theatre system communicates to its end-users. But do you know what? No matter how local or ‘global’ your language is  – and English definitely is a global language – everyone needs to look beyond their own way of conceptualizing the world through theatre. In an increasingly interconnected world, what people think or do in other corners of the world matters to us here and now. As citizens of multicultural societies shaped by migration and transnational flows of capital, we must take responsibility for how we engage with other cultures, because we simply cannot avoid them or turn a blind eye to them: culturally distant others are here to stay. However much we dislike how neoliberal capitalism and racism promote unequal exchanges between people, it is not by furthering cultural chauvinism and segregation that we will be able to address inequality or end oppression. The argument that we can only resist cultural imperialism by focusing on our own traditions and communicating less with other cultures is anti-historical and unrealistic. By engaging more people with the complexities and processes of telling someone else’s story, it may be possible to find new shared meaning, rather than lament its loss in translation. 74

Telling other people’s stories is what translators and theatre-­makers do on a daily basis: they speak on behalf of others. And that’s also what we do as readers, spectators, auditors and interpreters when we share with our interlocutors what we think we have seen, heard, read or understood about these stories. The practice of speaking for, on behalf of and with other people requires that we understand how to handle the huge responsibility that is given to us. Empathizing with others, who may be different from us, demands highly skilled emotional and intellectual labour, for which most of us – like athletes – require constant training through reading, listening and watching. Imagining ourselves in other people’s shoes nurtures our minds’ openness, hospitality and flexibility, and is therefore an important part of democratic, anti-racist sociability. Engaging with others’ stories whilst acknowledging the ethical issue of speaking on behalf of another, the risks of appropriation and the complexities of cross-cultural communication can play a crucial part in our mental exercise for a more equitable, diverse and inclusive world. Fear and hatred of the other stem from ignorance, but translation and performance can train us to meet other people’s world views, to begin to see the world from a perspective other than our own, relativize our own beliefs and practices and challenge ethnic absolutisms and essentialisms. While there are things we may never understand of other people’s experiences, we must keep trying and failing better by getting attuned to the complexities, paradoxes and difficulties of intercultural communication. This does not mean, 75

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however, that any kind of translation will do. Only those translations that remark themselves as translations can do the work of uprooting and regrounding that is necessary to resist cultural narcissism. The practice of writing, watching, reading and listening to translations as translations – not as misrecognised sameness that disregards the process of interpretation – can be instrumental in the training of hearts and minds for a progressive ethics of fair exchanges and reciprocity. We must learn to welcome the stories of others with respect and openness, and a critique of transparency is crucial in order to achieve this. We must also recognise that this mechanism of cultural exchange, of the hosting and inscription of others’ stories into a shared cultural tapestry, is constitutive of human history, and not just a phenomenon linked to modernity, colonialism or globalization. Erika Fischer-Lichte has dedicated her entire scholarly career to the notion of ‘interweaving cultures in performance’, whereby she argues that the process of intercultural ‘interweaving’ is always already at play through theatre, not just in so-called ‘intercultural theatre’ (2014). On the other hand, Rustom Bharucha has rightly pointed out that some cultural encounters, such as that between Britain/Europe and India, are not ‘two-way streets’ but rather ‘dead-ends’ dominated by appropriation and pillaging of the colonized culture for the colonizer’s exclusive benefit (1993: 2–3). From the point of view of Indian theatre-makers and audiences, then, it may not make sense to push for more translated plays to be imported from abroad. Instead, it may be 76

more appropriate in this context to concentrate on translating ‘intraculturally’, as Bharucha suggests, from one Indian language to another to further understanding within the heterogeneous nation state. However, the risk of ignoring, silencing and making others invisible is always around the corner. No culture is immune from the dangers of ethnocentrism. Using translation to decentre and subvert current hierarchies and dominant ‘common sense’ can be beneficial in any context. Visibility/Audibility

Which brings me to my argument number 2: more translations are needed to offer a voice and space to those who are rarely heard and seen in the theatre. Bharucha argued that it is pointless and even damaging to go and look for ‘novelty’ abroad, looting and cherry-picking from other people’s cultures, when there is so much variety and heterogeneity already at home. His argument may be taken in support for the need to translate from those (migrant or autochthonous) language/cultures that are present in the target context but are often not seen or heard there because of marginalization. For instance, in the United States, theatre-makers should strive to make Latinx plays written in Spanish or English more visible, given that Spanish-speaking migrants represent over 12% of the population. However, as playwright Quiara Alegría Hudes – who writes in English – has pointed out, mechanisms of othering and exoticization are constantly at play simply through the fact that staging her Latinx stories with Latinx performers in commercial US venues 77

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predominantly run and frequented by white, middle-class audiences. This means that her plays are taken to be ‘performing race’ rather than humanity (Hudes and Sanchez 2019: 3). Indeed, the theatre can do much more to make its own space more inclusive and equitable, even if, as I have argued, translation does not give us immediate access to the ‘original’. Translation remains our only tool: short of everyone learning every other language in the world, we have to make it work. So, the answer is not to give up, but to constantly re-­examine and critique translation as a practice and as a process to foster intercultural understanding, and to make more people aware of the complexities of translation by, for instance, making language learning compulsory in schools. Widening Access

And here’s my last argument in favour of more translations: that they provide access to the theatre for those that too often are denied it. Subtitled foreign-language or multilingual theatre can have a powerful and productive distancing effect in which a spectator is made acutely aware of the sheer effort required to communicate across language barriers – but accessing theatre through forms of translation, such as captions, audio descriptions and live interpretation may not be one’s own choice. For D/deaf, hard of hearing, blind and partially sighted spectators, these translation practices provide much-needed access to an art form that too often excludes rather than include difference. I have started this book with a description of a Graeae’s pioneering ‘aesthetics 78

of access’, which embraces translation in every aspect of performance. But recent technological advances promise to make accessibility techniques much more affordable and potentially widespread. In 2017, London’s National Theatre launched a set of pioneering captioning glasses that pledged to improve the experience of D/deaf and hard of hearing spectators. This new gadget alone does not solve the problem of widening theatre’s accessibility, which needs to be considered more holistically and embraced aesthetically, but technology can play a vital part in making theatre more inclusive in the future. Maybe one day AI will help solve most people’s accessibility problems, but until then it is up to us to raise to the challenge. Sometimes, for instance, hosting a subtitled version of an original foreign-language or multilingual production may be preferable to the translation of a script and the reconfiguring of it in the target language through a local cast – this is because for some, like parts of the D/deaf community, subtitled foreign-language productions may result in the performance being more, rather than less, accessible. The experience of not understanding the words being spoken on stage and having to read slides on a screen may not be everyone’s idea of a good night out, but it is a powerful reminder of the labour of translation, and of the existence of another language/culture beneath the surface and illusion of transparency. In the autumn of 2018, I attended a production by experimental Flemish theatre collective Needcompany, The Blind Poet. This was a multilingual performance in Dutch, Indonesian, French, Arabic, Norwegian, Tunisian and 79

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English, performed by cast members speaking in both their native and non-native languages, which was subtitled everywhere it was presented. Every member of this Brussels-­ based intercultural group of theatre-makers told the audience about their family tree going back a thousand years, mixing historical facts with pure invention and imagining how the company members’ ancestors would have met at some point in the past. The Blind Poet managed to create on stage a multilingual, utopian space in which to rethink history, subjectivity and belonging; any claim of purity in anyone’s background was hollowed out, and identity reconfigured as a permanent border zone. The subtitles, making translation visible, were an integral part of a moving performance that questioned the limitations of our current models of identification, and the urgency of reframing the paradigms of how we conceptualize who we are, where we are from and where we are going. Interpreting is at the basis of our everyday dealings with difference and otherness – not just with languages/cultures in the sense of national/regional identities and practices, but in our encounters with people of different backgrounds, attitudes, gender, age, class, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, ability, political affiliation, and so on. In this sense, then, even when strictly speaking, we share the same language, we are all ‘translators’ of the wor(l)ds of others. How will you pay your respect to the others you wish to represent? How will you be a good host, and a good guest? And how will you speak with, not only for them? 80

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further reading

Here are some recommendations  – by no means exhaustive – for what to read next. If you are interested in translation studies, the guides by Baker, Bassnett and Munday are excellent introductions to the theory and practice of translation; anything by Venuti is also highly recommended. For translation and postcolonialism, see also Robinson; Wakabayashi; and Tymoczko. For translation and gender: see Castro and Ergun. For cultural translation, see Maitland. For the theory of theatre translation, the best place to start is Aaltonen’s Time-Sharing on Stage, which unfortunately is out of print. Other key general texts on theatre translation are the volumes by Anderman; Baines, Marinetti and Perteghella; Bigliazzi, Kofler and Ambrosi; Brodie and Cole; Frigau Manning and Karsky (in French); Johnston; Krebs; Upton. For studies on specific contexts, see: Aaltonen and Ibrahim (Egypt); Boyle and Johnston (Spanish Golden 81

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Age in English); Brodie (London); Chan (Hong Kong); Curran (Japan); Nolette (francophone Canada, in French). The field of adaptation studies is currently dominated by the seminal book by Hutcheon, where she discusses theatre alongside other art forms. Books edited by Reilly and Laera focus on theatre and adaptation more specifically. Countless volumes have been published on adapting classical authors around the world, but Desmet, Iyengar and Jacobson’s collection on Shakespeare appropriations and Clayton and Meerzon’s on Chekhov adaptations offer important methodological lessons for the discipline as a whole. Aaltonen, Sirkku. Time-Sharing on Stage: Drama Translation in Theatre and Society. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 2000. –– and Areeg Ibrahim, eds. Rewriting Narratives in Egyptian Theatre:Translation, Performance, Politics. Abingdon; New York: Routledge, 2016. Ahmed, Sara. Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-­Coloniality. London; New York: Routledge, 2000. –– Claudia Castada, Anne-Marie Fortier and Mimi Sheller, eds. Uprootings/ Regroundings: Questions of Home and Migration. London: Berg, 2003. Alcoff, Linda Martín. ‘The Problem of Speaking for Others’, Cultural Critique 20 (1991), 5–32. Anderman, Gunilla. Europe on Stage:Translation and Theatre. London: Oberon, 2005. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in aWorld of Strangers. London: Penguin, 2007. Baines, Roger, Cristina Marinetti and Manuela Perteghella, eds. Staging and Performing Translation:Texts and Theatre Practice. Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Baker, Mona. In OtherWords: A Coursebook on Translation. 3rd edn. Abingdon; New York: Routledge, 2018. –– and Gabriela Saldanha, eds. The Rutledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies. Abingdon; New York: Routledge, 2011.

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Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. London: Vintage, 2000. –– Image Music Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. London: Fontana Press, 1977. Bassnett, Susan. Translation. Abingdon; New York: Routledge, 2014. –– ‘Translating for the Theatre: The Case Against ‘Performability’’, TTR 4.1 (1991): 99–111. Bharucha, Rustom. The Politics of Cultural Practice:Thinking Through Theatre in an Age of Globalization. London: Athlone, 2000. –– Theatre and theWorld. Performance and the Politics of Culture. Abingdon; New York: Routledge, 1993. Bigliazzi, Silvia, Peter Kofler, and Paola Ambrosi, eds. Theatre Translation in Performance. Abingdon; New York: Routledge, 2014. Billington, Michael. State of the Nation: British Theatre since 1945. London: Faber & Faber, 2007. Boyle, Catherine, and David Johnston, eds. The Spanish Golden Age in English: Perspective on Performance. London: Oberon, 2007. Brodie, Geraldine. The Translator on Stage. London; New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. –– and Emma Cole, eds. Adapting Translation for the Stage. Abingdon: Routledge, 2017. Carlson, Marvin. Speaking in Tongues: Languages at Play in the Theatre. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006. Castro, Olga, and Emek Ergun, eds. Feminist Translation Studies: Local and Transnational Perspectives. Abingdon; New York: Routledge, 2013. Chan, Shelby. Identity and Theatre Translation in Hong Kong. Heidelberg; New York: Springer, 2015. Clayton, J. Douglas, and Yana Meerzon, eds. Adapting Chekhov:The Text and Its Mutations. Abingdon; New York: Routledge, 2013. Cohen, Robin, and Paola Toninato, eds. The Creolization Reader: Studies in Mixed Identities and Cultures. Abingdon; New York: Routledge, 2010. Curran, Beverley. Theatre Translation Theory and Performance in Contemporary Japan: NativeVoices, Foreign Bodies. Manchester: St. Jerome, 2008. De Andrade, Oswald. Cannibalist Manifesto. Trans. Leslie Bary. In Latin American Literary Review 19.38 (1991): 38–47. Derrida, Jacques. Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. Abingdon; New York: Routledge, 2001.

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Déprats, Jean-Michel, and Antoine Vitez. AntoineVitez, le devoir de traduire. Paris: Actes Sud, 2017. Desmet, Christy, Sujata Iyengar and Miriam Jacobson, eds. The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Global Appropriation. Abingdon; New York: Routledge, 2019. Escobar Varela, Miguel. ‘Wayang Kontemporer: Innovations in Javanese Wayang Kulit’, unpublished, 2014, available at . Frigau Manning, Céline, ed. Collaborative Translation: From the Renaissance to the Digital Age. London; New York: Bloomsbury, 2016. –– and Marie Nadia Karsky, eds. Traduire le théâtre. Saint-Denis: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 2017. Harnish, David, and Anne Rassmussen, eds. Divine Inspirations: Music and Islam in Indonesia. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Hudes, Quiara Alegría, and Gabriela Serena Sanchez. ‘Pausing and Breathing: Two Sisters Deliver the ATHE 2018 Conference Keynote Address’, Theatre Topics 29.1 (2019): 1–13. Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. Abingdon; New York: Routledge, 2006. Jacobs-Jenkins, Branden. An Octoroon. London: Nick Hern Books, 2018. Johnston, David. Stages of Translation:Translators on Translating for the Stage. London: Oberon, 1996. Kenny, Mark. This Is Not forYou: An Elegy. Unpublished script, 2018. Knowles, Ric. Theatre & Interculturalism. London; New York: Red Globe Press, 2010. Krebs, Katja. ed. Translation and Adaptation in Theatre and Film. Abingdon; New York: Routledge, 2013. Laera, Margherita, ed. Theatre and Adaptation: Return, Rewrite, Repeat. London; New York: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2014. –– ‘Performing Heteroglossia: The Translating Theatre Project in London’, Modern Drama 61.3 (2018): 380–410. Lecoq, Jacques. The Moving Body (Le Corps Poétique):Teaching Creative Theatre. Trans. David Bradby. London; New York: Bloomsbury, 2009. Lobitinère-Harwood, Susanne de. Re-Belle et Infidèle/The Body Bilingual: Translation as Re-Writing in the Feminine. Toronto: Women’s Press of Canada, 1982.

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Maitland, Sarah. What is Cultural Translation? London; New York: Bloomsbury, 2017. Migration Observatory. ‘Migrants in the UK: An Overview’, 2018. Available at . Munday, Jeremy. Introducing Translation Studies:Theories and Applications. Abingdon; New York: Routledge, 2016. Nolette, Nicole. Jouer la traduction:Théâtre et hétérolinguisme au Canada francophone. Ottawa: Presses Universitaires d’Ottawa, 2015. Office for National Statistics (ONS). ‘2011 Census: Detailed analysis – English language proficiency in England and Wales, Main language and general health characteristics’, 2013. Available at Pavis, Patrice. Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture. Trans. Loren Kruger. Abingdon; New York: Routledge, 1992. –– The Intercultural Studies Reader. Abingdon; New York: Routledge, 1996. Rebellato, Dan, and David Eldridge. ‘British Theatre Repertoire 2013: Report by the British Theatre Consortium, UK Theatre, and the Society of London Theatre’, May 2015. Available at . Reilly, Kara, ed. Contemporary Approaches to Adaptation in Theatre. Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Ricoeur, Paul, and Richard Kearney. Paul Ricoeur:The Hermeneutics of Action. London; Thousand Oaks: SAGE, 1996. Robinson, Douglas. Translation and Empire: Postcolonial Theories Explained. Abingdon; New York: Routledge, 2014. Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC). ‘Press Release: RSC in China’, 6 October 2015, . –– ‘Chinese Classics Translation Project’, no date given, .

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Simons, Gary. ‘Welcome to the 22nd Edition’, 19 February 2019, in Ethnologue.com, . Svich, Caridad. ‘Caridad Svich Interviewed by Margherita Laera’. Unpublished email. 25 November 2018. Susmono, Enthus. Dewa Ruci [The Resplendent God], 2008. Trans. by Miguel Escobar Varela and Indraswari Kusumanigtyas. Singapore: Contemporary Wayang Archive. Available at ­. Tymoczko, Maria. Enlarging Translation, Empowering Translators. Abingdon; New York: Routledge, 2014. Upton, Carole-Anne, ed. Moving Target:Theatre Translation and Cultural Relocation. Abingdon; New York: Routledge, 2000. Venuti, Lawrence. Translation Changes Everything:Theory and Practice. New York: Routledge, 2013. –– The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. 2nd edn. Abingdon; New York: Routledge, 2008. Wakabayashi, Judy. ‘Secular Translation: Asian Perspectives’, in The Oxford Handbook of Translation Studies. Ed. Kisten Malmkjaer and Kevin Windle. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011: 23–36. –– and Rita Kothari, eds. Decentering Translation Studies: India and Beyond. Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2009. Weaver, Simon. ‘The “Other” Laughs Back: Humour and Resistance in Anti-­ Racist Comedy, Sociology 44.1 (2010): 31–48. Weng, Shihui. ‘Shihui Weng interviewed by Margherita Laera’. Unpublished conversation. 20 July 2018.

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index

accent, 38, 66, 70, 72 access, 17, 19, 26, 40, 68, 73, 78 aesthetics of, 4, 78–9 accessibility, 29, 79 adaptation, 18, 25, 26, 28, 29, 32, 37, 54, 71 Ahmed, Sara, 57, 64 Alcoff Martín, Linda, 6 anti-racist, 34, 57 Appiah, Kwame-Anthony, 61 appropriation, 6, 31, 32, 34, 46, 48, 75–77 assimilation, 48, 50, 53–9, 69 audibility, 67, 77 authorship, 18, 20

Black Tenderness:The Passion of Mary Stuart, 68, 69 blackface, 34 Blind Poet,The, 79, 80 Boal, Augusto, 23–5 Boucicault, Dion, 33–7 Brathwaite, Kamau, 63 Brook, Peter, 53 Brossard, Nicole, 6, 11 Carlson, Marvin, 53, 54 Castellucci, Romeo, 47 casting, 33, 34, 50, 66, 70–3 Césaire, Aimé, 63 city of refuge, 63 cosmopolitanism, 58–63 Créolité, 63 creolization, 58, 59, 63–5

Barthes, Roland, 14, 17, 18 Bassnett, Susan, 48 belle et infidèle, 11 Bharucha, Rustom, 68, 76, 77

dalang, 29–31 D/deaf spectators, 78, 79

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Hudes, Quiara Alegría, 72, 77, 78 Hwang, David Henry, 54

De Andrade, Oswald, 11 decolonial theory, 40, 63, 65 Derrida, Jacques, 59, 60, 63 Despeyroux, Denise, 68, 70 Dewa Ruci, 31, 32 difference (cultural and linguistic), 16, 26, 39, 49–51, 56, 58, 63, 66, 67, 69, 73, 78, 80 director (as translator), 12, 17–20 discrimination, 67

identification, 80 Image Theatre, 24, 25 inclusivity, 5, 55, 70, 75, 78, 79 Jacobs-Jenkins, Branden, 33–37 Kacimi, Mohamed, 16, 17 Keffyeh/Made in China, 38 Kenny, Mike, 2 Knowles, Ric, 54

empathy, 27, 75 essence, 19, 22, 23, 52 ethics, 3–7, 27, 39, 46, 49, 50, 54, 55, 59–62, 65–71, 75, 76 ethnicity, see race equivalence, 13–16, 20, 22, 36, 37, 49, 50 exoticization, 56, 58, 59, 69, 77

Lachmann, Piotr Peter, 69–72 Lecoq, Jacques, 21–25 Lobitinière-Harwood, Susanne, 11 Mahabharata (Hindu epic poem), 29–31 Mahabharata, see Brook, Peter marginalisation, 6, 48, 50, 58, 72, 77 McBurney, Simon, 19 migration/migrant, 5, 8, 56–8, 67–9, 74, 77 mimodynamics, see Lecoq, Jacques mise en scène, 19, 20, 48, 73, 78 multiculturalism, 27, 56, 57, 74 multilingualism, 23, 25, 31, 79, 80

familiar vs foreign, 53–56, 60, 70 fidelity, 19, 26 Fischer-Lichte, Erika, 76 fluency, 50–2 foreignization, 50–2 Glissant, Édouard, 63, 64 Gliwice Hamlet, 69–71 Godard, Barbara, 6, 11 Graeae, 1, 4, 78 guest and host, 28, 55–60, 65, 68, 73, 80

nation/nationalism, 56–68, 77 NDiaye, Marie, 69, 70 Needcompany, 79, 80 Negritude, 63

Hall, Stuart, 64, 65 hospitality, 53–75 House of the Spirits,The, 37

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‘spirit’ of the original, 22, 50 standard/non-standard, 29, 31, 38, 43, 48–52, 66, 70, 72 subtitles, 78–80 Susmono, Enthus, 29–32 Svich, Caridad, 37, 38

Ninagawa,Yukio, 53 Noh, 21, 53 Octoroon, An, 33–7 Octoroon,The, 33 Oedipus der Tyrann, 47 Oedipus Rex, 47 original, 10–12, 17–22, 27, 49 other(s), 6, 7, 26–9, 55–63, 65, 73–7, 80 otherness, 49–52, 80

Taha, Dalia, 38 Tarchetti, I. U., 51, 52 target text, 5, 12, 15, 18–20, 28, 44, 46, 48–52, 55, 56, 73, 77 Theatre of the Oppressed, 24, 25 This Is Not ForYou, 1–5 translation and adaptation, 25–9 and ‘equivalent effect’, 14, 15 and metaphors, 10, 11 as creative authorship, 19, 26 as historically/socially determined, 25, 28, 29 as intercultural communication, 12–18, 32, 39, 46, 53–55, 68, 75, 76, 78, 80 as interpretation, 7, 12, 14, 18, 19, 22, 25, 28, 48, 75 as performance, 18–21 as relocation of content, 10, 16 Chinese and Japanese etymology, 12, 13 English etymology, 8–10 post-colonial approaches, 11, 44 transparency, 20, 38, 39, 50, 69, 76, 79

Pavis, Patrice, 48 performability, 46–50 race, 33, 34, 56, 68, 70, 71, 75, 77, 80 Ramayana, 29, 30 readability, 50, 51 repetition, 21 representation, 4–6, 24, 25, 36, 40, 46, 57, 70, 71, 77 Ricoeur, Paul, 62 Romagnoli, Ettore, 47 Royal Shakespeare Company, 41–46 Said, Edward, 40 Sealey, Jenny see Graeae Sheller, Mimi, 64 sign language interpretation, 2, 4, 13 simpatico, 49, 50 Snakes,The, 69 social justice, 67 soft power, 40–2 source text, 6, 12, 17–22, 25, 26, 28, 30, 32, 34, 44, 46, 48, 49, 51, 54, 73

universal, 23, 25, 61, 63 vs particular, 17, 71

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Venuti, Lawrence, 16, 49–52, 66 visibility, 72, 77 Vitez, Antoine, 19

Weng, Shihui, 43, 46 Wilson, Robert, 47

Wakabayashi, Judy, 12, 20

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acknowledgements

T

he author and publisher would like to thank the following for the use of copyright text material in this book:

Mark Kenny and Graeae, for an extract from the unpublished script ‘This is Not for You: An Elegy’, used in the Introduction. Caridad Svich for extracts from personal correspondence used in Chapter 1. Nick Hern Books and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins for the extract from An Octoroon used in Chapter 1. Shihui Weng for extracts from an interview with the author used in Chapter 2. The author would like to thank many colleagues who have offered their comments on this book along the way: Diego Pellecchia for his insights into the Japanese etymology of ‘translation’ and Rossella Ferrari for her guidance on the Chinese etymology. Miguel Escobar Varela for his expertise 91

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on Javanese wayang. Clare Finburgh Delijani for her generous feedback on Chapter 2. Last but not least, Dan Rebellato for his skillful and illuminating editing and representatives of the publisher, Sonya Barker and Emily Lovelock, for their support throughout the process of writing this book.

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