Professing translation: The acts-in-between

David Johnston

Queen’s University, Belfast

Drawing on scholarship in translation ethics (Berman 1992; Cronin 2003) and performance studies (Conquergood 2002; Jackson 2004), this article approaches translation in the theatre from the double perspective of theory and practice. Professing translation as a model for the resolution of entrenched binaries (scholar/artist; theoretician/practitioner), the author sees the practice of translating for performance not just as a method of discovery or a hermeneutic tool but also as a mode of reflection that brings together both “readerly” and “writerly” approaches to text (Barthes 1974). By drawing on the experience of writing translations of García Lorca for the Belgrade Theatre, Calderón for the Royal Shakespeare Company, and Lope de Vega for the Watermill Theatre and the Washington Shakespeare Theatre, the article attempts to characterise such translation as an act of physical imagination, of a holistic understanding of both language and performance, into which textuality is incorporated and by which it is superseded.

Keywords:

Table of contents

Abstract
Keywords
1.Introduction: Theatre, translation and writing forward
2.The theory/practice binary: Another ossified polarity?
3.Translation as performance: Contingent and relational
4.Professing translation: Writing forward
5.Resistance and spectator response
6.Conclusion
References
Address for correspondence

“It is not possible to deduce from the performance the work that led up to it” (Pavis 1992: 24). The ambivalence of the word work in this translation of Pavis is fruitful, in that it brings both text and processes of rendering into conjoined perspective. Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture famously goes on to detail “the synchronic confrontation of signifying systems” (that is, the mise-en-scène) that brings together these systems in a given time and place for a more or less envisioned audience. The notion of confrontation, moreover, is a useful one for theatre translators. By reminding us that the final assemblage of the play on stage is intelligible not in terms of original intentions but depends rather on the concluding perspective [ p. 366 ]of the spectator, this confrontation leads us into a consideration of how we might think about the individual constituent processes at work in the performance. In the sense that the various elements that react together to configure that final assemblage (the creative dialectic, the chemistry, of the signifying systems) are all in themselves individual loci of performance, so the text becomes an object not to be imitated, but rather to be performed through an act of interpretation. It is in their core meanings of bringing something into meaning that performance and interpretation coincide. While the ultimate meanings of the play are generated by the encounters and tensions of the mise-en-scène, the text itself is subject to processes of reading and interpretation in which the emphasis on meaning as becoming makes the translation of that text a performative constituent of the mise-en-scène.

References

Agamben, Giorgio

1998 Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Barber, Karin

2003 “Text and Performance in Africa.” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 6 (3): 324–333.

Barthes, Roland

1974 S/Z. An Essay. Translated by Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang.

①

Benjamin, Walter

1994 The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, ed. by Gershom Scholem, and Theodor Adorno. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.[ p. 383 ]

Berman, Antoine

1992 “Translation and the Trials of the Foreign.” Translated by Lawrence Venuti. In The Translation Studies Reader, ed. by Lawrence Venuti, 284–297. London and New York: Routledge.

①

2000 The Experience of the Foreign: Culture and Translation in Romantic Germany. Translated by S. Heyvaert. Albany: University of New York Press.

Budick, Sanford, and Wolfgang Iser

(eds) 1996 The Translatability of Cultures. Configuratons of the Space Between. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Calderón de la Barca, Pedro

1991 The Painter of his Dishonour. Translated by A.K.G. Paterson. Warminster: Aris & Phillips.

1995 The Painter of Dishonour. Translated by David Johnston, and Laurence Boswell. Bath: Absolute Classics.

Certeau, Michel de

1988 The Writing of History. New York: Columbia University Press.

Conquergood, Dwight

2002 “Performance Studies. Interventions and Radical Research.” TDR/The Drama Review 46 (2): 145–156.

①

Crimp, Martin

2009 “Playwright to Playwright: Mart in Crimp meets Molière.” The Guardian 14 December.

Cronin, Michael

2003 Translation and Globalization. London and New York: Routledge.

①

Fawcett, Antoinette, Karla L. Guadarrama García, and Rebecca Hyde Parker

(eds) 2010 Translation: Theory and Practice in Dialogue. London and New York: Continuum.

Fauconnier, Giles, and Mark Turner

2002 The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind's Complexities. New York: Basic Books.

Frayn, Michael

2008 Stage Directions: Writing on Theatre 1970–2008. London: Faber and Faber.

García Lorca, Federico

1999 The House of Bernarda Alba. Translated by John Edmunds. Oxford: Oxford World's Classics.

1999 Unpublished script of The House of Bernarda Alba. Translated by Frank McGuinness. Lyric Theatre, Belfast.

Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich

1997 In 1926. Living at the Edge of Time. Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press.

Hare, David

1991 Writing Left-Handed. London: Faber & Faber.

Jackson, Shannon

2004 Professing Performance. Theatre in the Academy from Philology to Performativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

①

Johnston, David

2010 “Metaphor and Metonymy: The Translator-Practitioner's Visibility.” In Staging and Performing Translation: Text and Theatre Practice, ed. by Roger Baines, Cristina Marinetti, and Manuela Perteghella, 11–30. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Kearney, Richard

2003 Strangers, Gods and Monsters. Interpreting Otherness. London and New York: Routledge.

Kelly, Stephen

2012 “An Absence of Ghosts: Cultural and Theatrical Translation in the British Reception of The Mysteries-Yiimimangaliso.” Quaderns: revista de traducció 19: 69–75.

Murdoch, Iris

1978 The Sea, The Sea. London: Chatto & Windus.

Needham, Alex

2012 “Theatres Taking Fewer Risks as Funding Dries Up, Warn Playwrights.” The Guardian 19 February.

Pavis, Patrice

1992 Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture. London and New York: Routledge.

Ricoeur, Paul

2006 On Translation. Translated by Eileen Brennan. Abingdon and New York: Routledge.

Robinson, Douglas

2001 Who Translates: Translator Subjectivities Beyond Reason. Albany: State University of New York Press.[ p. 384 ]

States, Bert O

1975 Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Steiner, George

1975 After Babel. Aspects of Language and Translation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Taves, Ann

2011 “Brain-Mind.” In “Key Words in Material Religion.” Material Religion; The Journal of Objects, Art and Belief 7 (1): 26–33.

Tornqvist, Egil

1991 Transposing Drama. Studies in Representation. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

de Vega, Lope

1992 Two Plays. The Great Pretenders and The Gentleman from Olmedo. Translated by David Johnston. Bath: Absolute Classics.

2004 Unpublished script of The Gentleman from Omedo. Translated by David Johnston. Newbury: Watermill Theatre.

Waisman, Sergio

2005 Borges and Translation. The Irreverence of the Periphery. New Jersey: Associated University Presses.

Zatlin, Phyllis

2005 Theatre Translation and Film Adaptation: A Practitioner's View. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.

Zito, Angela

2011 “Body.” In “Key Words in Material Religion.” Material Religion; The Journal of Objects, Art and Belief 7 (1): 15–25.