TRANSLATION IN ACTION
"Traduttore, traditore," goes the Italian catchphrase: "To translate is to betray."
Gregory Rabassa quotes this aphorism in his recently published memoir, If This Be Treason: Translation and Its Dyscontents, and playfully inquires whether translation is treason. Rabassa—the esteemed translator of Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude and other classic Latin American novels—claims that he simply sits down and types a draft in English, translating texts word by word from Spanish or Portuguese into English without actually reading the entire novel first. He argues that this method creates a freshness to the translation and allows him to follow the words of the author faithfully. "A translator is essentially a reader," Rabassa writes, "and we all read differently, except that a translator's reading remains in unchanging print."
Would that Rabassa's plug-and-play method actually applied to the world of the theatre, where translation is often a collaborative effort involving endless drafts. And the theatre insists on a special kind of language that consciously addresses not only the mind of a reader but also the imagination of an actor and the receptivity of a live audience. In comparison to Rabassa's easygoing mode, play translation initiatives today are more fraught, more neurotic, more anxious and less innocent in their attempts to commune with the original author and pass on undistorted the plot or the message of the source plays (if there is a message or plot to be had, at all). Certainly, they are not lonely endeavors: The British practice—as proposed by David Hare or Tom Stoppard, who create new versions of Brecht or Chekhov based on someone else's literal translation—is now old-fashioned.
The new approach, reflected in the six essays and reports in this issue's special section, is bilateral. These articles delve specifically into the myriad interstices of international exchanges, cross-cultural collaboration and play translation initiatives between the U.S. and several foreign countries—Argentina, France, Japan, Mexico, Romania and Slovenia. One popular currency is to call these projects "think tanks." Typically a complex apparatus is set in place so that all the players and actors involved can participate in a spirit of mutuality, artistic dialogue and cultural understanding. In all six cases, travel is a necessary component. Because these exchanges take place over several months (some are a year in the making), funding partners and host theatre companies need to be secured. Most involve groups literally shuttling back and forth between countries to rehearse, collaborate in or shepherd new recreations of their works.
If translation is about understanding, interpreting and recreating a dramatic work, collaboration between writers becomes more controversial the more ignorant the participants are of each other's language, field of expertise and cultural experience. Without a doubt, an inherent inequality can be an essential ingredient. In many ways, the success of a translation is a microcosm of the variety of power plays that are involved in the process—the deliberate manipulations of the original source texts; the alterations of titles and names and places to follow perceived norms; the subtle or large distortions to make something more "commercially viable" or "critically accessible;" the misrepresentations that result from Jekyll-and-Hyde relationships in which the translator is all-too-aware of the author but the authors are not equally aware of the translator; the infestation that occurs when one culture introduces a virus (like, say, new-play development) into the resistant body of a host country (as is the case in Eastern Europe, a director's playground).
"No translation would be possible," the German literary critic Walter Benjamin once wrote, "if in its ultimate essence it strove for likeness to the original." Rabassa's thesis in If This Be Treason states as much: "People expect reproduction, but you can't turn a baby chick into a duckling. The best you can do is get close to it." Rabassa concludes that translation is indeed a form of treason, but not one punishable by death. In our increasingly globalized world, play translation is something like a performance, an interpretation akin to acting or dancing. And a mistranslation is punishable by…a lack of applause. —Randy Gener