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Performing Translation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2009

Karin Littau
Karin Littau
Affiliation:
(University of the West of England, Bristol)
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Extract

Both actor and translator, and by extension translation and performance suffer the plight of second hand art. Disloyal to their original masters they commit adultery. Thus, translation and performance become the unfortunate bastards of literature. If translation is meant to overcome the difference between itself and its other, performance is accused of playing it out and playing up. Such is the attitude which both have shared in each of their respective literary histories. The emphasis here is on literary history, for it assumes the tyranny of the text, the sacredness of the word. The quest for the origin, the reconstruction of the original greatness will always follow the linear path to the bastardized version, towards its own inferiorization. Precisely because translation and performance share this secondary status, this paper will adopt the metaphor of translation and adapt it to describe the relationship between text and performance. Translation here will be taken as that process which underlies any meaning production; it will not be reduced to a merely linguistic motion, nor seen in the form of an obvious reduplication, but as a complex interrelation between two elements. We will thus examine the translatory processes between text and performance before exposing the most illegitimate member in this affair: the translated dramatic text.

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Research International , Volume 18 , Issue 1 , Spring 1993 , pp. 53 - 60
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 1993

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References

Notes

1. Pirandello, Luigi, ‘Theatre and Literature’, trans, by Herbert Goldstone, in The Creative Vision, ed. by Block, M. and Salinger, H. (New York: Grove, 1960), p. 60.Google Scholar

2. Marvin Carlson points out the dangers of adopting translation as a metaphor to describe the text-performance relation. As he puts it, ‘[t]he more literally one takes the linguistic analogy, the more one foregrounds the script […] such a situation necessarily privileges the script as defining the originary parameters of the translation and makes performance subservient not only temporarily, but artistically, since it is unusual indeed for a translation to be considered aesthetically superior to its original …’ This paper takes a different stance from Carlson with regard to translation and will argue that the act of translation implies more than simply a linguistic transfer. See Marvin Carlson, 's brilliant essay ‘Theatrical Performance: Illustration, Translation, Fulfilment, or Supplement?’, Theatre Journal 37 (03, 1985), 5–11 (p. 8).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3. Patrice Pavis similarly rejects the translation metaphor: ‘If there is indeed an obvious relationship between text and performance, it does not take the form of a translation or reduplication of the former by the latter, but rather it takes the form of a transformation or confrontation of a fictional universe structured by the text and a fictional universe produced by the performance.’ See ‘From Text to Performance’ in Performing Texts, ed. by Issacharoff, Michael and Jones, Robin F. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988), pp. 86–100 (p. 94).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4. For a more detailed description of this couplet, see Krauss, Rosalind E., ‘The Originality of the Avant-Garde’, in Zeitgeist in Babel, ed. by Hoesterey, Ingeborg (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991), pp. 66–84.Google Scholar

5. For the debate between hermeneutics and deconstruction, or more precisely for the encounter between its primary representatives: Hans-Georg Gadamer and Jacques Derrida, see Dialogue and Deconstruction ed. by Michelfelder, Diane P. and Palmer, Richard E. (New York: State University of New York Press, 1989).Google Scholar

6. Pretext is my translation of Prätext, which is a term/notion used by a number of German Translation Theorists such as Armin Paul Frank and Horst Turk. It is an attempt to redefine the notion of the ‘original’. A summary can be found in POETICA 19 (1987).Google Scholar

7. Elam, Keir, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (London: Methuen, 1980), p. 209CrossRefGoogle Scholar. All quotes in the subsequent paragraph are taken from pp. 208–209 unless indicated otherwise.

8. Pavis, in Performing Texts, p. 94.Google Scholar

9. Pavis, Patrice, Languages of the Stage (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982), p. 137.Google Scholar

10. Pavis, in Performing Texts, p. 95.Google Scholar

11. Schechner, Richard, ‘News, Sex, and Performance Theory’ in Innovation/Renovation: New Perspectives on the Humanities, ed. by Hassan, Ihab and Hassan, Sally (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), 189–210 (p. 190).Google Scholar

12. Dort, Bernard, ‘Liberated Performance’Google Scholar, trans. Kerslake, Barbara, in Modern Drama 25, I, (03 1982), 60–68) (p. 67).Google Scholar

13. Bassnett-McGuire, Susan, ‘An Introduction to Theatre Semiotics’, Theatre Quarterly 38 (1980), 47–53 (p. 48).Google Scholar

14. See Carlson, Marvin: ‘A play on stage will inevitably display material lacking in the written text, quite likely not apparent as lacking until the performance takes place, but then revealed as significant and necessary. At the same time, the performance, by revealing this lack, reveals also a potentially infinite series of future performances providing further supplementations.’ (p. 10)Google ScholarCarlson, (p. 9)Google Scholar here draws on Derrida's logic of the supplément, Of Grammatology, trans, by Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976), p. 312.Google Scholar

15. Mesguich, Daniel, ‘The Book to Come is a Theatre’, Sub-Stance, 18/19 (1977), 113.Google Scholar

16. Vitez, Antoine, ‘Le devoir de traduire’, Théâtre/Public 44 (1981), 9Google Scholar, quoted in Pavis, Patrice, Theatre at the Crossroads, trans, by Kruger, Loren (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 146.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17. It has been argued that the written dramatic text offers clues/constraints for its performance, such as:

– an undertext of tempo-rhythms which determines the verbal and gestural enunciation of the theatrical utterance [see Susan Bassnett, ‘Translating Spatial Poetry’, in Literature and Translation, ed. by Holmes, James S., Lambert, Jose and Van den Broeck, Raymond (Leuven: ACCO, 1978), pp. 161–176Google Scholar.]

– a subtext of gestural patterning in terms of the link that deixis establishes between word and gesture [see Semiotics of Theatre and Drama]

The performance element also provides certain clues/constraints for the stage enactment such as:

– theatrical conventions, acting conventions, audience expectations, stage and design options, architectonic/spacial constraints etc.

18. This refers to Culler, Jonathan's, ‘Literary Competence’ and Stanley Fish's, ‘Interpreting the Variorum’, in Reader-Response Criticism, ed. by Tompkins, Jane (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980).Google Scholar

19. See Culler, Jonathan's ‘meaning is context-bound, but context is boundless’, in On Deconstruction (London: Routledge, 1983), p. 123.Google Scholar

20. Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix, ‘Introduction: Rhizome’ in A Thousdand Plateaus, trans, by Massumi, Brian (London: Athlone, 1988), pp. 1–25 (p. 25)Google Scholar. All other quotations are from the same essay.

21. See Pavis, , Performing Texts, p. 86.Google Scholar

22. Foucault, Michel, Language, Counter-memory, Practice, Selected Essays and Interviews by M. Foucault, ed. by Bouchard, Donald F., trans, by Bouchard, D. and Simon, S. (New York: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 34.Google Scholar

23. Deleuze, Gilles in conversation with Foucault, ‘Intellectuals and Power’, in Language, Counter-memory, Practice, p. 208.Google Scholar