Appunti esame Lingua inglese, prof. Carosso, dispensa consigliata Translating for the stage, Fernandes

Translation and Performability in Playtexts

To her, the problem of many playtexts is that they don’t take into account the interaction of verbal and non-verbal signs (they see the playtexts as a literary text). She sees translation as “the creation of a new dramatic score for a performance that is coherent and acceptable within the TC”. In T.S. the idea of performability is problematic for 2 reasons: the text should be reshaped, but this means distancing from the original text; the translator should be a dramatist. Johnston doesn’t like the term ‘performability’, he suggests that translators should find a rhythmical solution that enables speakability and stylistic marking to co-exist. Most recent works see the translated playtext as a work of re-creation, concerned with meeting the needs of a potential audience; different case studies report different treatments given to texts prepared to suit specific audiences in different countries. (see after) De Senna, translator of the play Blasted (from English)

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into Brazilian Portuguese), speaks of his dilemma as to whether or not he should relocate the English play to Rio de Janeiro in his translation for a Carioca audience. He chooses to relocate the play because his objectives were to expose Rio’s scandalous civil violence and he sees it making more explicit as his best option.

Another case of relocation (for an Irish audience) is Friel’s translation of Three Sisters (from Russian into English); he based his translation on 5 standard English translations from Russian without speaking a word of it. He felt the need to produce a version that would sound more appealing to Irish audiences.

The translated text also travels from one place to another in terms of its imagined setting. Cameron, translator of Cixous’s work, argues that translations are not reflections of its original text, but asymmetries. Translation is a transformation from A to B, but A in Cixous doesn’t equal B, as words in one language don’t equal words in another.

He also compares the translator's task to that of the actor: as the actor releases paralinguistic and proxemic meanings indicated in the playtext, the translator releases the potential of the original text into a new text. Upton and Hale state that a translated playtext is necessarily asymmetric. A translated playtext doesn't equal its original because it is crafted for a different purpose and audience, because deals with cultural representation. The translator should pay an active role in the production of the play, understanding the mechanisms of the theatre. (collaborative translation_Bassnett). Theatre translation should be a cultural encounter, which is embodied in the signifying elements (actors, gesture, set, costume, lightning, sound, kinesics...) and in the spoken word. In this fusion of cultural elements, a translated play creates a new world. This re-creation requires responsibility on the part of the translator; he may choose to dislocate elements in the play, to

bring them to the fore, to highlight them according to the purposes of the performance. Such representations are located within an imagined movement between those contexts.

Robert Corrigan, drama professor, highlights the emphasis on gesture as opposed to the spoken word; he criticizes the way in which many scholars classified the playtext as a branch of literature, and forgot that it is a performed text. The stage is a concrete physical space which must speak its own language, a language that goes deeper than the spoken language, that speaks directly to our senses rather than to the mind.

A drama translator doesn't write for readers, but for actors and for the audience. His most important tool is the actor, because in him resides the emotional force of the theatre. The writer's/translator's main resource to produce a performable script is the actor; the writer has to know the placing and timing of words combined with what the actors do, because there's a

subtext(Stansislavski) = the action behind, between and in the words. Translators use actors to understand the principle of speakability and what moves an audience. A translator is empowered and constrained by the requirements of a paying audience, that narrow the possibilities according to the demands of a potential audience. Translation Studies has levelled the theatre with the experience of translating theatre, but this is an oversimplification. Speakability is the production of a text to be spoken by actors; performability goes beyond because it is concerned with both actors and audience. So, they’re not synonyms. Cooperation between actors and director is a method to obtain a performable script. Differently from Bassnett’s definition of