Life, of Course

I

What's at stake in theatrical translation? Life, of course.

II

Not the translator as hero risking his life (it's almost always the opposite). What's at stake in all theatrical translation is the life of the text: everything that makes it possible for written words to translate life's complexity.

All writing, indeed all acts of language, tell two things simultaneously: dictum and modus. If we understand dictum as "what's said" and as what can be explained in more or less logical formulas, modus ("how it's said," the world of potential connotations supporting that dictum) cannot be as easily reduced or synthesized. It is therefore much more difficult to translate.

Poets and—oddly enough—physicists speak of a concept even more vital to this forum's subject: nuance. Nuance is the subtlety of meaning, a complex of feeling, or a delicacy of perception for which the mind still has no words or mental categories. In the presence of nuance, the creator suffers what might be called, in physics, an acute nonlinear reaction: a connection similar to the "butterfly effect" when we move a microphone near a speaker and a critical jump in the system occurs, submerging it into chaos—into an order suddenly complex and iterative.

Everything we consider knowledge about the world is a closed system, but our doubts, uncertainties, and questions are full of nuance. Of course, the world is saturated with potential nuance, filled with subtleties of meaning, feeling, and perception, experiences for which our languages and logic don't have categories or stabilizing forms. Nuance exists in the fractal spaces between—but do not belong to—our categories of thought. When we experience nuance, we enter into a border zone between order and chaos, where our grasping of the experience's totality and indivisibility resides.

The real question of what's at stake in theatrical translation is, precisely, the life of nuance: what makes plays translatable as ambiguous, suggestively rich, true experiences and not simply redundant information about a world beyond words.

III

As a playwright I find it difficult not to think of all forms of theatrical writing, including original work, as a kind of translation. The theatrical text is barely a kernel, lacking apparent real life yet mysteriously containing it and capable of being seen to grow and flower onstage. That is, behind the theatrical text there is already a writer who managed to translate an entire world of personal, incommunicable nuance to more or less codified forms of sentences, retorts, and words. But these words are not the play itself; they do not contain the tempi, rhythms, intentions, deviations, fancy, talk, and imagination that allow a play to come to life, expose nuance, and unleash itself from literary abstraction to the plain world of paper.

Because of this, theatrical translation is more complicated than other disciplines. You must keep in mind not only the particularities of two languages but also the universe of ideological, vital connotations in its three unwritable and unteachable dimensions, all of which the playwright must have visualized before writing. Translating theatre implies returning to this three-dimensional world, not just the dry, flat libretto.

A rhythmic difference is sometimes more important than a phrase's denotative content. A subtle shift in tone or register or a break in the character's written voice can undo all our work, especially when it sounds like a translated text. The too-obvious appearance of another's translating hand can make the stage life recede, because it draws our attention to the literature behind the text.

A fully faithful translation is a utopia. And I believe a fully effective translation is also utopian because if we want to simply read a play, then the translated play will look much like any other translation. But if, instead of reading a play like one reads a story or a poem, we want to give it (believable) onstage life, then we have to translate for the audience who will be watching it. And this is almost impossible.

Translating theatre is always, for better or worse, rewriting theatre—rewriting...