Homeless Words: Field Day and the Politics of Translation

Homeless Words: Field Day and the Politics of Translation W.B . WORTHEN [...] Idid a new adaptation of Antigone. an attempt along the lines we discussed, to sec what we can do for the old plays and what they can do for us. (Bertolt Brecht 10 Ferdinand Reyher, April I948) 1 Throughout his career, Bertolt Brecht often returned to "old plays" to explore, refine, and enlarge the scope of dialectical theater. What is perhaps surprising is that this strategy - the translation of Western classics - has remained a staple means ofpolitical critique in the theater, including theaters emerging from colonial domination. This 'is surprising in part because translation so readily raises questions offidelity: translation can appear to locate resistant theater in a belated relation to dominant or hegemonic culture. Yet while translation enacts agesture of fidelity, it also performs an act of appropriation, blurring a merely dualistic politics, particularly when verbal translation is accompanied by the transformation or hybridization of form. Translation draws our attention not only to the social and political interfaces between literatures and languages, but also to how those borders are configured, and to the cultural work that translating between or across them claims to accomplish. As Walter Benjamin argues, it is precisely the otherness of the source, the world constituted by its verbal identity, that resists and defeats translation between languages: a similar disjunction occurs between any dramatic text and its reproduction in the divergent discourses ofthe stage.' Indeed, this necessary betrayal is perhaps what makes translation an attractive gambit for playwrights engaged in cultural resistance. In works like Wole Soyinka's The Baeehae of Euripides and Opera Wonyosi; Carlos Morton 's The Miser ofMexico; Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona's The Island; or Aim" Cesaire's A Tempest, for example, the "classic" is both presented and represented, doubled in ways that foreground the original's position as classic, and also interrogate the work that translation can be made to do in refiguring the relation between the classic and contemporary culture.3 Modern Drama, 38 (1995) 22 Field Day and the Politics of Translation 23 Such plays dramatize the rhetoricity of translation, a rhetoricity it shares with performance in the Brechtian mode. To Gayatri Spivak, this dialectical interplay between the rhetoricity of language - which works "in the silence between and around words" - and the "logic" of language (syntax, grammar) is what forms agents in the world, and agents of a world: "The jagged relationship between rhetoric and logic, condition and effect of knowing, is a relationship by which a world is made for the agent, so that the agent can act in an ethical way, a political way, a day-to-day way; so that the agent can be alive, in a human way, in the world."4 The translator's task is to model and expose this other means of agency. Rather than using translation to transfer "bodies of meaning" (179), the translator engages a "staging of the agent," and attempts to "enter or direct that staging, as one directs a play, as an actor interprets a script" (181). Though Spivak is not really interested in performance , her elegant account of the "politics of translation" verges on the politics of theater, in refocusing the activity of theater away from the "faithful" reproduction of a text toward a more searching encounter with agency. with how agents - actors, characters, spectators - are produced at the interface between languages and between the languages of the text and the semiotics of the stage. This emphasis on the performative emerges more emphatically in Homi Bhabha's evocation of "the agency of foreignness" in translation, of translation as "the perfonnative nature of cultural communication. It is language in actu (enunciation, positionality) rather than language in situ (enonce or propositionality). And the sign of translation continually tells, or 'tolls' the different times and spaces between cultural authority and its performative practices."s Bhabha's sense of "translation"marks out two modes of cultural transmission, the propositional and the positional, a dialectic resembling that between the domain of the text (emphasis on origin, authenticity) and the domain of performance (emphasis on expression, alterity). In their mutual sense of translation as an interrogation of agency...