Thinking through Translation: The Psychophysical Dynamics of Direction

In The Politics of Cultural Practice I reflected on different stages of translation with particular reference to the dramaturgy of a text, within the intracultural context of a particular theatre culture in India—a context in which local differences in language (and inevitably in caste, class, and community) are subsumed within the imagined cultural homogeneity of a particular region.¹ Here, I shift my focus from dramaturgy to the psychophysical dynamics of direction, but still retain the intracultural context as my locus of attention. Working in such contexts where I may not know the language of the actors, how can I presume to direct them?

Inevitably, the act of direction becomes possible only through the interventionist presence and bilingualism of the translator, who succeeds in effectively undermining the director's omniscience and authority embodied in His Master's Voice. This undermining of the Voice elicits a psychophysical reflex: while directing actors in monolingual contexts, I find it hard not to fix them with my gaze, which almost authorizes me to read their unconscious without the actors being in a position to read mine, not least because their gaze is inevitably directed elsewhere, even when they appear to be looking outward. In bilingual or multilingual situations, however, I am compelled to constantly shift my gaze between the translator and the actor(s) as I seek verifications of meaning, clarifications of words, and some articulation of the messy semantics underlying the process of understanding a role. In such a ping-pong of hermeneutic uncertainties, there is no way in which I can pretend to be in control over the situation because I am as much in search of the meaning of a particular line as the actor. The fact that I may be aware of the dramatic text in its original language may be of no particular use to the phenomenology of the here and now, because the text I know may not necessarily correspond to its translation. At best, it hums in my mind like a musical score, resonating an unconscious point of reference that holds the chaos of the translation process together.

In embracing the uncertainties of meaning, I do not suspend my authority as a director and allow the translator to usurp my role. On the contrary, there have been many situations in which as director I am able to see that the translator's choices do not correspond to the actor's more visceral translation of a text's potentiality. This compels me to play the devil's advocate and arbitrate the differences between translator and actor. One thing is certain: I cannot determine, much less dictate, how the line should be spoken, though I know of directors who have no difficulty in instructing actors from foreign cultures on where exactly they should place the emphasis or inflection in a particular line, even if these choices work against the protocols of alien grammar. My own choice is to settle for a triangular, back-and-forth relay of messages out of which meanings evolve through a dialogic and argumentative process. Inevitably, such circuitous acts of direction through translation can be painfully slow, if not tortuous, but like the discipline of reading any text slowly, word by word, these acts can be enormously beneficial in opening the theatrical process to multiple and unprecedented trajectories of meaning.

Two axioms: While questions of power do not necessarily get erased through the active embrace of translation into the directorial mode, there is a greater possibility of redistributing power in the rehearsal room. And correspondingly, with this redistribution of power, there is also a different accentuation of responsibilities. Both of these factors contribute to a radical redefinition of the epistemology of direction in actual practice, whereby the director becomes an engaged listener rather than a disembodied conductor of the rehearsal process.

Let me describe at this point some of the dynamics involved in directing one particular scene from Woyzeck at the Ninasam Theatre Institute in the village of Heggodu in the state of Karnataka. Through a series of improvisations out of which I inevitably cast any play, I had selected a...