Encounters

I

All translation starts with an encounter of discovery; if successful, that meeting leads to further encounters. Sometimes this first encounter between future translator and author takes place through direct contact with a new play, seen in the theatre or read in a manuscript or book; sometimes it is a meeting with the playwright, at home or abroad. The ways these encounters can come about—by choice, by chance, by fatality—are as diverse as the different methods of translating. What they all have in common is the excitement of a meeting with someone or something new.

Encounters lead to the establishment of a connection that may be brief—a one-night stand, a short fling—or one that endures in a long-term commitment or even in a lifetime partnership.

The result may be that the translator embraces the author's culture: personal, local, regional, and national. The translator is a traveler in time and space journeying between languages and cultures, sometimes only imaginatively, without even actually going anywhere. The translator becomes acquainted with the author's ancestors, relatives, and descendants in order to know the country and culture. At the same time, though, the author travels also by learning to speak the language of the translator's land and culture.

This relationship can be a very personal one as the translator undergoes immersion in the author's life, becomes friends with the author's friends, and, most significantly, makes friends for the author. For the translator not only translates the author; the translator also represents the author to the world, serving as matchmaker, trying to pair the author off with a theatre.

II

Once you, as translator, have met the stranger and started to become acquainted, you bring the foreigner home and take the guest around with you everywhere. You speak for the foreign-tongued stranger, you interpret and represent. The language that the author now speaks is yours, the words the author uses are yours. You put these words into the characters' mouths; their dialogue is written by you.

The voice is yours—the author speaks through you. You have become your author's alter ego, medium, double. But the author is also your double. The author may seem to be putting words into your mouth, but in fact it is you who are putting words into the author's mouth. You have the upper hand, you now determine what the author means. And you can add to or subtract from what the author says.

Is this megalomania? A form of madness? Have you grown so possessive and proprietary that if another translator were to appear on the scene and claim to speak for your author, you would call the interloper a fraud?

Translator and author make an inseparable pair; they are twins, the more identical the better. You say to your author, "I am you." Your author replies, "You are me." In fact, you have become your author and perhaps found yourself.

Your author becomes a family member and dinner-table companion whose tics and mannerisms are found out. Could familiarity lead to boredom and indifference or even to resentment, impatience, jealousy, envy, hatred, or contempt?

After translating your author for many years you begin to feel that the author belongs to you. This is a form of possession—you possess the author. After all, in your country the author speaks your words, you speak for the author. But at the same time, the author possesses you and you belong to him. In the perfect symbiosis between translator and author does one or the other ever achieve dominance?

III

It was a chance encounter with a Polish playwright whose name I had never heard of that led me to embark upon my career as a translator. The circumstances of this first meeting are such as to make me wonder: Are there destined encounters between author and translator who have been mysteriously chosen for each other? Are they preordained partners?

My first trip to Poland took place in August 1965 when Tom Lantos, the director of overseas programs at San Francisco State College where I then taught, offered me the opportunity...