In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Editorial comment:the stakes of theatrical translation
  • Jean Graham-Jones

Nothing is translatable. . . . Everything is translatable.

—Emily Apter1

translation is a necessary impossibility

—Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak2

Globalization has taken our tongues from us.

—Jacques Lerza3

This special issue is dedicated to a topic that has long interested me as a scholar, practitioner, and educator committed to ensuring the presence of the Southern Cone's extraordinary performance history and texts in US theatre studies and production. An extended reflection—supported herein by five articles, twelve forum contributions, and multiple book and performance reviews—strikes me as all the more timely in view of recent developments in the fields of translation theory and practice.

Although there have assuredly been commentaries on translation for as long as there has been cultural encounter, it is only in the 1990s, as Susan Bassnett notes in the most recent edition of her influential Translation Studies, that the field of translation studies "came into its own."4 Recent scholarship regarding contemporary globalization's impact on intercultural communication has complicated earlier translation models of textual fidelity and bicultural exchange.5 Translation is not the simple "carrying across" from one language to another as the word's etymology might suggest.

Nor do the standard categories of translation, adaptation, and version accurately account for the complexity inherent in theatrical translation practices, given that the written text is only one possible functional component in the total performance process.6 Theatrical translation in performance, in which we so often sense the presence of two or more texts, stands as a clear example of what many theorists, going back to at least Walter Benjamin and his 1923 essay,7 consider a translation's (and a translator's) unavoidable relationality. As Jonathan E. Abel writes, "Translations do share something with the translated, but this sharing is not the communicating of one text's message to another, the erasing of one by another, the domineering of one over another, or the embellishment of one text at the expense of the other. This sharing is the being-in-common, the standing-in-relation between two texts."8 For some time I have regarded the process of all theatrical translation as taking place on [End Page ix] a continuum of accessibility. Do we translators make the play accessible to the audience, or do we make the audience accessible to the play? Do we attempt to do both? Lawrence Venuti and others have made pointedly clear that our translation choices—such as whether to domesticate and/or foreignize a play—carry with them consequences extending far beyond the linguistic equivalencies found in dictionaries.9

Traditional translation theory's principle of adequatio (equivalence and fidelity to the original) assumes a commonality and equality undermined from the start by linguistic and cultural difference. Emily Apter notes that the insurmountable challenge to translation is balancing "the singularity of untranslatable alterity against the need to translate quand même." The alternative is unthinkable: if we ignore the challenge and simply do not translate, we find ourselves trapped within a parochial monolingualism whose dangerous flipside is "a globalism that . . . translates everything without ever traveling anywhere."10 As Sandra Bermann states, the challenge to translation carries an ethical burden: "If we must translate in order to emancipate and preserve cultural pasts and to build linguistic bridges for present understanding and future thought, we must do so while attempting to respond ethically to each language's contexts, intertexts, and intrinsic alterity."11

Awareness of an ethics and politics of translation should be of special concern to those of us translating from other languages into English. Gayatri Spivak admonishes the English-language translator to "operate with great caution and humility."12 Why? First of all, certain linguistic fields have tended to dominate translation practices, thereby perpetuating what Apter calls "neocolonial geopolitics."13 Cultures end up "sequestered" in their respective language groups, and translated plays are typically taught, anthologized, and produced within the framework of those original languages. Derek Walcott's Anglophone plays are infrequently included in the same critical conversations with José Triana's Hispanophone and Aimé Césaire's Francophone texts, even though all three playwrights might be productively regarded as writing...

pdf

Share