Keywords and Contexts: Translating Theatre Theory
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUPTheatre translation must negotiate a critical tension, we might also say "drama," between competing paradigms, but this tension is best described not, as it often is, as a contest between "faithful" and "free" or between proper translation and improper adaptation. Rather, theatre translators must negotiate the contest between two imperatives, both legitimate: between effacing the work of translation in the interest of immediate communication with the local audience, and disclosing that work so as to communicate the challenge to communication posed by differences in language and culture. As Harley Granville-Barker wrote in 1924, the text of a play is less an art work than a kind of score whose full meaning is realized only in performance; in this context, the imperative of communication often wins out over that of displaying the translation's foreign origins. Since changing norms of performance and spectatorship make theatre translations obscure, even incomprehensible over time, calls for fidelity to a supposedly timeless original simply make no sense. In order to produce what Granville-Barker called (in the context of French translations of Shakespeare) "an equivalent effect . . . for a French audience played to by French actors to that produced by English actors upon an English audience,"2 the text must anticipate not only the linguistic codes of the target language but also the conventions governing actors and audiences in the receiving house.
As Brecht realized while collaborating with actor Charles Laughton on Galileo in 1947, translation also offers an opportunity to change the conventions of theatre production and reception and thus reshape the meaning of the play through the actor's embodiment of the gestus. Translating gestus as "both gist and gesture" of an action, a scene, or a play as a whole, John Willett highlights the combination of cerebral and corporeal intelligence at work in this fusion of theory and practice.3 The identification of gestus as the germ of theatrical meaning implies that the object of translation is more than the single word, and that achieving "equivalent effects" requires attention to the notations and conventions of embodiment as well as to transgressions of these conventions. [End Page 355] Translation that enacts what Douglas Langworthy called "faithfulness to the playfulness" produces plays that not only revive their sources but also challenge their targets.4 In a recent controversial example, James McGruder sought in his translation of Molière's Le malade imaginaire (The imaginary [or, to reinvigorate an older translation, would-be] invalid) compelling equivalents of Molière's satire of incompetent quacks in the currently more telling critique of Big Pharma.5 Leaving the satire to the subject of quackery would have reduced its critical edge and thus the playwright's meaning to a quaint anachronism and would thus have fallen short of a full translation of that meaning. Aiming satiric barbs at the corporations pursuing profits at the expense of health care restored to the play its full satiric force and, in its mixed reception, gave all participants a keener sense of Molière's controversial attacks on authority.
If translating plays takes translators, directors, and audiences beyond the word to the embodied gestus as the locus of "playfulness" or "equivalent effect," the translation of theatre theory pulls our attention back to words and out again to the evolution of keywords in their particular historical, ideological, and practical contexts. The very word "drama" may seem obviously central to us, but it appears in Aristotle's Poetics as mere raw material—δραμα (to drama) means "deed" or "act" or "doings"—for the "representation (μιμησιϛ~ [mimesis]) of a complete action" (emphasis added).6 In tragedy, this action should have magnitude and elevation, but while it is to evoke pity and terror through reversals of fortune (περιπετεια [peripeteia]) and the recognitions (αναγνωρισις~ [anagnorisis]) by both agent and audience of the force of the action, it does not explicitly call for the conflict between characters that came to signify drama in the modern period.
Despite Aristotle's authority, it is Hegel's often...
