Why Translation Matters

In the theatre, words are only one way information is conveyed; there are, of course, also sights and sounds that affect the spectator's experience. But in the realm of ideas, words do the lion's share of the work. Listening to a playwright's words as part of a theatrical production is quite different from reading that same text on a page. The reader is free to halt and consider the material, even to go back and read it over again, whereas the audience, caught in the forward rush of time, is only given one chance for understanding. With a translated text, this dynamic is especially acute: a translation must catch listeners' ears with the same freshness and immediacy as it does in its original language and culture or else theatregoers will soon weary from having to grope for meaning.

So the first thing that comes to mind when considering what's at stake in theatrical translation is the audience's experience of the play. Is the diction lively and exciting? Does it change gears when necessary to express heightened language, idiomatic speech, or slang? The more multilayered the audience's experience of the text and the more it reflects the nuances of the source text, the more we can say the translation has succeeded.

Good theatrical translations help to eliminate cultural boundaries by making texts accessible that would otherwise have remained undecipherable. The translator is constantly asking the question, "How would this speech sound to its original audience?" Because this comparison is never perfect—some things just do get lost in translation—the translator must live with the imperfection of his or her work while still striving for the best. But it is in this realm of bridging cultures that the most is at stake.

In breaking down cultural barriers, theatrical translation allows for cultures to affect one another. Without the brilliant Romantic translations of Shakespeare into German, who knows how German drama would have developed? Without Eric Bentley's translations of Brecht, playwriting during the 1960s and 1970s would have looked very different. This diversity invigorates culture, keeping us from being hermetically sealed.

Good theatrical translation also ensures that the audience has an experience in the theatre that is vibrant and deep. While a mediocre translation raises a wall between the spectator and the stage, a good one keeps the interaction direct and immediate. Without Richard Wilbur's jaunty, rhymed translations of Molière, how many dull evenings might have been spent in the theatre? All the colors of the original play should survive in the translation, whether they be tone (humorous, ironic, satiric, tragic, lofty, or vulgar), form (prose, verse, song), or the voice of a given character.

I recently translated Goethe's Faust, parts 1 and 2, for a production by New York's Target Margin Theater. Although people have generally heard of Goethe's masterpiece, I found that few have ever read it and that even fewer have seen it on the stage. My translation, if it worked, would in its own way help to bridge the cultural rift separating a twenty-first-century audience from Goethe's seminal dramatic opus. Given the length of the text before me, I knew this would be a tall order to fill. Fortunately, director David Herskovits was interested in developing Faust over the long term, and this allowed my work on the translation to stretch out over a two-year period. We produced the play in pieces: first, the first half of part 1, then the second half, then parts 1 and 2 combined in a production that lasted six hours, presented in two three-hour chunks. Because we served it up in installments, I could monitor my translation at regular intervals. I could hear how the language was working on an audience and make adjustments based on this information.

What was at stake for me in translating one of the Western canon's great works? My primary concern was to get it right. For those familiar with the text, I hoped to shed new light and bring a freshness to it that they hadn't encountered before. For...