Theatre Translation in Performance

This volume focuses on the highly debated topic of theatre translation, one
brought on by a renewed interest in the idea of performance and translation
as a cooperative effort on the part of the translator, the director, and the
actors. Exploring the role and function of the translator as co-subject of the
performance, it addresses current issues concerning the role of the transla­
tor for the stage within a multifarious cultural context. The current debate
has shown a growing tendency to downplay and challenge the notion of
translational accuracy in favor of a recreational and post-dramatic atti­
tude, underlying the role of the director and playwright instead. This book
discusses the delicate balance between translating and directing from an
intercultural, semiotic, aesthetic, and performative perspective, taking
a critical stance on approaches that belittle translation for the theatre.
Chapters emphasize the idea of dramatic translation as a particular and
extremely challenging type of performance, while consistently exploring its
various textual, intertextual, inter-translational, cultural, and intercultural
facets, providing a wide-ranging discussion from an international group of
scholars, directors, and translators.

Silvia Bigliazzi is Professor of English Literature at the University of Verona,

Italy.

Peter Kofler is Associate Professor of German Literature at the University

of Verona, Italy.

Paola Ambrosi is Associate Professor of Spanish Literature at the University

of Verona, Italy.
Routledge Advances in Theatre and Performance Studies

1 Theatre and Postcolonial Desires 9 Crossing Cultural Borders

Awam Amkpa Through the Actor’s Work
Foreign Bodies of Knowledge
2 Brecht and Critical Theory Cláudia Tatinge Nascimento
Dialectics and Contemporary
Aesthetics 10 Movement Training for the
Sean Carney Modern Actor
Mark Evans
3 Science and the Stanislavsky
Tradition of Acting 11 The Politics of American Actor
Jonathan Pitches Training
Edited by Ellen Margolis and
4 Performance and Cognition Lissa Tyler Renaud
Theatre Studies and the Cognitive
Turn 12 Performing Embodiment in
Edited by Bruce McConachie and Samuel Beckett’s Drama
F. Elizabeth Hart Anna McMullan

5 Theatre and Performance in 13 The Provocation of the Senses in

Digital Culture Contemporary Theatre
From Simulation to Stephen Di Benedetto
Embeddedness
Matthew Causey 14 Ecology and Environment in
European Drama
6 The Politics of New Media Downing Cless
Theatre
Life®™ 15 Global Ibsen
Gabriella Giannachi Performing Multiple Modernities
Edited by Erika Fischer-Lichte,
7 Ritual and Event Barbara Gronau, and Christel
Interdisciplinary Perspectives Weiler
Edited by Mark Franko
16 The Theatre of the Bauhaus
8 Memory, Allegory, and The Modern and Postmodern
Testimony in South American Stage of Oskar Schlemmer
Theater Melissa Trimingham
Upstaging Dictatorship
Ana Elena Puga
17 Feminist Visions and Queer 27 Dramas of the Past on the
Futures in Postcolonial Drama Twentieth-Century Stage
Community, Kinship, and In History’s Wings
Citizenship Alex Feldman
Kanika Batra
28 Performance, Identity and the
18 Nineteenth-Century Theatre and Neo-Political Subject
the Imperial Encounter Edited by Matthew Causey and
Marty Gould Fintan Walsh

19 The Theatre of Richard Maxwell 29 Theatre Translation in

and the New York City Players Performance
Sarah Gorman Edited by Silvia Bigliazzi, Peter
Kofler, and Paola Ambrosi
20 Shakespeare, Theatre and Time
Matthew D. Wagner

21 Political and Protest Theatre

after 9/11
Patriotic Dissent
Edited by Jenny Spencer

22 Religion, Theatre, and

Performance
Acts of Faith
Edited by Lance Gharavi

23 Adapting Chekhov
The Text and its Mutations
Edited by J. Douglas Clayton &
Yana Meerzon

24 Performance and the Politics of

Space
Theatre and Topology
Edited by Erika Fischer-Lichte
and Benjamin Wihstutz

25 Music and Gender in English

Renaissance Drama
Katrine K. Wong

26 The Unwritten Grotowski

Theory and Practice of the
Encounter
Kris Salata
Theatre Translation
in Performance

Edited by Silvia Bigliazzi,

Peter Kofler, and Paola Ambrosi

NEW YORK LONDON

First published 2013
by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Simultaneously published in the UK
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4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group,
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© 2013 Taylor & Francis
The right of the editors to be identified as the author of the editorial
material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted
in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and
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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
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Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Library of Congress Control Number: 2013932492
ISBN: 978-0-415-66141-6 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-203-07350-6 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9780203073506
Contents

Acknowledgements ix

Introduction 1
SILVIA BIGLIAZZI, PETER KOFLER, PAOLA AMBROSI

1 Transnational, Multilingual, and Post-dramatic:

Rethinking the Location of Translation in Contemporary Theatre 27
CRISTINA MARINETTI

2 Masks, Music Scores, and Hourglasses:

Rethinking Performability through Metaphors 38
EVA ESPASA

3 Semantics and Syntax in Translating Shakespeare 50

ALESSANDRO SERPIERI

4 Verse Translation for the Theatre: A Spanish Example 61

PAOLA AMBROSI

5 Performing Intertextuality in Translating Rewrites 77

SILVIA BIGLIAZZI

6 From the Peninsula Westward: A Journey among Translations 97

LUCIA NIGRI

7 Exploring a Bilingual Aesthetics through

Translation in Performance 111
LOUISE LADOUCEUR
viii Contents
8 Beckett, ‘Thou Art Translated’ 130
ENOCH BRATER

9 The Pirandellian mise-en-scène and the Vanishing Translation 140

SHARON WOOD

10 Translator and Director: At Daggers Drawn? 150

JEAN-LOUIS BESSON

11 Dramatic Text / Literary Translation / Staging 158

GUILLERMO HERAS

12 Translating for the Audience: Plautus’s Captivi

by Accademici Intronati (Siena 1530) and Goldoni’s
Adaptation of Voltaire’s L’Écossaise (Venezia 1761) 165
MARZIA PIERI

13 “To act, to do, to perform”: Franz Heufeld’s and Friedrich

Ludwig Schröder’s Hamlet-Adaptations for the German Stage 180
PETER KOFLER

14 “For the Newer Stage” and “For Our Contemporary Emotion”:

Suggestion and Emotion in Hofmannsthal’s Drama Translations 197
DIETER MARTIN

15 Nogami Toyoichirō’s Noh Translation

Theories and the Primacy of Performance 211
BEVERLEY CURRAN

16 Transforming Shakespeare into a Kabuki Pièce for

the Modern Audience: Ninagawa’s Twelfth Night 223
AYAMI OKI-SIEKIERCZAK

Contributors 241
Index 247
Acknowledgements

The editors of this volume wish to acknowledge the support of the Faculty
of Modern Languages of the University of Verona, Italy, for encouraging
this research and hosting seminars, conferences, and post-graduate courses
in translation, thus fostering an international milieu of cultural exchanges.
Special thanks go to Lucia Nigri for her generous collaboration in giving
advice and helping revise the book, to Brian Schneider (University of Man­
chester) and Elisa Sartor (University of Verona) for their assistance in the
project, and to Tohid Erfani (University College London) for his technical
support. The editors are also very grateful to Elizabeth Levine of Taylor &
Francis (Routledge Research) for believing in the project from the start and
offering invaluable advice.
 Introduction
Silvia Bigliazzi, Peter Kofler, Paola Ambrosi

TRANSLATION AND THE PERFORMATIVE TURN

Theatre Translation in Performance is no neutral title. In a critical pan­

orama showing growing preoccupation with translation issues and perfor­
mance studies, the choice to locate these terms side by side is indicative of an
attempt to treat them as a conceptual unity. Rooted in the 1960s, over the
years the idea of art as event has decisively contributed to an understanding
of culture not as ‘text’, as in Geertz’s famous metaphor, or in Lotman and
Uspensky’s semiotic system, but as ‘performance’. Theatre has become the
overall model for what cultural studies have defined as ‘performative turn’,
prompting critics to discard both hermeneutic and semiotic approaches in
favour of an ‘aesthetics of performativity’. More recently, Schechner has
written in his introductory volume to performance studies that “during
the last third of the twentieth century” the world changed its configura­
tion and “no longer appeared as a book to be read but as a performance to
participate in” because of new types of knowledge and the “new means of
distributing [it] via the internet” (2002: 21).
Thus understood as an integrating and collaborative form of meaning-
making, the word ‘performance’ has come to be applied to our way of
inhabiting the world and has even been utilized to define our social and
gender status through practices of reiteration.1 But narrowing its scope
to the specific context of theatre, this word has come to imply the dis­
solution of the subject/object antinomy, entailing that the performance is
accomplished only through “the physical co-presence of actors and audi­
ence” (Fischer-Lichte 2004: 47) and an autopoietic and dynamic feedback
between them (59). From this standpoint, both actors and spectators have
been considered as co-subjects of an event whose rules are negotiated among
all the participants (47), and this extends to all the related activities, trans­
lation included (Zuber-Skerrit 1984b). That is why the ideas of transla­
tion and performance have sometimes been seen as virtually coterminous,
leading to a view of translation as performance and in performance that
implies a dynamic process of (re)signification integrated within the overall
event in its various phases of production—something which can hardly
DOI: 10.4324/9780203073506-1
2 Silvia Bigliazzi, Peter Kofler, Paola Ambrosi
be assimilated to a more traditional text-based concept of theatre with its
hierarchical system of roles.2 Following Derrida’s famous devaluation of
the text as the site of the ‘author-God’ authority infusing the stage with a
theology of absence, 3 most critical debates on the idea of performance as
the ‘real presence’ of moving bodies on stage, opposed to the ‘false repre­
sentation’ of theatre (the staging of a text whose authenticity depends on
the absent author), have foregrounded the ‘present-ness’ of the spectacular
event and body action, downplaying the verbal as a textual trace of the
dominant author. Emphasis has consequently been laid on the playfulness
of the performance and on the creative and translation options deriving
from it, including audience-targeted relocation practices (Upton and Hale;
Fernandes), issues of domestication and foreignisation,4 the duplication of
writer and translator (and the new figures of the ‘literal’ and ‘surrogate’
translators to which we will return), transforming the translator into a cul­
tural promoter or metteur en scène (Baines, Marinetti, and Perteghella),
and blurring the boundaries between translation, version, and adaptation
within an all-comprehensive, yet fairly vague, category of ‘cultural (re)cre­
ation of meaning(s)’. Such a wide range of issues can only entail, or, derive
from, distrust of theory; accordingly, recent books on translation for the
theatre have confirmed a widespread suspicion about theory and resistance
to interpretation in favour of the exuberance of the performance and of the
performance (as) text. In this complex milieu, the field of the translator has
thus gradually shifted from the verbal to the polisystemic and culturally
determined semiotic event, opening up areas of investigation concerning
the relation between text and performance, translators and directors, and
the co-participation of audiences.
These are some of the main features of the current panorama result­
ing from the shaping power of a performative turn that over the years has
sought to replace, within the performative event, separateness with integra­
tion, exclusion with participation, ‘absence’ with ‘presence’. Yet, it should
also be pointed out that this trend has not been exempt from criticism and
contestation. Over the last few years counterarguments have occasionally
revised its assumptions, arguing that such a ‘democratic’ interpretation of
‘performance’ only substitutes “one authoritarian locus of power for its
opposite” (Heuvel 11); or contending that textual meaning is in fact autho­
rially deprived in the continuous meaning-production emerging through
the “slippage and interplay between signifying formalities” (Worthen 15);
or even arguing that most play texts (the Shakespearean ones in particu­
lar) are authorially unstable owing to the conditions of textual production
and reproduction (McGann). Renewed attention to form and texts has also
been launched by New Formalism (Levinson), and has occasionally been
vindicated outside critical movements in ways that may undermine, in some
respects, the pre-eminence of performance over textuality, and its collateral
notion of free and collaborative appropriation and recreation.
 Introduction 3
Today, compared with the euphoria generated at its onset, the performa­
tive emphasis, with its collaborative drive, has somewhat stabilized itself
as part of our contemporary critical jargon, and in acquiring a ‘role’ it has
also elicited opposition. The resulting scenario is evidently highly varie­
gated, and given such a coexistence of mutable and confl icting perspectives,
this may be the right time to take up the challenge again and think over
some of the recent developments and prospects of the performative turn in
an interdisciplinary age that sees also a renewed attention to form and the
resurgence of textual orientations for reconsidering the grounds of literary
and translation studies. While no comprehensive theoretical frame can be
envisaged in theatre and literary criticism, and, narrowing the scope to the
topic of this volume, in translation studies as well, we suggest that the per-
formative turn at least has had the lasting merit of favouring the centrality
of translation in the theatrical event as both a literary and a performative
act to be looked at as a specific activity for the theatre in performance.
It is also thanks to such a problematic reconceptualization of the rela­
tion between text and performance that a renewed interest in theatre
translation has become perceptible over the last decades, as the recent
proliferation of publications on the subject demonstrates. This phenom­
enon is clearly affiliated with the more general tendency in literary and
cultural criticism to cross disciplinary boundaries and generate multiple
approaches. The discussion is far from exhausted; we are still experienc­
ing a “moment of undisciplined, interdisciplinary flux, euphoria, uncer­
tainty, mystery, and doubt” (Worthen 23), and this is why it is hard to
define the contours and theoretical profile(s) of the discipline. What can
be safely argued, though, is that a few topics recur consistently, beginning
with an awareness that no convincingly comprehensive method has been
elaborated or even roughed out.
Sketching an account of the research in the field of the theory of drama
translation, in 1987 Brigitte Schultze lamented that theatre translation
had been highly disregarded (5); her voice was not isolated. In 1980 Susan
Bassnett had already pointed out that theatre translation had been largely
ignored by translation studies, and ten years later deplored that “[i]n the
history of translation studies, less has been written on problems of translat­
ing theatre texts than on translating any other text type” (1991: 99). She
also complained that “[m]ost of the existing literature on theatre translation
consists of case studies of individual translations and translators, transla­
tors’ prefaces or generalized remarks” (105), thus criticizing the lack of a
unified theoretical approach. A few years later, Joseph Che Suh lamented
that “the absence of clear and precise definitions for this abundant termi­
nology [such as adaptation or version or translation in translation studies]
sometimes leads to confusion” (2002: 52 and ff.), 5 and in 2004 Norbert
Greiner and Andrew Jenkins claimed that there did not yet exist a unitary
scientific approach in dealing with the specific problems of stage translation
4 Silvia Bigliazzi, Peter Kofler, Paola Ambrosi
(1008). Indeed, in different quarters theatre translation has been consid­
ered as “the most problematic and neglected area of translation studies
research” (Bassnett 1998: 90), characterized by pitfalls and red herrings,
which revealingly inspired Bassnett with the metaphor of the ‘labyrinth’ as
an image of the ambiguous status of the play text and its dialectical rela­
tion with the performance. Even the long-debated issue of performability,
to which we will return, has recently been subjected to fierce critique, and
this has encouraged the dismantling of a possible comprehensive method
based on an essentialistic approach referable to a stable text infused with
general properties.6 As Espasa argued in 2000, following Pavis, perform-
ability should now be looked at as synonymous with other context-based
notions such as theatricality, actability, and theatre specificity which are
conditioned by theatrical and textual practices (Pavis 1989, 1992). Thus,
performability may be seen as a pragmatic instrument associated with the
style, conventions, and ideology of the target cultural environment, rather
than as an abstract and universal quality of the source text. If this is what
features at present in translation studies, we have come, so to speak, full
circle: no stable frame is possible because there is no unifying abstract
essence one can reach and what can be offered are simply multiple examples
of individual practices.
Far from endorsing any ultimate single position, this volume wishes to
interrogate similar issues by looking at the present state of theatre transla­
tion from different points of view so as to locate the debate within a context
of lively confrontation between theorists, translators, and stage practi­
tioners from different parts of the world. The aim is to situate, and raise
questions on, the role of contemporary translators within a wider critical
discussion presently engaged with problems of text and performance, and
the correlated topics of authority, authenticity, multilingualism, interpreta­
tion, cultural relocation, and resistance to domestication and/or foreigni­
sation in a culturally oriented age. A succinct overview of the state of the
art and of the history of some of the issues currently on the table may be
helpful before we venture into deeper seas.7
The following brief review of critical positions is not aimed at sharply
differentiating the topics under discussion but only at tracing a path across
a treacherous terrain. The source(-text)-oriented approach will be com­
pared to the target(-performance)-oriented one for the reasons recalled
above pertaining to the different attitudes towards the ‘author-God’ text
and the ‘present-ness’ of the performance which lie behind much of the
present debate. These two concepts will be utilized to cover varying degrees
of adherence to the text and to the performance, while not implying that
the source(-text)-oriented approach describes a literary attitude to drama
texts, or that the target(-performance)-oriented one ignores it. They will
be treated as two flexible options of a complex process. The source(-text)­
oriented approach, in particular, will always be assumed as being alert to
the requirements of the stage in dealing with a typically performative and
 Introduction 5
in-performance text type. Following Pavis, the translated text will be con­
sidered to form part of “both source and target text and culture, assuming
that the transfer simultaneously involves the source text’s semantic, rhyth­
mic, aural, connotative and other dimensions, necessarily adapted to target
language and culture” (1989: 25–26).

THE STARTING POINT

There is a clear distinction between drama translation and theatre transla­

tion, two notions that refer to a reader-oriented and a stage-oriented type
of translation, respectively; as such they will be used here. A few years ago
David Ritchie lucidly illustrated the fundamental ontological and cognitive
difference between a reading and an acting version: “On the page a play
is fixed, permanent, spatially arranged, and access to it is conceptual. On
the stage a play is fluid, ephemeral, primarily temporally arranged, and
access to it is physical” (65). Literary studies have long focused on the text
(Greiner and Jenkins 1008), at least since the 1970s, when translation stud­
ies began taking into serious account the particular demands of the mise en
scène. This has required, on the one hand, that the translated text be con­
sidered only as one signifying system among others, and, on the other, that
the special requirements of a foreign stage should always be kept in mind.
Already in the 1960s Roland Barthes defined theatre as “a kind of
cybernetic machine” producing and presenting a “polyphony of messages”
through a “density of signs” (261–62). And at least since Kowzan’s 1975
Litérature et spectacle, Eco’s “Semiotics of Theatrical Performance” (1977),
and the semiotic researches led on theatre by Ubersfeld (1977), Serpieri
(1977) and colleagues (1978, 1981), and Elam (1980), among others, it has
been widely recognized that in the mise en scène the verbal code is part of
a multimedial and multisemiotic event, which includes the actors’ physical
appearance, gesture, kinesics, proxemics, the setting, costumes, lighting,
sound, and so forth. Yet, in the following years theatre anthropology and
cultural studies pointed to the shortcomings of semiotics,8 which seemed to
relegate to the background the performance while enhancing a reading of
the mise en scène; thus even sign-oriented semioticians started concentrat­
ing on the ‘experience’ of the performance from the point of view of the
spectator and the target culture (Ubersfeld 1981; Pavis 1982).
It was due to a new emphasis on cultural studies that in the 1980s an
essentialistic approach was often contested in order to prioritize the con­
ventional variability of the individual cultures and to focus on diversity
and plurality. However, both semiotics and theatre anthropology agreed
on no longer considering the written text as the essential component of
theatre, although it was the latter orientation especially that held it “as an
entity in its own right that has a particular function at a given point in the
development of culturally individualistic theatres” (Bassnett 1991: 110).
6 Silvia Bigliazzi, Peter Kofler, Paola Ambrosi
These well-known issues are worth recalling to locate the origin of a shift
in the debate precisely in a new emphasis on target texts and (systems of)
cultures, and to consider the issues described below as the off spring of
this initial debate.

FROM DRAMA TEXT TO PERFORMANCE TEXT

If Schechner (1988) assumes that everything is performance, and semioti­

cians argue that everything can be read as a text, it follows that the notion
of ‘performance text’ refers to the various articulations of the performance
space through movement, lighting, sound, objects, bodies, and so forth,
including, or not including, the written and spoken word. For quite a few
years criticism has pointed out that drama text and performance text are
not totally separate entities but are linked through the theatrical potential
of the verbal text to be transformed into stage gesture. As a consequence,
the main aim of a stage translation has no longer been seen as having a
thorough semantic or stylistic proximity to the source text considered as a
literary text, but as an attempt to exceed the semiotic boundaries of verbal
art by indirectly pointing to the multitude of signifying elements involved
in the theatrical performance. This is how source text and performance
text will be used here, never implying an idea of literariness released from
the performative potential of the drama text.
The straightforward link between drama text and the performance is
evidently afforded by the stage directions; yet– possibly due to a widespread
suspicion towards a philological attitude to the play text for its association
with the supposedly binding force of the written word–, these indications
have largely been ignored by translation studies (Schultze 2004: 1027).
Sophia Totzeva, however, has recently provided a useful basis for practi­
tioners by drawing a functional distinction between stage directions com­
menting on the text and those explicitly describing gesture and movements
(153 and ff.). At the same time, a thorough search for the lost, or original,
performance has been prompted by an eagerness to establish performative
authenticity based on authorial (or co-authorial) priority (what the ‘origi­
nal’ performances were like and how the actual mounting of the play bore
on the drama text as we have it). In other words, this attempt has stressed
the relevance of the drama text as the locus of the original stage-craft as
devised by the author (and the collaborating company), providing what
stands behind “the material practice of performance” as it occurred in the
past and recorded as such in the script (Dillon 74).
Such a position relies on an idea of theatricality that may be deduced
from the text in ways that semioticians have long been exploring, at least
since the late 1970s, when they rightly showed how through deixis lan­
guage becomes situational, visual, aural, gestural, and corporal (Serpieri
1977; Serpieri et al. 1978; Déprats 35, 37, and ff.), as well as speakable
 Introduction 7
and actable at large (Zuber-Skerritt 1984a: 1). For the translator this has
come to mean trying to recapture the driving force of language to guide the
actor’s voice and body, and, finally, to release its creative energy, its ‘theat­
rical potential’ (Totzeva), within the context of a foreign stage. The basic
argument was that the play text is full of gaps that need to be ‘fi lled in’ by
stage action and gesture (Ubersfeld 1977), and therefore the play text’s
specificity is its deictic and performative dimension (Serpieri et al. 1981).
Translation was thus acknowledged as a complex performance-oriented
activity which required engaging with an acting subtext traceable in the
verbal signs, however variably transmittable on stage, with the intention
of safeguarding their situational drive and endowing them with the thrust­
ing power of words and gesture to fuel action (Serpieri 1988, 2001, 2002,
2004a, 2004b).
Such premises evidently summon the later often disputed notion of a ges­
tic text, which relies on the assumption that the text or, semiotically speak­
ing, the verbal code, directly or indirectly refers to gesture. Since gesture
has often been considered perhaps the most important signifying system
in theatre, the question is closely related to the intersemiotic connection
between word and gesture and, consequently, to the debate on whether
the stage translation of a dramatic text can be metaphorically taken as the
score of the stage performance (Snell-Hornby 1997; Greiner and Jenkins
1012 and ff.) or as a silent or implicit mise en scène (Ranke 1016).
The concepts of speakability, stageability, and performability, especially,
have thus come to represent one major area of critical attention (see Aal­
tonen 2000: 41–46; Espasa; Nikolarea; Suh 2011), occasionally even acquir­
ing a normative status in the 1980s. Ansgar Haag, for instance, expressed
the idea that “in order to assure stageability, the wording of the text must
comply with the rhythm of the emotions. In this regard, the concept of
‘breathability’ means that the sentence rhythm and the length of the words
should answer the feelings expressed through the actor’s respiration” (221;
our translation). Likewise, Mary Snell-Hornby was convinced that “for the
purpose of breathability, the language of the theatre text should be in tune
with the natural breathing rhythm” (1984: 107). But only a few years later
Patrice Pavis put speakability into question by warning against the threat
of trivialization and remarking that the norm of euphony should not bring
about a rhetorical simplification of the text or a lowering of the actor’s
performance (1989: 30). More recently, Sirkku Aaltonen has expressed the
belief that speakability “defined in terms of simplicity is clearly not a very
accurate way of characterizing theatre texts. Theatre texts do not need to
be simple and easy to speak” (2000: 43). Since no actor would ever change
the original wording because of its difficulty, while companies dealing with
translated texts often do, asking of the translator fluency and ease, simplic­
ity evidently falls within the scope of domesticating practice.9 Interpret­
ing speakability in these terms actually means aiming the discussion in
the wrong direction and misunderstanding the theatrical potential of the
8 Silvia Bigliazzi, Peter Kofler, Paola Ambrosi
verbal. To a different type of speakability, which finds in ‘difficulty’ a pecu­
liar performative asset, Serpieri, Bigliazzi, and Besson have devoted a few
pages in this volume.
A similar controversial fate was met by the concept of performability,
which after having been long foregrounded seems nowadays to have largely
fallen into disgrace. In the 1980s Pavis proposed a very challenging view
of the way the word-gesture relation should be faced by the translator. His
starting point was to contrast two antithetic ideas of gesture:

The classical tradition sees it as an accessory of speech, which it must

necessarily be seen as ‘an expression of’ . . . thus implicitly reaffi rming
its submission to the logos. Contemporary research . . . considers it,
on the contrary, as the pure and primitive element of theatre, capable
of escaping logical or linguistic thought, and revealing to the actor
and to the spectator a new and immediate reading of the actor’s body.
(1981: 66–67)

By relying on the notion of the ‘language-body’, that is, “the union of

thing-presentation and word-presentation” as “the union of spoken text
and the gestures accompanying its enunciation” (1989: 36), Pavis sug­
gested that “[w]e should grasp the way in which the source text, fol­
lowed by the mise en jeu of the source, associates a particular gestural
and rhythmic enunciation with a text”, and further remarked that “then
we would look for the language-body that fits the target language”; the
assumption is that in order “to effect the translation of the dramatic text,
we must have a visual and gestural picture of the language-body of the
source language and culture” (36–37).
Yet, there are also different positions. Bassnett, for instance, has shown
distrust towards the language-body traceable in the text and a more radical
belief in the unpredictability of cultural variation. After contending that
theatre translators should be aware of the structural features that make the
play text performable (1980), she revised her position several times, eventu­
ally coming to deny the existence of a ‘gestic subtext’ (1985, 1991, 1998).
At some point she even argued that the term ‘performability’ in fact “has
never been clearly defined, and indeed does not exist in most languages
other than English” (1991: 102), adding that “[t]here is no sound theoreti­
cal base for arguing that ‘performability’ can or does exist. If a set of crite­
ria ever could be established to determine the ‘performability’ of a theatre
text, then those criteria would constantly vary, from culture to culture,
from period to period and from text type to text type” (ibid.).
Albeit controversial, the gestic subtext, however, is precisely what affords
generic specificity to the drama text, and its denial only reduces drama to
a literary text deprived of performative thrust and translational relevance
in the context of theatre. Many critics are reluctant to do so, assuming that
translation is a complex and open process which looks at both the source
 Introduction 9
and the target texts, and is therefore flexible and susceptible to revision.
As a matter of fact, translations are rarely produced only for one perfor­
mance and one particular theatre, director or group of actors; much more
frequently they provide the basis for a series of different mises en scène,
so that their structure, rhythm, and overall style should guide the actor’s
voice and body without narrowing the scope of interpretation by being
exceedingly prescriptive (Déprats 43; Hörmanseder 67). This means adjust­
ing the language-body of the source text to the individual requirements
of the target culture in a continuous encounter of actorial practices. Of
course these are only general indications because what are considered to
be loose performative references may be understood as too normative or
simply unsuitable for individual theatrical projects. Therefore besides and
beyond theory, fresh input is likely to derive from the actual praxis of trans­
lations and their coping with the ‘theatrical body’ and the ‘body as sign’
while concentrating on the body of signs: on their embodiment in the actor,
whose fluent, evanescent, and unpredictable gestures and voice enrich and
exceed the meaning of the verbal text at every single performance. This is
why the rhythm, sound patterns, and versification are so relevant in the
theatre as well as in other types of performances (including reading—not
only private and silent, but also to an audience: Bigliazzi 2002), because
they gear the verbal to the vocal and the gestural, as Paola Ambrosi, Silvia
Bigliazzi, and Beverley Curran demonstrate in this volume. But while much
ink has been spilt in discussions of the general notion of speakability, little
has so far been said about the translation of verse (Jekutsch 981), which is a
crucial topic in posing a number of questions regarding its relation to prose,
the available measures in the target language and culture, and the current
perception of conventional forms on stage.

FROM CULTURAL RELOCATION TO INTERDISCIPLINARITY

Shifting attention more consistently to the cultural perspective and the

demands of the audience in the overall performative event means also deal­
ing with dislocation and cultural relocation, two issues which have come
to represent a major concern in theatre translation (Scolnicov 1). Interest
in the audience’s tastes and expectations recalls time-honoured practices
of appropriation and adaptation, as Marzia Pieri and Dieter Martin, in
particular, show in this volume. It has been claimed that “translated texts
are subject to social constraints in the target system”, because “they will
function in the new culture according to their purpose, which may differ
from the source purpose” (Perteghella 1). The assumption is that “texts
do not have any inherent fixed readings which would automatically be,
or have to be, repeated in their translations”; therefore, if meanings “are
always context generated”, it follows that they “arise from relations and
differences among signifiers but also from the interaction between signifiers
10 Silvia Bigliazzi, Peter Kofler, Paola Ambrosi
and readers/audiences” (Aaltonen 2000: 28). As is obvious, this eminently
applies to theatre translation, where “theatre traditions and the current
theatre situation of the target country, the cultural, linguistic and other
competences of potential dramaturges and actors, and the cultural, aural
and other competences of a future audience” are crucial features that need
to be taken into account (Schultze 5; our translation; see also Fischer-Lichte
1990: 46; Ortiz García 880; Ranke 1018).
Given the plurality of variables here recalled, it is no surprise that a
broader methodological spectrum has sometimes been advocated as the
necessary critical approach in an ever changing world where a “study of the
movement of texts between theatrical systems requires an interdisciplinary
framework, and theatre translation can best be analysed, and the findings
understood, against the background of many disciplines, of which transla­
tion studies, theatre studies, cultural studies, literary studies, communi­
cation studies and linguistic studies first come to mind” (Aaltonen 2000:
28). Interdiscipline has evidently come to be viewed as a must also in the
field of theatre translation studies (Snell-Hornby, Pöchhacker, and Kaindl;
Snell-Hornby, Jettmarová, and Klaus Kaindl; Bassnett 2007). This suggests
that new inclusive academic subjects covering socio-cultural variables need
reconfiguration, thus pointing to a ‘sociology of translation’ supported by
an “investigation into the (new) function of the cultural product within the
target social systems, its selection first, and reception later” (Perteghella 6).
This type of interdiscipline clearly shows an awareness of the multifaceted
production process and of the number of different factors bearing upon it.
Yet the risk, within such a fluid milieu of growing multiculturalism and
socio-cultural demands, is that some major questions concerning the actual
practice of translation and its theoretical awareness may be left aside after
years of heated debate. The very notion of ‘translation expertise’ is a rel­
evant issue these days, when competence in translating plays has become
a controversial topic due to varying attitudes to translators and what is
required of them (a literal version, collaboration on stage, the work of a
dramaturge etc.). The instability of their role urges at least a few basic ques­
tions: what are they expected to do with the drama text in view of the per­
formance text? Where are they positioned in relation to the performance
and the overall production process?
As practices of displacement of translation to the margins of the theat­
rical event currently alternate, in different areas, with its foregrounding
in the rehearsal room, no single answer may be offered. Bespeaking radi­
cally different attitudes towards the text and the performance (the issue we
started from), this sway of positions involves a range of practical, cultural,
but also specifically theatrical, textual, and theoretical factors in different
countries. The issues prompted by such a variety of practices are crucial for
our understanding of the migration of plays into foreign cultures, inviting
us to interrogate the status of translators and ask whether they should be
 Introduction 11
mere invisible deliverers of a text or have an active role in the staging of the
play: what kind of interpretative and recreative job is asked of them? Or, to
put it in David Johnston’s words, should they “play feudal servant to their
master” or be “a second author in their own right” (1996: 7), and what
does this binary choice itself tell us?

THE TRANSLATOR AS COLLABORATOR AND

THE ‘END’ OF THEATRE TRANSLATION

In recent years there has been a growing tendency to engage in a thorough

and extensive reconsideration of the tasks and the role of the performance-
oriented translator. Already in 1980 Franz Link called for “the necessity
for cooperation between playwright, translator, dramatic advisor, stage
manager, and scholar” (24), something which in certain environments
has often been common practice. The thick epistolary exchange, now in
print (Colombo), between Italian director Giorgio Strehler and scholar and
translator Agostino Lombardo on the famous 1978 mise en scène of The
Tempest at Milan Piccolo Teatro, beautifully illustrates such an experiment
of co-working. It is no coincidence that Strehler believed that in the case “of
a foreign text the first critical operation is the translation. I would even say
that the ‘critical work’ of the director is strictly linked with the problem of
translation. The two things are or should be part of one and the same deep
unity” (281; our translation).
However, while in 2000 Aaltonen argued that the theatre translator is in
fact an ‘author’ in his or her own right, at least in the sense that he or she is
the author of a stage-oriented reading and concretization of the source text
(28; see also 1997), in the same year Terry Hale and Carole-Anne Upton
still regretted that “the theatre translator has rarely been acknowledged as
a creative figure integral to the process of production” (10). A few years
later, Zatlin (2005) resumed the topic of the theatre translator as a fully
entitled co-subject of the mise en scène, who more than writing for the
stage, should “perform with a stage” (vii). In this view, he or she ought to be
admitted among the protagonists of the rehearsal room (Hörmanseder 15),
because “[o]nly a fully-fledged performance environment, with its emphasis
on verbal interaction, will bring the translator into direct encounter with
the nature of stage language as the prime component of drama” (Johnston
2004: 36); and Zatlin went even further by stating that the theatre transla­
tor’s “contribution may be similar to that of a dramaturge” (5).
Nonetheless, the idea of (co-)authorship has become a testing-ground
for different cultural attitudes towards translation practices. By duplicating
the translation roles and distributing them between the literal translator
and the dramaturge, British policy, for instance, has been active in mar­
ginalizing translators for years. As Bassnett wrote in 1991, “translators
12 Silvia Bigliazzi, Peter Kofler, Paola Ambrosi
are commissioned to produce what are termed ‘literal’ translations and
the text is then handed over to a well-known (and most often monolin­
gual) playwright with an established reputation so that larger audiences
will be attracted into the theatre. The translation is then credited to that
playwright, who receives the bulk of the income” (101). Then, in 2006
Bassnett edited with Peter Bush a collection of essays “in response to
the idea of ‘the translator as writer’” (1), and Bill Findlay, one of the
contributors, called attention on “what has become a given in British
theatre: the notion of the ‘translator as writer’; or, perhaps more accu­
rately, ‘the writer as translator’” (46). This is nothing but a rewording of
the translation policy earlier referred to: the erasure of the collaborative
translator and his or her subservience to the dramaturge, who in turn
becomes a ‘translator’. Findlay’s two-stage co-translation experience of
Goldoni’s Baruffe chiozzotte into Scots recorded there is a lucid example
of this practice: Findlay’s own work, which aimed at achieving “a per­
formance script balancing source-text fidelity—in the conditional terms
of surrogate translation . . .—with the imperatives of stagecraft” (55),
was only made possible by the aid of “a gifted and published translator
from Italian” who “provided him with a literal translation containing
copious parenthetic explanations . . .” (47–48). In such cases, the word
‘translator’ has thus come to be loosely applied to dramaturges who in
fact rewrite a literal translation without recourse to the source text (as
in David Hare’s ‘translations’ of Pirandello and Brecht: ibid. 46; Hare
1996). Towards similar choices, however, some resistance has also been
voiced. In Findlay’s essay just quoted, for instance, the author commented
on Joseph Farrell (1996) lamenting the “‘wholly new figure of the sur­
rogate or pseudo translator’”, in that he “lacks the ‘level of knowledge
of the original play which is indispensable to the production of a work
meriting the title “translation”’” (Farrell 53–54, qtd. in Findlay 46). By
contrast Findlay reported Johnston’s “more relaxed view”, showing that
in the face of someone’s queasiness about this practice there is still a
witty option available: “‘Straightforward translation and adaptation/new
version come to represent opposite poles of fidelity; rightful inheritor,
upright and true, and bastard child, wickedly lively and devil-may-care’”
(Johnston 1996: 8, qtd. in Findlay 46). No equivocation should there­
fore ensue from the label ‘translator as writer’ when this means ‘writer
as translator’: the coalescence of writing and translating as a secondary
practice within a two-step translation process only enhances playwriting
with no interlingual and little intercultural awareness, while downplaying
‘actual’ translation.
But if what counts is the success of the performance—and to this end a
thorough domestication of foreign texts is allegedly needed, starting from
the reworking of their language by ‘dramaturges as translators’—what
might be the fate of competent theatre translators and the worldwide cir­
culation of drama?
 Introduction 13

THE VOLUME: PERFORMING TEXTS, PERFORMING

CULTURES, AND THE TRANSLATOR AS (CO-)AUTHOR

The essays collected here address this crucial question by dealing with some
of the topics sketched above from different angles and experiences. They
span from a reassessment of the concepts of performability and speakabil­
ity to a discussion of the straight line that connects textual distrust and the
primacy of the dramaturge as translator. Translation practices of collabo­
ration are interrogated through a diversity of approaches which embrace a
‘holistic’ perspective, whereby the translator is considered to be part of the
production team and the performance a synthesis of the drama text and
the requirements and conventions of the target culture.10 In many cases
the subsidiarity of the verbal ‘text’ is questioned in favour of a practice
of integration between source- and target-oriented approaches, showing
that a culture of performance does not necessarily ignore or dismantle the
source drama text while also encouraging code-switching and intermedial­
ity. Bilingualism, for instance, is here vindicated as a cultural opportunity,
setting off an interesting dialectic between languages and media through
surtitling which bestows upon the written text—shown off stage while the
action unfolds—a new unexpected function endowed with playful effects.
Accurate knowledge of the source text is also presupposed when verbal
translation accesses different stage genres in West-East encounters of the­
atrical traditions. Translational collaboration may also feature as a differ­
ent type of ‘distant encounter’ between translators through verbal citation,
which situates authorial control in a no-man’s land of intertextuality as a
performative act which requires textual attention and awareness of acting
conventions. Besides these and other issues, questions are raised to prompt
reflection on the motives lying behind the cultural fear of interpretation and
textual authority, inviting further thought about our traditions of transla­
tion practices and envisaging future possibilities for the role of the transla­
tor. By looking at individual examples from the Renaissance to the present,
the volume investigates habits of appropriation and rewriting that on the
whole support an idea of the translator as co-subject and/or co-author of
the performance, competent both in textuality and stage-performativity,
in verbal and gestic style, as well as acting conventions: an indispensable
figure of cultural and theatrical mediation.

*****

The volume looks at what might happen should the figure of the translator
be officially declared a ‘theatrical absence’ (Marinetti); it then reverts to a
discussion of contemporary critical jargon in translation studies (Espasa),
and moves on to see what the translator, when ‘present’ and active in
a collaborative enterprise, does in different parts of the world, and has
been doing over the centuries. Although the essays have not been grouped
14 Silvia Bigliazzi, Peter Kofler, Paola Ambrosi
under distinct sections, they have been distributed according to their main
topics: Which textual and intertextual features of the drama text offer
peculiar challenges to the translator who aims at an actual or possible
performance text (Serpieri, Ambrosi, Bigliazzi)? What are the horizons of
translating dialects and the solutions offered in a context of multilingual­
ism (Nigri, Ladouceur, Brater)? What is the relation between translator,
director, and the audience in contemporary theatre and what is the scope
of translation as performance (Wood, Besson, Heras)? What has been the
practice of translation in the history of theatre when the notions of author­
ity and authenticity were not conceived of as they are today (Pieri, Kofler,
Martin)? And, finally, on which grounds may Eastern and Western tradi­
tions meet in translation practices (Curran, Oki-Siekierczak)?
As can be seen, the overall question running through all of these issues
is the extent to which the source (text) and target (performance) approaches
may be reconciled and what the orbit of their individual practices is in a
context of growing multilingualism.

*****

Before raising these questions through the help of individual case studies,
the volume offers as a starting point a discussion of the ‘absent translator’
precisely to mark the boundary beyond which it is not possible to stretch the
present inquiry into translation for the theatre without resorting to figures
different from that of the translator. In an age which has long experienced
the death of the author, talking about the death of the theatre translator
is a side effect that could easily be expected. In the opening essay Cristina
Marinetti tackles this topic nicely by considering its motives and afteref­
fects. From an Anglo-centred perspective, which privileges the British case
as a “gateway between Europe and the World”, she describes the experi­
ence of marginalization of foreign drama recalled above and the current
devaluation of the role of translators on the British scene—a practice which
to some extent she questions while acknowledging the obsolescence of the
theatre translator. Sceptical about translation models favouring interpreta­
tion in discreet phases, Marinetti shuns theoretical frames and looks at
the pros and cons of working practices, focusing on cultural negotiation
as translation. By embracing recent preoccupations with the translational
nature of culture, she also foregrounds the positive encounter of languages
and representational modes in a globalized and multilingual environment
that allows for new perspectives on intercultural and interlingual roles, such
as that of the interpreter, which have not yet received enough attention.
Stepping back from the threshold dividing translation and interpreta­
tion as the ultimate boundary of theatre translation here described, Eva
Espasa leads the discussion into the metacritical field of the ideological
implications residing in today’s critical jargon, and concentrates on our
way of looking at translation practices through metaphors. By harping on
 Introduction 15
the general communicative model and singling out three of its main com­
ponents (sender, message, receiver), Espasa examines the cultural and ideo­
logical implications of figurative language in describing translation. The
assumption that metaphors help conceptualize theoretical models makes for
a reconfiguration of the traditional idea of meaning-transferral inscribed in
the etymology of the word in transactional terms, which Espasa argues in
the context of theatre translation as a favourite site to (re)construct mean­
ing. If these issues help us to think about theatre translation in connection
with performability, Espasa points out that in the last ten years this topic
has lost momentum in the critical agenda: on the contrary, attention has
shifted from general topics concerning the performability of texts to indi­
vidual performances of translated texts with special attention to the once
marginalized voices of Eurocentric discourse, as well as to multilingualism
and alternative forms of interlingual and intercultural practices.
Both Marinetti and Espasa come to the same conclusion that the new
globalized panorama favours experiences that may involve new mediating
figures such as the interpreter, yet their awareness of the possible obsoles­
cence of translation bespeaks different attitudes which invite us to look at
them through more, or less, positive lenses. By taking an alternative course,
the following three essays demonstrate that the time to toll the funeral
bell for theatre translation may not have come yet. The essays by Serpieri,
Ambrosi, and Bigliazzi tackle different aspects of translation for the theatre
by discussing the performative role of specific features of dramatic dis­
course within the text/performance dialectic: semantics and syntax, verse,
and intertextuality, respectively.
Semiotic and drama theorist, but also experienced translator, Alessandro
Serpieri reminds us of the peculiar status of dramatic language, both liter­
ary and performative, and disputes the theoretical devaluation of the script
that has occurred over the last few decades. Deeply convinced that word
and gesture are strongly linked in the dramatic text, he argues that speak-
ability and performability are central issues for all translators who should
therefore be alert to the staging potentialities encoded within the multidis­
course of the verbal. The theoretical frame is supported by examples taken
from his own translations of plays by Shakespeare and his collaborative
experience with major Italian directors and companies, offering evidence
of how Shakespeare’s language does not need to be paraphrased or simpli­
fied in another language, or just domesticated into a new speakable jargon.
Serpieri also argues that what one eventually comes to understand is that
languages have individual tricks imbued with a performative thrust that
cannot be “imported into another one”: the transferral metaphor he fi nally
resorts to shows awareness of an ultimate boundary beyond which the hard
work of balancing speakability and performability in creating a new text
(and theatrical language) cannot reach.
A similar awareness of the limits of verbal and cultural translatability
also runs through Paola Ambrosi’s essay on verse translation for the theatre,
16 Silvia Bigliazzi, Peter Kofler, Paola Ambrosi
although she does not acknowledge an abated performative power of the
translated text, but gives an account of the efforts required to make for an
effective performance. Her Italian translation of Bergamín’s La sangre de
Antigona, which she presents as a telling case study, is in fact a beautiful
example of the challenges offered by the sound, semantic, and performative
heterogeneity of two languages as close as Spanish and Italian. Rejecting
theoretical fetters and endorsing a practice of reading and re-reading the
source text in order to distil the emotional and performative drive of the
verbal, Ambrosi launches into a passionate discussion of a theatrical exper­
iment carried out by a Verona amateur company directed by Nicoletta
Zabini and Guillermo Heras on her own translation of Bergamín’s play.
Considering the theatre as a privileged site of linguistic and communicative
confrontation, Ambrosi illustrates the operatic and ritualistic nature of this
text as the testing-ground for the metrical experimentation attempted by
the author and eventually recaptured in her Italian translation. Her central
concern is with the acoustic effect of the voice encapsulated in the rhythm
and lines of the sonnets scattered in the play which form an acting subtext
to be tested during the performance in order to enhance its choral and
musical dimension.
Style and rhythm as performative clues linked to actorial vocalization
and gesture are also one of the main concerns of Silvia Bigliazzi’s essay on
intertextuality and the performance of rewrites. The argument embraces
an interpretation of intertextuality released from an exclusively liter­
ary domain and linked to the stage through the performative power of
the text and the dialogue between acting conventions. Thus withdrawing
from authorial sway and essentialism, yet heedful of the demands of both
the source text and the target culture, the essay wishes to reconcile the play
text and the performance text through the discursive modulations of the
verbal and their staging potential. Bigliazzi argues that rewrites are par­
ticularly interesting in this respect because their performativity is invested
with historicity, parody, and cultural overtones related to a stratification
of performative modes which lend themselves to being acted out on stage
according to the practices of the target environment and to its interpreta­
tions of the source text’s acting and cultural conventions. The discussion
concentrates on a group of Shakespearean rewrites leading to specific con­
siderations on Stoppard’s ‘Hamlet plays’, including Rosencrantz and Guil­
denstern Are Dead which is looked at from the unusual perspective of the
‘distant collaboration’ between two translators (Lia Cuttitta and Eugenio
Montale) in the Italian print version of the play.
The following three essays by Lucia Nigri, Louise Ladouceur, and Enoch
Brater tackle problems of multilingualism and the relation between domi­
nant and non-standard languages in translating for the theatre. Domestica­
tion/foreignisation, surtitling, and self-translation are their main topics.
Lucia Nigri offers a reassessment of issues of cultural assimilation of for­
eign drama texts by examining the case of a two-way English-Neapolitan
 Introduction 17
translation process, involving the rendition of Eduardo de Filippo’s Nea­
politan Filumena Marturano into English and Eduardo’s own translation
of Shakespeare’s The Tempest into Neapolitan. Nigri aptly shows how the
English domestication of Eduardo’s dialect at best paraphrases its language,
failing to grasp its local and expressive colour typical of an acting style that
challenges easy stereotypes of Italian body language. Coming to the other
end of the topic, Nigri explores the uncertain balance between domestica­
tion and foreignisation in Eduardo’s adoption of a jargon which owes much
to old Neapolitan. She unveils how his attempt to remain faithful to an idea
of pastness attached to Shakespeare in fact results in foreignising the Bard
to Italian speakers as well as contemporary Neapolitans, for whom the old
dialect has a defamiliarizing effect. This raises questions on the very idea of
fluency advocated by practices of domestication, while problematizing the
critical scenario and hinting at not yet fully explored aspects of the relation
between standard language and dialect.
Multilingualism and the performance of written/oral texts are the
main focus of Louise Ladouceur’s exploration of the cultural potential
of surtitling in an environment of bilingualism. The peculiarity of the
Canadian play text Ladouceur intriguingly picks out is that it requires
that the audience should actually be bilingual in order to understand the
implications conveyed through code-switching. Marc Prescott’s 1993
Sex, Lies et les Franco-Manitobains offers the example of a bilingual
environment being broken into by a unilingual person, allowing what
happens on stage—equivocations and ironies—to reverberate onto the
spectators whose enjoyment depends on their lingual competence. Ladou­
ceur goes into the potential for performance of surtitling, examining the
role of the translator on stage as an active component of the performance,
and illustrates the dialectics between on-stage and off -stage discourses,
enhancing linguistic plurality. By taking into account the limits as well as
the enormous potentialities of this kind of double-talk, Ladouceur argues
in favour of an aesthetics of bilingualism for its capacity to subvert tradi­
tionally dominant monolingual discourses.
Bilingualism—actually trilingualism (Irish, English, French)—and inter­
textuality are also the topics taken up by Enoch Brater in his thought-pro­
voking essay on Beckett’s ‘miltilingual’ texts, which debates issues of the
director-translator relation that will be resumed also by the following two
contributions. Posing a real challenge to performance theorists and prac­
titioners who wish to locate ‘the’ Beckett text within the long series of the
author’s revisions, adaptations, variations, and self-translations, Beckett’s
plays are a beautiful example of “linguistically based cultural migration”.
Not only was Beckett-the-playwright also Beckett-the-director, but he was
even Beckett-the-(self-)translator. Beginning his discussion with the ‘minor
issue’ of title translation and then moving on to play texts, proto-texts, and
pre-texts for performance, Brater discloses the rich potentialities for mul­
tiple meanings and performances in Beckett’s drama. An exploration of the
18 Silvia Bigliazzi, Peter Kofler, Paola Ambrosi
many facets of translation in performance leads the argument on to issues
of interlingual and intercultural (and intertextual) transaction, as well as to
a page-to-stage type of translation, raising questions of authenticity, autho­
rial direction, and performative liberty.
The next three essays by Sharon Wood, Jean-Louis Besson, and Guillermo
Heras concentrate on the prospects and limits of translation as performance
and of performance as translation, examining the position and function of
the translator in respect to the director/actor and the audience.
Wood takes up the intriguing example of Pirandello to challenge the idea
of theatre translation as a simply interlingual operation, and demonstrates
the contiguity between the language-to-language and page-to-stage trans­
lation, showing that textual (un)performability in fact means textual (un)
translatability. Wood illustrates how, like Samuel Beckett, Luigi Pirandello
too was an essayist, writer, and theatre director, and his playing different
and simultaneous roles throughout his career made him move away from
his earlier idealist stance as writer influenced by Croce’s Aesthetics, to the
more pragmatic attitude of theatre practitioner aware of the materiality of
the stage and the demands and active role of the audience. The play she
selects for discussion is Pirandello’s renowned Six Characters in Search of
an Author as a telling example of a vanishing text existing only through an
in-progress performance where the author is replaced by the director and
the audience is constantly challenged to engage in an act of interpretation,
which is also one of translation.
The following two essays by Besson and Heras are more clearly focused
upon the relation between translators and directors, which they tackle
from two distinctly different perspectives, privileging a text-oriented and a
performance-oriented approach, respectively. Scholar and translator, Jean-
Louis Besson picks up the topic discussed by Marinetti at the outset, but
looks at it from a different angle, which now shows the translator and the
director ‘at daggers drawn’. The scene is not British, but French, and the
examples offered come from translations of Ibsen’s works and from the
author’s own co-translation of Büchner’s Woyzeck. Besson’s argument is a
passionate defence of literal translation, if by this expression is meant not a
word-for-word transposition but the jostling of the target language in order
to recapture the gesture and vocality, the breath and action, in short, the
body language of the original, even if this means doing away with ‘flowing
speech’. Besson heartily deprecates practices of marginalization of transla­
tors due to the directors’ choice to rewrite themselves literal versions made
by competent specialists, or even to cannibalize other translators’ versions
without acknowledging their debt.
If Guillermo Heras shares this harsh criticism of ‘bogus translators’, his
attitude is quite the opposite as regards what translation for the theatre is.
While Besson holds that the text bears a theatricality of its own on whose
ground the translator and the director negotiate how to interpret the trans­
lated text, Heras frankly states that no performance is embedded in the
 Introduction 19
script, and consequently stigmatizes those who do not separate the play
text and the mise en scène in contemporary theatre as conservative. Actor,
director, and playwright, Heras does not tackle the issue from a technical
perspective; rather, he offers scattered ideas on the relation between direct­
ing and translating plays, relating examples from his own experience as
theatre practitioner mostly engaged with the contemporary stage and post-
dramatic experiments. From this perspective, which is that of the direc­
tor and playwright, rather than the scholar’s, he enthusiastically advocates
freedom from authorial constraint, collaboration with competent transla­
tors, and, most of all, militant diversity.
The next three essays by Marzia Pieri, Peter Kofler, and Dieter Mar­
tin wind the clock backward and cope with periods in the history of the­
atre when translation clearly coalesced with rewriting, and when the very
notions of authenticity and authority as we consider them today had not
established themselves yet or, as in the case of Martin’s essay, were obfus­
cated by practices of adaptation.
Drawing the contours of these practices in Renaissance Europe, Pieri
nicely shows how the birth of a modern European theatre coincided with a
militant culture of performance grown out of habits of exchange and appro­
priation which relied on extensive borrowings, translations, adaptations,
and actual rewrites. The two borderline cases on which she dwells, offering
full details of how they called into question the idea of authority, are the
collaborative rewrite of Plautus’s Captivi carried out by sixteenth-century
Siena-based Accademici Intronati, and Goldoni’s intriguing appropriation
of Voltaire’s L’Écossaise, a work which in turn was claimed to have fi rst
been written in English by M. Hume, brother to David. Pieri elucidates, in
the two cases, the choices of tailoring the new versions for the theatre mar­
ket, while enthusiastically exhibiting their derivative nature, and records
the game of mutual references in which Goldoni engaged with the French
author in a competition that eventually saw the ‘translated work’ gain the
upper hand on stage.
Turning to the German context, Peter Kofler explores the eighteenth-
century translations of Hamlet and investigates the autopoietic feedback
between stage and audience in their adaptions for the stage. The essay
focuses on the acting of the ghost in III, 4, as played by Garrick, Brockmann,
and Schröder, and the intensive debate it raised among German critics. It
also refers to the descriptions and drawings illustrating the performances
that were provided at the time, examining their close relation to what in
eighteenth-century Europe was called the art of gesture. By looking at the
German version of this theory and its application to the Hamlet role, Kofler
delves into the topics of adaptation, description, and illustration which pro­
vide telling insight into the complex problem of relocation during the last
third of the eighteenth century. Within a context of expected domestication
of foreign plays, Kofler foregrounds the overall relevance of translation at
every step of the production process, concentrating mainly on two German
20 Silvia Bigliazzi, Peter Kofler, Paola Ambrosi
translators, Heufeld and Schröder, who were also experienced directors,
dramaturges, and actors.
The argument for translation as rewrite is resumed by Dieter Mar­
tin, who shifts the focus onto Hofmannsthal’s attempt to modernise the
ancients in his own versions of the Greeks and adaptations of Molière for
the German stage around 1900. Disappointed with language, while being
fully immersed in it, Hofmannsthal was very perceptive of the multicoded
discourse making up the theatrical event, and although he was neither a
director, nor a stage designer, nor a choreographer, he enhanced scenery
and choreography to overcome the limits of the verbal. Martin investigates
this aesthetics, which is also one of rewriting, aimed at wrenching the clas­
sics from the hands of scholars and philologists who advocated faithfulness
to the original, and making them live on the modern stage in productions
little attentive to authenticity and authority.
With the last two essays by Beverley Curran and Ayami Oki-Siekierczak
the volume turns to a West-East encounter seen through the eyes of two
Japan-based scholars. By discussing Nogami’s 1930s translation theory
in a period when Japan was coping with the challenge of constructing a
national identity and exporting it abroad, Curran shows the resistance of
Japanese Noh songs to being translated according to Western theatrical
categories such as plot and semantic clarity, pleading to be considered for
what they are: musical drama. Curran illustrates how Nogami, aware of
the Western difficulty with coming to terms with Noh, proposed the idea
of the ‘reading circle’ conceived of as the “circulation of ideologies and
cultural production”, and encouraged translation to be carried out as an
Eastern-Western collaborative enterprise between those who were aware
that Noh is primarily rhythm and performing bodies. She also offers full
details of Nogami’s affective theory of translation based on adherence to
sound, tone, and gesture, and invites us to pay attention to the evocative
power of the performance and the emotion released by it, even if this means
producing an effect of foreignisation.
Finally, Ayami Oki-Siekerczak tackles the opposite topic of translat­
ing foreign drama into Japanese and for the Japanese audience by looking
at the hybridisation carried out by Ninagawa in recent years in making
a proper ‘kabuki Shakespeare’. The approach strikes a new note in cou­
pling a discussion of performance issues with a study of the play text and
translation choices intent on distinguishing verse from prose and fi nding
suitable solutions for punning. Oki-Siekerczak argues that this type of
translation marks a relatively new trend testifying to a fresh interest for the
source-text approach compared to the 1980s preference for a target text
primarily suitable for a performance aimed at a Japanese audience. The
essay offers ample evidence of the blending of Shakespearean and kabuki
elements, including characters and stage-craft, and goes into the linguistic
choices affected by intercultural conditioning in the treatment of humour
and bawdy language.
 Introduction 21

NOTES

1. Reference is here to Judith Butler’s studies on aesthetic and social perfor­

mance and her concept of performativity related to gender as “a reiteration
of a norm or a set of norms”; “to the extent that it acquires an act-like status
in the present, it conceals or dissimulates the conventions of which it is a
repetition. Moreover, this act is not primarily theatrical; indeed, its apparent
theatricality is produced to the extent that its historicity remains dissimu­
lated (and, conversely, its theatricality gains a certain inevitability given the
impossibility of a full disclosure of its historicity)” (xxi).
2. In some quarters of the Anglophone world, for instance, the word ‘theatre’
has sometimes been opposed to ‘performance’, which in turn has been show­
cased as a form of resistance to an idea of theatrical authenticity related to
the ‘author-God’. For an introduction to this controversy see Shepherd and
Wallis (152 and ff.).
3. Derrida’s notion of a theology of the stage making for false representations
is based on the following components: “an author-creator who, absent and
from afar, is armed with a text and keeps a watch over, assembles, regulates
the time or the meaning of representation, letting this latter represent him
as concerns what is called the content of his thoughts, his intentions, his
ideas. He lets representation represent him through representatives, direc­
tors or actors, enslaved interpreters who represent characters who, primarily
through what they say, more or less directly, represent the thought of the
‘creator’. Interpretative slaves who faithfully execute the providential designs
of the ‘master’” (296).
4. For a critique on fluency in translation and a thorough discussion of domesti­
cation and foreignisation see Venuti (1995, 1998) and Aaltonen (1997, 2000).
For a historical overview of philosophical and critical positions on herme­
neutic approaches to translation and their relevance to the above-mentioned
topics see also Pym. This issue is taken up by Nigri in this volume.
5. “The resultant translations emanating from this trend [target text/target cul­
ture and reception-oriented approach] have been described and labelled in
various ways. Researchers have, for example, referred to them or described
them variously in English as ‘adaptation,’ ‘rewriting,’ ‘version,’ ‘transplant­
ing,’ ‘naturalising,’ ‘neutralising,’ ‘integrating foreign works,’ ‘large-scale
amendments,’ ‘recreation,’ ‘transposition,’ ‘reappropriate,’ and in French
as ‘transposer complètement,’ ‘traduction ethnocentrique,’ ‘traduction­
assimilation,’ ‘traduction totale,’ ‘déplacement,’ ‘déraciner de son contexte,’
‘l’assimilation,’ etc.” (Suh 2002: 53).
6. A brief survey of the debate on this notion can be found in Nikolarea.
7. For synthetic but lucid reassessments of theatre translation within a wider
discussion of the turns of translation studies see for instance Snell-Hornby
(2006: 84–90; 2007) and Kuhiwczak and Littau.
8. ‘Theatre anthropology’, ‘intercultural performance’, and ‘theatrical inter­
culturalism’ are often used interchangeably (Fischer-Lichte, Riley, and
Gissenwherer).
9. The degree of domestication of foreign drama and the role of the translator
may vary greatly depending on the cultural circumstances of the target theat­
rical system. Aaltonen, for instance, has remarked that the “translator’s role
in the theatrical system as creator or mediator is related to the centrality or
peripherality of translated drama in the receiving theatrical polisystem. When
translated drama occupies a central position in the domestic theatrical sys­
tem—for example when the system is still very young and enough domestic
22 Silvia Bigliazzi, Peter Kofler, Paola Ambrosi
material is not yet available—the distinction between source text and its trans­
lation is not considered as important as when translated drama is peripheral to
the system . . . This was the case, for example, in the 19th century Finnish the­
atre when foreign plays were cannibalized into the Finnish polisystem through
total acculturation. It was important that there were play texts available and
that they were in Finnish. The mode of translation was borrowing and often
only the central idea of a source text was used and a new play woven around
it. Foreign plays were turned into new Finnish plays, and for example Macbeth
and Erasmus Montanus were rewritten as Finnish plays” (1997: 91). Yet, con­
trary motives related to cultural hegemony, rather than the need to appropriate
foreign drama for lack of available plays, may support similar domesticating
practices (for references see above endnote 4).
10. For a discussion of this type of ‘holistic’ approach see Snell-Hornby (2006,
2007).

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1 Transnational, Multilingual,
and Post-dramatic
Rethinking the Location of
Translation in Contemporary Theatre
Cristina Marinetti

What is incredibly fascinating about theatre, and has been its driving force
from very early on, is its immediacy and transience, that characteristic of
being there one moment and gone the next. And this is particularly poi­
gnant in street and improvised performance, because of the lack of the
architectural frame which makes us aware of the ‘fiction’ of the theatre.
This quintessential aspect of theatre is encapsulated in the moment when
a street actor says a word, or strikes a pose and catches the attention of a
passerby. And how do they do that? How do they make you stop? Because
they are doing or saying something different, something out of the ordi­
nary, something worth stopping for and watching. In that moment we have
‘theatre’, a moment of extraordinary exchange that creates the distinction
between actor and spectator. The actors, as a creative force, use their body
in space to build a unique connection with the spectator which is consumed
in the moment of performance.
Eugenio Barba describes this use of the actor’s body as ‘extra-daily’ tech­
niques, and he sees them as what defines at its core the notion of perfor­
mance. For Barba the way we use our bodies in daily life is substantially
different from the way we use them in performance. We are not conscious
of our daily techniques: “of how we move, we sit, we stand, we carry
things, we kiss” (Barba and Savarese 9). In performance the body’s daily
techniques “are replaced by extra-daily techniques, that is, techniques that
do not respect the habitual conditionings of the body” (ibid.). And it is
this stage ‘presence’, created by the body of the actor in performance, that
defines the theatre in the same way that it has defined attempts to study
translation in the theatre.

RESISTING TRANSLATION:
PRESENCE, DRAMA, AND PERFORMANCE

But it is also this very ‘presence’ which makes theatre resistant to transla­
tion. The immediacy of the theatrical experience, predicated on the here and
now of the performance, destabilizes the assumption of stable meanings of
DOI: 10.4324/9780203073506-2
28 Cristina Marinetti
the dramatic text. Writing about “the work of art in the age of mechani­
cal reproduction”, Walter Benjamin sees photography and its technique of
infinite reproduction as the motive for a reconceptualization of the work
of art:

Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one

element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place
where it happens to be. This unique existence of the work of art deter­
mines the history to which it was subject throughout the time of its
existence . . . [T]he technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced
object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions, it
substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. (220–21)

Concepts of originality and authenticity are predicated for Benjamin on

the notion of “presence in time and space”, and mechanical reproduction,
by detaching the work of art from tradition, “substitutes a plurality of
copies for a unique existence”. So it is ‘presence’ in time and space, like
the actor on stage at the moment of performance, that creates a sense of
authenticity, the experience of witnessing an act of creation. This brings
us to the paradox of translation in the theatre: how can one reproduce in
another language and context ‘theatrical performance’, which is by defi ni­
tion unique and unrepeatable?
Pioneering scholars in theatre translation have been fascinated by this
paradox and have offered great insights to our understanding of the nature
of the dramatic text and its consequences on the theory and practice of
translation. Drawing on contemporary Italian work on theatre semiotics,
Susan Bassnett was the first to seek ways to uncover the actor’s ‘presence’
in the text. The dramatic text was seen as a ‘blueprint for performance’
which the translator was to recognize in the source text, decode and recode
in the target text. In an analysis of three translations of Racine’s Phèdre she
unveils how two of the translators succeed in reproducing the rhythm of
the French verse thereby also recoding in the target language the patterns
of physical gesture of the actor, and she concludes:

In short, the translation process has involved not only a sequence of lin­
guistic transfers from SL to TL on the level of discourse signification,
but also a transfer of the function of the linguistic utterance in relation
to the other component signs of the theatre discourse. (2002: 124)

In later writing, Bassnett gradually moves away from the structural idea
of ‘gestic subtext’ and recognizes the limits of it as a concept which was
born of a specific approach to a specific type of text, namely a structural
approach to ‘the theatre of psychological realism’ (1998). But the idea of
‘presence’, so embedded in the notion of performance, continued to be pro­
ductive for thinking about theatre translation.
 Transnational, Multilingual, and Post-dramatic 29
For Patrice Pavis, the physical presence of the actor—their gestures,
movements, tone of voice, and facial expression—becomes one with the
written word of the text. This presence, which he terms the ‘language­
body’, should substitute equivalence as a constituent unit (and criterion) for
translation, since the main object of theatre translation is not the equiva­
lence of texts but the appropriation of the source text by the target culture
(137–38). Broadening the discussion to the processes of rehearsal and stag­
ing, Sirkku Aaltonen tells us that not only actors but “playwrights, transla­
tors, stage directors, dress and set designers, sound and light technicians as
well as actors all contribute to the creation of theatre texts when they move
into them and make them their own” (32), leaving their mark on the theatre
text, which signifies only to the extent that it has been inhabited.
My difficulty with Aaltonen’s and Pavis’s models lies in the fact that
they both see as unproblematic a view of translation where interpretation
occurs in discrete phases. Both Aaltonen’s metaphor of time-sharing—dif­
ferent agents inhabiting the text at different moments—and Pavis’s differ­
ent phases of the articulation of the language-body suggest a separation of
the ‘linguistic’ from the ‘dramaturgical’ and the ‘performative’. The risk of
such perspectives is that the creative potential of cultural encounters begins
and ends with the translated text, which is then passed on to dramaturges,
playwrights, directors, and actors who no longer have the means to engage
with the language of the source culture.

BRITISH THEATRE: ‘NOT LOST IN TRANSLATION’

The British case is particularly poignant, both because of its geopolitical

importance as the gateway between Europe and the world, and because it
presents an extreme case of marginalization of foreign drama and, as we
will see, of the figure of the translator themself. As Jack Bradley recently
put it, “the British scene is not lost in translation” (Baines, Marinetti, and
Perteghella 187). As Figure 1.1 illustrates, the percentage of translations
commissioned and produced by British theatres is minimal compared
to other European countries, even in the most established and publicly
funded theatres. The National Theatre, for example, between 1995 and
2006 produced 250 plays, and of those 250 only forty-one are translations
(16.4%):1
If we look at the plays that fall under the category of foreign titles (Fig­
ure 1.2), it becomes even more interesting. While Greek, Russian, German,
Norwegian, and French plays appear at first sight to be well represented,
different productions of Oresteia and Oedipus count for over 70% of the
Greek plays, the Russian titles are mostly Chekhov, the German Brecht
and the Norwegian Ibsen, the French contribution is made up entirely by
Marivaux and Molière, while the Swedish and Italian correspond to Strind­
berg and Eduardo respectively. So not only do mainstream British theatres
30 Cristina Marinetti

Figure 1.1 Type of plays produced by the National Theatre between 1995 and 2006.

not invest in translations, but when they do they do not go for new or lesser
known authors, they retranslate the classics.
And here is where the situation becomes difficult for the translator,
because most theatres in these cases commission the translation work not
to a bilingual translator but to a monolingual playwright. In many cases
bilingual translators are employed only initially to provide what is called ‘a
literal translation’ that is then passed on to a monolingual playwright who
‘makes it performable’. There is nothing wrong with this method of work­
ing in principle, except for the idea that there is such a thing as ‘a literal
translation’ and that you can neatly separate the language of the play from
the performance context within which it was developed. But as a working
practice it is very positive in that it allows one to combine linguistic and
cultural expertise with an ability to write for actors and deliver a prod­
uct that will be functional to a performance. Unfortunately, however, this
collaboration is often, in practice, damaged by the imbalances of power
between the translator and the writer. Unlike in many other countries in
Europe, the literal translator in the UK is considered a technician at best.
They do not need to be experts on the particular author nor on the theatri­
cal tradition the play originates in. Moreover, they are usually not included
in the process of rehearsal and staging, they do not receive a percentage of
the royalties, nor do they have ownership of their own translation which
becomes the property of the company.2
 Transnational, Multilingual, and Post-dramatic 31

Figure 1.2 Language distribution of the foreign plays.

In a recent interview, award-winning writer and translator Christopher

Hampton talks about an example of this collaboration, and although it
sounds like an extremely successful collaboration, one cannot help but feel
a little uncomfortable at his description of the literal translator:

Yes, no Uncle Vania was first. And Ashley Page directed it and he got
a literal translation. Actually I had studied French and German so I
was technically a linguist but I had only done one year of Russian and
I didn’t even take the O-level at school, so I sort of knew the alphabet
and so on but very little else. So Ashley Page got this woman called
Nina Fraud who was the editor of the Russian cookbook and lived
somewhere in North London and she did a literal translation and I
asked her to make it as literal as possible, to observe as closely as pos­
sible the punctuation and the length of the sentences, which she sort
of did, and we did it an act at a time over several months. I would do
it as it were one act at a time and we would go and spend an evening
at Nina’s and she would cook some fabulous meal and we would go
through it pretty much line by line, because the intention was, and
my intention always is when I translate, to try and get as close to the
original as possible and to try and reproduce it in its effects as closely
as possible, so that’s what we did over several months and then we went
32 Cristina Marinetti
into rehearsal with Paul Scofield, Michael Lamarsh. We pretty well did
what the Royal Court does, which is not a word was changed. (qtd. in
Baines, Marinetti, and Perteghella 56)

If we look at Hampton’s words from the perspective of the text, of the

product of translation, it seems that the collaboration was successful and
produced a translation that was both performable and informed of the lin­
guistic and cultural context of the original, but if we read it as a document
of the role of translators in the theatre, we can argue that their position
seems to have gone back to that of the enthusiastic amateur of the eigh­
teenth century. There is no sense of the need for academic or professional
input. She was the expert in the Russian language and he was the expert
in writing plays, writing for actors and making the text suitable and suc­
cessful for a British audience. But, as anyone who has studied theatre or
who has ever translated will know, it takes years of reading and studying
the work of an author in the original to be able to unlock the patterns of a
play. Who had the expertise to access Chekhov’s language and poetics? To
understand the connotations of the language of his characters in the socio­
historical context in which they were created? And more importantly, why
was that knowledge not just of the source language but of its cultural and
theatrical connotations not considered relevant for the translation task?
But there is something else that we can glean from Hampton’s words, and
which is at the basis of the widespread use of monolingual playwrights as
translators in British theatres, that the very notion of theatre translation in
British cultural discourse has shifted, moving radically away from some­
thing that has to do primarily with language.
It seems that a focus on performability, on the ‘presence’ of performance
in the dramatic text, has lead to a marginalization of drama translation
in practice, which is however accompanied by a rhetoric of fidelity and
authenticity in public discourse: “We pretty well did what the Royal Court
does, which is not a word was changed”. So is translation becoming obso­
lete in the theatre? If we define translation as the interlingual transfer of
dramatic text then the answer seems to be yes, at least in Britain.

TRANSLATION AS CULTURE: TRANSNATIONAL,

MULTILINGUAL, AND POST-DRAMATIC THEATRE

Recent scholarship in translation studies, however, has moved away from

a definition of translation as the movement of linguistic and cultural signs
from a source to a target text and, influenced by the translation turn in
cultural studies, the focus has shifted to the translational nature of culture.
In this view, translation becomes less a procedure to which cultures can be
subjected than itself the very fabric of culture:
 Transnational, Multilingual, and Post-dramatic 33
Today the movement of people around the globe can be seen to mir­
ror the very process of translation itself, for translation is not just the
transfer of texts from one language into another, it is now rightly seen
as a process of negotiation between texts and between cultures, a pro­
cess during which all kinds of transactions take place mediated by the
figure of the translator. (Bassnett 2002: 5–6)

If, as anthropologists maintain, any act of interpretation of a culture

by another is an act of translation, then cultures, which are not explain­
able through the scientific analysis of essential features but are constructed
through multiple discursive practices that are based on interpretation, are
also by nature translational. Translation scholars have thus turned to the
contact zones, the interstices of cultures rather than original and target
texts for a definition of translation and have offered new locations for the
study of translation.
For Sherry Simon, a translation is “writing that is inspired by the
encounter with other tongues” (17) not necessarily by virtue of having been
originally written in another language; so bilingual, multilingual, hybrid
texts are all legitimately translations. For Edwin Gentzler, who is interested
in tracing the history of translation in the Americas, translation becomes
an even broader concept. By looking at post-coloniality in Latin America,
bilingual writing in Canada, and the multicultural nature of cultural pro­
duction in the US, he traces the very origins of cultures in the Americas to
a series of processes of translation: “[T]ranslation in the Americas is less
something that happens between separate and distinct cultures and more
something that is constitutive of those cultures” (5).
As opposed and complementary to the interlingual translation of texts,
the idea of cultural translation can play a very powerful role in the study
of culture and “act as an anti-essentialist, anti-holistic metaphor that aims
to uncover counterdiscourses, discursive forms and resistant actions within
a culture, heterogeneous discursive spaces within a society and enable a
dynamic concept of culture as practice of negotiating cultural differences,
and of cultural overlap, syncretism, creolization” (Bachmann-Medick 37).
This view of cultural translation is very relevant to contemporary theatre.
While drama translation may be on the decline, the value of the encoun­
ter between languages, cultures, and modes of representations has become
central to both theatre practice and scholarship. William Worthen’s latest
book, for example, Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance,
dedicates a whole chapter to ‘Shakespeare geographies’ to underline the
importance that foreign and intercultural Shakespeare productions have
on our contemporary understanding of Shakespeare (117). Also, as a result
of globalization and the internationalization of artistic practice he shows
how directors and actors are now working across national boundaries in
a ‘transnational’ space where Shakespeare performance becomes not only
34 Cristina Marinetti
a site of cultural negotiation but also a globalized product and as such an
instrument in the politics of global capital (149–50).
In approaching intercultural Shakespeare, Worthen warns us against
trusting ‘transnational discourses’ when they are used to legitimate cul­
tural tourism. As an example he quotes Mark Rylance—artistic director
of the Globe Theatre in London—describing the performance of Romeo y
Julieta by Brazilian street theatre company Grupo Galpao: “[T]he actors
do not see themselves as part of any classical tradition: they are closest to
Brazil’s strong tradition of street theatre and circus performance . . . and
yet the company’s energetic blending of tragedy and comedy was closer to
Shakespeare than we can be today” (149).
Worthen argues that against the backdrop of the globalized space of
Shakespeare’s Globe—globalized because of its multinational sponsors and
international audiences—Rylance’s words feel more like a marketing slo­
gan for the globalized product of the global Shakespeare than an authentic
attempt to engage with other worlds, other languages, and other cultural
traditions (150). But while Worthen’s argument stops there, because he is
primarily interested in situating Shakespearean performance within the
politics and economics of global capital, translation studies could take it
further. The methods of translation analysis which combine “the smaller
formats, textual and interactional analyses . . . to wider translational frame­
works” (Bachmann-Medick 5) could “uncover counter discourses” (ibid.)
and pockets of resistance to assimilation in the linguistic and cultural nego­
tiation that occurs in the practice of intercultural theatre, during rehearsal,
staging, and reception.
Another promising area for the study of translation in the theatre is the
work of multilingual groups, which often arises in relation to contexts of
migration. A good example is Tara Arts, one of the most successful British
Asian companies whose whole history is entangled with questions of iden­
tity, language, and cultural representation.3 Founded in the late 1970s by
a group of first- and second-generation South Asian immigrants, the com­
pany played a very important role in giving visibility to the multicultural
nature of British society at a time when it still saw itself as primarily white
and monolingual.4 Tara’s mode of theatricality is based on an approach to
language in performance that Marvin Carlson describes as ‘post-colonial
heteroglossia’, a way for post-colonial subjects to use multiple languages to
oppose and resist the cultural dominance of the colonial language (122). In
the case of Tara, this heteroglossic approach however found its roots not in
a political stance, at least initially, but in the multiple language practices of
its actors, as director Jatinder Verma explains:

There was an extraordinary disjunction at the beginning between

the language we employed in rehearsal, where a lot of us modulated
between English, Punjabi, Gujerati and our actual work in front of
the audience, which was entirely in English, even to the point where
 Transnational, Multilingual, and Post-dramatic 35
we were caricaturing ourselves: when we had Indian characters, they
spoke a broken English. We never allowed ourselves to speak our own
language. But then we realized that we were lying to ourselves. Our
reality is that we negotiate several languages, but we are not putting
that reality onto the stage. Sure if we are true to ourselves, then we have
a problem: what about the audience that doesn’t understand that odd
word, or phrase or sentence in Hindi or Punjabi or in whatever other
language? Well, that’s a theatrical problem: you have to fi nd other
means through which people can understand. (1997: 353)

Tara’s multilingual performance then becomes the opposite of the tra­

ditional notion of translation which presupposed a trajectory between
source and target culture. Their refusal to express their migrant experi­
ence through English, the colonial language, is a refusal of translation, as
assimilation into the target culture but a foregrounding of Homi Bhabha’s
idea of ‘cultural translation’ as the ‘third space’ of the migrant, who is not
just caught between two languages and cultures but embodies through lin­
guistic and cultural hybridity the fragmentary nature of identity. Through
multilingual performance Tara foregrounded the state of ‘cultural transla­
tion’ experienced by the British Indian community while highlighting the
fractures, discontinuities, and incommunicability of language difference.
Unlike its title suggests, Hans-Thies Lehmann’s Postdramatic Theatre
does not endorse “a mere looking away from the tradition of drama” (27)
but seeks to identify new modes of interpretation of contemporary theatre.
Lehman shows how much contemporary performance exists quite inde­
pendently from drama and functions “as a point of departure not a site of
transcription/copy” (32). This ‘performative’ rather than ‘representative’
understanding of theatre can help us find yet other locations of translation
in contemporary theatre beyond the translation of drama: for instance, in
the reception of foreign language performance. Miriam Gilbert gives us her
account of watching and hearing foreign Shakespeare:

The foreign language had something to do with the strangeness. I was

in a theatre that I had attended repeatedly, but it was new and different,
I was the outsider. Those people onstage and the ones backstage knew
what was going on but I didn’t. And so I had to pay attention, had to
figure out who was who and where I was. That kind of distancing and
discomfort isn’t usual when I see a Shakespeare production, and yet it
seemed to me strangely salutary. (38)

This account locates translation not in the dramatic text or the perfor­
mance text but in the alignment or misalignment between the culture of on
stage signs and that of the spectators reading them. Through the foreign­
ness of language, the spectators are displaced from the familiarity of the
canonical text and have to negotiate their understanding through a foreign
36 Cristina Marinetti
culture and this makes them experience the familiar in terms of the foreign.
Foreignness and non-understanding then function in a performative sense,
which goes beyond verbal communication, and makes audiences experi­
ence a moment of cultural translation which may (or may not) make them
question their own cultural and linguistic identity.

CONCLUSION

I think that defining translation in the theatre as something that is not lim­
ited to the interlingual transfer of dramatic texts is very important. Firstly,
an inclusion of examples of transnational, multilingual, and post-dramatic
theatre practices as objects of study of theatre translation will help us study
translation in the theatre not in terms of ‘reproduction’, as in the paradox
I mentioned at the beginning of my essay, but as forms of cultural produc­
tion. Secondly, by focusing not only on the text/performance relationship
but on performance itself as a way of questioning and destabilizing notions
of identity and otherness, we can offer performance studies the linguistic
and cultural tools to read signs of translation in performance. But most
importantly perhaps, embracing the idea that translation has become cen­
tral to the study of culture, and unveiling the presence of translation in con­
temporary theatrical practice and discourse may also help raise the profi le
of translation and make a case for the importance of the study of language
difference and for the value of translation and translators in contemporary
theatre.
We began from the notion of ‘presence’, its importance in defi ning perfor­
mance and its influence on theorizing theatre translation. Future research
should perhaps begin by addressing an ‘absence’, that of the interpreter
in the theatre, a figure that has remained invisible and underresearched
but is clearly fundamental to the negotiation of the transnational spaces
of contemporary theatre. What is their role? When are they used and by
whom? What type of background/training do they have and how does this
affect their position in relation to actors, directors, and audiences? And
when interpreters are not used, who mediates between speakers of different
languages? These questions, aided by recent advances in the theorization of
agency in translation studies, offer a bright future for the study of theatre
translation.

NOTES

1. These two pie charts are new but they are based on figures given by Jack
Bradley and found in Roger Baines, Cristina Marinetti, and Manuela Perteg­
hella (187–90).
2. For a comprehensive discussion of the practice of ‘literal translation’, I refer
the reader to Manuela Perteghella.
 Transnational, Multilingual, and Post-dramatic 37
3. For more information on Tara Arts’s multilingual aesthetics and its impor­
tance in giving visibility to the British Asian experience, see Godiwala; Davis
and Fuchs.
4. Interesting in this sense are Verma’s recent reflections on the role of Tara in
connection to both the Asian diaspora and the specific case of the British
multicultural project (2009).

WORKS CITED

Aaltonen, Sirkku (2000) Time-Sharing on Stage: Drama Translation in Theatre

and Society, Clevedon, Buffalo, Toronto, and Sydney: Multilingual Matters.
Bachmann-Medick, Doris (2006) “Meanings of Translation in Cultural Anthro­
pology”, in Translating Others, vol. 1, Theo Hermans (ed.) Manchester: St
Jerome, 33-42.
Bhabha, Homi K. (1994) The Location of Culture, London: Routledge.
Baines, Roger, Cristina Marinetti, and Manuela Perteghella (eds) (2011) Staging
and Performing Translation: Text and Theatre Practice, Houndmills, Basing-
stoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Barba, Eugenio and Nicola Savarese (1991) A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropol­
ogy: The Secret Art of the Performer, London: Routledge.
Bassnett, Susan (1998) “Still Trapped in the Labyrinth: Further Reflections on
Translation and Theatre”, in Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere (eds) Con­
structing Cultures, Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 90–108.
(2002) [1980] Translation Studies, London: Routledge.
Benjamin, Walter (1969) Illuminations, Harry Zohn (trans.), New York:
Schocken.
Carlson, Marvin (2006) Speaking in Tongues: Languages at Play in the Theatre,
Ann Arbour: University of Michigan Press.
Davis, Geoffrey and Anne Fuchs (eds) (2007) Staging New Britain: Aspects of
Black and South Asian British Theatre, Oxford: Peter Lang.
Gentzler, Edwin (2008) Translation and Identity in the Americas: New Directions
in Translation Theory, London: Routledge.
Gilbert, Miriam (2007) “Hearing with Eyes: Watching Shakespeare”, Shakespeare
Bulletin 25 (4): 35–45.
Godiwala, Dimple (2006) Alternatives within the Mainstream: British Black and
Asian Theatres, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press.
Lehmann, Hans-Thies (2006) Postdramatic Theatre, Karen Jürs-Munby (trans.),
London: Routledge.
Pavis, Patrice (1992) Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture, Loren Kruger (trans.),
London and New York: Routledge.
Perteghella, Manuela (2004) “A Descriptive Framework for Collaboration in The­
atre Translation: School of Languages, Linguistics and Translation Studies”,
PhD thesis, University of East Anglia, Norwich.
Simon, Sherry (2006) Translating Montreal: Episodes in the Life of a Divided City,
Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Verma, Jatinder (1997) “The Evolution of a Company”, New Theatre Quarterly
13 (2): 349–68.
(2009) “The Generations of the Diaspora and Multiculturalism in Britain”,
New Theatre Quarterly 29 (3): 203–23.
Worthen, William B. (2003) Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance,
Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
2 Masks, Music Scores,
and Hourglasses
Rethinking Performability
through Metaphors
Eva Espasa

Since discourse on stage translation is verbalized differently across disci­

plines (theatre studies and translation studies), and across agents (scholars
or practitioners), metaphors can be used as a shared language, as common
ground to provide understanding between rich, diverse, and often contra­
dictory views on stage translation.
A convenient starting point for discussion is the general model of com­
munication, based on a ‘message’ being transferred from sender to receiver.
The main elements in communication (sender, message, receiver) have been
linked to specific metaphors (masks, music scores, hourglasses) which have
been used in connection with translating for the stage. This essay will con­
sider these metaphors in relation to a few key issues in stage translation:
the status of authors and translators, the tensions between written and per­
formed texts, and the cultural and ideological ascription of translation.
These, in turn, will be related to the notion of performability, an elusive
but omnipresent concept (and term) in discussions on stage translation,
involving the status of translation and translations, theatrical issues, and
the ideological contexts that surround performance.
Translation and performance have been metaphorically associated in
many different ways. Translation, not necessarily for the stage, has often
been compared with performance, as Nicholas Round reminds us: “‘A
performative relation to the other text’ is what, for Venuti, distinguishes
translation from scholarship (44). Godard (91) and Spivak (179–81) both
develop the theatrical metaphor in a context of feminist translation prac­
tice. Ann MacLaren (1998) brings out more specific links with drama. Alex
Gross . . . invokes various performances, musical and magical, as figures
for translation (33–34, 35–36); Christopher Middleton (1989) argues for
seeing it as ‘a species of mime’” (Round 56).
If translation has been seen as performance, the performance of a written
text has also been considered as translation. According to Susan Bassnett,
the process of transposing a written text into a performance is often called
translation, within theatre studies in English (94). And the pioneering stud­
ies edited by Ortrun Zuber in the 1980s, when there was still little theo­
rization on stage translation, focused on ‘scenic transposition’, which is
DOI: 10.4324/9780203073506-3
 Masks, Music Scores, and Hourglasses 39
understood as both intralingual translation and as the intersemiotic trans­
lation involved in staging plays (1980: 103; 1984: 1, 8). I will not explore
the general metaphors of performance, but specific images which have been
used to describe theatre translation, both by translators and scholars.
Reflections on translating for the stage have always been rich in meta­
phors. Theatre translation, embodied in the performers’ bodies, voices, and
attire, is very visible and physical, in contrast with other forms of text-
transfer, where the translation is only made visible in its written aspect.
These metaphors will be analysed in connection with performability, to
investigate what they may bring to the specificity of stage translation.
Metaphors are not mere images, pure props, so to speak, but aids to
conceptualize stage translation. Elaborate studies on metaphor have shown
that the distinction between literal and figurative meaning is far from clear
(Rumelhart), and that metaphorizing is an integral part of conceptualiza­
tion (Ortony). More recent studies have brought the discussion to translation
studies and have focused on Thinking through Translation with Metaphors,
as shown by the illustrative title of the volume edited by James St. André
(2010a). The persistence of metaphors in theoretical discourse reminds us
that they can be useful to construct new theoretical models, to persuade oth­
ers to adopt new paradigms, and to aid pedagogy (St. André 2010a: 5). All
these uses may be present in discourses on translating for the stage.
The communicative model, based on the fundamental distinction
between senders and receivers of texts, has proved useful to show the
multiplicity of agents involved in stage translation and their connections
(Espasa 2001: 73–94). But this model is itself implicitly based on what is
called ‘the conduit metaphor’ (Reddy). This metaphor may be misleading,
in that it presupposes that meaning can easily flow, be carried over, from
one place to another, without modification. Reddy offers instead what he
calls ‘the toolmaker’s paradigm’, which proposes a constructivist alterna­
tive, whereby we construct meaning, rather than ‘carry it over’.
Theatre translation provides an exceptional arena for showing this idea
of meaning as constructed, rather than simply transmitted. I intend to focus
upon the main ‘tools’ of the model—that is, the sender, the message, and
the receiver—and link them to specific metaphors (masks, music scores,
hourglasses) which have often been employed in the context of stage trans­
lation. These metaphors will not be considered as vague impressionistic
views on translating processes, but will be regarded in the light of con­
temporary criticism on translation, which questions traditional notions of
equivalence, fidelity, and authorship.

MASKS

The mask metaphor has frequently been used in visual discourse on theatre
translation, since the mask itself has become a visual icon representing the­
atre. It is not surprising, therefore, that masks often illustrate book covers on
40 Eva Espasa
theatre translation (Pujante and Gregor; Upton 2000), and that this meta­
phor has been employed in connection with theatre writing and translating.
Elias Canetti resorted to the metaphor of the ‘acoustic mask’ to dis­
tinguish between different characters’ speech patterns, and this image
guided Anthony Vivis’s translation of Canetti’s Hochzeit (Vivis 40). The
mask metaphor, applied to stage translation, makes a forceful connection
between translation and theatrical practice; and it is in this context that
we can understand the translators’ comments on the need to fi nd specific
voices for their translations, or to read them out themselves, or to listen to
the actors reading them out in rehearsal, thus establishing a connection
between translation and characterization.
Another dimension of the mask metaphor is related to the visibility
and status of translators and translation. The mask is both a prop and
a metaphor showing the difference between performer and character.
The mask both shows and hides these two identities. Audiences see the
performers wearing masks, but suspend their disbelief and focus on the
characters portrayed. Taking this as a metaphor of translation, when
translated plays are performed their status as translation is shown (in
programmes, in credits, in reviews, usually in connection with the status
of the ‘original’ play, author, or culture). Yet, it is also hidden, given the
usual requirements to produce a language and an acting style which is as
close as possible to the target context. What this involves for the transla­
tor is a tension among different elements, basically the requirements of
the source or target texts, their theatrical styles or cultural and ideologi­
cal contexts. All this lies behind the debate on the translation’s, and the
translator’s, invisibility. According to David Johnston, the translator may
“be conceived of as an actor who performs in terms of the imperatives of
the text, and who . . . produces work in which he or she is both visible
and invisible—simultaneously subsumed into the text (actor as character,
translator as reader) and an active agent of its re-creation (actor as per­
former, translator as theatre-writer)” (2011: 17).
This introduces the image which is close to the mask metaphor: that of
acting. Yotam Benshalom has extensively discussed it as a means of explain­
ing stage translation (2010), in that, like acting, it involves impersonation.
He has suggested that translation should proceed from the perspective of
the character, rather than the author, as a ‘getting into a role’, and has
favoured acting and rehearsal techniques in translation processes.
A metaphor metonymically linked with that of the mask is that of the
perruque, or wig, which can be considered as a kind of subversive mask.
Sociologist Michel De Certeau created the concept of la perruque in the
context of cultural studies as the practice which enables one to distance
oneself from the institutionalised models. This was adapted for theatre
translation studies by Sirkku Aaltonen: “Just as workers may do their
own work in the workplace and disguise it as being done for the employer,
borrowing the tools or the time allocated to do a job, so translations can
 Masks, Music Scores, and Hourglasses 41
become la perruque, work disguised as that of the ‘employer’, that is, a
superior culture and its superior author but in fact subverted to serve one’s
own purposes” (80–81).
If the mask at first may seem to be an image of impersonation, of imita­
tion, the perruque can be seen as an image of appropriation.1 It is not used
to imitate the source text, but to pretend to do so, to accommodate the
needs of the target text and culture. While a mask or costume can normally
be put on and taken off at will, appropriation makes the disguise subversive,
the transformation profound, and, therefore, not easily reversible. In this
connection, we can mention the metaphor of cross-identity performance, as
recently studied by James St. André:

Cross-identity performance [describes] a variety of practices whereby a

person pretends to be something other than who/what she or he ‘really’
is, usually in terms of sexuality, gender, race or class. The word ‘really’
is in quotation marks to indicate that one of the things crossing does in
many cases is call into question the stability of our concepts of identity,
both of the self and the Other. (2010b: 280)

This image furthers the suggestions behind the mask and acting meta­
phors—which concentrate on translation as imitation—and, like the image
of the perruque, is indicative of the deep transformative and appropriation
powers of translation, in terms of class (as the perruque metaphor sug­
gests), or of gender and race (in the cross-identity performance metaphor).
This reminds us, according to St. André, that translation is a multifaceted
activity not easily reducible to a single figure, and that the crosser repre­
sents an Other through a set of learned practices (2010b: 284).

MUSIC SCORES

Translators—not necessarily for the stage—have been viewed as restorers

of historical music scores, composers, or musical performers or improvis­
ers (Gross 1991). Translators and critics usually refer to the ‘musicality’
or speakability of translation, and its need to ‘sound’ natural. Sometimes,
these comments are easily related to a naturalistic conception of theatre.
However, as Steve Gooch underlines, the demands for a natural-sound­
ing language must not be confused with naturalistic theatre styles (18).
Although linguistic and theatrical priorities are often interlaced, the usual
requirements of realistic-sounding language have nothing to do with real­
istic theatre.
Another topic evoked by the score metaphor is the relation between text
and performance. This metaphor applied to drama texts has been chal­
lenged by contemporary drama theorists on the grounds that it may foster
a univocal relation between text and performance (Birch 8) and, we may
42 Eva Espasa
add, a ‘reproductive-(restorer’s)-versus-productive’ connection between
source and target texts. However, play texts, like music scores, always lead
to multiple interpretations. As James St. André points out, “it is common
knowledge that no two performances of a piece of music will be exactly the
same, even by the same performer” (2010a: 5). When translators are seen
as composers, performers, or as conductors, they are given a ‘creative-ver­
sus-imitative’ role in the construction of the theatre event. Another interest­
ing potential of the score metaphor has to do with the translator’s status:
“[T]he musician is an artist, not an artisan, and therefore deserving of a
certain social status” (ibid. 6), which applies when translators are credited
for their works.
To sum up, the music score metaphor is well suited to stage translation
in that it relates it to a similar type of performance (music performance). It
also acknowledges the creativity of translators, their ability to orchestrate
diverse elements and agents in an unrepeatable performance, and offers a
certain recognition of status; in short, it provides us with a “positive and
empowering” view of translators (ibid.).

HOURGLASSES

Let us now look at images related to the place and position of translation,
not forgetting that even the meaning of the term ‘translation’ in various
languages is metaphorical, and refers to a movement. As Theo Hermans
reminds us, “the notion of translation as transference is deeply rooted in
the very etymology of the word ‘translation’ (from the Latin ‘transferre’,
to carry across) and its metaphorical associations of ferrying across—and
the word ‘metaphor’ itself means transference, transposition, translation”
(1999: 51). Stage translation can be seen, in this light, as “transfer[ring]
events that have taken place in another time and place to the present con­
text of the audience” (Jänis 359). This idea of ‘carrying over’ has been
related to the above-mentioned conduit metaphor, which may be replaced
by the toolmaker paradigm (Reddy).
Reddy rightly concentrates on the tools and the agents that make meaning.
In translated theatre, a way of elucidating how meaning is constructed across
cultures is by looking at metaphors that foreground cultural exchange, with
a focus on the challenges and conflicts involved in cultural contacts, rather
than on the ease of transference suggested by the conduit metaphor.
Thus, the nature of intercultural exchange is explained in detail through
the hourglass metaphor, in which each grain, or source-culture element,
has to turn over in order to reach the target culture:

[The hourglass] is a strange object, reminiscent of a funnel and a

mill . . . In the upper bowl is the foreign culture, the source culture,
which is more or less codified and solidified in diverse anthropological,
 Masks, Music Scores, and Hourglasses 43
sociocultural or artistic modelizations. In order to reach us, this cul­
ture must pass through a narrow neck. If the grains of culture or their
conglomerate are sufficiently fi ne, they will flow through without any
trouble, however slowly, into the lower bowl, that of the target culture,
from which point we observe this slow flow. The grains will rearrange
themselves in a way which appears random, but which is partly regu­
lated by their passage through some dozen filters put in place by the
target culture and the observer.
The hourglass presents two risks. If it is only a mill, it will blend
the source culture, destroy its every specificity and drop into the lower
bowl an inert and deformed substance which will have lost its original
modelling without being molded into that of the target culture. If it is
only a funnel, it will indiscriminately absorb the initial substance with­
out reshaping it through the series of fi lters or leaving any trace of the
original matter. (Pavis 1992: 4–5; my emphasis)

This image acknowledges the negotiations involved in transcultural trans­

actions.2 We may wonder about the possibility of transference processes
“without any trouble” in the above quote by Pavis, which may imply a lack
of resilience on the part of one culture towards acculturation. Post-colonial
perspectives remind us that intercultural exchanges are often, in fact, cul­
tural expropriations (Cameron 18). The second part of Pavis’s quote makes
it clear that such transference is not problem-free, and aptly focuses the
metaphor on the filtering frame (the hourglass, the funnel/mill). However,
Rustom Bharucha has criticized the hourglass model for its unidirection­
ality, arguing that interculturalism should be a back-and-forth movement
(241); in other words, the hourglass has to be repeatedly turned upside
down. Eugenio Barba has also considered the unequal processes involved in
intercultural theatre: “[T]here remains an undeniable embarrassment: that
[the asymmetrical exchanges between Eastern and Western stages] might
be part of a supermarket of cultures” (Barba 31; Espasa 2004: 137). Tejas­
wini Niranjana has denounced Western translation studies that have not
accounted for the connection between “unequal” languages (48). And Pavis
himself has recently questioned older views of intercultural theatre:

The effects of globalization on our way of doing and understanding

theatre are increasingly evident. Hence the renewal, or the complete
mutation of interculturalism; hence our growing consideration for the
phenomena of globalization, our will to think of theatre according to
the world which produces and receives it, taking into account its socio­
economic and ethical dimensions. (2010: 13; my emphasis)

In his discussion of the transformations of theatre due to globaliza­

tion, Pavis talks of “mutation” (2010: 11, 13). Even though he does not
exploit the metaphorical potential of the word ‘mutation’ and he does
44 Eva Espasa
refer to translation, he provides a notion that may reverberate with the
idea of translation as transformation. The hourglass, with its implication of
‘blending’, brings to the fore the transformative power of translation. The
source and target texts are no longer—implicitly—compared, redressed,
disguised. Nor are they merely transferred from place to place. The source
text becomes the target text every time the hourglass is turned upside down.
If we think of translation as mutation, such transformation may be seen as
something more profound and irreversible.
The transformations involved in translation have been aptly queried by
Theo Hermans, although he talks neither of metaphors, nor of theatre, but
focuses on issues that are relevant for debates on stage translation. In The
Conference of the Tongues (2007) he reflects on fundamental questions of
translation through perspectives largely unexplored in translation studies.
In the chapter called “Real Presence”, he turns to theology and looks into
the Catholic dogma of transubstantiation, following its historical debate,
and relating it to the issue of translation. 3 He questions whether an author
can say “This is my work” about a translation in the same way as a priest
or minister can say, in imitation of Christ, “This is my body” (102). Her­
mans’s approach addresses the strange coexistence of translation and its
source text by assuming that, “in line with the idea of transubstantiation,
the translation continues to look like a text in its own right but it is now
entirely that other work of which also the pre-text is a manifestation” (103).
Translation is no longer seen as the transformation of a source into a target
text, because “when a text is successfully declared to be a translation of a
pre-existing text, the pre-text comes to inhabit the translation” (ibid.). In
other words, a text becomes a translation by means of a speech-act which
declares it to be a translation. Hermans also stresses the idea of communi­
ties of believers, underscoring the argument that “[t]ranslations function as
translations—that is, they are accepted and recognised as translations—
only for believers, communities of readers or text users who are willing
to suspend their disbelief and to consume translations as either being or
representing an underlying original” (104).
These are central concerns in theatre translation in that they combine a
focus on the target text, on the audience, and on the peculiar transforma­
tive power of translation over the source text, which does not completely
replace it, but inhabits it through the audience’s ‘suspension of disbelief’:
they may temporarily ‘believe’ that the source-language author is speak­
ing to them in their own language, and not through actors and characters
within dramatic fiction.
The metaphors discussed above demonstrate the tensions between the
following elements and issues:

1. the mask metaphor questions the identities of performers and charac­

ters, and addresses the ‘author versus translator’ and ‘imitation versus
appropriation’ topics;
 Masks, Music Scores, and Hourglasses 45
2. the music score foregrounds the relation between the written text and
the performance, and between the source and the target texts, and
interrogates the status and creativity of translation;
3. the hourglass pinpoints the connections and conflicts between cul­
tures, and the uneasy coexistence of source and target texts in trans­
lated performances;
4. the transubstantiation image highlights the strange coexistence of
source and target texts; it also brings to the fore the need of a com­
munity of believers for a text to be declared to be a translation, by
means of a consecrating speech-act.

These metaphors may help rethink the idea of performability. In a study

in 2000, I discussed this concept and its related terms: under ‘speakability’
I grouped the debates on the oral requirements of translating for the stage;
under ‘playability’ those concerning the relationship between translations,
acting styles, and theatrical conventions, assuming that these often guide
the evaluation of a translation as (un)performable; finally, under ‘saleabil­
ity’ I pointed out the connections between translations and their commercial
and authorial issues. In the last ten years, the debate on performability has
continued, changing significantly. Nowadays, the ongoing discussion is not
so much on whether translations are performable, or on the validity of the
term, but on how translations are performed and how translation processes
are integrated into staging (Espasa 2009). In this connection, the title of a
recent volume by Roger Baines, Cristina Marinetti, and Manuela Perteghella
is telling: Staging and Performing Translation: Text and Theatre Practice.
Title and contents alike show the editors’ involvement in both translation and
performance processes. This may be related to yet another critical trend: visi­
bilising the different agents and roles involved in stage translation and perfor­
mance. A glance at the book is illuminating: the translator is seen as metteur
en scène (Upton 2011), as cultural promoter (Rose and Marinetti 2011), as
credited author in collaborative translation processes (Meth, Mendelsohn,
and Svendsen 2011, chaired by Perteghella). These views evidence the dif­
ferent masks worn by translators and their creative role in interpreting—or
constructing—the music scores of performed translation.
The metaphorization of translative discourse and its consistent applica­
tion to stage translation is also another current trend. From vivid but spo­
radic uses of metaphors by individual translators and scholars (as can be
found in Johnston 1996), we have come to witness a theorization of meta­
phors in the above-mentioned volume by James St. André, with specific
sections which are particularly relevant to stage translation (Benshalom;
St. André 2010b), and which allow us to rethink translating for the stage
in new terms.
If past debates on performability were focused on European notions of
performance, recent studies have decentred the debate away from Euro­
centric discourse and have, as it were, turned the hourglass upside down.
46 Eva Espasa
A brief mention of monographic volumes on stage translation outside
Europe displays this fashion. For example, Joseph Che Suh has analy­
sed specific African standards of performability (2005); Jennifer Lindsay
(2006) has broadened our current understanding of stage translation to
include other forms (oral summary, rewording, simultaneous interpreta­
tion) that suit different performance practices across Asia; and Beverly
Curran (2008) has explored the resistances found in translating and per­
forming Western plays in Japan. These studies give more prominence
to less canonized voices in translation discourse, and acknowledge the
confl icts involved in intercultural negotiation and, specifically, in theatre
practices and discourses.
From masks, perruques, and cross-identity performances and their
appropriation roles, through music and the creative powers of transla­
tion, to hourglasses showing translation as a site of cultural exploration
and appropriation, and to the view of translation as transubstantiation,
the critical panorama displays a range of recurring metaphors in theatre
translation. They may help us understand present views on performabil­
ity and the specificity of translating for the stage, and may also provide
a common tool enabling dialogue among theatre translators, performers,
and scholars.
I conclude with a quote very relevant to theatre and to the arguments I
have adumbrated above, in that it captures the similarities between transla­
tion and metaphor, and the ability of both questioning language and defa­
miliarizing it:

Translation may not actually be metaphor, but it is something very

like it. When we translate, we are operating with the language of our
source-text in very much the same way as we would operate on a
stretch of metaphorical language. To the monolingual the language of
a foreign-language source-text is strictly meaningless; to the translator
it is, like figurative language, profoundly non-standard, but indirectly
representative of something else: it is the image of a target-language
text which has not yet come to be. To perceive the mental space which
this later might occupy is to displace the source-text into a figurative
zone. Some very specific and powerful pragmatic intervention is needed
to get it out again. . . . That intervention . . . is the translation process.
(Round 60)

NOTES

1. The distinction between metaphors of imitation and appropriation has been

lucidly presented in Round (58).
2. This metaphor has also been briefly addressed by Espasa (2000: 60).
3. For a different approach on transubstantiation as a metaphor for acting see
Held and Satz.
 Masks, Music Scores, and Hourglasses 47

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3 Semantics and Syntax in
Translating Shakespeare
Alessandro Serpieri

The last decades have shown, in the studies of scholars from different coun­
tries, a theoretical assessment of the peculiar features that characterize dra­
matic language when compared with other literary genres. Any play is both
a text to be read and explored in the complex richness of its literary struc­
ture, and a script which develops all its potential on a stage where charac­
ters perform an action in a fictitious space through a full range of mutual
relations in front of an audience. If it is true that other literary texts, such as
tales or poems, may be staged, it is also true that some kind of adaptation
must make their language work dramatically and grant both speakability
and performability to the lines through which the action develops.
Susan Bassnett, among others, has recently questioned the concepts
of speakability and performability in dramatic language on the ground
that they defy a precise and convincing definition. She does not agree, for
instance, with Anne Ubersfeld who in the late 1970s argued that the play
text is troué, that is, full of gaps that can only be realized physically.1 Then
she adds: “Others have seen the play text as a network of latent signs, wait­
ing to be brought out in performance, or even as a blueprint for an eventual
performance. What all these theories have in common is the idea that the
play is not complete in itself and requires a physical dimension” (Bassnett
91–92). Following Veltrusky, who maintains that one needs to look at the
dramatic text as ‘literature’, she thinks that “the translator’s task involves
the interlingual transfer of a piece of writing, and speculation about the
possible existence of coded gestic texts or a feature termed ‘performability’
or ‘speakability’ will not take us far” (100).
Yet, she concludes her article on a contradictory note. First she confi rms
her disavowal of drama as a gestic text: “The time has come for translators
to stop hunting for deep structures and coded subtexts” (107); and then she
subscribes to it:

What is left for the translator to do is to engage specifically with the

signs of the text: to wrestle with the deictic units, the speech rhythms,

DOI: 10.4324/9780203073506-4
 Semantics and Syntax in Translating Shakespeare 51
the pauses and silences, the shifts of tone or of register, the problem of
intonation patterns: in short, the linguistic and paralinguistic aspects
of the text that are decodable and reencodable. (ibid.)

This view has been shared by many critics and theoreticians of drama
in the last decades. I contributed to this debate (Serpieri 1977, 1980, 1988,
1989; Serpieri et al. 1978, 1981). In my experience it has stood the test of
the challenging transposition of several plays by Shakespeare into Italian:
a hard and fascinating work that puts one squarely in front of the pecu­
liar features of a language whose grammar, syntax, rhetorical and stylistic
modes appear to be closely connected with action within a pragmatic con­
text. Such a context necessarily involves speakability and performability.

SPEAKABILITY

My first test in 1978 was one of the hardest, since I was asked by actor
and director Gabriele Lavia to provide a new Italian version of Hamlet.
At the beginning of such an enterprise I was at a loss for the right words,
phrases, and rhythms that would not betray the complex texture of the
concert of voices through which the action unrolls. I prepared a fi rst draft
which was tested first by the director, then by the whole company during
an initial reading, and finally during rehearsal. The director shared my
decision to adhere closely to the original text and resist the temptation
of explaining and paraphrasing what at first glance appeared to be too
dense, complicated, or tortuous. On several occasions, when not quite
happy with the rendering of a complex or obscure speech, he asked me
to go back to the original text and provide a word-for-word and clause-
for-clause explanation. More often than not he found that the meaning of
an intricate speech was made clear when entrusted to the voice and body
of the actor on stage, and had therefore to be rendered according to the
intention of the original text. 2
As an example, during rehearsals the actor playing Claudius declared his
inability to articulate the first speech of the king at the beginning of I, 2,
which I had faithfully rendered in its convoluted syntax:3

Though yet of Hamlet our dear brother’s Sebbene della morte del nostro caro fratello
death Amleto
The memory be green, and that it us befitted la memoria sia ancora verde, e a noi si
convenisse
To bear our hearts in grief, and our whole di recare cordoglio nel cuore, e a tutto il
kingdom nostro regno
To be contracted in one brow of woe, di star contratto in un’unica fronte di dolore,
52 Alessandro Serpieri
Yet so far hath discretion fought with nature purtuttavia tanto ha il discernimento combat­
tuto con la natura
That we with wisest sorrow think on him che noi con più saggio dolore pensiamo a lui
Together with remembrance of ourselves. ricordandoci al contempo di noi stessi.
Therefore our sometime sister, now our queen, Pertanto, la nostra un tempo sorella, ora nostra
regina,
Th’imperial jointress of this warlike state, imperiale co-erede di questo stato guerriero,
Have we as ’twere, with a defeated joy, abbiamo noi, per cosí dire, con gioia abbattuta,
With an auspicious and a dropping eye, con un occhio lieto e l’altro lacrimante,
With mirth in funeral and with dirge con letizia nel funerale e lamentazione nelle
in marriage, nozze,
In equal scale weighing delight and dole, con uguale bilancia pesando diletto e duolo,
Taken to wife. Nor have we herein barr’d presa per moglie. Né abbiamo, in ciò, escluso
Your better wisdoms, which have freely gone il vostro miglior senno, che liberamente ha
sostenuto
With this affair along. For all, our thanks. tutto questo affare. Per tutto, il nostro grazie.
(I, 2, 1–16)

The director then acted it himself several times in order to test its
speakability and performability. Quite convinced of the result, he lec­
tured the whole team on how such convoluted syntax and baroque rheto­
ric characterized the king from his very first appearance on stage. It is
in fact the speech of an illegitimate king trying to legitimize his newly
grasped power. He starts with a seven-line passage that is meant to both
‘remember’ the past king he has murdered and to argue the necessity of
‘forgetting’ him. In the second seven-line passage, he is busy justifying
his hasty marriage with the widow queen as having been contracted with
mixed feelings of sorrow and joy, in order to ensure stability in a kingdom
endangered by an imminent attack from Norway. His syntax is a subtle
mixture of semantic messages that aim to obtain consensus: an intent
that is more apparent in the following three lines, where he thanks the
notables of the kingdom for the support they have given him during his
coronation and marriage, and flatteringly gives them credit for their “bet­
ter wisdoms”. At this point, all the characters, Hamlet included, do not
know what he has done to gain the throne, but his hypocritical character
has already been displayed by the ‘tactics’ he employs. In my translation
I tried to adhere as much as possible to the rhetorical coordination of
the syntactical members displayed through parallelisms, anaphoras, oxy­
mora, rhythmical scansion, while in line 13 I maintained the alliterative
coupling of opposite emotions of “delight and dole”, which sums up the
sophistication of his hypocritical attitude. The director urged the actor in
question to perform it accordingly, and he soon acknowledged that this
speech helped him to get into the character.
 Semantics and Syntax in Translating Shakespeare 53
This speech constituted my first recognition of the embedded speakabil­
ity of dramatic language that requires a faithful response in translation.
Rendering the unusually long periods of Claudius does not just amount to
producing a semantic equivalence, since the import and aim of his speech
depend on the transmission. A translation that does not respect it inevitably
betrays the speakability and the meaning of the speech on stage. Thus I dis­
covered that translating any play involves a due apprenticeship in writing
a second-hand text in another language for another theatre. The translator
is both a reader and an author, an addressee and an addresser. He or she
must recognize and reproduce as much as possible the syntax, rhetoric, and
rhythm of a special language which is both literary and situational, thus
performing meaning and developing action.
In translating Shakespeare’s plays I have always paid much attention to
the decisive import of the syntactical framing of convoluted speeches, and
recently experienced again how dramatic language defines characters from
the very beginning. Measure for Measure opens with an ambiguous and
revealing speech of the Duke Vincentio, who is responsible for instigating
the entire action by his decision to leave the government of his dissolute
Vienna to Angelo, an apparently chaste and rigid deputy (I, 1, 1–13):

Of government the properties to unfold Se del governare esponessi le proprietà

Would seem in me to affect speech and ciò potrebbe sembrare affettazione di parola
discourse,
Since I am put to know that your own science e di ragionamento, poiché sono obbligato
Exceeds, in that, the lists of all advice a riconoscere che, in questo, la vostra
conoscenza
My strength can give you. Then no more supera la sfida di ogni consiglio che io abbia
remains
But that to your sufficiency as your worth is la forza di darvi. Quindi non resta che
able,
And let them work. The nature of our people, alla vostra capacità si unisca il vostro merito,
Our city’s institutions, and the terms e che operino insieme. La natura del nostro
popolo,
For common justice, you’re as pregnant in le istituzioni della nostra città, le procedure
As art and practice hath enriched any di amministrazione della giustizia, di tutto
That we remember. There is our commission, voi siete provveduto, in teoria e in pratica,
From which we would not have you warp. Call quant’altri mai possiamo ricordarne dotato.
hither,
I say, bid come before us Angelo. Eccovi il nostro mandato, da cui non
vorremmo
che deviaste. Chiamate qui, dico, chiedete
ad Angelo di venire da noi.

It is not accidental that the speech starts with particular emphasis on

the genitive ‘Of government’—that is, of the task of any ruler at large—fol­
lowed by the noun ‘properties’—that is, the whole range of what measures
54 Alessandro Serpieri
should be applied to exercise power. But what is right and what is wrong?
What, in other words, is the ‘measure’—the key word of the play—that
should be followed? Escalus, to whom the speech is addressed, is credited
with knowing how to govern properly, while the Duke implicitly feels at a
loss. In fact, he is both disturbed and irritated, since in his oblique compari­
son with Escalus, and even more with Angelo who will soon be summoned,
he acknowledges his own impotence in advising his substitute(s). Escalus—
but more to the point, Angelo, the indirect addressee of the speech—is
endowed with a ‘science’ of government that “exceeds . . . the lists” of
the advice which the Duke might give.4 The embedded metaphorical line
expresses both frustration and challenge. If “lists” (l. 4) is commonly inter­
preted as ‘limits’ or ‘boundaries’, another meaning surfaces here regarding
the field of a tournament which the Duke has not the ‘strength’ to win. 5
But, while acknowledging his own failure, he is ready to show, in the fol­
lowing lines, at least some doubt about the capacity of his substitute(s). The
intricate and much discussed phrase has made some editors suppose the
omission of a line by the printer. J. W. Lever advances a dubitative explana­
tion: “Perhaps Escalus is being urged to add to his sufficiency of ‘science’
the Duke’s ‘conscience’” (Shakespeare 1965: 4). The meaning, however,
seems clear enough. Besides his ‘science’ of government, the person who
will be invested with full power (Angelo, as the next few lines reveal), must
have the human ‘worth’ to administer it.
As in the above case of the player who acted Claudius in Hamlet, the actor
who played the Duke in Measure for Measure was at first hesitant about
this speech. But the director, Marco Sciaccaluga, insisted on sticking to the
translation. I met the actor soon after the first night of the play when he told
me that he was initially unsure about the character of the Duke, but once
over the initial barrier felt quite at ease with all the Duke’s following, often
similarly ambiguous, speeches. Speakability had passed another trial.

PERFORMABILITY

Drama is a literary text with a difference, due to its mimetic rather than nar­
rative representation of a story. Narrative privileges the utterance (enoncé)
over the utterance act (énonciation); it does not rely on a pragmatic context;
it adopts a temporal axis mostly based on the past, and is able to move eas­
ily from one temporal and spatial level to another; it makes use of descrip­
tion of characters, objects, and space. In contrast, dramatic mimesis is
institutionally tied to the speaking process; it requires a pragmatic context,
virtual on the page and actual on the stage; it performs actions; it presents
a story in fictitious spaces within a flowing present that is determined by
past events and looks forward to a yet unknown future; and finally it leaves
characterization to the attitudes, modes of address, and, most of all, tactics
of all the participants in the story it depicts.
 Semantics and Syntax in Translating Shakespeare 55
In dramatic dialogue speeches develop along indexical-deictic-perfor­
mative segments which always ‘refer’ to an actual context, and at the
same time ‘implement’ episodes of the story they tell/show. This special
language ‘in situation’ inscribes in itself the more or less explicitly lexi­
calized messages of its referential space (a function that may, or may not,
be delegated to stage directions). In drama, both semantics and syntax
depend upon ‘deixis’, the referential axis which regulates speech-acts,
and upon ‘performativity’ through a language that develops actions. Dra­
matic speeches are more than simply locutionary acts: they are mostly
illocutionary (having the task of informing, ordering, warning, under­
taking, and so forth) and/or perlocutionary (bringing about or achieving
something by speech).
Through both its deictic and performative tracks dramatic language
conveys most, if not all, of the stage signs (appertaining to codes and con­
ventions historically determined) which concur with the theatrical per­
formance: that is, intonation, mimicry, gestures, proxemics, kinetics, and
so forth (what Brecht altogether defined as ‘Gestus’). The relative fidelity
aimed at in any translation should be entrusted both to the congruity of a
hermeneutical reading and to a coherent transposition of the play’s theatri­
cal potential in the light of productions in another language.
Famously, Roman Jakobson defined three kinds of translation: the
intralingual “or rewording is an interpretation of verbal signs by means of
other signs of the same language”; the interlingual “or translation proper
is an interpretation of verbal signs by means of another language”; and
the intersemiotic “or transmutation is an interpretation of verbal signs by
means of nonverbal sign systems” (429). The intralingual translation takes
in native speakers too, particularly in the case of classical texts (such as
Shakespeare’s plays), and often needs the help of explanatory footnotes in
order to ascertain the meanings of words and phrases; but it also engages
critics and translators. By ‘intersemiotic translation’ I here mean the capa­
bility of understanding and rendering the stage codes which are ‘inscribed’
in dramatic language, since they convey attitudes, movements, gestures,
facial expressions, intonations, and so forth. Thus, the interlingual transla­
tion of drama is the final result of all the previous steps.
To make clear what I mean by stage action embedded in language, I will
present a few simple examples of ostensive deixis. In Hamlet II, 2, Polonius
expounds to the king and queen his theory on the cause of the prince’s mad­
ness, and, when asked if he is quite sure of it, he peremptorily puts his life at
stake: “Take this from this if this be otherwise” (l. 153; my emphasis). The
three repetitions of ‘this’ (the first two referential, the third anaphorical)
belong to his typical rhetorical attitude and should not be paraphrased in
translation, for instance with something like, “Cut off this head from this
trunk if what I have been telling you comes out not to be true”. My transla­
tion has closely followed the original phrase: “Spiccate questa da questo se
questo sta in altro modo”. It is quite obvious that a speech like this could
56 Alessandro Serpieri
not be as effective in fiction or poetry, since its meaning is entrusted to the
body and gesture of a character to another character, and to an audience.6
More complex is the case when deixis transmits stage action through a
particular style of wording; for example, in Hamlet, when, on leaving his
mother, the prince addresses the dead Polonius with grim irony: “Come,
sir, to draw toward an end with you” (III, 4, 220; my emphasis). The pri­
mary meaning of the verbal phrase is “to finish with you”, “to conclude
the dialogue” which has gone on ineffectually in the previous scene (II, 2,
172–216) and is now ironically ended by his death. On the stage, though,
a secondary meaning comes to the surface since ‘drawing’ also implies his
pulling away the corpse. Thus, dramatic language shelters an intersemiotic
double meaning, which is confirmed in the following scene, when Gertrude
answers the question of the king about the movements of Hamlet. “Where
is he gone?”, he asks her, and she replies: “To draw apart the body he hath
kill’d” (IV, 1, 24). In translating Hamlet’s speech I tried to render the verbal
and the stage meaning simultaneously expressed by the phrase: “Venite,
signore, per tirare fin in fondo il discorso con voi”. Once again, we are
confronted by a gestic text which simultaneously transmits a message and
performs an action.
The performative drive of speech-acts is evident in such cases. In acting
mainly through words, characters get defined and characterized by ‘what’
they say, mean, or imply, and even more by ‘how’ they say it. Semantics,
argumentation, lexicon, grammar, syntax, rhetoric, and metre—all the
linguistic levels concur in making characters drive the plot in which they
are involved.
Drama is institutionally a multidiscursive text, which pivots on a main
theme or question. It thus needs, and exhibits, an overall ‘semantic coher­
ence’, granted by the logic of the action. In Hamlet, for example, many
characters are concerned with the themes of anxiety, haste, suspicion, sim­
ulation and dissimulation, deception, enquiring, spying, madness, death.
In The Merchant of Venice, the paradigms of usury, profit, interest, excess
are shared by the main characters throughout the plot, both in Venice and
in Belmont. In Measure for Measure, the action develops with the use of
key words and concepts, such as government, scope, authority, liberty, vice,
guilt, restraint, mercy, measure.
The semantics of a play pivots around common themes, problems, and
issues. The characters contribute to the semantic ‘coherence’ along different
performative routes, which constitute the particular ‘cohesion’, or sequen­
tial connectivity, of the interplay of speech-acts. Dramatic language needs
the stage to ensure that textual coherence and cohesion are accomplished,
while other literary genres leave both to the page. Speech-acts obey both
literary modes and the peculiar strategies of all characters. Those strategies
are mainly conveyed through syntax; that is, through the different ways
the characters display their approach to the main plot. ‘Putting together’ is
the original meaning of syntax, ϛύν (together, with) τάζις (order, position).
 Semantics and Syntax in Translating Shakespeare 57
The coordination or combination of words and phrases can convey more,
or differently, than the lexical-semantic import of speech-acts on the stage.
If all the characters participate in the plot, each of them presents and con­
structs his or her ‘text’ in progress mainly through syntactical and rhe­
torical devices. Each of them has an attitude, an intonation, and a bodily
behaviour—all traits that may change according to different situations, and
still make each of them altogether that character with that function in the
plot. The performability of drama lies in mutually coalescing codes, both
linguistic and extralinguistic, as embedded in speeches.

BEYOND TRANSLATION

However faithful any translation may try to be to the original text, much
is inevitably lost. Apart from the metre, rhythm, and euphony, which can
only be roughly rendered, the subtlety of semantics, rhetoric, and style has
to find new, poorer dresses in the target language. The rub may sometimes
present itself in a simple preposition, which is the case in a speech by Mark
Antony in Julius Caesar, III, 1.
Antony is the master of rhetorical and gestic language. Passionate and
shrewd at the same time, he achieves his political purpose through both
words and actions. When, with the death of Caesar, it seems that the repub­
lican regime is now safe and Brutus will become the new democratic leader
of the state, Antony’s oration reverses the course of Roman history by stir­
ring up the people against the conspirators they had previously applauded.
Shakespeare carefully prepares the character of Antony by somewhat
perversely presenting him in the first two acts as a secondary figure. In the
first, he is given only two speeches, amounting to six lines; in the second, a
one-line speech: thirty-six words altogether, five of which are the name of
Caesar. But when he enters the stage in the third act, things change radi­
cally: he has thirty speeches with a total of 246 lines. In the fourth and fi fth
acts he seems to revert to a secondary place with only twenty-eight and
thirty-eight lines. There is no other case in the canon of such a discontinu­
ous presence.
Thus, it is a surprise when, at the centre of the play, he becomes the main
protagonist at a turning point in history. He enters the Capitol a short time
after the killing of Caesar and immediately starts working on his political
project. As a friend and ally of Caesar, he is well aware of the risk to his
own life: “My credit now stands on such slippery ground / That one of
two bad ways you must conceit me, / Either a coward or a flatterer” (III, 1,
191–93). He must either betray Caesar and be branded a coward, or flatter
the conspirators and reveal himself a servile opportunist. In fact he does
neither; instead he manoeuvres, like a tightrope walker, between his loyalty
to Caesar and bowing to the apparently victorious conspirators. His fi rst
speech already demonstrates his skill:
58 Alessandro Serpieri
O mighty Caesar! Dost thou lie so low? O potente Cesare! Giaci così in basso?
Are all thy conquests, glories, triumphs, spoils, Tutte le tue conquiste, glorie, trionfi, spoglie
Shrunk to this little measure? Fare thee well. si sono ridotti a questa piccola misura? Addio.
I know not, gentlemen, what you intend, Io non so, signori, che cosa intendiate,
Who else must be let blood, who else is rank. chi altri debba subire un salasso, chi altri sia
marcio.
If I myself, there is no hour so fit Se io stesso, non c’è ora così adatta
As Caesar’s death’s hour, nor no instrument come l’ora della morte di Cesare, né c’è
strumento
Of half that worth as those your swords, che sia degno la metà di quelle vostre spade,
made rich
With the most noble blood of all this world. fatte ricche dal sangue più nobile di tutto
questo mondo.
I do beseech ye, if you bear me hard, Io vi prego, se mi volete del male, che ora,
Now, whilst your purpled hands do reek and ora che le vostre mani imporporate fumano di
smoke, sangue,
Fulfil your pleasure. Live a thousand years, appaghiate il vostro desiderio. Vivessi mille anni,
I shall not find myself so apt to die. non potrei trovarmi così pronto a morire.
No place will please me so, no mean of death, Nessun posto mi piacerà così, nessun mezzo
di morte,
As here by Caesar, and by you cut off, come qui, accanto a Cesare, e da voi falciato,
The choice and master spirits of this age. gli spiriti più scelti ed eletti di questa epoca.
(III, 1, 153–63; my emphasis)

Brutus has welcomed him, but Antony doe not answer the greeting. Rather,
he goes directly to the corpse of Caesar, whom he addresses with sincere emo­
tion, thus showing that he remains faithful to the man. Then he turns to the
conspirators and offers them his life, if they deem advisable to take it, but only
if they consider that his blood, perhaps like Caesar’s, is ‘rank’. Rank in their
homicidal opinion, but Antony holds the opposite view: that Caesar’s blood
was the most noble of all the world, and he is ready to die with him.
Nonetheless, he closes this first speech, so richly wrought on deictics, with
a flattering homage to the conspirators, no longer addressed as traitors and
murderers, but as “choice and master spirits” of the age! The last two lines
are a masterpiece of rhetoric pivoting on a simple ‘by’: a preposition which
first means ‘close to’ the corpse of his loved Caesar, and soon afterwards sig­
nifies his readiness to be killed ‘by’ the conspirators. As in many other cases,
rhetoric on stage is closely linked to action through deixis. In pronouncing
these words, in fact, Antony first turns to the corpse—“here by Caesar”—
and then to the murderers—“by you”. Thus a simple preposition sums up the
strategy that will soon have full scope in his oration to the Roman people.
There is no preposition in the Italian language that can render the
double meaning, and effect, of ‘by’. This last example shows the limits of
translation: a gratifying job at times, when one hopes to have adhered as
much as possible to the original text; a frustrating cause of fatigue, as in
 Semantics and Syntax in Translating Shakespeare 59
this case, when one is at a loss. Any language has tricks that cannot be
imported into another.

NOTES

1. Ezra Pound had noted it many years in advance: “ . . . whereas the medium of
poetry is WORDS, the medium of drama is people moving about on a stage
and using words. That is, the words are only a part of the medium and the gaps
between them, or deficiencies in their meaning, can be made up by ‘action’” (46).
2. Quite appropriate, though referred to the translation of poetry, is the warning
of Robert de Beaugrande: “ . . . it is essential to preserve the meaning potential
of a text during translation. As a reader the translator tends to complete the
text, filling in gaps or supplying details and responses at appropriate points.
There will be a constant danger that the translator will render into the goal
language not just the meaning potential of the text, but the translator’s own
additions and responses . . . The result is a text deprived of its dynamic aspect,
since the readers’ role has been filled up by the translator” (30). Taking care
of the dynamic aspect of a text is all the more important in the translation of
drama since its language is always meant to develop action on a stage.
3. All quotations from Shakespeare’s plays are from my editions (see the Works
Cited section); they are slightly revised.
4. ‘Science’ had not yet acquired its modern meaning and simply expressed
‘knowledge’, as defi ned by the Oxford English Dictionary 1.a; in the obso­
lete defi nition of 1.b it is linked to ‘conscience’: “Contrasted or coupled with
conscience, emphasizing the distinction to be drawn between theoretical
perception of a truth and moral conviction”. Even though the fi rst occur­
rence of this distinction dates from 1620, it is possible that Shakespeare was
already aware of the problematic relationship between ‘science’ and ‘con­
science’ in the crucial field of governing and administering justice, which
asks for a demanding balance between ‘codes’ and ‘judgment’, theory and
praxis, which is the central theme of the play.
5. An implied tilting fight is conveyed by ‘lists’ in the sense offered by the Oxford
English Dictionary n3, 9.a: “The palisades or other barriers enclosing a space set
apart for tilting”. Besides, ‘lists’ as the arena of a tournament occurs frequently
in the canon: see Richard II, 2, Henry VI, Pericles, and Venus and Adonis.
6. Similarly, Macbeth’s speech on entering the stage for the fi rst time as king
in the opening scene of the third act is an elliptic meditation on the precari­
ousness of his new rank: “To be thus is nothing / But to be safely thus”, the
two adverbs thus being deictics distributed in the figure of parallelism and
reinforced by strong accents. Through them Macbeth refers to his precari­
ous royalty, evidently exhibited on the stage by a crown, a sceptre, or a royal
robe, and trembles at its possible vanity. My consequent translation of the
gestic phrase is this: “Essere così è nulla, / se non si è sicuramente così”
(Shakespeare 1996: ll. 92–93).

WORKS CITED

Bassnett, Susan (1998) “Still Trapped in the Labyrinth: Further Reflections on

Translation and Theatre”, in Ead. and André Lefevere (eds) Constructing Cul­
tures, Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 90–108.
60 Alessandro Serpieri
Beaugrande, Robert de (1978) Factors in a Theory of Poetic Translation, Assen:
van Gorcum.
Jakobson, Roman (1987) [1959] “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation”, in Kry­
styna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy (eds) Language in Literature, Cambridge,
MA and London: Harvard University Press, 428–35.
Pound, Ezra (1961) ABC of Reading, London: Faber and Faber.
Serpieri, Alessandro (1977) “Ipotesi teorica di segmentazione del testo teatrale”,
Strumenti critici 11 (32–33): 90–137.
(1980) “La retorica a teatro”, Strumenti critici 41: 149–79.
(1988) “Libertà e vincolo nel tradurre Shakespeare: Per una teoria della tra­
duzione drammatica”, in Elizabeth Glass et al. (eds) Metamorfosi: Traduzione/
Tradizione, Pescara: CLUA, 37–72.
(1989) On the Language of Drama, Pretoria: Sigma Press, University of
South Africa.
Serpieri, Alessandro et al. (1978) Come comunica il teatro, Milano: Rizzoli.
(Spring 1981) “Toward a Segmentation of the Dramatic Text”, Poetics
Today 2 (3), Drama, Theater, Performance: A Semiotic Perspective: 163–200.
Shakespeare, William (1997) Amleto, Alessandro Serpieri (ed. and trans.), Venezia:
Marsilio.
(1993) Giulio Cesare, Alessandro Serpieri (ed. and trans.), Milano:
Garzanti.
(1996) Macbeth, Alessandro Serpieri (ed. and trans.), Firenze: Giunti.
(1965) Measure for Measure, J. Walter Lever (ed.), London: The Arden
Shakespeare.
(2003) Misura per misura, Alessandro Serpieri (ed. and trans.), Venezia:
Marsilio.
Ubersfeld, Anne (1977) Lire le théâtre, Paris: Éditions sociales.
4 Verse Translation for the Theatre
A Spanish Example
Paola Ambrosi

READING AND RE-READING THE TEXT

By reading criticism on translation one becomes aware that it only affords

general indications, individual suggestions, and subjective positions. This
confirms that translations resist theoretical fetters, always—and fortu­
nately—allowing for the imperfection long advocated by translation stud­
ies. All translators work with an awareness of the theoretical problems
implied in each phase of the translation process, although knowledge of
theories and debated issues in the end is only passive, since while at work
they do not really think about them.
Reading is perhaps the truly common practice on which both theoreti­
cians and translators agree. No theoretical indication is as useful to the
translator as that of reading and re-reading the text until meaning becomes
clear, or even re-reading it when meaning has been temporarily forgotten.
Reading means possessing the text. Depending on how the silent or vibrant
word is articulated, one can ‘listen’ to what is said, unveil what is hidden,
and appreciate the emotion communicated through language. Thus the
translator discovers the words, rhythms, and sounds that may help reartic­
ulate the original emotion in a different language. Even when there are no
major interlingual differences, the overall process entails a cultural transla­
tion which is always the result of a number of operations whose final aim is
creatively to interact with the receiver.
This is all the more true for theatrical translation, because of the many
stage codes involved, which makes the process of textual resemanticization
and revitalization extremely difficult. While the actor and the director are
ultimately responsible for giving life to what may be termed the ‘scenic
word’, whether according to a principle of interlingual coherence or to one
of discrepancy, the rhythm, sound, and the implied gestural expressiveness
and deictic orientation of the dramatic word are necessary concerns of the
translator if the performative potential of the original is at stake.
This is why a common preoccupation of translators is to preserve the
author’s style without resorting to models precodified in the target lan­
guage.1 This discretionary power to select between faithfulness and

DOI: 10.4324/9780203073506-5
62 Paola Ambrosi
unfaithfulness to the source text in view of the receiver’s reaction allows for
linguistic innovation and creativity, making theatre translation the site of
linguistic and communicative confrontation. At the same time, it requires
that language should not be deprived of its performative thrust, a dynamic
drive that contributes to giving shape to a physical, visual, and acoustic
space. Semantics is also crucial, as– for reasons which will soon become
apparent— it may play a fundamental role in theatre, gearing the symbolic
and thematic levels to stage action.
In Spain the theoretical debate on such issues has focused almost exclu­
sively on the comedy of the Spanish Golden Age (Calderón de la Barca, in
particular) and on the reception of Shakespeare’s plays.2 There is also a gen­
eral lack of interest in drama translation from Spanish into Italian and this
may be due to the fact that there does not exist a large enough corpus of
translated texts, and therefore, compared to what happens in other European
countries, it is impossible to examine different translations of the same text
and identify different solutions for the same translation problem.
My aim here is to show how the rhythms and sounds of a drama text
matter on stage. I will examine a contemporary play written by Bergamín
in both prose and verse, and will investigate the translative problems it
poses as regards the use of verse and the way it affects the stage action sug­
gesting tonal variation and gesture in a substantially different way from
prose. In fact, the constant alternation between verse and prose urges the
actors to change the rhythm of their utterances accordingly, thus pointing
to the performative power of poetry.
As will be seen, the sonnets contained in this play function as poles of
attraction but also of dispersion of the textual semantic fields, and this has
an impact on the whole semiotic system of the performance. Depending
on practical circumstances (in our case, a certain type of non-professional
actor, a particularly fascinating theatrical space, reduced technical facili­
ties, and low budget), the mise en scène affects the dramaturgy in a con­
tinuous effort to attain aesthetic balance and coherence.
As far as the translation of a typically Italian metre such as the sonnet
is concerned, the main interest lies in the degree of domestication and for­
eignisation produced by bringing it back to its source culture without losing
Bergamín’s experimental characteristics. As a rule, the differences between
the Italian sonnet and Bergamín’s handling of this form are virtually imper­
ceptible, but at times they prove to be surprisingly substantial.
Like every translation, also the one I will look at has its own story and
can be considered as a work per se, although it too belongs to an open pro­
cess which moves away from the original text and comes back to it as in a
loop. In this case, the translation was meant to be performed and sung on
stage and therefore combined discontinuous and dynamic elements which
were both poetic and dramatic. As a matter of fact, poetry does belong to
theatre as its intrinsic source, as Federico García Lorca claims in one of his
most famous quotes: “[E]l teatro es poesía que se levanta del libro y se hace
 Verse Translation for the Theatre 63
humana” [Theatre is the poetry which rises from the book and becomes
human] (1078).3 By rejecting the pleonastic defi nition of teatro poético
(poetic theatre), José Bergamín himself confirms Lorca’s claim:

Hay poesía teatral estupendamente hablada aunque esté o parezca mal

escrita . . . Una verdadera poesía teatral es la que vuelca hasta lo más
hondo, secreto y entrañable de la consciencia humana. Aunque lo haga
brutalmente, o sin buenas formas literarias, al parecer. El hecho poético de
la teatralidad es este religioso, de comunicación o comunión humana.

[There is wonderfully spoken theatrical poetry even if it is badly writ­

ten . . . True theatrical poetry is the one which stirs even the deepest,
secret, and intimate human consciousness, even though it does it bru­
tally or in a poor literary form. The poetical action of theatre is a reli­
gious action of communication or human communion.] (2000: 192)

And the translation should attempt not to betray it.

A MYSTERY IN THREE ACTS FOR THE ITALIAN STAGE

José Bergamín’s La sangre de Antígona: Misterio en tres actos [Antigone’s

Blood: A Mystery in Three Acts], which I translated for a specific mise
en scène, was written in 1954 at the request of Roberto Rossellini, who
wanted for his young wife Ingrid Bergman a role as important as the one
she had played in Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher [Joan of Arc at the Stake] by Paul
Claudel, with the music by Arthur Honneger. As implied in the subtitle, the
play has from its very beginning a strong declamatory and liturgical qual­
ity. It was Salvador Bacarisse, the Spanish musician also exiled in Paris,
who proposed Antigone, as its focus on the fratricidal confl ict between
Eteocles and Polynices suggested allusions to the Spanish Civil War.
Differently from the more famous Antigones by European playwrights—
Hasenclever, Brecht, Anouilh, and Cocteau (in 1922 Honneger wrote the
music for Cocteau’s text which also became a libretto in 1927)—this
Spanish rendering of the myth has never been staged, despite having been
advertised in Naples in 1956. Thus it has followed the fate of most twen­
tieth-century Spanish plays of the avant-garde and Francoist period which
have never been produced.
The European premiere of my Italian version was held at Verona Teatro
Romano. Sponsored by public and private institutions, the performance
was the result of the collaboration of two directors, Verona-based Nicoletta
Zabini and Guillermo Heras, who worked with a cast of amateur actors
from Verona University. Nonetheless, the outcome compared favourably to
that of professionals, thanks to their commitment and dedication in carry­
ing out the project.
64 Paola Ambrosi
Although the author had given the play an operatic cast which included
non-singing parts for the protagonist, the performance was entirely spoken
because of the actors’ inability to sing, which allowed Heras to refrain from
making cuts and to pay due respect to the author—as he believes one should
do at least the first time. He also explained in the programme that “apart
from its operatic quality, [José Bergamín’s Antígona] is also a specifically
theatrical experiment, full of dramatic potential and particularly fascinat­
ing in the field of experimental theatre, where a brilliant style together with
a cathartic drive update the myth”. Yet, the pieces specifically written by
composer Carlo Ceriani, with two additional songs related to the Spanish
Civil War, made music all the same central to the overall performance.
The play’s protagonist, Antigone, is counterpointed by Ismene, her
sweet and timorous sister, who acts as a foil to her. Creon is only marginal
here, as if to underscore the author’s republican persuasion, which the
Veronese performance foregrounded by enhancing the tyrant’s frivolous­
ness and ruling detached automatism to pinpoint that authoritarianism is
unable to understand the real problems of the polis. Not even the presence
of Eurydice interferes with Antigone’s dominant authority. It is no coin­
cidence that the tragedy ends on her death, thus preventing other deaths
(Eurydice’s and Haemon’s) and the tyrant’s desperation from pushing her
figure into the background. Also Haemon looks powerless in accepting
Antigone’s decision—his bride-to-be—to renounce their love and give up
the idea of having a child. All the other characters have a choral function:
although they invite Antigone to ‘choose life’ they neither interact with
her, nor interfere with her decisions. Only Tiresias at some stage becomes
active, and it is when his call to the Thebans to share collective responsi­
bility eventually proves effective on Creon and the Thebans. Finally, the
Chorus highlights the most important themes of the story and repeatedly
underlines its sacral quality, showing that iteration is the dominant struc­
tural pattern of the play.
In the performance Antigone’s long monologues were appropriately
divided into sequences in order to make them accessible to the inexperi­
enced eighteen actresses, who thus appropriated them by individually
experimenting on short pieces. These segmented monologues constitute the
bulk of the text, which is made up of three acts of nine sequences, each
reflecting the position of the characters on stage.
The subtitle Misterio en tres actos added to the play hints at the strong
liturgical quality that Bergamín wished to give it as a lay ritual, recalling
the genre of the mystery play, and making it crucial in the development of
the plot. The term ‘mystery’ refers to the ritualized forms of the Oriental
and Greek cult as well as to the medieval theatre (Toschi), which both in
Spain and in Europe staged religious topics. Traditional theatrical forms in
Bergamín’s production are peculiar of his style, even when he follows the
innovative theatrical practices typical of the 1920s avant-garde. In one of
his most significant writings he claims that “theatre and religion coincide
 Verse Translation for the Theatre 65
naturally and supernaturally in becoming expression and communication,
or communion of the human consciousness through poetry. Visibly or
invisibly” (Bergamín 2000: 197). The sonnets, which appear numerous in
the play, and the unanswerable questions raised in specific passages (as in
the final “¿Por qué muere Antígona?”, “¿Por quién muere?”, “¿Para qué?”
[Why does Antigone die?, For whom?, What for?]) have a significant role
in the structure of the play, which the Veronese mise en scène stressed by
continuously underlining its collective and ceremonial character.4
What we are presented with here is an anticipation of the search for
ritual roots which one decade later would be carried out by The Perfor­
mance Group led by Richard Schechner in New York. The importance of
the acoustic impact of the voice, which was strongly advocated by the per-
formative turn in theatre, is in fact one of the main issues of this play too,
and this is why particular attention must be given to the rhythm of lines
also in the translation process.

THE BLOOD

In addition to what has been said so far, it should be noticed that the title
itself focuses on one crucial element of the play: the cursed blood inher­
ited by Antigone from her father’s (Oedipus’s) incest with his own mother
Jocasta, whose suicide anticipates the deaths of Antigone and her brothers.
In the performance, part of this story was recalled in a musical prologue
narrating the off-stage events, from Jocasta’s death to Oedipus’s blindness
and his recognition and rejection of Polynices before his daughters. This
preliminary scene was cast as a sequence of short music pieces accompa­
nying a series of dance-theatre actions in video-clip style: Eteocles and
Polynices’s fight was followed by the women’s funeral song—Soldado no—
which accompanied Eteocles’s coffin, while on the other side of the stage
soldiers guarded Polynices’s unburied corpse on which Antigone symboli­
cally threw some soil.
As regards the semantic and symbolic value of the “sangre maldita”
[cursed blood] of the title, it posed a major translation problem, because
when it came to be rendered into Italian its resemanticization entailed a
drastic change of gender, turning the Spanish feminine into the Italian
masculine. This seemingly small, but fundamental, detail, which cannot
be avoided by the translator, implies a series of very different semantic
and metaphoric relations in the two languages which, in turn, influence
the translation.
In Spanish, La sangre de Antígona is related to the essence of the main
female character: it is part of her own identity, as Antigone declares at the
end of the first act, when she replies to Creon’s request to reveal herself:
“¿Eres tú, Antígona, la que se rebela contra los vivos y los muertos, la que
desobedece a su ley?” [Is it you, Antigone, the one who fights the living
66 Paola Ambrosi
and the dead, who disobeys their law?]; “Obedezco a mi sangre! / Soy yo!”
[I obey my blood! / It is me!] (26). Antigone’s blood is her very life and
femininity; it coincides with the denied possibility of becoming a mother:
“Nuestra sangre maldita no puede engendrar hijos” [Our cursed blood can­
not generate children] (12). It is what links and, at the same time, divides
her lineage. With reference to her brothers, the Chorus says: “El furor de su
propia sangre los ha juntado” [The fierceness of their own blood has united
them] (8); and Ismene confirms it: “Nos han separado en nuestra sangre,
hermana; / nos han juntado en nuestros muertos” [They have separated us
in our blood, sister; / they have united us in our dead] (Bergamín 2003:
12). Even the Corypheus chimes in: “La sangre se vierte para que perezca
el amor” [Blood is poured to let love die] (8). It makes a great difference
to think about it as feminine, as in the original, or as masculine, as in the
Italian or other versions.
Thus, this simple change of gender prompts a whole cultural rethink­
ing of the text, though its performative implications have more to do with
directorial choices than with the translation process itself. While the actors
and the directors must come to terms with it, the translator may simply be
aware of the problem and leave the text as it is, without making massive
changes to increase the word’s evocative power. Sangue, for example, could
be substituted with linfa vitale (life blood) to save the feminine gender; but
thus one loses the reference to blood as a fluid, and the word ceases to be a
distinctive feature of the character.
In the Veronese performance emphasis was laid on the protagonist’s
femininity, and, at the same time, on her manly characteristics. By doing
so the production tried to reproduce the dual connotation of the blood
Antigone identifies with. It is worth noting that the property which charac­
terized the protagonist in the interpretation of the eighteen actresses was a
red cloth worn by each of them in turn as a belt, or a shawl, or a bandage,
giving the impression of flowing blood. Antigone also wore a 1950s men’s
suit of a large size and a ladies red top.
The word sangre, repeated by the messenger in the short prologue,
recurs more than thirty times in the first act. Later in the play, the number
of occurrences diminishes drastically as Antigone gradually detaches from
life: twenty-four and nine times in the second and third acts, respectively.
This high rate, as well as the expressive adjectivization and periphrastic
or appositive contextualization, call for attention: “sangre-sueño” [blood­
sleep/dream], “nuestra sangre” [our blood], “maldita” [cursed], “inocente,
impure” [innocent, impure], “la [ley] de mi sangre” [the law of my blood],
“sangre humana con hedor de muerte” [human blood which smells of
death], “¡que es la sangre en mis ojos la que llora!” [and it is the blood
which cries in my eyes!] (8, 19, 12, 16, 42, 52). In the Italian translation of
this last example, “ed è sangue che piangono i miei occhi”, a slight gram­
matical change foregrounds the idea of blood as the object flowing from
the eyes, rather than the subject of crying. The literal translation, “ed è il
 Verse Translation for the Theatre 67
sangue che piange nei miei occhi”, would be acceptable from a metrical
point of view and perhaps would even have the effect of “transparentar (de)
lo diferente” [revealing what is different], by suggesting the cultural impli­
cations of the hypotext. 5 In my opinion, however, this image does not make
much sense in Italian and the original effect would be lost anyway.

THE GHOST

Apart from the blood, the other central feature of the play is the ghostly
nature of Antigone, of the other characters, and of space itself. This is con­
veyed through manifest performative implications:
–Antigone’s opening line “¡Callad los vivos!” (“Tacete, voi che siete
vivi!”) [Be silent, living people!] (10) not only declares her detachment from
the living but also shows a strong performative potential. My Italian trans­
lation unfortunately fails to render the conciseness of the original as well
as the rhythmic liveliness of the iambic flow, whose first accent is on an
apocopated word. A possible alternative could be “Zitti, vivi!” [Shut up,
living people!], but it changes the original register and makes Antigone’s
lines too trivial. In any case, it would be up to the actor or the director
to choose which version best suits the performance. Directions lacking, it
is advisable to avoid too connoted expressions in order to leave meaning
open to interpretation, an approach which should be coherently followed
throughout the play. Of course, the performative implications contained in
the text are worth being well weighed, keeping in mind that the translation
choices should prove performable on stage.
–Although Antigone denies to the soldiers that she is a ghost who con­
verses with the dead, she wonders if, as a ghost, she might actually speak
with those she considers ghosts of the living (Creon, Haemon). The variants
used for ‘ghost’ are “esqueleto” [skeleton] and “sombra” [shadow], two
words that are particular to Bergamín’s style and should not be overlooked
in the translation.6
–Also the protagonist’s ‘mental space’ is ghost-like. Antigone floats
between life and death: “¡Fantasma del tiempo, no me sigas! / ¡No soy tuya
ya!”, “¿Si los muertos no quieren mi vida, por qué quieren los vivos mi
muerte?” [Ghost of time, do not follow me! / I’m not yours anymore!; If the
dead do not want my life, why do the living ask for it?] (12, 22).
–In the performance this overemphasised ghostly quality of the text was
introduced from the very entrance on stage of the ghost-characters, who in
the dark defined an equally ghostly space by holding a candle. This is where
the Shadows of the brothers later moved.
This shows that before translating this play it is necessary to identify
its key images,7 such as the highly connoted ones of the blood and the
ghosts, which interweave its deep texture, and help draw coherent lines of
interpretation. These should not be made away with or downplayed in the
68 Paola Ambrosi
translation, which should also recapture the play’s performative and plastic
potential implied in the verse, a feature which is equally crucial to both
meaning and the performance.

THE SONNET AND THE ACOUSTICS

OF THE PERFORMANCE

From the start, and increasingly in the course of the translation, a main
preoccupation was how to treat the sonnet form and the rhyme schemes,
which I eventually decided to reproduce into Italian.8 This choice was long
pondered, and although it may be debatable, it has on its side the fact that
the target language is the birthplace of the sonnet. In the performance the
rhythm of the hendecasyllable was easily recognizable in the scansion of
the fourteen lines, and the audience could perceive the structure and, at the
same time, appreciate the phonic and rhythmic value of the composition,
even before grasping its semantic import. Moreover, the fact that the audi­
ence at Teatro Romano was offered a booklet with the play in the two lan­
guages allowed a certain degree of translational freedom. This proceeded
from an awareness that the linguistic proximity between Spanish and Ital­
ian would facilitate comparison and understanding, even if the linguistic
competence of the spectator was limited.
The eight sonnets and a few other verse sequences (a romancillo and a vari­
ety of pentasyllabic lines—the only classical forms in the play) appear more
consistently as the text proceeds towards its end. In particular, the six sonnets
uttered by Antigone are distributed as follows: one in the first act, two in the
second, and three in the third. In addition, there are two more sonnets, Hae­
mon’s in the second act and the Corypheus’s at the end of the third act.
In translating these pieces I was dealing with a sort of metric experi­
mentation. In fact, besides the classical structure of the sonnet, Bergamín
also employs the typically modernist sonnet in alexandrine—of Parnas­
sian origin—and the sonnet with seven-syllable lines, new to the Spanish
tradition, but familiar to the thirteenth-century Italian sonetto minore as
defi ned in treatises of versification.9 If these formal choices may appear an
unnecessary explanation of the literariness of the text—and even unrelated
to the main object of our discussion—the structure of the play sheds light
on some of the writer’s dramaturgical intentions. As a matter of fact, the
author enhances a feature typical of the sonnet in its earliest phase: the
poet’s address to the ‘you’ with a strong gestural expressiveness capable of
evoking a visual, acoustic, and tactile world in keeping with the theatrical
dimension of the pièce.
Nowadays sonnets are fairly uncommon in plays and tend to belong to
individual poetics. One of their main characteristics lies in their reflexiv­
ity, something which in drama coincides with a pause in the action, for
 Verse Translation for the Theatre 69
instance when a character soliloquises and shares his or her thoughts with
the audience. Originally, as Montagnani has remarked, it “instead implies
an external element of aggregation, as in the case of an explicit tenson”
(63). While theoretically excluding dialogue, the sonnet actually involves it:
“[I]t is a text functional to something else . . . and which lacks autonomy”
(ibid.). Thus, also in the handling of the sonnet form Bergamín makes it
his own: he accepts Lope’s lesson, and foregrounds a feature typical of the
primitive examples of the most classical of the Italian forms.
On the whole, the six sonnets recited by Antigone explore one main
topic: the perception of approaching death and the protagonist’s interaction
with this death figure, later appearing as a woman in Spring clothes, the
personification of Proserpina (queen goddess of the underworld), associ­
ated with the blossoming of earth.
A major performative thrust of these sonnets resides in the prevailing
plastic quality of certain clusters of images. The first sonnet shows a picto­
rial image of life of Petrarchan origin:10 a richly textured veil, which may be
turned into a scenic prop, as was done in the Verona performance. On that
occasion, it was used a semi-transparent cloth showing the interweaving of
the words sombra, sueño, and sangre, whose mesh became apparent when
in the fourth line the sequence was inverted, while the easily reproducible
alliterative thread was kept unaltered. Here the elegant acoustic and rhyth­
mic balance of the lines calls for special attention:

De sombra, sueño y sangre está tejido D’ombra di sogno e sangue si è intrecciato

con hilo de ilusión, el transparente con filo d’illusione, il trasparente
tramado de la vida, mortalmente tessuto della vita, mortalmente
en sangre, en sueño, en sombra convertido. In sangue, in sogno, in ombra trasformato.
... ...
Cuando la luz me prende sin tocarme Da una luce mi lascio imprigionare
no hay sombra que no pueda ser vencida e non c’è ombra che non sia sopita,
porque sólo el amor puede asombrarme perché solo l’amore può stupirmi. (12–13)

Light, which is the plastic element par excellence, is very powerful in

these lines, in that it symbolically denotes death, and in the performance
was exploited so as to provide an all-embracing flow reminding one of a
scene by Appia. It is the same white morning light which reappears in the
last stage direction, when Antigone strips off her belt and hangs herself
with it: “[S]e hace el oscuro y se oye un gran estrépito como de trueno de
tormenta, llantos, gritos, gemidos, voces inintelegibles. Después, con luz
de amanecer va iluminándose la escena, distinguiéndose en ella el cuerpo
colgando de Antígona” [It is dark and a loud noise is heard, like a thunder­
storm, crying, screaming, wailing, gibberish. Afterwards, the dawn light
floodlights the scene showing Antigone’s body hanging] (56).
70 Paola Ambrosi
The protagonist’s disarming remark in the last sonnet is appropriately
followed by the Chorus’s lament: fifteen short lines where the anaphoric
iteration of “ay” [woe] seven times emphasises the effect of crying. What
is more, at the beginning of the first act, the Chorus intersperses “¡Ay
de mí! / ¡Ay de mí!” [Woe is me! / Woe is me!] three times in the lines of
Corypheus I and Corypheus II, as if they were recurrent musical notes
distributed in the irregular series of lines where “el vencido amor” is
repeatedly evoked.
Through the contradictory and semantically complex term vencido, the
Chorus also reasserts one of the main topics of the play. This is why it is
worth looking at the possible translations prompted by the whole semantic
chain derived from the word vencimiento, an oxymoronic term in Spanish
with a wide range of nuances. Translation in this case is all the more dif­
ficult because, being for the stage, it must have an immediate and incisive
effect, and adjectival sequences or explicative periphrases—admissible in
prose—hardly suit the performative context.
The term vencido means overwhelmed, defeated, beaten, surrendered,
abandoned, convinced, evidently offering manifold translative options. The
translation of the adjective, however, here should be coherent with that of
the noun (vencimiento), which in the play is often used with the meaning
of love as ‘surrender’, as Antigone claims: “¿Cuál es el nombre de amor si
no es vencimiento?” [What is the name of love if not surrender?] (10). More
generally, vencimiento means inclination, turn, persuasion, but also vic­
tory, a word which conveys the versatility and richness of the original by
implying the opposite meaning of defeat and abandonment. My translation
favoured the prevailing sense, while occasional changes in the qualification
attempted to render the polysemy of the word: surrendered, conquered and
conquering love (10–11), but also ‘appeased’, as in line 10 of the first son­
net, where ‘vencida’ qualifies the shadow (12).
Going back to the sonnets, the second one—“¡Con qué paso pausado y
cauteloso / se acerca, viene a mí la Primavera!” (“Con che passo pausato e
cadenzato / viene verso di me la Primavera!”) [With a slow and measured
step / Spring comes towards me!] (30)—is addressed to an attentive inter­
locutor– the audience– who is invited to join in the perception of the soft
approach of death. Thus, also the sonnet which ends the second act under­
scores allocution as a primary feature of theatricality. In order to maintain
the structural, phonic, and metric unity of the sonnet, the translation pro­
duced semantic changes, including extension and dislocation of meaning
from one word to another:
¡Ven, muerte, ven, como la Primavera! Vieni a me, morte, vieni Primavera!
Te espero, tan vencida y deseosa Ti aspetto, sopraffatta ed anelante
que apenas siento, apenas, temblorosa che appena sento, appena, trepidante
latir mi pulso en anhelante espera. pulsare la mia vena prigioniera.
No es la sangre en mis venas prisioneras In questa attesa l’anima mia spera. (46–47)
 Verse Translation for the Theatre 71
The original “latir mi pulso” was substituted with a passage from the
following quatrain: “mis venas prisoneras” (“la mia vena prigioniera”) [my
prisoner vein], the pulsating blood prisoner of a body offered to death. In
the original text, this image makes the identification of the character with
her own blood—feminine in Spanish, as already said—more evident.
The image of the fabric of life is also repeated in the fifth sonnet delivered
by Antigone at the beginning of the third act, when she enters her prison,
a place that she knows will be her tomb. Temporarily floating between life
and death, melancholy wraps her as in a ‘shroud’. Once more, the sonnet
offers metaphorical images, such as the shroud and the light, which can
be transformed into plastic ones on stage by using props such as veils and
threads. The light is also functional to building up the scene from a tem­
poral point of view, marking the passage from day to night. The ‘door’ is
closed behind her, stifling all her hopes; the ‘night’ and the ‘wind’ extin­
guish the afternoon lights; the cold wind of night, which in the second line
already anticipates what is going to happen, contains the echo of the last
hours of the day (an effect emphasised by the hummed song). The wind also
hushes the noise of steps—which, in the memory, are frightening—and of
faded voices:

Los tristes ecos de la tarde muerta La triste eco della sera morta,
que arrastra el viento de la noche fría, che il vento nella notte spazza via,
se apagan ya, como se apaga el día, si spegne con il giorno e non riavvia
callando pasos que el temor despierta. quei muti passi di paura insorta.
(Canto de voces sin palabras) (Canto di voci senza parole)
Detrás de mí, cerrada está la puerta Richiusa è ormai, dietro di me, la porta
que cerró el fin de la esperanza mía che pose fine a ogni sparanza mia.
Como un sudario, la melancolía Come un sudario, la malinconia
me va envolviendo con su sombra incierta. Mi va avvolgendo in un’ombra contorta.
La noche apaga, como apaga el viento La notte spegne, come spegne il vento
Las luces de la tarde, trastornadas, le luci di una sera travolgente
la lejanía de un amor que siento la lontananza di un amore che sento
como si se acallase en mis pisadas come se si spegnesse nel presente,
ahogando el eco de mi sentimiento smorzando l’eco del mio sentimento
con un rumor de voces apagadas. con un rumor di voci ormai spente. (48)

Life is perceived by the protagonist as an echo, which has an important

effect on the acoustics of the performance. Love too is only the echo of
the same feeling which prompted her to show human compassion for her
brother for which she is now condemned. And it is because of that forbid­
den, but necessary and sacral, gesture that Antigone eventually performs
her sacrificial act. In the long ritual leading to the end of the tragedy she
alters the Christological structure while recalling it. She refuses to eat the
bread the soldiers give her, scatters it around and sheds the wine onto the
72 Paola Ambrosi
ground, without taking any, in order to return both to the earth: this makes
the communion rite, which might have saved her, impossible. All the same,
she performs the ritual right to the end only to negate it.

LITURGY AND THE VERSE RITUAL

It is precisely when the play recovers this liturgical-ceremonial aspect that it

becomes extraordinarily significant. The gestural expressiveness implied in
the long monologue accompanying the ritual, supported by a well-measured
sonority, is divided into three phases, which correspond to a rite whose reli­
gious origin is recognizable through the recovery of three basic symbols of
Christianity: the bread, the wine (Christ’s flesh and blood), and the sword,
an instrument owned by every soldier of Christ; yet, the dramatist turns it
into a lay ritual, as shown by these few examples:

(Toma el pan, el vino y la espada y los coloca delante de sí)

(Tomando el pan)
¡Silencio!¡Soledad!¡Amor!
(Prende il pane, il vino e la spada e li colloca davanti a sé)
(Prendendo il pane)
Silenzio! Solitudine! Amore! (50–51)

(Toma el vino)
¡Sangre que no eres sangre!
(Prende il vino)
Sangue che non sei sangue! (ibid.)

(A la espada)
¿Y eres tú la que viene a darme la libertad?
(Alla spada)
Sei tu che vieni a darmi la libertà? (52–53)

The sword which hurts is the tangible element that unites and mirrors
the progressive approach of death in the fourth sonnet “Se acerca a mí,
se acerca todavía”. Also the sonnet in alexandrines “Escucho vuestra voz
cuando escucho un lamento” (“Sento la vostra voce, quando sento un
lamento”) [I hear your voice when I hear a lament] fits well into the dia­
logue, which foregrounds tension between ‘I’ and ‘you’ from the very fi rst
line. Antigone perceives the Shadows of her brothers in the rustle of the
leaves, in the sound of the wind, in the voice of the sea. The monotony of
the funeral lament is matched by the rhythm of the lines (6–13), which the
translation tries to preserve as far as possible. The same can be said of the
sound patterns, at times onomatopoeic, and of the wealth of images (such
as the shadows, the leaves, the sound of the sea and the wind), which are
capable of building up the scene through a refined use of rhetorical devices.
 Verse Translation for the Theatre 73
And it is mainly upon these formal elements that the dramatic and plastic
power of the play depends.
When the moment comes to make choices, Antigone, like every true
tragic hero, has already made up her mind, and despite being urged by her
sister Ismene and by Haemon to choose life, she has already renounced it.
After addressing her last words to the Shadows of her brothers, Antigone
resorts to silence, which counterpoints the vibrant sonority of most lines
of this sonnet. Hers is the silence of one buried alive, a silence polemically
claimed and imposed upon everyone when she enters on stage with a cue
which brilliantly sums up her position against the living: “Callad los vivos”.
But this is also the silence imposed by the tyrant upon Antigone, and on
the Spanish people during the Francoist period; it is the silence which runs
through the triplets as their main motif:
En mano del silencio abandono mi vida Al silenzio mi arrendo, gli consegno la vita
ahora que, por callarla, la siento sin dolor. Che adesso, ammutolita, sento senza dolore;
Muda como la sangre que brota de la herida muta come il sangue che sgorga dalla ferita,
Muda como la muerte. Muda como el amor. muta come la morte, muta come l’amore.
(54–55)

The sonnet in seven-syllable lines recited by Haemon differs from the

other ones in that its verbal puns and contradictions—facilitated by the
short measure—become central to its structure. He sees his beloved Anti-
gone as if estranged from herself (she can neither see what she looks at, nor
hear what she says): now she is in the embrace of death, visualized in the
‘shadow’s hand’ typical of Bergamín’s imagery. The repetitive allocution to
‘you’ is emphasised by the beat falling on the fi rst syllable, which is hardly
translatable into Italian, where the stress rather goes onto the possessive
and reflexive “Tu—Te” in the following lines:

Hemón (Cantando) Haemon (Cantando)

Tú no oyes lo que dices Non senti ciò che dici
Tú no ves tu mirada Non vedi che il tuo sangue
Tu sombra desangrada e la tua ombra esangue
arranca tus raíces. ti strappa le radici.
Te dices y desdices Ti dici e ti disdici,
... ...
una mano de sombra sei una mano d’ombra
que acaricia la piedra. che accarezza la pietra. (36–37)

The almost obsessive presence of the image of blood justifies my arbi­

trary substitution, in the second line, of the look (“tu mirada”) with “il
tuo sangue”, although its being repeated in line 9 (“lo que miras / ciò che
guardi”) underlines its relevance here (“Non vedi più il tuo sguardo”). In
order to preserve the playful rhythm of the sonnet, as opposed to its tragic
content—after all, Haemon is telling her that she is already the image of
74 Paola Ambrosi
death, a shadow’s hand caressing the stone—I had occasionally to change
the meaning while enhancing the sound patterns, as in lines 9–10, where
“vedi” [you see] reinforces “voce” [voice] in the following line.
Precisely on the image of the hand of death Antigone weaves her last
speech on stage, where she takes up again some of the most significant
themes of the play: the lack of hope, because “la vida no tiene esperanza
de amor” [life has no hope of love], and the three pivotal words of the
first sonnet: “sangre, sueño y sombra” [blood, sleep/dream and shadow].
Finally, the hand of death recurs up to seven times in the last monologue:

Quisiera que una mano me arrancara del pecho . . . mi proprio

corazón.
¡Una mano de sombra que acaricie mi cuerpo . . . que me aranque la
voz!
Una mano que fuera igual que la de un niño—engendrado en mi
sangre por mi oscuro dolor
...
¡Una mano de suño que acaricie mi sombra!
Vorrei che una mano . . . mi strappasse dal petto il cuore.
Una mano d’ombra, che mi accarezzi il corpo . . . che mi strappi via
la voce!
Una mano che fosse uguale a quella di un bambino—generato nel
sangue dal mio oscuro dolore
...
Una mano di sogno che accarezzi la mia ombra! (56–57)

The scenic potential of these images is evident here. Not only are they
related to the protagonist’s body, voice, and blood, but they are also con­
nected with the temporal and symbolic dimension of the story; and for the
last time the hand of death is associated with sangre, sueño, and sombra.
Once more, the translation should be functional to the acting and to the
whole process leading to the mise en scène by respecting the delicate phonic
and rhythmic balance, as well as the powerful intensity of the key words.
From mouth to mouth, in a ceremonial and choral rite which includes
the Chorus, Corypheus I, Corypheus II, the Voices, the Soldiers, and the
Shadows of the brothers, many ‘whys’ are asked in the text. The most sig­
nificant group is formulated as a kind of refrain. In the fi rst act, it is Anti-
gone who asks these questions in the presence of the soldiers—who have
invited her to follow them—of the Chorus, of Creon, and of Eurydice:

¿Y por qué morir? ¿Para quien? E perché morire? Per chi?

¿Por quién muero? ¿Para qué muero? Per chi muoio? Perché muoio? (24–25)

The same questions are repeated by Tiresias with appropriate variants at

the end of his monologue which concludes the second act:
 Verse Translation for the Theatre 75
¿Por quién muere Antígona Per chi muore Antigone??
¿Por quién? Per chi?
... ...
¿Para qué muere Antígona? Perché muore Antigone? (44–45)
At the beginning and ending of the third act, the Chorus and the Voices
again pose the same questions, though in a shorter form:
Coro. ¿Por qué muere Antígona? Perché muore Antigone?
¿Por quien muere? Per chi muore?
¿Para qué muere? Per che cosa muore? (48–49)
One understands why, at the end of the performance, the actors pressed the
spectators with the same questions, eventually leaving the scene to intermingle
with the audience in the amphitheatre and making those questions relevant to
them by turning the public into an active co-subject of the performative event.

NOTES

1. In his utopian idea of the translation, Ortega y Gasset warned the transla­
tor not to use the style of the target language, but “to retain the style of the
author to translate” (452).
2. See Espasa and Braga Riera: both discuss theoretical issues and include
detailed bibliographies (Espasa 323–34; Braga Riera 233–52). See also
Marchante Moralejo, Mate Martínez-Moralejo (1996, 2000), and Ezpeleta
Piorno (2007, 2009).
3. All translations are mine.
4. For a study of this mise en scène, see Ambrosi (2007).
5. I borrow Víctor Andrés Ferretti’s defi nition of “[t]raducción componible. Un
alegato en favor de la literalidad” (143).
6. For the ghostly quality of the characters in Bergamín’s theatre, see Ambrosi
(2012).
7. The defi nition is from Cascetta and Peja.
8. See Cortés Gabaudán for some interesting comments on her own translation
of Goethe’s Faust.
9. See Menichetti. This is a very rare structure, however, which as far as I know
was once used only by Bandello.
10. The connotation here is poetic: “S’Amore o Morte non dà qualche stroppio
/ a la tela novella ch’ora ordisco” (Petrarca, Canzoniere [Rerum vulgarium
fragmenta] XL).

WORKS CITED

Ambrosi, Paola (2007) “El fantasma de la Antígona Bergaminiana en la puesta

en escena de Guillermo Heras”, in José Romera Castillo (ed.) Análisis de
espectáculos teatrales (2000–2006), Actas del XVI Seminario Internacional del
Centro de Investigación de Semiótica Literaria, Teatral y Nuevas Tecnologías,
Madrid: Visor Libros, 221–35.
76 Paola Ambrosi
(2012) “Los personajes fantásticos del teatro bergaminiano”, Pygmalión
4: 93–106.
Bergamín, José (2003) La sangre de Antígona: Il sangue di Antigone, Paola
Ambrosi (trans.), Firenze: Alinea.
(2000) “Musaraña del teatro”, in Id. and Gonzalo Penalva Candela (eds)
Antología, Madrid: Castalia, 188–99.
Braga Riera, Jorge (2009) La traducción al inglès de las comedias del Siglo de Oro,
Madrid: Fundamentos.
Cascetta, Annamaria and Laura Peja (2003) Ingresso a teatro: Guida all’analisi
della drammaturgia, Firenze: Le Lettere.
Cortés Gabaudán, Helena (2008) “La traducción de la forma literaria”, in Javier
Gómez Montero (ed.) Nuevas pautas de traducción literaria, Madrid: Visor
Libros, 87–116.
Espasa Borrás, Eva (2001) La traduccuiò d’alt de l’escenari, Vic: Eumo.
Ezpeleta Piorno, Pilar (ed.) (2009) “Dossier: De la traducción teatral”, TRANS:
Revista de traductología 13: 11–136.
(2007) Teatro y traducción: Aproximación interdisciplinaria desde la obra
de Shakespeare, Madrid: Cátedra.
Ferretti, Víctor Andrés (2008) “Traducción componible: Un alegato en favor de
la literalidad”, in Javier Gómez Montero (ed.) Nuevas pautas de traducción
literaria, Madrid: Visor Libros, 133–52.
García Lorca, Federico (1977) “Entrevistas y declaraciones”, in Obras completas,
vol. 2, Madrid: Aguilar.
Gómez Montero, Javier (ed.) (2008) Nuevas pautas de traducción literaria, Madrid:
Visor Libros.
Marchante Moralejo, Carmen (1996) “Calderón en Italia: Traducciones, adapta­
ciones, falsas atribuciones y scenari”, in Maria Grazia Profeti (ed.) Tradurre,
riscrivere, mettere in scena, Firenze: Alinea, 17–63.
Mate Martínez-Moralejo, Marta (1996) “El componente escénico en la traducción
teatral”, in Miquel Edo (ed.) Actas del I Congrés Internacional sobre Traducció,
Barcelona: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad Autónoma, 907–18.
(2000) “La ‘representabilidad’ como eje de las discusiones sobre la traduc­
ción teatral”, conference paper presented at IV Jornadas de traducció a Vic:
traducció teatral, Universidad de Vic, 6 April.
Menichetti, Aldo (February 1975) “Implicazioni retoriche nell’invenzione del
sonetto”, Strumenti critici 9 (1): 1–30.
Montagnani, Cristina (1986) “Appunti sull’origine del sonetto”, Rivista di Let­
teratura italiana 4 (1): 9–63.
Ortega y Gasset, José (1955) “Miseria y esplendor de la traducción”, in Obras
completas, vol. 5, Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 431–52.
Toschi, Paolo (1966) L’antico teatro religioso, Matera: Montemurro.
5 Performing Intertextuality
in Translating Rewrites
Silvia Bigliazzi

CITATION IN DRAMA TEXT AND PERFORMANCE TEXT

All translators for the theatre know that meaning on the page is not exactly
the same as meaning on the stage. When the verbal leaves the page and is
translated into the vocal and the gestural, meaning comes to life for the
short time of a production; it acquires specific intention, expressiveness,
corporeality, and the individual actor does with the words what no printed
page can ever convey: a bodily incarnation of the verbal into living drama.
Lists of properties of the page/stage opposition have long been provided,
marking a rigid binarism that contrasts the dialectical and collaborative
dimension of theatre and the authoritarian univocality of the page (Ritchie
66–67)– or, as Worthen has put it, the “‘performance’ (transgressive, mul­
tiform, revisionary)” and the “(dominant, repressive, conventional, and
canonical) domain of the ‘text’” (1997: 5). The post-modern endorsement
of the performative turn in certain areas of literary studies has aroused
impatience against what has been labelled as a justification of directorial
originality, against which a page-centred approach has been advocated in
support of the reasons for the verbal.1 Recently Weimann and Bruster have
rightly pointed out that the gap between language and performance should
not be looked at according to an order of hierarchy, but rather in terms of
“interactive relationship of text and performance” (15; Weimann 2000).
This balanced view sounds perfectly reasonable, and resolves the page/
stage opposition into the ‘bifold authority’ of a dialectic not much distant
from what the semiotic approach contended a few decades ago (Serpieri et
al. 1978, 1981; Ubersfeld). As Elam has argued: “The written text/perfor­
mance relationship is not one of simple priority but a complex of recipro­
cal restraints constituting a powerful intertextuality. Each text bears the
other’s traces . . . it is a relationship that cannot be accounted for in terms
of facile determinism” (209).
In this perspective, while the page may still be considered “the grammar
of the dramatic situation” (Ewbank 71), it can also be seen as the result
of theatrical practices, in turn conditioned by variable cultural require­
ments and tastes. Thus, looking at the text as “a new dramatic ‘score’ for
DOI: 10.4324/9780203073506-6
78 Silvia Bigliazzi
a performance that is coherent and acceptable within the target culture”
(Snell-Hornby 1997: 195; 2006) does not mean considering the latter deriv­
ative, but only focusing on the dynamic that makes the script both condu­
cive to vocality and gesture, and originating from them. Besides, the text
itself retains in its own material forms of performativity related to printing
and publishing practices that bear on the history of dramatic literature
and its relation with the history of dramatic performance, raising a whole
range of issues that one way or another underpins interaction. “Dramatic
performance is not determined by the text of the play”, Worthen argues,
in that “it strikes a much more interactive, performative relation between
writing and the spaces, places, and behaviors that give it meaning, force,
as theatrical action” (2003: 12). Although the word ‘performance’, which
derives from the Latin performāre via French, literally means ‘to carry out
and accomplish’, and suggests temporal priority in assuming that some­
thing needs to be fi nished off (Bigliazzi 2002), interaction and reversibility
between page and stage in fact make the play text the two-faced Janus
looking in the direction of literariness and theatrical performativity.
These few considerations are meant to help deal with the notion of inter­
textuality, which normally arouses scenarios of literary exchanges alien to
theatrical practices. Citation and textual interpolation have often been a
favourite topic of literary studies (of the page, to go back to the ‘hot’ termi­
nology), as Riffaterre revealingly implies by associating it with literariness
and the signifying processes involved in the literary reading of mainly sty­
listic features (1978, 1979, 1980). 2 Situating borrowings within the theatri­
cal context means to divest them of the primacy of literariness and refer
their instances, alongside rewritings in general, to the ‘intertextuality’ of
theatrical practices as performative potentials encrypted within the page
and open to varying interpretations.
Genette includes intertextuality within the larger category of so-called
transtextuality, comprehending also the mute generic features (architex­
tuality) (1979), and the rewrite, labelled by him ‘hypertext’ (as opposed
to the source text, or ‘hypotext’) (1982). Yet, being more interested in the
theoretical issue than in the occasional theatrical specificities involved, he
does not distinguish between literary and dramatic texts, including both in
his extensive study of literary collaboration.
Yet, when citation, generic affiliation, and rewriting concern texts for
the theatre, things are complicated by the composite performative qual­
ity deriving from the stratification of theatrical conventions evoked by the
blend of borrowings and the new material. The text / inter- or hypotext
dialectic results into a mixture of different styles, registers, ways of address­
ing or monologuing, even metrics, each attuned to the theatrical medium
for which they have been thought out in the particular time and space for
which they have been created. Historicity, in other words, creeps into the
rewrite as an allusion to specific modes of communication and acting. This
means that the encapsulated pieces bear the traces of time and theatrical
 Performing Intertextuality in Translating Rewrites 79
modes, and these are often the testing ground for the efficacy of the overall
transtextual experiment. Dealing with these types of play texts, therefore,
poses questions about what to do with the performative specifics of each
(inter)text—whether to underline them or instead pass them off as more or
less casual. It means becoming aware of a rift present within the script and
raising issues on how to come to terms with it before the translational (and
recreative) appropriation is accomplished.

A TYPOLOGY

To give an idea of what I mean I will refer to an imaginary typology of

rewrites drawn from the Shakespearean repertory, from plays presenting
minimal allusions to the originals, to plays entirely made up of Shakespear­
ean excerpts. The line linking these extremes stretches from transtextuality
as latent assumption, to transtextuality as manifest texture, or, to put it
differently, from absence of quotations to the text as collage (see Figures
5.1 and 5.2)
At one end of the spectrum, minimal allusiveness, in line of principle,
needs minimal or no special translational care: a text like Edward Bond’s
Lear (1971), which shows no major relation with its source in terms of plot,
characters, and language, but mainly in terms of themes—such as filial ingrat­
itude—and in other minor features (for instance the name of the protagonist),
is not pre-eminently engaged with citational problems and verbal echoes.
In a somewhat more central position along the spectrum there stand
rewrites which include passages from their hypotext(s), or source text(s),
but with no manifest aim at making them recognizable. This is the case
with many Restoration revisions of Shakespearean plays, Nahum Tate’s
Richard II (1680) or King Lear (1680) to name but two. While in these
plays the encapsulated lines are meant to run as smoothly as possible, thus
not requiring a contrastive type of translation, rewritings openly making
a parody of their hypotexts call instead for greater translational attention.
W. S. Gilbert’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, A Tragic Episode in Three
Tabloids (1875), for instance, jibes at all the characters of Shakespeare’s
Hamlet, and language, when not citational (as in the epitomic “to be or not
to be” quote), is imbued with a caricatural import coherent with the overall
parodic frame.

latent assumption manifest texture

•--------------------------------------------------------------------------•
no quotation collage
•--------------------------------------------------------------------------•
Figure 5.1 Intertextuality
80 Silvia Bigliazzi

0 quotes seamless quotes parodic plot parodic text/intertext collage

Bond ------------ Tate --------------Gilbert ------------Stoppard-------- Marowitz

Figure 5.2 Intertextual relevance.

For a number of reasons Stoppard’s more recent parody of Hamlet in
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966) appears subtler than Gil­
bert’s, and this is demonstrated also by his handling of intertextuality.
Long passages from the play are interpolated in the text and the two spies
are required to change vocal and gestural attitudes as well as linguistic
registers on account of their being either in or out of the ‘generative play’
Hamlet. In this case, interlingual translation, as we are about to see, cannot
ignore the performative frictions deriving from the alternation and clash
between text and intertext, the Elizabethan theatrical discourse—with
blank verse speech and recognizable vocabulary and turns of phrases—and
contemporary colloquialisms and references belonging to the present time.
Of course these are very general indications, since the label ‘Elizabethan
theatrical discourse’ is itself vague and changeable, depending on how it is
interpreted in different cultures.
Finally, Marowitz’s Shakespearean collages (Hamlet 1965; Macbeth 1969;
Measure for Measure 1975; The Shrew 1973), as well as Stoppard’s Fifteen-
Minute Hamlet (1979), are positioned one step further, at the opposite end
of the spectrum from Bond’s Lear, in that they rely exclusively on portions of
their hypotext, mutilated and reassembled anew for motives and aims that
may vary greatly. Marowitz’s intention, for instance, was to prove that the
essentials of the play could be conveyed without resorting to a consequential
plot, as he wrote in the introduction to the printed edition:

The first exercise of mine along these lines was the direct result of con­
versations with Peter Brook in which we discussed the possibilities of
conveying theatrical meaning without reliance on narrative. Would it
be possible, we conjectured, to convey the multitude of nuances and
insights which are to be found in Hamlet through a kind of cut-up of the
work which thoroughly abandoned its progressive story line? If the story
proper would not be conveyed through such drastic reassembly, what
would? The result was a twenty-eight minute collage stitched together
from random selections of the play and wedged into an arbitrary struc­
ture (viz. the soliloquy ‘How all occasions do inform against me’). (11)

The fragmentary dimension of the resulting collage was bound to affect the
performance, as Marowitz points out, underlining how difficult it was for
actors during rehearsals to deal with discontinuity of action and character.3
These few remarks prompt some basic questions: what is the effect
upon the translative process and stage transference of the intertextuality
 Performing Intertextuality in Translating Rewrites 81
and performativity involved in such plays? How may citation be rendered
on stage in a different language and culture without the help of commen­
tary and footnotes and how does this affect gesture and body language?
Here we encounter, among others, problems of cultural conditioning and
issues of style.

CULTURAL CONDITIONING

Testimony to the scarce adaptability of transtextual plays to different

cultural contexts comes from yet another Shakespearean rewrite. In a
1981 review of a US performance of Tom Stoppard’s Dogg’s Hamlet and
Cahoot’s Macbeth (1979), Ralph Toucatt intriguingly pointed out that
“the same Stoppard play, performed by the same actors [that is, the British
American Repertory Company] first in London, and then in San Francisco
. . . can be good in England and bad in America” (19). The plays in ques­
tion are two brilliant and very innovative examples of rewrites famously
integrating within their plots two extremely truncated versions of Ham­
let and Macbeth, respectively, so as to suggest parody and metatheatrical
awareness. In the former, Hamlet is acted by a group of schoolchildren in
a public school at Awards Day, where English is replaced by the made-up
language of Dogg; in the latter, Macbeth is performed by a group of dis­
sident Czech actors in a living room until at some point it is interrupted by
a police inspector and then resumed in Dogg’s obscure language in order to
escape censorship. Toucatt identified the cause of the US fiasco in the Amer­
ican audience’s dislike for the cerebral and elitist combination of meta­
language and intertextuality:4 the performance was reduced to “‘merely’
a language-game” enjoyable only by “over-educated Americans”, that is, a
limited number of people who could relish “the additional game of recog­
nizing the sources” (ibid.). While the British found the iconoclastic thrust
ridiculing old Will extremely enjoyable, the American audience were deeply
annoyed precisely by the self-indulgent Englishness cropping up in the very
choice of Dogg’s artificiality. What was passed off as being natural was in
fact built on specifically upper-class British socio- or idiolects, the result of
which, in the reviewer’s opinion, was both insular and parochial. “Only
those Americans who habitually read Edwardian-age memoirs”, he further
remarked, “will realize that a ‘private language’—a made-up slang that
only schoolboys and their teachers can understand—has long been a part
of upper-class English education. ‘Cube’ is thus no arbitrary choice, for that
is exactly how ‘thank you’ sounds when spoken in the clipped accents of
aristocratic English” (ibid.).
This example makes it very clear how deeply cross-cultural differences
may affect the performance in a context presenting no insurmountable lin­
guistic gap as the American one for an English play. To this day no Italian
translation has been published, 5 and yet it is no hard guess that the posh
82 Silvia Bigliazzi
Englishness of the clipped pronunciation of ‘cube’, perceived by the Ameri­
cans as idiosyncratic and sociolectal, is doomed to get lost in translation
alongside other cultural implications of lingual specifics. Likewise, to an
Italian audience (or other non-Anglophone audiences) the debunking effect
of the mangled Shakespearean plays is also likely to appear less hilarious
than in Britain—at least for the general public.

STYLE AND ARCHITEXTUALITY

Making transtextuality work on stage is no easy matter. Translating is

part of the process that should make it accessible to the audience while
not downplaying its textual and performative interactivity. In the 1980s,
Ritchie, among others, took up Jakobson’s communicative functions to
demonstrate that the vocal meaning pertaining to the performance cor­
responds to the emotive function (70). He also contended that, while the
other five functions (conative, referential, poetic, phatic, and metalinguis­
tic) are established verbally, that is, on the page, the emotive one is infi nitely
variable and is produced vocally by the actor. This suggestion is interesting
as long as it lays emphasis on the changeability of the performance, while
not dismissing the notion that vocality, as here interpreted, has something
to do with the way lines are written, and therefore, with syntax and rheto­
ric in general.6 If vocality were not potentially inscribed within style, and
investing the six communicative functions, the actor (but also the silent
reader) would not even get an idea of meaning, including communicative
intention and potential expressiveness, before its appropriation, possible
contestation, and even disruption. As mediator of the original text and the
performance, the translator should of course be alert to it. To quote just
one famous example, Claudius’s opening speech in Hamlet I, 2 features a
typically Shakespearean tortuous style revealing hypocrisy, as shown by
Serpieri in this volume. Rhythm has a prominent role, in that it reinforces
the syntactic and argumentative turns offering expressive variations on the
iambic base. It significantly opens on two strong beats (“Though yet”),
marking the beginning of a strategy of persuasion hinged upon the anoma­
lous underscoring of connectives, and continues with an accurate use of
adversatives and suspensions which delay meaning while encapsulating
oxymoronic images which connote his discourse as double-talking:

Though yet of Hamlet our dear brother’s death

The memory be green, and that it us befitted
To bear our hearts in grief, and our whole kingdom
To be contracted in one brow of woe
Yet so far hath discretion fought with nature
That we with wisest sorrow think on him
Together with remembrance of ourselves.
 Performing Intertextuality in Translating Rewrites 83
Therefore our sometime sister, now our queen,
Th’imperial jointress to this warlike state,
Have we, as ’twere with a defeated joy,
With an auspicious, and a dropping eye,
With mirth in funeral, and with dirge in marriage,
In equal scale weighing delight and dole,
Taken to wife; nor have we herein barr’d
Your better wisdoms, which have freely gone
With this affair along. For all, our thanks.
(I, 2, 1–17)

The five extant Italian translations in print vary from prose (Baldini and
Bertinetti) to verse (Montale, Serpieri, and Lombardo); some of them fore­
ground the rhetorical, deictic, and semantic backbone (very prominent in
Serpieri),7 others the euphonic sound patterns and an easier running of the
lines, either through syntactical and lexical reordering or elision (Montale
and Baldini especially).8 Montale’s translation, in particular, was made at a
time when he was experimenting with rhyme and sound patterns in his own
poetry, and had already tested himself against Shakespeare’s sonnets;9 it is
a case in point of how Claudius’s rough lines may be beautifully smoothed
into pleasing sounds and reshaped according to a more fluent pattern irre­
spective of rhetorical structuring and its performative expressiveness. In
spite of his lamenting the literalness and philological accuracy required of
him by the publisher, his version of Hamlet shows much poetic licence,10
and it is this version which is often chosen for the stage even today. Shake­
speare’s sixteen-line passage is given two more lines (thus amounting to
eighteen lines), which include three hendecasyllables (ll. 1, 4, 10)11 scattered
among verses of different measures spanning from twelve to sixteen sylla­
bles. He adds rhyme (“affl izione” / “espressione” / “moderazione”, ll. 3–5,
reinforced by an internal rhyme at l. 9: “ragione”), builds alliteration on
semantic variation (l. 8: “più pacato dolore”),12 omits words, such as “as it
were” in line 10 (l. 9 in his version), thus doing away with Claudius’s under­
tone of emotional embarrassment. The Italian poet also softens sounds, as
in the beautiful anapaestic hendecasyllable “lieto da un occhio e piangente
dall’altro” (l. 10; “With an auspicious, and a dropping eye”); he adds dis­
cursive flow to several lines through enjambment and avoids synthesis for
clarity’s sake,13 as when he renders the two impressive oxymora in line 12
(“With mirth in funeral, and with dirge in marriage”, ll. 11–12 in his ver­
sion) through periphrastic redundancy within a parenthetic clause: “(come
chi dicesse allegria in funerale / e requiem dei morti per un matrimonio)”.
Finally, the incisive “For all, our thanks” on which the king’s speech ends is
integrated within the discursive flow of the last sixteen-syllable line which
is neatly divided into two octosyllables by an expressive pause followed by
a conjunction (“nel corso di quest’affare; e ve ne rendiamo grazie”). Mon­
tale’s rendering of Claudius’s speech sounds beautiful; and yet its added
84 Silvia Bigliazzi
fluency changes the performative potential of the original script, based on
the hard vocalization of syntactical inversion and deferral, antithesis, and
rhythmical variation.
To stick to the same Shakespearean context, it has been shown how
famous passages testify not only to precise performative traditions—such
as the carnivalesque manner derived from “predramatic practices” inves­
tigated by Weimann and Bruster (16)—but also to a particular styling
connoting subgenres or peculiarly foregrounded modes (narrative or dia­
logical). As Serpieri has aptly argued, drawing on Bakhtin, style and restyl­
ing, particularly with a parodic aim, may play an important role both in an
intralingual context, in the form of parody, hybridisation, and rewriting,
and in interlingual translation (Serpieri 1988). To offer just one brief exam­
ple of the proximity of intertextuality and architextuality (rewriting and
restyling with ‘generic’ features), another famous scene from Hamlet may
be of help. It develops on a mockingly mimetic styling of the bombastic-
tragic mode typical of the age (ibid. 68), but also, as I have suggested else­
where (2001, 2005), on a contrastive reshaping of the epic mode meant to
conflict with the overall tragic context by which it is framed.14 The passage
I have in mind is the so-called ‘Pyrrhus speech’ recited by the fi rst player
in II, 2, a narrative excerpt which Shakespeare made up possibly under the
influence of Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage (1594), in the imitation
of a stereotyped epical discourse vaguely moulded on the Aeneid. The tone
is set from the start, when Hamlet himself gives the cue to the player by
beginning to perform the speech:

The rugged Pyrrhus, he whose sable arms,

Black as his purpose, did the night resemble
When he lay couched in the ominous horse,
Hath now this dread and black complexion smear’d
With heraldry more dismal. (II, 2, 434–38)

The regular iambic beat scheme makes for easy recitation, reinforcing
the feeling of a dejà ouï story replete with stock images (from the blackness
of Pyrrhus’s purpose, to the ominous horse) which in the course of the pas­
sage become more and more gruesome. Then the performance gradually
changes, but what these few lines and the metatheatrical context they are
set in suffice to underline is a problem of genre (epic vs tragic) consigned to
language and acting.
After Polonius’s comment on Hamlet’s performance—“well spoken,
with good accent and good discretion” (ll. 448–49)—the player’s following
impromptu bears the stamp of a pompous and strongly passionate speech,
rich with archaic expressions (as in l. 450, “Anon he finds him”), rhetori­
cal set pieces (“Out, out, thou strumpet Fortune”, l. 457), invocations to
the gods (l. 475), and long tirades that provoke Polonius’s irritation. But
when the speech relates the lamentable episode of Hecuba’s desperation for
 Performing Intertextuality in Translating Rewrites 85
Priam’s atrocious dismemberment, the player’s recitation becomes so mov­
ing that Polonius entreats him to stop. The whole passage evidently stands
within the play as a ‘generic’ interpolation in both thematic and performa­
tive terms (including its speakability). Not only is it meant to underline the
stark contrast between Hamlet’s lack of vengeful passion and Pyrrhus’s epic
impetuosity—only suspended for a moment’s wavering before the defence­
less Priam—but it also shows how different the staging of a tragic story
may be from an epic one. As Hamlet’s moments of conscience are opposed
to Phyrrus’s mindless and arduous action, so the language of Hamlet’s trag­
edy has nothing of the narrative stereotypical magniloquence of the player’s
performance. It is the very diction of the latter that points out its own
artificiality compared with the rest of the play, only occasionally showing
its dramatic import by gearing Aeneas’s narration to the temporal context
of the enunciation (“Now”, l. 474), and stressing the emotive and conative
functions (see the “For lo” interjection in l. 459). All the same, the fi nal
part of this speech is played in a very natural way, the player showing evi­
dent symptoms of passion which leave on Polonius an unbearable impres­
sion of reality. This effect is precisely what Hamlet will later require of the
players in the performance of The Murder of Gonzago, a play meant to be
a mirror-image of the tragic story he finds himself in, not an example of
an overacted epic speech. He will then make it very explicit that a mirror-
up-to-nature type of acting is what he wants, so that the players will not
“o’erstep the modesty of nature” (ll. 17–18) by suiting words to action and
vice versa.
Clearly the ‘Pyrrhus passage’ not only underscores a performative break
akin to what may be required by intertextual bits, but also shows that it is
encoded within the script itself in a way not unlike what we will soon be
exploring with regard to one particular example of Shakespearean rewrites.

TRANSLATORS AT (CO-)WORK

Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is a case in point of

how the intertext may cause frictions at the level of performance. The play
is entirely made out of two strands: the one with Ros and Guil as protago­
nists derives from Hamlet and forms the outer context within which pas­
sages from its source, where the two spies play second leads, are contained.
The two plays juxtapose two different stories and two different languages
and (potential) performances.
Stoppard’s new parts shape the two characters as a revised, roughly
post-modern, version of the Beckettian clown-like doubles, whom they
resemble in their inability to communicate and in their constantly waiting
for somebody to provide them with explanations and instructions.15 Their
wait is clearly connoted as a metatheatrical metaphor for life, so that the
explanations they look forward to are but stage directions. This implies a
86 Silvia Bigliazzi
dismal metaphysical awareness that life is only part of a larger play they
(and we) are ignorant of (“We don’t know how to act”; “We are entitled to
some direction”; and so forth).16
It has been noted that Guil is the first of the long line of Stoppard’s
punsters populating his plays. As Zeifman remarks, the two characters
are a kind of pun themselves: “[T]wo separate and distinct ‘identities’
happening to share a single unit (Rosencrantzandguildenstern), just as,
in a linguistic pun, two separate and distinct meanings happen to share
a single sound. And, as with all puns, the inevitable result is con-fusion:
human identity is as puzzling as linguistic identity” (212). The metalin­
guistic function is consequently prominent in their exchanges, as thema­
tized in their playing-at-questions session in act I, when words are beaten
back as a tennis ball according to the rule of never making a statement nor
repeating questions. In the course of this game they grow bitterly aware
that: 1) they have no possibility to choose; 2) God does not exist; 3) their
life is like a game whose direction they cannot make out; 4) their game
(= life) is incomprehensible. Things appear really desperate because, all in
all, words are the only thing they have—“Words, words. They’re all we
have to go on”, Guil says after their fi rst encounter with the court (31)—
which boils down to very little, since meaning is not fixed and therefore
is unreliable. This is why probability is the law Guil regularly calls on,
pretending to make his reasoning as scientific and logical as possible, but
more often than not with ridiculous results.
This kind of pseudo-rational punning alongside an often confused and
confusing use of language, due either to linguistic slips or to Ros’s and
Guil’s panicking for feeling at a loss, are at odds with the language of the
Shakespearean intertext. In the interpolated passages from Hamlet not only
do they speak in verse, but also use a courtly register, certainly less collo­
quial and more refined than the one they normally display in the ‘secondary
play’. One example may suffice. Right before the fi rst intertextual excerpt,
Guil and the player discuss what actorial playing means. Guil urges him to
don his costume, which the other claims he cannot do because he never gets
it off, but Guil insists that he should come on stage, and the other replies
that he is already there. The exchange continues along these lines until the
player lifts his foot and shows underneath that the last tossed coin, in the
coin-spinning obsessive game which has been going on for a while, even­
tually is tails, marking an unexpected change in the incredible stretch of
ninety-odd repeated heads favouring Ros.17 There follows a brief exchange
between Ros and Guil, in which Guil does not get Ros’s allusion to his fi nal
luck—“ROS: I say—that was lucky. GUIL (Turning): What? ROS: It was
tails” (26). Then the scene abruptly changes with the irruption of Hamlet
on stage and his going off again after meeting Ophelia. The following inter­
polated passage is from Hamlet, II, 2, a scene hinged upon the couples of
Claudius and Gertrude, on the one hand, and of Ros and Guil, on the other,
each repeating twice the same order and show of obedience, respectively.
 Performing Intertextuality in Translating Rewrites 87
Stoppard plays on the indistinguishable character of the two spies, which is
foregrounded by the king’s and queen’s farcical misapprehension, magnify­
ing incertitude about the identity of the two courtiers already suggested in
Shakespeare.18 As in his fi rst speech to the court in I, 2, the king’s rhetoric
shows a refined use of connectives, modifiers, and speech-acts that make
his lines strongly performative:

Welcome, dear Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

Moreover that we did much long to see you,
The need we have to use you did provoke
Our hasty sending. Something have you heard
Of Hamlet’s transformation, so call it,
Sith nor th’exterior nor inward man
Resembles that it was. What it should be,
More than his father’s death, that thus hath put him,
So much from th’understanding of himself,
I cannot dream of. I entreat you both
That, being of so young days brought up with him
And sith so neighbored to his youth and haviour
That you vouchsafe your rest here on our court
Some little time, so by your companies
To draw him on to pleasures and to gather
So much as from occasion you may glean,
Whether aught to us unknown afflicts him thus,
That opened lies within our remedy. (ll. 1–18)

He starts by mingling a courteous and an imperative tone by talking

about ‘desire’, ‘order’, and ‘use’ with reference to the hasty calling of the
two ‘spies’ to court (“did much long to see you”, l. 2; “The need we have
to use you”, l. 3; “hasty sending”, l. 4). By reversing the standard word-
order (“Something have you heard”, l. 4), he emphasises the vagueness of
the topic he is soon going to define as “Hamlet’s transformation” (l. 5). He
then underlines that this lexical choice is due to want of a better word, thus
implying in passing that this evidently political affair is extremely tricky
(“so call it”, l. 5). The following lines, modulating his command into a
prayer (“I entreat you both”, l. 10), pivot on logical and deductive verbal
modes and connectives (“being of so young days . . .”, l. 11; “And sith so
neighbored . . .”, l. 12; “so by your company . . .”, l. 16), demonstrating
the appropriateness of ‘using Hamlet’s two best friends’ as spies to ‘glean’
his hidden truth—a word which will later repeatedly resound in Ros’s and
Guil’s thinking over the received instructions.
In turn, Gertrude’s speech is courteously and redundantly periphrastic
(“if it will please you / To show us so much gentry and good will / As to
expand your time with us awhile”, ll. 21–23). Yet, it suddenly takes on a
brisker tone (“I beseech you instantly”, l. 35), and eventually ends on a
88 Silvia Bigliazzi
key word which again will soon rebound in Ros and Guil’s metalinguistic
inquiry into its meaning—“a king’s remembrance” (l. 26). “I like the sound
of that. What do you think he means by remembrance?”, Ros candidly asks
after taking leave, thus ludicrously triggering Guil’s speculation.
Before leaving the Hamlet scene, and moving back to Stoppard’s deriv­
ative play, Ros and Guil are revealed as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern,
and in the Shakespearean context they show a relatively good capacity to
play the court game, in harsh contrast to what Ros and Guil have demon­
strated in terms of their communicative skills. Rosencrantz is the fi rst to
reply, appropriately showing his awareness that while seemingly praising
them, the king is only exerting his unquestionable power, so that they in no
way can escape his command. Guildenstern chimes in along Rosencrantz’s
cue, and adds that, in spite of the king’s apparent entreaty, they will both
“obey” his command (l. 29)– theirs is not a free choice. Then, he says that
they are ready to be ‘used’ to their utmost capabilities (“in the full bent”,
l. 30, is a metaphor from archery, indicating the strung bow); but more
cautiously than the king, who has very bluntly made it clear that they are
political instruments, Guil calls their readiness laying “our service freely at
your feet” (l. 31). And finally, on taking leave, he shrewdly combines two
tell-tale words, “presence” and “practice” (“Heaven make our presence
and our practices / Pleasant and helpful to him”, ll. 38–39), into an allitera­
tive hendiadys that splits one and the same idea: being present means for
them making practices, that is, scheming, planning, making machinations,
treachery, intrigue, as in OED, 6 (a. and b.). No doubt they have perfectly
grasped the political relevance of their spying, and are attuned to the lan­
guage of indirection, as Guildenstern eventually proves by stating that his
wish is to be pleasant and helpful to him (Hamlet)—of course meaning
them (the royal couple).
Thus, a clash becomes perceptible between the prosaic and often equivo­
cating utterances of Ros and Guil in the derivative play, and Rosencrantz
and Guildenstern’s fine show of rhetorical skill in the intertext. Besides, this
clash (both linguistic and possibly vocal and gestural) in turn contradicts
the stage directions that Stoppard adds within the interpolated passage,
suggesting a farcical awkwardness alien to their apt words.19 Thus friction,
as a generalized metatextual method, concerns both the intertwining of
text and intertext (Ros and Guil vs Rosencrantz and Guildenstern), and
the coalescing of the intertext with Stoppard’s interpolated stage directions
within the derivative text.
An interlingual translation and a stage transposition of this compos­
ite, strident interweaving of text, intertext, embedded performative scores,
and new (partly contradictory) stage directions within the quotation(s), is
no easy task. The extant Italian printed translation by Lia Cuttitta is an
example of an unusual form of ‘distant collaboration’, not involving the
translator and the director, but two translators. The passages from Ham­
let come in fact from the above-quoted Montale version, whose idiolect
 Performing Intertextuality in Translating Rewrites 89
is perceptibly different from Cuttitta’s. She generally opts for a colloquial
register attuned to the prose and ordinary exchanges of the original, striv­
ing to make the text accessible and simplifying quibbles and wordplay. One
example may suffice: after the encounter with the royal couple just quoted,
Ros and Guil (here translated into their full names throughout the play)
feel at a loss and wish to go away, but get only ensnared into the pitfalls of
language and emotional disarray:

ROS: I want to go home.

GUIL: Don’t let them confuse you.
ROS: I’m out of my step here–
GUIL: We’ll soon be home and high—dry and home—I’ll–
ROS: It’s all over my depth–
GUIL: —I’ll hie you home and–
ROS: —out of my head–
GUIL: —dry you high and–
ROS: (Cracking, high)—over my step over my head body!—I tell you
it’s all stopping to a death, it’s boding to a depth, stepping to a
head, it’s all heading to a dead stop. (29)

The idiomatic phrases weaved into ludicrous slips, starting with the erro­
neous blend of “high and dry” and “home and dry”, and making for slap­
stick comedy in the following equivocation on “depth”, “death”, “head”,
“high”, and “hie”, are streamlined in the Italian translation, which plays
on the idiom “salvare capra e cavoli” (meaning “to have it both ways”, “get
out of an impasse”) and on sound repetition:

ROSENCRANTZ: Voglio andare a casa.

GUILDENSTERN: Non lasciarti impressionare da loro.
ROSENCRANTZ: Mi sento mancare il terreno sotto i piedi . . .
GUILDENSTERN: Vedrai, presto salverai cavoli e capra . . . capra e casa
...
ROSENCRANTZ: . . . mi sembra di affondare . . .
GUILDENSTERN: . . . ti trarrò in salvo, sta’ tranquillo . . .
ROSENCRANTZ: . . . perdo il controllo . . .
GUILDENSTERN: . . . cavoli e capra . . . capra . . . casa . . .
ROSENCRANTZ: (in tono acuto, con voce incrinata) . . . fuori di me . . .
senza controllo . . . Corriamo a rotta di collo . . . soli e ignari in
un tempo cupo . . . Rotoleremo in fondo a un dirupo . . . (54)

Not much explanation is needed and meaning is immediately under­

standable, though simplified. Within this type of overall transitive trans­
lation, Montale’s excerpts strike a different note, going in the direction
of alliterative euphony, fluency, and melodious rhythmicality. Again one
example may suffice:
90 Silvia Bigliazzi
RE: Benvenuti, cari Rosencrantz e Guildenstern.
Oltre il nostro vivo piacere di vedervi,
il bisogno in cui ci troviamo dei vostri servizi
è la causa per cui vi abbiamo chiamati
così in fretta. Avete sentito parlare
della trasformazione di Amleto; e tale
potete ben dirla, perché in lui né l’esteriore né l’animo
somigliano ormai a ciò che essi furono.
Quale possa essere la spinta, all’infuori
della morte di suo padre, che l’ha tanto allontanato
dall’intendimento di se stesso, io non so
neppur di lontano. Scongiuro perciò voi due,
che fin dai primi anni foste educati con lui
e siete quindi tanto vicini alla sua giovinezza
e ai suoi umori, di voler degnarvi
di restare qui alla nostra corte
per qualche tempo. In tal modo, se vi riuscirà
d’indurlo ai vostri piaceri, non vi mancherà
l’occasione di spigolare se ci sia qualche cosa
a noi ignota che lo affligge, e di farcene parte,
affinché noi tentiamo, se possibile, di porvi rimedio. (Shakespeare
1949: II, 2, 1–21)

His rendition of the king’s opening lines in his encounter with Ros and
Guil cited earlier exhibits a perceptibly incantatory pattern, especially
stressing the fricative and guttural sounds (/v/, /z/, /s/, /k/), as well as par­
allelistic repetitions (“in cui ci troviamo”, “per cui vi abbiamo”, ll. 2, 3)
leading to the emphatic closure of the sentence on the isolated temporal
expression “così in fretta” (l. 4). Accordingly, the fairly straight word “use”
in l. 3 is translated as “servizi”, which is figuratively and euphonically more
coherent, but semantically and dramatically less appropriate. The passage
flows on quite smoothly, with few tonal departures from the source, such
as Gertrude’s more familiar “amici miei” (l. 22) than “Good gentlemen” (l.
19), and her comparatively more concise entreaty to have them at court (“Se
avrete pazienza / di spendere un poco di tempo con noi”, ll. 24–25, strips
one line off the original “If it will please you / To show us so much gentry
and good will / As to expand your time with us awhile”, ll. 21–23). Mon­
tale also occasionally proves semantically inaccurate, as when he translates
“remembrance” as “gratitudine” (Gertrude: “Your visitation shall receive
such thanks / As fits the king’s remembrance”, ll. 25–26; “la vostra visita
/ otterrà le grazie che si convengono / alla gratitudine di un re”, ll. 26–28),
thus missing its connotative import within a play so insistently and ambigu­
ously pivoting on the topic of memory. 20 But above all, while in the Mon­
tale Hamlet this choice has no repercussion on the following exchanges,
in Stoppard’s play it turns out to be very tricky, bringing translational
 Performing Intertextuality in Translating Rewrites 91
collaboration at this level to an abrupt impasse. When Ros and Guil fi nd
themselves debating on what the queen meant by promising that they will
receive thanks worthy of a “king’s remembrance”, Lia Cuttitta is compelled
to struggle with Montale’s “gratitudine” in a context where the metalin­
guistic exchange is rather on “ricordo” or “memoria”. And this results in a
communicative and performative problem. In fact, after a few lines where
linguistic cohesion is more or less safeguarded, Ros and Guil get stuck on
nonsense dialogue. Their exchange on what the King might have meant by
this word is introduced by the pronoun ‘that’ referring to ‘the opposite of
amnesiac’, which in English is ‘remembrance’ whereas in Italian—absurdly
enough—‘gratitude’. This contributes to making Guil’s following interpre­
tative meandering on the meaning of ‘remembrance’ inconsequential. In
fact, what have amnesia and the elephantine memory cited by Guil to do
with gratitude? Very little indeed, unless one jumps several logical steps
and makes an effort to endow elephants with gratitude:

GUIL: And receive such thanks as fits a GUIL: E ricevere le grazie che si conven­
king’s remembrance. gono alla gratitudine di un re.
ROS: I like the sound of that. What do ROS: Mi suona bene. Cosa credi che
you think he means by remembrance? intendesse dire con la parola “gratitu­
dine”?
GUIL: He doesn’t forget his friends. GUIL: Che non dimentica gli amici.
ROS: Wouldn’t you care to estimate? ROS: Ti dispiacerebbe fare una stima?
GUIL: Difficult to say, really—some GUIL: Veramente, difficile a dirsi . . .
kings tend to be amnesiac, others I alcuni re tendono all’amnesia, altri,
suppose—the opposite, whatever that immagino, al suo contrario, qualunque
is . . . cosa esso sia. . .
ROS: Yes—but– ROS: Sì. . . ma. . .
GUIL: Elephantine . . .? GUIL: . . . da elefante?
ROS: Not how long—how much? ROS: Non per quanto. . . ma.. . .quanto?
GUIL: Retentive—he’s a very retentive GUIL: Tenace. . . tenacemente ricorda e
king, a royal retainer. . . tenacemente risparmia. È un re di maes­
tosa tenacia.
ROS: What are you playing at? ROS: A cosa stai giocando?
GUIL: Words, words. They’re all we GUIL: Parole, parole. Non abbiamo altro
have to go on. (Stoppard 1967: 31) per tirare avanti. (Stoppard 2007: 58)

The Italian version of the film (1990) avoided such inconsequentiality

and stuck to the more faithful “la vostra visita avrà la riconoscenza degna
della memoria di un re”.
According to a translational pattern favouring a fairly easy and very
pleasant speakability, Montale simplifies and shortens Guildenstern’s reply
to Gertrude, getting rid of the refined archery metaphor we saw earlier, and
eventually stressing in Guildenstern’s final words the gestural allusion to his
92 Silvia Bigliazzi
actual kneeling before her—“restiamo inchinati ai vostri piedi” can hardly
be pronounced without kneeling. The English version (“To lay our service
freely at your feet”) is less explicit as to the implied gesture, but discursively
more subtle in accentuating the pronominal parallelism. The adverb ‘freely’
is also used in contrast with Guildenstern’s previous reference to their obe­
dience to the royal order (“But we both obey”), and suggests that their
help will be generous. Besides, in his second reply, Guildenstern’s original
two lines are reduced by Montale to one; and, most of all, his ironic wish
to be pleasant and helpful “to him”—suggesting, as already noticed, to
“them”—is done away with, as is his cunning implication that their own
“practices” will be Machiavellian. On the whole, Montale’s line sounds
comparatively flat, despite the exclamation mark added at the end: “Pos­
sano i cieli rendergli utile il nostro zelo!”.
Within Cuttitta’s fairly ‘literal’ translation, Montale’s smooth and
melodious style marks a break from the prosaic and colloquial exchanges
of the characters within the ‘outer play’ framing the Hamlet excerpts.
At the same time, their reduced discursive complexity in the ‘inner play’
renders the clash with their often broken, colloquial, and pseudo-logical
exchanges in the ‘outer one’ less strident. Thus, while Montale’s verse
and lexical choices inserted in Cuttitta’s translation underline the existing
architextual friction between text and intertext (twentieth-century play
vs Elizabethan tragedy), the simplified syntax and lexical excision, as well
as the general fluency, slightly reduce the stark contrast perceptible in the
play between Ros’s and Guil’s cues attuned to the context of the court,
and their more general discursive patterns. At the same time they stamp
an individual poetical imprint on it. A prose translation or lexical choices
pervaded with archaisms or peculiar turns of phrases, as in Baldini’s ver­
sion, would produce yet different reverberations with an obvious bearing
on the performance. 21

CONCLUSION

These few notes are meant to give a very brief account of the possible fric­
tions caused by the coexistence of different translations within the same
play text. As has been seen, lexical choices may affect the follow-up of the
play when certain words of the intertextual excerpt crop up again in dif­
ferent parts of the play. If they are rendered differently in the two transla­
tions and happen to be situated at crucial points of the dramatic exchange,
unexpected effects may ensue. Besides, stylistic choices in the intertext are
bound to relate to the style adopted in the rewrite, and this interaction is
likely to become very shifty when the play is translated into a different lan­
guage and culture, for the reasons seen so far.
To conclude, when one such multilayered play is translated for the the­
atre, the intertextual effects lend themselves to be refracted in many other
 Performing Intertextuality in Translating Rewrites 93
directions. This is due to the additional overlapping of the translational
options available for the inserted passages (one or more translators and
styles), and of the cultural overtones referable to well-known theatrical or
filmic interpretations that may fall within the expectations of the audience.
In the case of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead Olivier’s Freudian
performance in Hamlet, to name but one made popular by the screen, is
likely to be very present to actors and audiences alike, inevitably working as
a cultural filter conditioning directorial and actorial choices alike.
But this is a more general issue concerning all acting on stage. As
Simon Russell Beale, who played Hamlet in John Caird’s production at the
National Theatre’s Lyttleton auditorium and on a 2000–01 international
tour, observed,

No actor can approach the part unaware of who has played it before,
and there had been some great recent performances—Fiennes, Rylance,
Jennings. When I did Richard III ten years earlier, I remember wak­
ing up to the papers on the morning press night and reading various
articles that looked forward to analysing my performance (charitably
or uncharitably, it was difficult to say) in the light of those by Sher,
McKellen, Holm and Olivier—Olivier for God’s sake! (146)

The anxiety of influence not only affects writers, but also actors and
directors, as well as translators, who may be haunted by performances (and
translations) crystallized in our collective memory. And here is where the
rewrite, and its translation(s), may access unexpected signifying modes.
Intertextual performativity, activated by a dialogue between translated
texts, drama text, and performance text, does the rest.

NOTES

1. For a lucid synthesis of these positions see Weimann and Bruster (12–15).
2. I am not referring here to the citational and iterative model put forward by
Butler, but to textual citation.
3. “ . . . it encouraged the actors to forego all the conventional means by which
they usually achieved their effects. Nothing could build, for instance, for lon­
ger than two or three minutes; no scene could develop to a logical conclusion
because no scene ever concluded but was abruptly intersected by another,
invariably with a different texture and from another part of the play. The
sustenance of character as a result of jumps in time and location. The collage
was eventually extended to eighty minutes after which time the pressure of
discontinuity became almost unbearable” (Marowitz 12).
4. In the preface Stoppard claims that the scope of the two plays—which are
meant to follow each other in a single production—is to enact Wittgenstein’s
assumption, contained in his Philosophical Investigations, that meaning is
use, or, to put it differently, that language is defi ned, and acquired, in relation
to its use, not to its referentiality. Building on this premise, Dogg’s Hamlet
sets off “to teach the audience the language the play was written in” (1993:
94 Silvia Bigliazzi
142) from the start, when the characters, who are involved in the construc­
tion of a stage, use words such as “planks”, “cubes”, and “bricks” to signify
“ready”, “thank you”, and “here”, respectively, with an obviously estranging
effect.
5. However, a production was mounted by the Florence-based Mimesis com­
pany in July 2011 with a translation made by the same company: see http://
gruppomimesis.blogspot.com/2011/07/amleto-di-dogg-di-tom-stoppard.
html (last access 13 February 2012).
6. See Serpieri in this volume; Bigliazzi (2002).
7. For instance he is the only one to maintain the inversion between object and
complement in “of Hamlet our dear brother’s death / The memory be green”:
“Sebbene della morte del nostro caro fratello / Amleto la memoria sia ancora
verde” (I, 2, 1–2); he is also the only one to emphasise the accentuated “yet”
at the beginning of line 5, adding alliterative stress: “yet so far”, “pur tut­
tavia tanto” (Shakespeare 1980).
8. Both Montale (Shakespeare 1949) and Baldini significantly reorder lines
8–16 postponing the object at the end of the long paragraph: Montale: “ho
tolto in moglie colei che fu già nostra sorella / ed ora è regina e imperiale
erede di questo / Stato guerriero”; Baldini: “abbiam tolto in moglie colei che
un tempo era nostra sorella ed ora è nostra regina”.
9. His translations of sonnets 22, 33, and 48 date before 1938 and were pub­
lished in 1944; in those years he was working on his Occasioni (1928–1939)
and La Bufera e altro (1940–1954), and in 1930s he had been studying the
poetry of Hopkins, whose Pied Beauty he had translated in 1946. On these
issues see Barile; Erspamer. On Montale as translator see also Meoli Toul­
min; Musatti.
10. Erspamer (269–70). Montale’s Shakespearean translations include A Mid­
summer Night’s Dream, The Comedy of Errors, Timon of Athens, Julius
Caesar, and The Winter’s Tale.
11. “Benché il ricordo della morte del nostro” (l. 1), “e al regno una sola e uguale
espressione” (l. 4), “Per tale ragione, con incerta gioia” (l. 10).
12. All the other translators adhere to the original “wisest sorrow”: Baldini: “più
assennato dolore”; Serpieri: “più saggio dolore”; Lombardo: “più saggio cor­
doglio”; Bertinetti: “più savio dolore”.
13. “Benché il ricordo della morte del nostro / caro fratello Amleto verdeggi
ancora” (ll. 1–2); “e al regno una sola e uguale espressione / di cordoglio,
tuttavia la moderazione / ha in noi lottato tanto con la natura” (ll. 4–6); “ed
ora è regina e imperiale erede di questo / Stato guerriero. Né in ciò abbiamo
messo da parte / il vostro saggio avviso, che non ci è mai mancato / nel corso
di quest’affare” (ll. 15–18).
14. Bigliazzi (2005). For a discussion of metatheatre and metanarrative with
regard to the tragic and the epic modes in Hamlet, see Bigliazzi (2001).
15. This is also Genette’s opinion, who considers the play as a remake or trans-
focalization (that is, change in narrative focus) of Hamlet in the style of
Beckett’s Godot (1982: 293).
16. Stoppard (1967: 49, 16). Subsequent quotations are from this edition.
17. “GUIL: Well . . . aren’t you going to change into costume? PLAYER: I
never change out, sir. GUIL: Always in character. PLAYER: That’s it. (Pause)
GUIL: Aren’t you going to—come on? PLAYER: I am on. GUIL: But if you
are on, you can’t come on. Can you? PLAYER: I start on. GUIL: But it hasn’t
started. Go on. We’ll look out for you. PLAYER: I’ll give you a wave. (He
doesn’t move. His immobility is now pointed and getting awkward. Pause.
ROS walks up to him till they are face to face.) ROS: Excuse me. (Pause. The
PLAYER lifts his downstage foot. It was covering GUIL’s coin. ROS puts his
 Performing Intertextuality in Translating Rewrites 95
foot on the coin. Smiles.) Thank you. (The player turns and goes. ROS has
bent for the coin.) GUIL (Moving out): Come on.” (Stoppard 1967: 25–26).
18. See the royal couple’s chiastic address: Claudius: “Thanks, Rosencrantz and
gentle Guildenstern.” Gertrude: “Thanks, Guildenstern and gentle Rosen­
crantz.” (II, 2, 33–34).
19. “CLAUDIUS: Thanks, Rosencrantz (Turning to ROS who is caught unpre­
pared, while GUIL bows) and gentle Guildenstern (Turning to GUIL who is
bent double). GERTRUDE (correcting): Thanks, Guildenstern (Turning to
ROS, who bows as GUIL checks upward movement to bow too—both bent
double, squinting at each other) . . . and gentle Rosencrantz. (Turning to
GUIL, both straightening up—GUIL checks again and bows again.)” (Stop­
pard 1967: 28).
20. Besides the numerous occurrences of the key verb ‘remember’, the word
‘memory’ occurs nine times and the word ‘remembrance’ five.
21. Here is Baldini’s version of the exchange between the royal couple and the
two spies quoted above: Regina: “Se vi compiacerete dimostrarci tanta corte­
sia e buona volontà da spendere con noi un po’ del vostro tempo per aiutarci
a inverare le nostre speranze, questa vostra visita riceverà tali ringraziamenti
quali si convengono alla memore riconoscenza d’un re”. Rosencrantz: “Tutt’e
due le maestà vostre, per il sovrano potere che han su noi, potrebbero affidare
i loro riveriti e temuti desiderii più a un ordine che a una supplica”. Guilden­
stern: “Ma noi obbediamo entrambi, e qui offeriamo noi stessi, nella piena
intenzione di deporre ai vostri piedi tutt’interi i nostri servigi, soltanto per
ricevere i vostri ordini”. Re: “Grazie Rosencrantz, e gentile Guildenstern”.
Regina: “Grazie Guildenstern, e gentile Rosencrantz. Vi prego al più presto
di andare a visitare il mio figliuolo, ahimè troppo mutato. Vada, alcuno fra
voi, e accompagni questi signori dove si trova Amleto”. Guildenstern: “Il
cielo renda la nostra presenza, e tutto quel che potremmo mettere in opera,
grato e giovevole a lui” (Shakespeare 1963; my emphasis).

WORKS CITED

Barile, Laura (1990) Adorate mie larve: Montale e la poesia anglosassone, Bolo­
gna: il Mulino.
Bigliazzi, Silvia (2001) Oltre il genere: Amleto tra scena e racconto, Alessandria:
Edizioni dell’Orso.
(2002) Sull’esecuzione testuale: Dal testo letterario alla performance, Pisa:
ETS.
(2005) “Transubstantiating the Performance: Towards a Mimetic Narrative
in Hamlet’s Hecuba Scene”, in Douglas Burnham and Enrico Giaccherini (eds)
The Poetics of Transubstantiation: From Theology to Metaphor, Aldershot:
Ashgate, 44–54.
Butler, Judith (1997) Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, New York:
Routledge.
Elam, Keir (1980) Semiotics of Theatre, London: Methuen.
Erspamer, Francesco (1990) “I sonetti dell’esperienza: Montale traduttore di Shake­
speare”, Quaderni d’italianistica 11 (2): 269–85.
Ewbank, Inga-Stina (1983) “The Word in the Theater”, in Kenneth Muir, Jay L.
Halio, and D. J. Palmer (eds) Shakespeare, Man of the Theater, East Brunswick,
London and Mississauga, ON: Associated University Presses, 55–76.
Genette, Gerard (1979) Introduction à l’architexte, Paris: Seuil.
(1982) Palimpsestes : La littérature au second degré, Paris: Seuil.
96 Silvia Bigliazzi
Marowitz, Charles (1990) [1978] The Marowitz Shakespeare, New York and Lon­
don: Marion Boyars.
Meoli Toulmin, Rachel (1971) “Shakespeare ed Eliot nelle versioni di Eugenio
Montale”, Belfagor 26 (4): 453–71.
Musatti, Maria Pia (1980) “Montale traduttore: La mediazione della poesia”, Stru­
menti critici 41: 122–48.
Riffaterre, Michael (1979) La production du texte, Paris: Seuil.
(1980) “La trace de l’intertexte”, La Pensée 215 (October): 4–18.
(1978) Semiotics of Poetry, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Ritchie, David (1984) “The ‘Authority’ of Performance”, in Ortrun Zuber-Skerritt
(ed.) Page to Stage: Theatre as Translation, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 65–82.
Russell Beale, Simon (2003) “Hamlet”, in Robert Smallwood (ed.) Players of
Shakespeare, vol. 5, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 145–77.
Serpieri, Alessandro (1988) “Libertà e vincolo della traduzione: Per una teoria
della traduzione drammatica”, in E. Glass et al. (eds) Metamorfosi: Traduzione/
Tradizione, Pescara: CLUA, 37–72.
Serpieri, Alessandro et al. (1978) Come comunica il teatro, Milano: Il
Formichiere.
(Spring 1981) “Toward a Segmentation of the Dramatic Text”, Poetics
Today 2 (3), Drama, Theater, Performance: A Semiotic Perspective: 163–200.
Shakespeare, William (1949) Amleto principe di Danimarca, Eugenio Montale
(trans.), Milano: Cederna.
(1963) Amleto, Gabriele Baldini (ed. and trans.), Milano: Rizzoli.
(1980) Amleto, Alessandro Serpieri (ed. and trans.), Milano: Feltrinelli.
(1995) Amleto, Agostino Lombardo (ed. and trans.), Milano: Feltrinelli.
(2005) Amleto, Paolo Bertinetti (ed. and trans.), Torino: Einaudi.
(1971) Montale traduce Amleto, Eugenio Montale (trans.), Milano:
Longanesi.
Snell-Hornby, Mary (1997) “Is This a Dagger which I See before Me? The Non­
verbal Language of Drama”, in Fernando Poyatos (ed.) Nonverbal Communica­
tion and Translation, Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 187–201.
(2006) The Turns of Translation Studies: New Paradigms or Shifting View­
points?, Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Stoppard, Tom (1993) Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoots Macbeth, in Id., The Real Inspec­
tor Hound and Other Entertainments, London: Faber and Faber.
(1967) Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, London and Boston:
Faber and Faber.
(2007) [1998] Rosencrantz e Guildenster sono morti, Lia Cuttitta (trans.),
Palermo: Sellerio.
Toucatt, Ralph (Spring 1981) “Cross-Cultural Stoppard”, The Threepenny Review
5: 19.
Ubersfeld, Anne (1977) Lire le théâtre, Paris: Éditions sociales.
Weimann, Robert (2000) The Author’s Pen and the Actor’s Voice, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Weimann, Robert and Douglas Bruster (2010) [2008] Shakespeare and the Power
of Performance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Worthen, William B. (1997) Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance, Cam­
bridge: Cambridge University Press.
(2003) Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Zeifman, Hersh (1979) “Tomfoolery: Stoppard’s Theatrical Puns”, The Yearbook
of English Studies 9: 204–20.
6 From the Peninsula Westward
A Journey among Translations
Lucia Nigri

For above all the function of theatre, says Eduardo, ‘is the desperate
attempt on man’s part to put some meaning into life’.1

RETHINKING DEFINITIONS:
DOMESTICATION AND FOREIGNISATION

As two opposite strategies, ‘domestication’ and ‘foreignisation’ represent

the options a translator has when he or she works with a foreign text. Even
if the adoption of these terms is relatively new to translation studies (Venuti
1995), the problem tackled here is an old one. We may even say that the
origin of this dichotomic relationship may be traced back to the very fi rst
act of translation, since in the passage from one language to another the
translator must always choose the degree of ‘familiarity’ of a text with the
target language and culture.
Although the subject has been closely examined within the critical com­
munity in the last fifteen years or so, Venuti’s redefinition of the whole ques­
tion stands on giants’ shoulders, those of the German romantics. Friedrich
Schleiermacher (1768–1834) and Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835), to
name but two, were among the first to privilege foreignisation in a transla­
tion (less familiarity) over experiments of domestication (more familiar­
ity).2 Foreignisation was for them central to the development of a German
national culture (Lefevere; Berman) and, to put it in “ethical terms” as
Anthony Pym has done, signalled “a mode of openness that welcomes
rather than excludes the other” (27).
From this perspective, translation is not only an act of writing (or
rewriting), but a social process which is in keeping with the nationalis­
tic understanding of the role played by a whole generation in a specific
historical moment. Yet, problems of national identities may also entail a
different attitude towards translation, as for example the one endorsed
by French translators who, only twenty years before the French Revolu­
tion, were more inclined to adopt domesticating practices. The French-
German debate between authors like Jacques Delille (1738–1813) and
Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), arguing in favour and against the
target-text-oriented approach respectively, is an example of how different
perceptions, closely linked to historical situations, may be considered as
the starting point from which a particular translation strategy is favoured
DOI: 10.4324/9780203073506-7
98 Lucia Nigri
(Bassnett 2005: 396–97; see also Aaltonen 1997: 91). Therefore, it does
not come as a surprise that in a more multicultural milieu, such as France
today, Schleiermacher’s and von Humboldt’s theories have been eventu­
ally brought back to life and reassessed, after years of oblivion, by Ber­
man and other French intellectuals.
Berman’s contribution to the debate owes much to this German tradi­
tion and to the work of a much less acknowledged French scholar, Henry
Meschonnic, who deserves consideration in a discussion of domesticating
and foreignising strategies privileging the source- or the target-language
culture. The reasons why Meschonnic’s critique of translation practices is
not more often cited in translation studies—with the exception of several
authoritative voices (Pym)—are still unidentified. In the introduction to the
English translation of Meschonnic’s Éthique et politique du traduire, Pier-
Pascal Boulanger rightly points out that:

[T]he query [why Meschonnic’s work does not circulate in transla­

tion studies in English] has become all the more pressing in that his
work abounds with far-reaching concepts—such as ‘decentring’ and
‘annexation’, which he posited in 1973 and anticipated the well-known
‘foreignising’ and ‘domestication’—that have yet to be discovered and
discussed. (Meschonnic 16)

Therefore, Venuti’s contributions (1995, 1998) must be understood in

the wake of the criticism developed in France and in Germany in the pre­
vious years. Their originality does not lie so much in the recognition of a
dichotomic relationship that, as we have seen, had already been acknowl­
edged at least two hundred years before, nor in the rethinking of two terms
that, however canonical today in the field of translation studies, are sub­
stitutions for previous vocables and definitions. What is really original in
Venuti’s contribution to the debate is his unprecedented acknowledgement
of a specific Anglo-American tendency to reduce the source text to target-
language cultural values, an operation which inevitably entails specific and
‘targeted’ social, historical, ethical, and political implications.
Discussing Eugene Nida’s notion of ‘dynamic’ or ‘functional’ equiv­
alence, 3 Venuti forcefully attacks Nida’s defence of transparency as
“enlisted in the service of Christian humanism” (1995: 21).4 Convinced
that every translation is politically and socially influential, he resolutely
advocates the adoption of ethnodeviant foreignised practices in order
to resist “the ethnocentric violence” of imprinting domestic values on a
source text (ibid. 61). 5 For Venuti, this violence is perpetrated through the
specific choice of texts to be translated (those accepted in the canon of a
foreign literature) and the adoption of what he terms as ‘fluency’. By this
notion Venuti refers to “a discursive strategy ideally suited to domesticat­
ing translation capable . . . of concealing [the] violence by producing the
effect of transparency, the illusion that this is not a translation, but the
foreign text, in fact, the living thoughts of the foreign author” (ibid.).6
 From the Peninsula Westward 99
Considered as a “locus of difference” (ibid. 42), translation also becomes
for Venuti a matter of ethics (1998: 189).7
But is the English-language panorama of translation that Venuti
denounced almost twenty years ago still dominated by a target-language
culture orientation and by texts which are part of an official canon? And
what happens when a foreign non-standard language is translated into
English, or is used in translation from English?
Here I will look at the relation between the Anglophone context and the
translation of texts originally conceived in a less dominant language within
the European milieu, such as Italian, and will address issues of domestication
and foreignisation with reference to the Italian theatre and the role played by
non-standard languages. In particular, I will examine how the contemporary
Neapolitan dialect has been translated into English even before Venuti’s con­
demnation of Anglo-American translational practices, and, vice versa, how
an older version of this dialect has been used to translate Shakespeare.

IN BRITAIN TODAY

The translators’ visibility is still perceived as a thorny issue, despite the fact
that some steps towards a full appreciation of their role in the linguistic and
cultural transfer to another language have been made to render the transla­
tor a key agent and full participant in the production team (Aaltonen 1997:
92; Snell-Hornby 2007: 115).
However, the British and American cultural standardisation of foreign
literature condemned by Venuti is, as Cristina Marinetti argues in the chap­
ter contained in this volume, still considered as the prevailing practice in
translational processes. Fluency continues to be perceived as an essential
prerequisite for a translation to be ‘accepted’, and, as a consequence, plays
are linguistically and culturally homogenised to ‘guarantee’ a wider partici­
pation in an environment where financial considerations matter.
This is not to say that fascinating theatrical experiments, which privilege
foreignising practices in the linguistic and cultural transmission, have not
been proposed. The Complete Works Festival organized by the Royal Shake­
speare Company at Stratford-upon-Avon between April 2006 and April 2007
is a case in point. The festival was meant to stage thirty-seven Shakespearean
plays, and included several versions of these plays in different languages. The
performances—accompanied by English surtitles—were part of a successful
multilingual and multicultural experiment of foreignisation, since many of
these plays had been domesticated abroad and returned—‘foreignised’—to
the English stage.8 The process of foreignisation at stake here, however, is
a peculiar one since the festival offered on stage what we may term as ‘for­
eignised domestic plays’. The plays were in fact ‘foreignised’ linguistically
and culturally, since the foreign directors had conceived them by taking into
account the artistic, intellectual, and social environment where they would
first be staged.9 Yet, it can be argued that the experiment was made possible
100 Lucia Nigri
because the ‘canonical’ (domestic) choice of plays to perform would meet,
without too much risk, the demands of the audience, curious to see the trans­
formations that their myth of ‘Englishness’, Shakespeare, went through.
But what happens when the choice of plays to stage is less canonical?
When, for example, the text to be translated is linguistically considered as
part of a minority, as in the case of plays written in a foreign dialect (even
when that particular play has itself become a sort of classic)?

WHAT IS A DIALECT?

As an independent linguistic system possessing a grammar and a vocab­

ulary of its own, a dialect is historically and geographically determined.
Marginal to the dominant, official language, it is inextricably rooted in the
socio-cultural context it belongs to and, as Luigi Bonaffi ni claims,

is posited . . . as the language of concreteness and difference, in direct

opposition to the flat homogeneity of the language of television and
advertising, and therefore offers a greater potential for individual creativ­
ity. The strength of dialect, in fact, lies in its essential ‘otherness’, in its
position of eccentricity with respect to the national language, in its dif­
ferent history, predominantly oral, which has saved it from the process
of erosion and usura [sic] which always attends literary languages. (279)

On occasion, though, the geographical borders which generally contain

dialects are crossed and what is perceived as specifically ‘regional’ reaches
a national and international ‘visibility’. This has happened to the Nea­
politan dialect, considered by many as the mouthpiece of a particularly
rich theatrical, musical, and literary tradition, but which, outside its wider
national context, has raised problems concerning its translation.
As a matter of fact, when the translation of a dialect text is attempted,
the translator should be alert to the many implications of a language that
represents for its speakers a space of naturalness,10 a locus of resistance
to the dominant national language, and a reservoir of ancient knowledge
which is re-actualized in the present. Much is at stake here. Also, translat­
ing dialectal literature into a different language and a different context—
for instance from Neapolitan into English (not into standard Italian, where
the national context remains the same)—cannot prescind from a reflec­
tion on the personal, cultural, even political choices that stand behind the
imprinting on the page of what is ‘predominantly spoken’. Translations of
plays written in dialect make even more evident the immediate link that
exists between languages and theatre, since all those elements which, on
the page, are residual traces of a complex semantic and connotative rich­
ness of the spoken language are (or should be) brought back to life on stage.
But what aspects of this multifaceted operation are especially challenging?
And which ‘other’ language is to be chosen in order to suggest the same
 From the Peninsula Westward 101
subtleness, the same ‘eccentricity’ conveyed by the use of a dialect in the
source text? Should a translator favour the standard language in the target
culture or a corresponding sociolect which is geographically determined?
And is, for example, the “happy tonality of Neapolitan, expressing love for
life” (Bonaffini 285) translatable into English?

TRANSLATING DIALECT: THE CASE OF FILUMENA MARTURANO

If the English panorama is mainly dominated by domesticating approaches to

translation of texts accepted in the canon of a foreign literature, the live inter­
est in translating Neapolitan plays by Eduardo De Filippo (Eduardo, as he is
known in Italy) implies a degree of complexity which is worth analysing.
Filumena Marturano, performed on 7 November 1946 at the Teatro
Politeama in Naples, stages the story of a woman, Filumena, who feigns
dying in order to convince Domenico, the man she had been living with for
twenty-five years, to marry her. The woman’s shrewdness in resorting to
this stratagem is soon explained with the news that she has three children,
one of them with Domenico. Resolved to give all her children his surname,
Filumena does not reveal the identity of the son she has with the man, who
eventually accepts the three as his own.
The play is thoroughly embedded within the socio-cultural and linguis­
tic reality of the city where it was staged: Naples (Bentley 121; Esposito). As
Eduardo himself declares in 1956, even the plot of the play is based upon a
Neapolitan story that he had found in a piece of news:

una donna, a Napoli, che conviveva con un uomo senza esserne la

moglie, era riuscita a farsi sposare soltanto fi ngendosi moribonda.
Questo era il fatterello piccante, ma minuscolo. Da esso trassi la vicenda
ben più vasta e patetica di Filumena, la più cara fra le mie creature.

[In Naples, a woman who had co-habited with a man without being
his wife convinced him to marry her by pretending she was dying. This
was a spicy, if tiny, anecdote. It was from this that I was inspired to
produce the most complicated and pathetic story of Filumena, the dear­
est of my creatures.] (qtd. in Di Franco 1975: 123; my translation)

The language spoken in the play by the characters exploits, as Andrea

Bisicchia argues, “the resources of the spoken language, which is able to
penetrate, with detachment, the mediocrity of the life of the middle-class or
the fantasy of the life of the low-class which, with a discursive and urban
tone, plumbs the depth of the ambiguous psychology of the characters”
(qtd. in Di Franco 1984: xiv; my translation).
Using dialect is a necessary choice for Eduardo who claims that he is a
“servo del dialetto” [a slave of the dialect] because, as he continues, “non
saprei recitare in lingua. È questo rapporto fra attore e autore che debbo
102 Lucia Nigri
risolvere. Io mi sono accorto che più le commedie sono in dialetto e più
diventano universali. Filumena Marturano è stata tradotta in tutti i paesi”
[I wouldn’t know how to perform in standard language. It is this relation­
ship between actor and author that I must necessarily solve. I’ve realized
that the more the comedies are in dialect the more they become universal.
Filumena Marturano was translated in every country] (qtd. in Di Franco
1975: 26; my translation).
A translator who wants to venture on this linguistic and cultural journey
should therefore start from a full understanding of the language, of the
ways Neapolitan conveys meanings which find in the reality of Naples their
ultimate correlative. The risk is otherwise to misunderstand the interdis­
cursive dimension Eduardo’s language belongs and refers to.11
However, even a cursory glance at some of the English translations avail­
able today shows that something vital is indeed missing, since the lively
Neapolitan dialect is replaced in most cases by standard English.12 True,
dialects are perceived very differently in Britain and the association of any
of the English sociolects to the Italian dialect may even result in a dis­
tortion of the messages conveyed. Each dialect is socially connoted in its
own peculiar way and an absolute correspondence between them is hardly
attainable. But the language domestication which informs the translation
of Eduardo’s plays in English “reduces”, as Alessandra De Martino Cap­
puccio argues, “the cultural impact of the original plays” (47).
For the sake of fluency, translations in English often sacrifice (domesti­
cate) the immediacy of the original dialect in an attempt to convey ‘a’ sense
which can be more easily understandable by the majority of spectators or
readers. This, of course, is achieved at the expense of a more nuanced ‘local
taste’ (the foreign element) suggested in the source text with its idiomatic
expressiveness.13 Carlo Ardito’s translation of Filumena Marturano (1976)
seems to corroborate this assumption. The passage which follows is taken
from the fi rst act of the play, when Domenico lashes out at Filumena right
after having discovered her trick:
DOMENICO: . . . Avesse visto maie DOMENICO: . . . All the years I’ve
na lagrima dint’a chill’uochhie! Maie! known you I’ve never seen you cry once,
Quant’anne simmo state nzieme, nun like other human beings.
ll’aggio vista maie ’e chiagnere!
FILUMENA: E avev’ ’a chiagnere pe’ te? FILUMENA: Now why should I cry over
era troppo bello ’o mobile. you?
DOMENICO: Lassa sta ’o mobile. DOMENICO: There’s something pecu­
un’anima in pena, senza pace, maie. liar about you, you know. I’ve never
Una donna che non piange, non seen you shed a tear. You might as well
mangia, non dorme, T’avesse visto be a woman who never eats or drinks or
maie ’e durmi’. N’ànema dannata, sleeps. Now that I think of it I’ve never
chesto si’. (act I, De Filippo 1964: 18) seen you sleep, either. You’re some kind
of creature from another planet . . . (De
Filippo 1976: 184)
 From the Peninsula Westward 103
The humour conveyed by the original language is here flattened, if not
completely lost: “bello ’o mobile”—literally ‘as if this piece of furniture were
beautiful’ (that is, ‘as if you were special’)—can only be translated into Eng­
lish with a paraphrase that Ardito chooses to avoid. But what is truly missed
here is not only Eduardo’s humour, which is such a fundamental characteris­
tic of all his plays,14 but a peculiar aspect of the Neapolitan language, which
‘makes sense’ of things through the concreteness of the images evoked.
Ardito’s domestication practice also misses another important cultural ref­
erence in the source text. In the original version, Domenico accuses Filumena
of being a lost, damned soul (“N’ànema dannata”). In Ardito’s rendering,
Domenico’s reference to Filumena’s perdition in religious (and superstitious)
terms—an important aspect of the Neapolitan and the Southern Italian cul­
ture—is translated into a more neutral “You’re some kind of creature from
another planet”. The cultural richness referred to by a single expression is
here ignored, with the consequent impoverishing of the target-play.
A translator, therefore, should always be alert to the cultural constitu­
ents of the original version, as Beatrice Basso seems to be aware of:

[I]n the course of the translation process [of Saturday, Sunday, Mon­
day], I found myself living through two main phases: the linguistic
translation and the transmutation of the physical/cultural essence of
the piece into another culture. The sensitivity both to the linguistic
issues of the original text and to the culture from which the play stems,
is—I believe—necessary to any translation aimed at production. (161)

If linguistic and cultural elements are central issues for a stage transla­
tor, so are paralinguistic, kinesic, and proxemic factors which are already
inscribed in the source text. The intrinsic performability, and speakability,
of the play text are in fact essential criteria to be taken into account by all
the agents of the production team (translator, playwright, and actors).15
From this perspective, the long and detailed stage directions which accom­
pany Eduardo’s plays are meant as ‘instructions’ for the mise en scène.
Almost all of the clues in the play are accompanied by the specification of
the gestures, movements, postures that characters should assume, as shown
in the following passage:

DOMENICO: (come colto in fallo DOMENICO: (as if caught out angrily)

reagisce, furente) . . . ...
FILUMENA: (niente affatto intimidita, FILUMENA: (not at all put out and
con maggiore violenza di Domenico) . . . matching Domenico’s tone) . . . (As if
(Come raccontando una cosa incredi- telling an incredible story) . . . (Dis­
bile) . . . (Con irrefrenabile senso di gusted) . . . (Points to the table) . . .
nausea) . . . (la indica [la tavola]) . . .
DOMENICO: (esasperato) . . . DOMENICO: (Angrily) . . .
FILUMENA: (dispettosa) . . . FILUMENA: (Maliciously) . . .
104 Lucia Nigri
FILUMENA: (ironica) . . . FILUMENA: (Ironically) . . .
DOMENICO: (con aria trionfante, DOMENICO: (Triumphantly as though
credendo di aver compresa la ragione suddenly understanding the reason for
recondita della beffa di Filumena) . . . the trick she has played on him) . . .
FILUMENA: (avvilita per FILUMENA: (Disheartened by his
l’incomprensione, con disprezzo) . . . obtuseness) . . . (De Filippo 1976:
(act I, De Filippo 1964: 19–20) 185–86)

In a few pages, the stage directions are so frequent and exhaustive, even pre­
scriptive, that it is almost possible to follow the plot through them. Arguably,
the presence of so many stage directions in the translated dramatic text may rep­
resent the translator’s intention to contain in the new version a foreignised ele­
ment, the Italian gesture and physicality, which do not disturb or challenge the
dominant target-language culture where the cliché is widely accepted.16 Once
on stage, however, the translator (or possibly the playwright) should attempt
to explain them carefully to the actors in order to avoid misunderstanding and
caricature or a stress on what is believed to be the typical Italian ‘expressiveness’
through body language. To misinterpret this would do Eduardo’s play a great
injury. After all, before being a playwright, Eduardo was an actor whose style
was acclaimed all over the world because, as Eric Bentley beautifully describes,

[v]oice and body are so quiet. Pianissimo. No glamor, no effusion of

brilliance. No attempt to lift the role off the ground by oratory and styl­
ization, no attempt to thrust it at us by force of personality. Not even
the sustained mesmerism of big Ibsen performances. Rather, a series of
statements, vocal and corporeal. . . . It is a realistic style. It makes few
large departures from life. No oratory, no stylization. Both in speech and
in gesture, rhythm, accent, and tempo are an imitation of life. (121–22)

Given that every translation requires understanding of the source- and

target-language culture of the play, translating dialects is all the more com­
plicated because the chances to lose seminal aspects of the original in the
new version are, if possible, even higher. The language in use here is indeed
closely rooted in the local reality where it is spoken, although the themes it
treats are universal. Thus, when Eduardo’s plays are rendered into another
language, the translator needs courage, since he or she is called upon to
choose the right strategy in the translational process and to defend himself
or herself from Harold Acton’s firm assertion that “Eduardo’s best plays
defy the translator’s exertions” (qtd. in De Filippo 1992: xvi).

TRANSLATING IN DIALECT:
THE CASE OF A NEAPOLITAN TEMPEST

In 1983 Giulio Einaudi asked Eduardo to translate a Shakespearean play for

the series “Scrittori tradotti da scrittori” [Writers Translated by Writers].
 From the Peninsula Westward 105
Eduardo, the “distinguished man of theatre, [who] represents three different
figures so far left split in the practice of theatre . . . the author, the actor and
the director” (Di Franco 1975: 3; my translation), had at the very end of his
career the chance to put himself to the test as a translator, adding to the three
figures recognized by Di Franco a fourth agent in the collaboration process.
As Eduardo confesses in the “Nota del traduttore” [Translator’s Note]
published at the end of his La tempesta (1984), his fascination for the seven­
teenth-century theatrical genre of the Féerie and the themes of tolerance and
forgiveness contained in the play were among the main reasons why he chose
this comedy over the others. The representation of an authoritarian father, the
many references to the city of Naples, and the fact that the play is a farewell
to the stage for both dramatists were also seen as further links connecting the
lives and the careers of Shakespeare and Eduardo (Fischer; Tomaiuolo).
But what immediately differentiates, and characterizes, this translation
from the source text is its language: the seventeenth-century Neapolitan.17
The final version is however only the arrival point of a work on the text which
was mediated by yet another translation, a ‘literal’ one, made by his wife Isa­
bella in standard Italian. The Neapolitan La tempesta is then a translation
of a translation, despite Eduardo’s explanation that “in un certo senso ho tra­
dotto direttamente dall’inglese, perché mia moglie Isabella mi ha trasportato
in italiano letteralmente tutta la commedia, atto per atto, scena per scena,
cercando poi in certi suoi libri inglesi il significato doppio e a volte triplo di
certe parole arcaiche che non mi persuadevano” [in a way, I have translated
directly from English, since my wife Isabella has transferred literally into
Italian the whole comedy, act by act, scene by scene, finding in some of her
English books the double and sometimes triple meaning of certain archaic
words which did not convince me] (“Nota del traduttore”; my translation).
The case of Isabella Quarantotti’s translation of The Tempest is another
example—Italian this time—of the translator’s invisibility. Despite Edu­
ardo’s acknowledgement that a first translated draft on which he actually
drew exists, no published edition of Isabella’s version can actually be con­
sulted. The ‘literal’ translation remains invisible, as does its translator, and
becomes nothing more than a map used by Eduardo; a ‘subaltern’ version.18
Were it available, however, it would be interesting to explore the ways
Isabella’s version had interacted with, and possibly obliged, some of the
choices later made by Eduardo for his Neapolitan La tempesta.
Yet, from Isabella’s ‘invisible’ text Eduardo moved on to write a ver­
sion performable in the dialect, which means that the dialect itself as the
language in which the play was to be performed was the other discursive
influence Eduardo was under. This is why, although La tempesta was never
staged—but only tape-recorded by Eduardo who lent his own voice, differ­
ently modulated, to all the masculine characters—it is clearly endowed with
elements related to its speakability.19 For Eduardo, probably influenced in
this by his own career as an actor, the theatrical word is always “parola di
voce, non d’inchiostro” [word of voice, not of ink] (qtd. in De Filippis 191;
my translation), a word which is the actor’s comfort zone, as it was the
106 Lucia Nigri
Neapolitan for him. It is this concern for speakability that may have driven
Eduardo’s historicization of a language written by, as he declares,

un uomo che vive oggi; sarebbe stato innaturale cercare un’aderenza

completa ad una lingua non usata ormai da secoli. Però . . . quanto è
bello questo napoletano antico, così latino, con le sue parole piane, non
tronche, con la sua musicalità, la sua dolcezza, l’eccezionale duttilità e
con una possibilità di far vivere fatti e creature magici, misteriosi, che
nessuna lingua moderna possiede più.

[someone who lives nowadays; it would have been artificial to look for
an adherence to a language for centuries not in use. But . . . how beauti­
ful this old Neapolitan is, so Latin-like, with its paroxytone, rather than
apocopate, words, with its own musicality, its exceptional suppleness and
capacity—as no other modern language can—to bring magical and mys­
terious creatures back to life.] (“Nota del traduttore”; my translation)

On the use of the old Neapolitan, Saverio Tomaiuolo argues that La

tempesta “textualizes and enacts a ‘marginal’ approach” to Shakespeare’s
plays both linguistically and dramatically; he also claims that

[Eduardo] shares the translating methods Lawrence Venuti himself

advocates, based upon marginal and alternative reconfigurations of the
source text, according to which ‘[a] calculated choice of foreign text
and translation strategy can change and consolidate literary canons,
conceptual paradigms, research methodologies . . . and commercial
practices in the domestic culture’. (130)

Yet, the possible ideological commitment implied in the use of vernacu­

lar should not be overestimated, being of secondary importance compared
to the fact that, as mentioned before, Eduardo ‘is’ a “servo del dialetto”,
and therefore could not have acted in any other language than his ‘mother
tongue’ (“non saprei recitare in lingua”). 20 True, he chooses an alternative
to the ‘standard’ Neapolitan. But this has more to do with both a ‘philolog­
ical’ faithfulness to Shakespeare’s modern English—“ho cercato di essere
più fedele possible al testo, come, a mio parere si dovrebbe essere nel tra­
durre” [I have tried to be as faithful as possible to the text, as I believe it
should be done in translation] (“Nota del traduttore”; my translation)—
and Eduardo’s particular concern for a text that should be easily, or as
easily as possible, spoken by the actor(s).
But Tomaiuolo is right when he claims that “the final result is thoroughly
‘foreignising’” (130). Eduardo’s ‘speakable old Neapolitan’ provides an
unusual lingual hybrid whose impact on Italian speakers varies according
to their lingual competence. Being Neapolitan, the play ‘is’ a ‘domesticated
Shakespeare’, but in a way that ‘foreignises’ the text to audiences who do
 From the Peninsula Westward 107
not speak the dialect as well as to those who speak only the contemporary
dialect and are bound to perceive different rhythms or lexical choices with
a defamiliarizing effect making for ‘otherness’.
From a cultural perspective, on the other hand, the Neapolitan and
Southern Italian reality is undoubtedly absorbed into the text. References
to Naples and Neapolitans are frequent: Sicorax (“la strega Sicorace”; 1984:
38) is here associated with Benevento (a city in the South of Italy famous
for its witches); the “Nostromo” [Boatswain] incites the crew by saying:
“Guagliú, facímmece annòre: simmo Napulitane!” [Hey you, let’s show
who we are: we are Neapolitans!] (1984: 5; my translation); typical idiom­
atic expressions are interspersed in the play text, like “papà mio è buono
cumm’ ’o ppane” [my father is as good as bread] (1984: 62; my translation);
and local patrons are mentioned underlining a religious background which
adds to the specific Mediterranean atmosphere:

dobbiamo rummanere addenucchiate

nu pare d’anne, e forse cchiùne,
nanz’a lu prutettore
San Gennaro

[We should kneel

a couple of years, and perhaps even more
in front of San Gennaro
our patron] (1984: 64; my translation)21

La tempesta by Eduardo thus offers an unusual example of domestica­

tion. While building on the potential of cultural relocation to the Nea­
politan linguistic context, it plays with an idea of naturalisation that avails
itself of a language spoken by a minority and defamiliarizes it to its own
speakers. To what extent this operation was an act of political and ideologi­
cal ‘subversion’ of standard language, rather than the result of an unusual
interpretation of translation faithfulness to the source and a particular
interest in speakability, it is hard to tell. The reasons we have given so
far, nevertheless, pinpoint that the latter certainly were a major concern in
Eduardo’s translation process; and this may help shift the attention from
ideology to an aesthetics of language and theatre.

NOTES

1. Ardito in De Filippo (1992: xvi).

2. The terms used by Schleiermacher were Verfremdung (alienation) and Ent­
fremdung (naturalisation), privileging the source text and the target text
respectively (Schjoldager with Gottlieb and Klitgård 141–42. On this issue
see also Snell-Hornby 2006: 6–19 and 145–48).
3. In contrast to ‘formal’ equivalence, dynamic or functional equivalence is “to
be defi ned in terms of the degree to which the receptors of the message in
108 Lucia Nigri
the receptor language respond to it in substantially the same manner as the
receptors in the source language. This response can never be identical, for
the cultural and historical settings are too different, but there should be a
high degree of equivalence of response, or the translation will have failed to
accomplish its purpose” (Nida and Taber 24; Yang 78).
4. Nida was the executive secretary for Translations of the American Bible
Society.
5. For Sirkku Aaltonen, James Holmes’s defi nition of naturalisation is inter­
changeable with Venuti’s notion of domestication (2000: 96).
6. “A fluent translation is immediately recognizable and intelligible, ‘famil­
iarised’, domesticated, not ‘disconcerting[ly]’ foreign, capable of giving the
reader unobstructed ‘access to great thoughts’, to what is ‘present in the orig­
inal’. Under the regime of fluent translating, the translator works to make
his or her work ‘invisible’, producing the illusory effect of transparency that
simultaneously masks its status as an illusion: the translated text seems ‘nat­
ural’, i.e., not translated” (Venuti 1995: 5).
7. On the relationship between ethics and translation strategies, however, there
are different opinions. Susan Bassnett, for example, in an article entitled
“Translating Terror” claims that, on occasion, domesticating practices in
translation may be more ‘ethical’ than foreignising practices (2005: 396).
8. Among the plays are: A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Indian languages, Rich­
ard II in German, Richard III in Arabic, Macbeth in Polish, Twelfth Night in
Russian, and Henry V in Italian, the latter directed by Pippo Delbono.
9. See, for example, the Japanese setting of Yukio Ninagawa’s stylised Titus
Andronicus.
10. Yet, as Bonaffi ni claims in relation to the translation of dialect poetry, “[T]he
fact remains that dialect is by nature a distinct and marginal language with
respect to a standard language, and all speakers of dialect consider it such—
that is, they are conscious of speaking a language which in some way is in
opposition to another, more widespread and important, even if they are in
a totally dialect-speaking setting where the opposition is only virtual. This
means that translation from dialect must in some way reflect its uniqueness
and diversity, even if the various solutions may take very different forms”
(283).
11. By ‘interdiscursive system’ I here refer to Cesare Segre’s notion of a system of
expressions and syntagms of unknown or lost origin, that are used and cir­
culated by speakers (111). On interdiscursivity applied to theatre see Serpieri
(109–92).
12. For a study of the cultural transfer in some of the English translations of Filu­
mena, in particular by Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall (1977), Timberlake
Wertenbaker (1998) and Maria Tucci (2002), see De Martino Cappuccio.
Tanya Ronder’s new translation of the play (2012) has been described as
“revelling in the colloquial [and having] Filumena’s sons calling one another
‘twat’ and ‘big man’, and people screeching ‘silly old cow’” http://exeunt­
magazine.com/reviews/fi lumena/ (last access 30 July 2012).
13. Bonaffi ni claimed in fact that “the untranslatableness of dialect—that is, its
semantic opacity—is proportional to the idiomatic use of words, slang, and
jargon limited to local color” (285).
14. In 1940, in an interview with Giovanni Sarno, Eduardo said that:
“L’umorismo . . . è la parte amara della risata. . . . Esso è determinato dalla
delusione dell’uomo che è per natura ottimista” [Humour . . . is the bitter
side of laugh . . . It is determined by the disappointment that man, by nature
optimistic, experiences” (qtd. in Di Franco 1975: 227; my translation).
 From the Peninsula Westward 109
15. On the question of performability see Snell-Hornby (2007: 111). Susan
Bassnett, on the contrary, argues “against the case of performability”, a term
“frequently used to describe the indescribable, the supposedly existent con­
cealed gestic text within the written” (1991: 102). On the difference between
performability and speakability, see Fernandes (131).
16. On the role of translations in confi rming stereotypes about Neapolitan cul­
ture, Alessandra De Martino Cappuccio claims that “the peculiarities of
Neapolitan culture are either neutralized through the standardization of the
language or incorporated in the receptor system through clichés, so that the
translated texts metonymically represent Neapolitan culture according to
domestic stereotypes and preconceived ideas about such a culture” (50).
17. On the question of Eduardo’s rewriting of the play, see Lombardo; Fischer;
Tomaiuolo.
18. Perteghella argues that the textual relationship between Isabella’s and Edu­
ardo’s version “points to a notion of a translational ‘fragmented’ agency,
whereby two subjectivities enter in a dialogue with the text at different stages
of the translational process, and collude at some point in the writing” (123).
19. For a discussion of Eduardo translating for a version to be published (in the
Einaudi series) rather than for a performance to be staged, see Perteghella.
Tomaiuolo reminds us that Eduardo “repeatedly suggested using marionettes
instead of real actors, adding pre-recorded voices” (129).
20. On this point, see also Perteghella who denies any “politically motivated,
ideologically driven domestication” (120).
21. For other examples of domestication in the play, see Perteghella;
Tomaiuolo.

WORKS CITED

Aaltonen, Sirkku (2000) Time-Sharing on Stage: Drama Translation in Theatre

and Society, Clevedon, Buffalo, Toronto, and Sidney: Multilingual Matters.
(1997) “Translating Plays or Baking Apple Pies: A Functional Approach to
the Study of Drama Translation”, in Mary Snell-Hornby, Zuzana Jettmarová,
and Klaus Kaindl (eds) Translation as Intercultural Communication, Amster­
dam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 89–97.
Bassnett, Susan (1991) “Translating for the Theatre: The Case against Performabil­
ity”, TTR: Traduction, terminologie, rédaction 4 (1): 99–111.
(2005) “Translating Terror”, Third World Quarterly 26 (3): 393–403.
Basso, Beatrice (2003) “Italian Dramaturg in a Translation Process”, Theatre Top­
ics 13 (1): 161–63.
Bentley, Eric (Winter 1951) “Eduardo de Filippo and the Neapolitan Theatre”, The
Kenyon Review 13 (1): 111–26.
Berman, Antoine (1984) L’épreuve de l’étranger: Culture et traduction dans
l’Allemagne romantique, Paris: Gallimard.
Bonaffini, Luigi (Spring 1997) “Translating Dialect Literature”, World Literature
Today 71 (2), Italian Literature Today: 279–88.
De Filippis, Simonetta (2002) “Shakespeare ed Eduardo: Scrittura e riscrittura
della Tempesta”, in Agostino Lombardo (ed.) Shakespeare e il Novecento,
Roma: Bulzoni, 187–206.
De Filippo, Eduardo (1968) [1964] Filumena Marturano, Torino: Einaudi.
(1992) Four Plays: The Local Authority; Grand Magic; Filumena Mar­
turano; Napoli Milionaria, Carlo Ardito (trans.), London: Methuen Drama.
110 Lucia Nigri
(1984) The Tempest, Torino: Einaudi.
(1976) Three Plays: The Local Authority; Grand Magic; Filumena Mar­
turano, Carlo Ardito (trans.), London: Hamish Hamilton and St. George’s Press.
De Martino Cappuccio, Alessandra (2011) “Translating Neapolitan Dialect in The­
atre: Problems of Cultural Transfer”, Translation Studies Journal 3 (3): 47–63.
Di Franco, Fiorenza (1975) Il Teatro di Eduardo, Bari: Universale Laterza.
(1984) Le commedie di Eduardo, Roma-Bari: Editori Laterza.
Esposito, Edoardo (2004) Eduardo De Filippo, discours et théâtralité: Dialogues,
didascalies et registres dramatiques, Paris: Editions L’Harmattan.
Fernandes, Alinne Balduino Pires (2010) “Between Words and Silences: Translat­
ing for the Stage and the Enlargement of Paradigms”, Scientia Traductionis 7:
120–33.
Fischer, Donatella (2007) Il teatro di Eduardo De Filippo: La crisi della famiglia
patriarcale, London: Legenda.
Lefevere, André (ed.) (1992) Translation, History, Culture: A Sourcebook, London
and New York: Routledge.
Lombardo, Agostino (2008) “Eduardo e Shakespeare”, Memoria di Shakespeare
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Meschonnic, Henry (2011) Ethics and Politics of Translating, Pier-Pascale Bou­
langer (ed. and trans.), Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Nida, Eugene Albert and Charles R. Taber (2003) [1969] The Theory and Practice
of Translation, Leiden: Brill.
Perteghella, Manuela (2006) “Poetry, Music and Transformation in the Gulf of
Naples: A Creative Voyage of The Tempest”, in Ead. and Eugenia Loff redo (eds)
Translation and Creativity: Perspectives on Creative Writing and Translation
Studies, London: Continuum, 109–23.
Pym, Anthony (2007) “Philosophy and Translation”, in Piotr Kuhiwczak and
Karin Littau (eds) A Companion to Translation Studies, Clevedon, Buffalo, and
Toronto: Multilingual Matters, 24–45.
Schjoldager, Anne with Henrik Gottlieb and Ida Klitgård (2008) Understanding
Translation, Denmark: Academica.
Segre, Cesare (1984) Teatro e romanzo, Torino: Einaudi.
Serpieri, Alessandro (1986) “Polifonia shakespeariana”, in Id., Retorica e immagi­
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and Karin Littau (eds) A Companion to Translation Studies, Clevedon, Buffalo,
and Toronto: Multilingual Matters, 106–19.
(2006) The Turns of Translation Studies: New Paradigms or Shifting View­
points?, Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Tomaiuolo, Saverio (2007) “‘Something Rich and Strange’: Eduardo De Filippo
Translating The Tempest”, in Richard Trim and Sophie Alatorre (eds) Through
Other Eyes: The Translation of Anglophone Literature in Europe, Newcastle
upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 121–32.
Venuti, Lawrence (1998) The Scandals of Translation, London and New York:
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7 Exploring a Bilingual Aesthetics
through Translation in Performance 1

Louise Ladouceur

Francophone theatre artists in Western Canada, who are bilingual by

necessity, have explored their bilingualism and enlarged their audience
with the use of English surtitles designed to accompany productions pre­
sented in French. First conceived to translate the message delivered on the
stage, surtitles later became an object of experimentation in creating new,
less faithful messages that offer paradoxical meanings accessible only to
bilingual or multilingual spectators, as was the case in recent produc­
tions such as Boom and Sex, Lies et les Franco-Manitobains. This type
of ‘playful translation’ cannot exist outside of the performance since it
is created in relation to the performance of a play destined for a specific
audience. By offering multiple messages that can be perceived differently
according to each spectator’s linguistic profile, this mode of theatre trans­
lation uses the resources of the performance to explore new intercultural
and bilingual aesthetics that echo the polyphony of increasingly diverse
and heterogeneous societies. In this article, I intend to reflect upon the
performative aspects of this playful use of surtitles and their effect on the
reception of a play in performance.
Canada is an officially bilingual country where the vast majority of the
population speaks only one of the two official languages. While English is
the sole official language spoken by 67.7% of Canadians, mostly residing in
Central and Western Canada, unilingual Francophones make up 13.25%
of the population and are concentrated in the East, mainly in Quebec. The
remaining 17.43% of the population is bilingual and spread out across the
country, with 2.13% residing in the four Western Canadian provinces (Sta­
tistics Canada 2006). Many are descendents of francophone pioneers from
the East who settled in Western Canada at the beginning of the nineteenth
century. Although they are bilingual by necessity, since they live in a pre­
dominantly English territory, they still claim French as their fi rst language
and as their language of identity.
It is important for artists in these small francophone communities to
be able to create in French, the language with which they identify, and to
take part in a francophone culture unfolding on national and international
stages. However, due to the minimal resources at their disposal and the
DOI: 10.4324/9780203073506-8
112 Louise Ladouceur
great distances separating them from the major francophone cities in Que­
bec, Western Canadian francophone theatre productions remain for the
most part local events that reach a very limited audience, which is decreas­
ing over time as many Francophones find themselves functioning in English
and abandoning French. Theatre plays a special role within these small
francophone communities. Called upon to ensure that a French language
and culture, which are threatened by their co-habitation with a dominant
English, resonate throughout the public sphere, theatre is a favoured site
of identity affirmation and cultural resistance for Canada’s Francophones
(Ladouceur 2012: 19). As shown in the work Plus d’un siècle sur scène!
Histoire du théâtre francophone en Alberta (Godbout, Ladouceur, and
Allaire), theatrical activity is exceedingly present in the history of small
francophone communities wanting to champion a language that is per­
ceived as vulnerable and to promote its usage.

CHANGING PERCEPTIONS OF BILINGUALISM

Up until 1960, the French language found on the small community stages
was normative French unaffected by the influence of English. At the time,
the mission of theatre was to promote and enrich the francophone cul­
ture by offering up an idealistic linguistic model most often borrowed from
the French repertoire. This can be attested to by the name of the oldest
francophone theatre company in Canada, Le Cercle Molière, founded in
Saint Boniface, Manitoba in 1925, and whose repertoire was for a long
time made up of “oeuvres . . . fortement inspirées par le style français de
l’époque, plusieurs des auteurs étant d’origine européenne” [works . . .
greatly inspired by the style of French of that period, many of the authors
being of European origin] (Léveillé 342).
With the rise of the nationalism that characterized the 1960s in Canada,
theatre acquired new functions. The elaboration of a Franco-Canadian rep­
ertoire responsible for affirming a local specificity distinct from the French
norm required the use of a local vernacular language. Since this vernacular
bears the most highly accentuated markers of the way in which a people
have appropriated a language, it is invested with the highest identity coef­
ficient and acts as an agent of distinction in the sense put forward by Pierre
Bourdieu, for whom “l’identité sociale se définit et s’affirme dans la dif­
férence” [social identity defines and affirms itself through difference] (191).
According to Pascale Casanova, the European nationalisms emerging at the
end of the eighteenth century utilized the vernacular languages, which were
adjudged national and put to good use in elaborating so-called ‘popular’
literatures destined to “servir l’idée nationale et lui donner le fondement
symbolique qui lui faisait défaut” [serve the idea of the nation and to pro­
vide it with a symbolic foundation that was missing] (73). Thus, for nascent
or minor literatures that employ a major literary language such as French,
Exploring a Bilingual Aesthetics through Translation in Performance 113
resorting to popular speech enables a reappropriation of this prestigious
language while asserting a linguistic specificity (386).
In this way, the recourse to joual, the vernacular language of Montreal’s
working-class neighbourhoods, resulted in the inauguration of a repertoire
that would henceforth be described as Québécois. Incorporating archaisms
that date back to the time of the French colonization of North America,
as well as expressions borrowed from the native languages and Anglicisms
acquired through contact with the English, joual bears the distinct mark­
ers of its North American affiliation. More specifically, joual is represen­
tative of Quebec, where French is the vernacular and dominant common
language. According to Henri Gobard, any given cultural sphere borrows
from four types of language:

I. Un langage vernaculaire, local, parlé spontanément, moins fait pour

communiquer que pour communier et qui seul peut être considéré
comme langue maternelle (ou langue natale). . . . Il est la noblesse des
peuples . . . la marque indélébile de l’appartenance.
II. Un langage véhiculaire, national ou régional, appris par nécessité,
destiné aux communications à l’échelle des villes . . . Le véhiculaire se
veut universel et tend à détruire les langages vernaculaires.
III. Un langage référentiaire, lié aux traditions culturelles, orales ou
écrites, assurant la continuité des valeurs par une référence systéma­
tique aux œuvres du passé . . .
IV. Un langage mythique, qui fonctionne comme ultime recours, magie
verbale dont on comprend l’incompréhensibilité comme preuve irré­
futable du sacré.

[I. A ‘vernacular language’, local, spoken spontaneously, used less as

a means of communication than of communion and that alone can be
considered as a mother tongue (or native tongue). . . . It is a people’s
nobility . . . the indelible mark of belonging. II. A ‘vehicular language’,
national or regional, learned out of necessity, intended for ‘commu­
nications’ on an urban scale . . . The vehicular language sees itself as
universal and tends to destroy vernacular languages. III. A ‘referential
language’, connected to cultural, oral, and written traditions, assur­
ing the continuity of values through a systematic reference to enduring
works of the past . . . IV. A ‘mythic language’, which functions as an
ultimate resource, verbal magic whose incomprehensibility is under­
stood as an irrefutable proof of the sacred.] (34–36)

In Quebec, the sole Canadian province with a francophone majority,

French fulfils the first three of these functions. This is not the case, how­
ever, in other parts of Canada where small francophone communities are
found scattered throughout the country. In these communities, English
is the vehicular language that dominates all sectors of public life, while
114 Louise Ladouceur
French is the vernacular language within the private space of the family and
within the very few francophone institutions.
Faced with the predominance of English, which is also the language of
the public sphere, Francophones in a minority context must master both
languages and switch easily from one to the other in their daily activities.
Bilingual out of necessity, they have developed hybrid linguistic mecha­
nisms that inform their francophone identity. Omnipresent in everyday life,
this bilingualism has nonetheless long been banished from theatre stages
entrusted with reproducing the ideal model of standard French imported
from France. Following the introduction of the 1969 Official Languages
Act, which ascribes equal status to English and French in Canada, Franco­
phones outside of Quebec found their bilingualism in conflict with the deni­
gration it was subject to within Quebec. In a province where French is the
language of the majority, the “cheval de Troie du bilinguisme” [Trojan horse
of bilingualism] (Tessier 29) was seen as a corrupting influence on French,
leading to an “appauvrissement du tissu langagier par la domination de la
langue anglaise” [impoverishment of the fabric of the language through
its domination by the English language] (Harel 89). The bilingualism of
Francophones outside of Quebec was thus perceived as a necessary evil that
resulted in undermining their francophone identity and contributed to the
decline of French in Canada. In his foreword to the bilingual play Je m’en
vais à Régina, written by Franco-Manitoban Roger Auger and published in
1976 by Éditions Lémeac, the Québécois critic Jacques Godbout severely
criticized the characters’ bilingualism, viewing it as a sign of the imminent
demise of Western Canadian Francophones. According to Godbout, the play
was the work of a playwright who “s’est donné comme tâche de décrire la fin
d’un people” [has undertaken the task of describing the end of a people] and
who presents “l’avenir que nous préparent les tenants du bilinguisme . . . le
mélodrame québécois transposé” [the future that those who advocate bilin­
gualism are preparing for us . . . the Québécois melodrama transposed] (x).
As a result of this fatalistic view of bilingualism, Western Canadian Franco­
phones chose for a long time not to display this bilingualism in their theatre
productions as it was felt to be a degradation of French and an emblem of
inferiority. Auger’s play was however republished in 2007 by Éditions du blé
in a trilogy entitled Suite manitobaine that contains two of his other plays.
In the preface to this trilogy, Bryan Rivers contends that “ce qui distingue les
trois pièces, plus que leur contenu, c’est qu’elles constituent la pierre d’angle
du théâtre franco-manitobain” [what distinguishes these three plays, more
than their content, is that they constitute the cornerstone of Franco-Man­
itoban theatre] (14). Such recognition for a play that inaugurated a drama
repertoire depicting the bilingualism of Franco-Manitobans was more than
thirty years in the making.
The globalization of the marketplace, which began during the 1980s,
modified the perception of bilingualism by bestowing upon it an added
value. Within a global economy that had established English as its lingua
Exploring a Bilingual Aesthetics through Translation in Performance 115
franca, the bilingualism of Francophones in a minority situation became
an asset. It “restructure les rapports entre les ressources que les franco­
phones possèdent, notamment en matière de connaissances linguistiques,
et la possibilité de les investir sur le marché du travail” [restructures the
links between the resources that Francophones possess, particularly with
regards to linguistic knowledge, and the possibility of investing them in the
labour market] (Heller and Labrie 20), thus allowing them to participate
in the new economy and to reap its benefits (21). This redefinition of the
value accorded to bilingualism would result in playwrights willingly stag­
ing works that utilized a vernacular language characterized by frequent
code-switching. In time, not only would they display their bilingualism
on stage, they would lay claim to it as a fundamental component of their
identity, as can be seen in the 2009 production of Marc Prescott’s Sex, Lies
et les Franco-Manitobains.

PERFORMING BILINGUALISM

Created in Saint-Boniface in 1993, Marc Prescott’s play displays a pro­

nounced heterolinguism that endows the French and the English with an
important diegetic function, 2 which is to say that the information delivered
in each language is essential to understanding the plot. It is not a question
here of occasional code-switching that gives the text a hybrid flavour but
does not call into question the primacy of one narrative language—“La
langue tutélaire est celle qui prend en charge les autres langues” [The cus­
todial language is the one that takes charge of the other languages] (Leclerc
2010a: 26)—as is often the case when one wants to evoke a multilingual
context within a story without confounding the targeted unilingual specta­
tor. For example, several plays by Franco-Ontarian playwright Jean Marc
Dalpé, such as Le chien, Lucky Lady, and Trick or Treat, are written in
French but contain rare instances of code-switching that serve to indicate
the inevitable presence of English in the Franco-Ontario context in which
the action unfolds. This strategy enables the plays to be produced in Que­
bec for audiences mostly composed of unilingual Francophones (Ladouceur
2010: 188). In the case of Sex, Lies et les Franco-Manitobains, the target
audience must actually be bilingual as it is impossible to comprehend the
dialogue without a thorough understanding of the two languages.
In this play, the action unfolds in the apartment of a young woman (Elle)
on Christmas Eve. After she has surprised and tied up an initial burglar
(Lui) who turns out to be a Francophone, a second burglar (Him), this time
an Anglophone, enters the house and ties her up. The three characters pro­
ceed to argue while the second burglar empties the apartment. Inasmuch as
this second burglar only speaks English, he must be addressed in English
or have any of the exchanges in French between the other two characters
translated for him along with the contents of a diary written in French
116 Louise Ladouceur
that he discovers in the course of his efforts. The presence of a unilingual
Anglophone on stage affects the form of the dialogue and the way in which
the action unfolds, as can be seen in the following excerpt, from the 2001
published version of the play:

LUI: I just can’t fuckin’ believe it. Une minute, j’entends des sirènes pis
je pense que je suis faite pis la prochaine . . .
HIM: . . . Your story is gonna go down in cat burgling history (Him
recommence à rire) It’s so funny. It’s a goddam riot!
ELLE: Je trouve pas ça drôle, moi.
LUI: She thinks it’s pretty funny.
ELLE: Non je trouve pas ça drôle. Pas du tout.
LUI: Correction here. She doesn’t think it’s funny—she thinks it’s
hilarious.
HIM: It’s a goddam riot! I’m gonna split a gut. (Him rit.) Man! Sorry,
sorry if I don’t speak French. I took a class once, but I forgets
everything, everything except : (Avec un énorme accent.) Dje
m’excuze, but dje ne parluh pas franzais.
LUI: Not bad.
ELLE: It could use some work.
LUI: Maybe you could teach him.
ELLE: Ta gueule! (Prescott 2001: 61–62)

Not only does the play depict the actual bilingualism of the francophone
characters, the play’s structure and the efficiency of the dialogue rely on
ambiguities, quid pro quos, and word plays that are based on a thorough
knowledge of the two languages, which enables the francophone characters
to fool the unilingual Anglophone burglar, as shown in the following excerpt.
In order to satisfy the curiosity of the latter, Lui finds himself reading aloud,
and then translating, the erotic contents of the young woman’s diary:

LUI: Je me demande si un jour je pourrai me donner à un homme.

Pour l’instant, je devrai me contenter de mes fantasmes en atten­
dant mon prince charmant”. (À elle.) Comment ça tu pourrais
pas?
ELLE: C’est pas de tes affaires.
HIM: What does it say?
LUI: It says she couldn’t.
HIM: Couldn’t what?
LUI: Couldn’t . . . Euh . . . Couldn’t join him in his exploration of the
continent down under because . . .
HIM: Because?
LUI: . . . because. (Rapidement) . . . because she didn’t have any expe­
rience, she had never been to Australia and she didn’t like kan­
garoos. (Prescott 2001: 74–75)
Exploring a Bilingual Aesthetics through Translation in Performance 117
The theme of bilingualism is even more pronounced in the version of this
play revised by Prescott for the 2009 productions in Edmonton, Alberta
and Saint Boniface, Manitoba. In this revised version, the author made
significant changes to his text and in doing so added a line in which the
francophone burglar affi rms his bilingualism. Expressing himself in a ver­
nacular French that combines code-switching and Anglicisms, this charac­
ter lays claim to a linguistic and cultural hybridity that for him constitutes
a measure of authenticity, as demonstrated in the following exchange taken
from the revised 2009 manuscript version of the play:

ELLE: Je n’ai pas besoin de vivre au Québec pour vivre en français! Je

peux la vivre pleinement ma culture au Manitoba.
LUI: Bullshit! Ça c’est de la bullshit pure et simple. Tu peux pas vivre
en français au Manitoba. C’est mort. . . . Moé, je suis bilingue,
pis tous les Franco-Manitobains que je connais sont bilingues. Pis
c’est ça que je suis: bilingue. Pas anglophone, pas francophone:
BILINGUE. (Prescott 2009a: 48–51)

With this affi rmation, the character effectively proclaims bilingualism

an essential component of his identity within a context where English is
dominant and where remaining francophone is contingent upon one’s bilin­
gualism. In such a context, one’s bilingualism is not a defect that impedes
the possibility of being truly francophone, but is rather the condition sine
qua non for remaining so. It is an act of resistance signifying a refusal to
renounce French, despite adverse conditions that would effectively contrib­
ute to just such a refusal. Assuming responsibility for a bilingual identity
allows Western Canadian francophone playwrights to explore their linguis­
tic duality in works that bring both of Canada’s official languages to the
stage in diverse and sometimes provocative ways.
According to Judith Butler, for whom “identity is performatively consti­
tuted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results” (25), depict­
ing a genuine bilingualism on stage by way of characters that unabashedly
make the most of its resources, and in doing so affirm its fundamental
identity quotient, contributes to the construction of a bilingual identity
through performative acts. As is the case with gender identity, linguistic
identity is constructed by the acts that express it. In this case, the play­
wright portrays a performative act that establishes a bilingual subject as he
creates an actual bilingual narrative that incorporates the two languages
without hierarchical distinction and in which a character lays claim to an
identity that is defi ned as strictly bilingual. He thus reinvents the defi nition
of his identity through a “resistant performance” (Carlson 166) that eludes
the existing models and classifications. The stage then becomes not only a
performance space, which is to say one where the play is performed, but
also a site of performativity in the sense that a bilingual identity is being
performatively constructed on stage.
118 Louise Ladouceur
The caveat stipulated by Butler with regards to on-stage performances
“that de-realize the act, making acting into something quite distinct from
what is real” (278), although valid for acts of gender identity, does not apply
to acts of language identity. Bilingualism cannot be faked or counterfeited on
stage or in real life. The way one speaks a language, or for that matter many
languages, reveals a linguistic identity that is inescapable. Various accents
or intonations, a specific pronunciation, a type of vocabulary or grammar
instantly reveal an individual’s origins, class, or social status. One may try
to modify his or her speech pattern in order to meet linguistic standards,
but it is impossible to simulate bilingualism or multilingualism. The act of
speaking various languages is extremely difficult to replicate on stage. There­
fore, its performance on stage is endowed with real-life performativity. The
performativity of Prescott’s play was further enhanced through a translation
strategy designed to explore the bilingualism of the audience.

BILINGUAL THEATRE AND TRANSLATION

Portraying a bilingualism characteristic of Canadian Francophones’ lin­

guistic duality has a significant downside. From the outset, belonging to
two linguistic spheres undermines the idea that a culture is characterized
by a sense of unity, which is consolidated by language. From this perspec­
tive, displaying pronounced markers of heterolinguism, a term put forward
by Rainier Grutman to qualify literary manifestations of multilingualism
(18), indicates no real belonging to a linguistic category or to any literary
grouping legitimately centred on a single language.
The heterolinguism of a literary text condemns it to circulate on the
margins of the dominant institutions and repertoires as “l’unilinguisme
[agit] comme principe structurant dans le champ littéraire” [unilingualism
(acts) as a structuring principle within the literary field] (Leclerc 2010b:
40). Its manifestations in a dramatic text destined for the stage are highly
problematic and have the effect of marginalizing it. A pronounced hetero­
linguism based on a thorough knowledge of several languages impedes the
circulation of the dramatic work, because theatre communication requires
that the message is immediately understandable during the performance,
in contrast with other literary texts that can be read with the aid of a dic­
tionary, footnotes, or other linguistic support (Ladouceur 2012: 37–38).
Reduced to addressing a limited audience possessing the required linguis­
tic competence, the bilingual dialogue of Franco-Canadian dramatic texts
limits their circulation to the periphery of major cities both in Canada and
abroad. To circumvent this discrimination, heterolingual dramatic texts
must, out of necessity, resort to translation. Faced with this problem, trans­
lation must however reduce or erase the original play’s heterolinguism to
render it acceptable within the dominant, monolingual institutions and in
doing so ensure its access to the markets over which they hold sway.
Exploring a Bilingual Aesthetics through Translation in Performance 119
This is incidentally the approach most often taken with regards to the
translation of texts incorporating a minimal heterolinguism that does not
require a thorough knowledge of all the languages in question. This has
occurred in several of Jean Marc Dalpé’s plays that, as mentioned previ­
ously, contain rare instances of code-switching wherein the English has
practically no diegetic value. The English translations of these texts are
unilingual, as any trace of this heterolinguism has been erased (Ladouceur
2007: 105–06). However, translating a text in which heterolinguism plays
an essential role in transmitting information critical to the unfolding nar­
rative represents a significant challenge. How can it be translated in a way
that conserves the linguistic plurality of the source text while rendering it
accessible to an audience that is for the most part unilingual? This is the
challenge presented by the 2009 Edmonton production of a translated ver­
sion of Sex, Lies et les Franco-Manitobains for an audience consisting of
spectators that were either bilingual or unilingual Anglophones.
Because it allows for the performance to be given in its original form,
while rendering it accessible to an audience for whom it would otherwise
be unintelligible, surtitling has been enormously successful for the small,
Western Canadian francophone theatres hoping to reach a vast, previously
inaccessible Anglophone audience. Already in use in numerous theatre
festivals throughout the world, surtitles offer the invaluable advantage of
rendering a foreign-language production accessible while preserving the
integrality of the original performance. As Linda Dewolf points out, “Le
surtitrage permet de faire connaître, à la fois aux professionnels du théâtre
et au public, toute la variété des styles et des thèmes de l’écriture drama­
tique contemporaine” [Subtitling allows both theatre professionals and the
general public to discover the varieties of style and subject matter in con­
temporary dramatic writing] (102), and presents an opportunity to dis­
cover approaches to playwriting and new performance aesthetics to which
we would not otherwise be exposed.
If surtitles represent an asset for a theatre production insofar as they
allow it to be presented to various audiences in its original form, they
are nonetheless subject to specific constraints of faithfulness and econ­
omy that differ greatly from those of a traditional translation. The latter
enjoys an autonomy vis-à-vis a source text that remains inaccessible to an
audience during a performance. It is therefore possible to modify either
structure or content and considerably stray from the original in order to
ensure increased comprehension and facilitate reception within the tar­
get audience. This type of modification remains impossible with surtitles.
Inasmuch as the two versions are conveyed simultaneously on stage, it
is necessary to adhere closely to the source text so as not to divert the
attention of audience members able to understand the messages delivered
in both languages and for whom any disparity would act as a distrac­
tion. Faithful to the message delivered on stage, surtitles must also be
easy to read quickly: they only convey information deemed essential with
120 Louise Ladouceur
the greatest linguistic economy of means, as they must create the least
possible visual disruption. 3 As Carlson underlines, “Supertitles, forcing
spectators to shift their focus, even if momentarily, away from the stage,
are much more actively disruptive, since they are directly competing with
other stimuli to the visual channel” (197).
For the translation of Sex, Lies et Les Franco-Manitobains produced
by Théâtre au Pluriel in 2009, inasmuch as the bilingual spectators were
easily able to understand dialogue in both of the languages, the decision
was taken to translate only the lines delivered in French in order to mini­
mize the visual distraction caused by the surtitles. The latter rendered the
performance accessible for the Anglophone spectator while retaining the
heterolinguism of the original play that targeted a bilingual audience. Thus
the surtitles’ primary function was to provide a faithful English translation
by reproducing what was delivered on stage in French. However, during
rehearsals, the playwright and director, Marc Prescott, placed the transla­
tor on stage and invited her to take a more active role in the performance.4
With this support from the director, she began to experiment in a way that
led to the creation of playful surtitles that were added to the conventional
ones. These few playful surtitles would transmit their own message, dis­
tinct from the one delivered on stage by the actors.

PLAYFUL SURTITLES5

From the beginning of the play, the translator is situated on a corner of the
stage, from where she operates her computer in plain sight of the audience.
This visibility runs counter to the traditional imperative that views a trans­
lation as the result of an activity destined to remain invisible in order to
ensure transparency, which “is the point to which the translation seems to
have originally been written in the target language” (Translation Schools).
Thus, to find the translator ensconced on the stage during the play is in
itself an invitation to break with the norms when it comes to the transla­
tion. During the performance, the actors were called upon to interact with
the surtitles. Thus, in a line where a character lists the names of a very large
family, the actor is able to make up for a memory lapse by glancing at the
English surtitles that contain the sought-after name. On another occasion,
when the English burglar asks the French burglar to translate a part of the
young woman’s diary for him, the actor first requests the help of the trans­
lator, who refuses. He then conforms to the playwright’s original intention
by directing his request to the other character.
Encouraged by the playful nature of the production, the translator
subsequently created surtitles that exceeded their primary function of
reproducing the message delivered on stage. Thus, when one of the fran­
cophone characters rids himself of his frustration with a series of “Fuck­
duhduhfuckfuck-fuckfuck” shouted out to the well-known tune of the
Exploring a Bilingual Aesthetics through Translation in Performance 121
Imperial March from Star Wars, the surtitles display the following message:
“#*%#&^@!$!♫”. In this way, members of the audience
were called upon to interpret this translation on their own, according to
their individual references and preferences. The function of this translation
strategy was essentially playful, which was underlined by the spectators’
laughter, as it comically expressed something other than what the actor
was actually saying on stage.
Later in the play, the surtitles became the voice of the translator when
she addressed the audience directly to reassure them regarding any difficulty
they might be having in understanding the ramblings of the Anglophone
burglar, whose language had been modified by the playwright through the
addition of a highly accentuated ‘rap slang’. This modified dialogue was
also delivered with a pronounced accent that rendered it extremely difficult
to decode for an uninitiated member of the audience. Here is an excerpt
taken from the version published in 2001 and the same excerpt from the
manuscript version revised by the author in 2009, in which the revisions
are underlined:

HIM: It’s just way too funny! I thoughts I was fucked when I tripped
the neighbor’s alarm especially when I hears the police sirens.
So I makes like a hockey player and I gets the puck out of there.
I jumps the fence into the back yard, and by then, the cops are
pretty close, eh! Then I looks around and I sees that the win­
dow’s busted, right? MegaBonai! I mean, I got a horseshoe stuck
right up my arse! Shit! I got the whole fuckin’ ranch! (Prescott
2001: 61)
***
HIM: That shit’s whack! I thoughts I was fucked when I tripped the
neighbor’s alarm—especially when I hears the popos comin’. So
I makes like a hockey player and I gets the puck out of there,
you know what I’m sayin’?. I jumps the fence into the back yard,
and by then, the popos be closin’ in! Then I scopes the place
out, recon style and I sees that the window’s busted. Foschizzle!
I mean, I got a horseshoe stuck right up my ass! Hell! I got the
whole fuckin’ ranch! (Prescott 2009a: 61)

Because this dialogue was originally in English, it was not surtitled. How­
ever, following the first performance, numerous Anglophone and bilingual
spectators admitted that they did not really understand the slang employed
by the Anglophone burglar. This appeared to be mainly a question of a
generation gap, as the younger members of the audience, Anglophone and
bilingual alike, seemed comfortable with this type of language, which was
surely beyond the reach of those of previous generations. Yet having real­
ized the problem too late to provide English surtitles to accompany and thus
explain the English burglar’s dialogue, the translator nonetheless wanted to
122 Louise Ladouceur
react to this. For the second performance, she followed up on the playful
approach adopted during this production and underlined what was occur­
ring by warning the audience with the following surtitle that appeared
at the beginning of the above-quoted excerpt: “If you don’t understand
what this guy is saying, don’t worry—Neither does 50% of the rest of the
audience. (This message brought to you by your friendly neighbourhood
surtitler)” (Prescott 2009b: slide 602). The surtitles thereby became the
off-stage voice of a character whose discourse was superimposed over the
dialogue of the play being performed.
Further on in the performance, the first burglar sings a francophone
Christmas carol, the words of which have been modified to express his
frustration. Here is an excerpt of the song followed by the original lyrics in
brackets: “C’est comme ça que ça se passe dans le temps des Fêtes / Tape
le voleur, les filles pis le poêlon de galette / C’est comme ça que ça se passe
avec un maudit fatiguant” (Prescott 2001: 30), [C’est comme ça se passe
dans le temps des Fêtes / Tape la galette, les garçons les filles avec / C’est
comme ça que ça se passe dans l’temps du Jour de l’An]. The surtitles that
accompanied this song alluded to a completely different Christmas carol,
this time an Anglophone song, in which the words have also been altered
in a similarly playful fashion: “Deck the robber for his folly / Fa-la-la-la­
la la-la la la / With a frying pan in lieu of holly / Fa-la-la-la-la la-la la la”
(Prescott 2009b: slide 76), [Deck the halls with boughs of holly / Fa-la-la­
la-la la-la la la / Tis the season to be jolly / Fa-la-la-la-la la-la la la]. For the
bilingual Francophones in the audience, familiar as they are with both of
these songs, the surtitles offered an additional meaning as they had access
to two totally different messages delivered in French and in English. Because
it presented different messages addressed to spectators belonging to two
distinct linguistic profiles, the translated version of the song multiplied not
only the messages but the possible interpretation of these messages and of
their juxtaposition, according to the linguistic resources of the spectators.
This playful use of the translation resembles what Marvin Carlson
describes as a “metatheatrical playfulness” (203), a quality characteristic
of post-modern productions that attempt to confound our expectations
through eclectic means employed to produce a multitude of messages. Carl-
son provides an example of metatheatrical playfulness through the use of
surtitles to project an original text while an actor is silently reading it to
himself on the stage within a performance of a play by Shakespeare (203–
04). In this instance, the surtitle breaks with its usual task of reproducing
the original message to become the principal element of transmission of the
original text itself. This is a provocative example of “surtitles as a more
independent stage language, not simply a device for duplicating the spoken
text, but a separate communicative channel in the theatrical experiment”
(200). When surtitles take on functions other than reproducing the mes­
sage delivered on stage, they are invested with a ‘playfulness’ that not only
allows for multiple messages to be delivered during the performance, but
Exploring a Bilingual Aesthetics through Translation in Performance 123
also for the conception and communication of these messages to specifi­
cally targeted spectators corresponding to certain linguistic profi les.
For example, during a bilingual performance of Jacob Wren’s En français
comme en anglais, It’s Easy to Criticize, presented at Montreal’s National
Theatre School in October 2011, the actors were divided into two groups,
Anglophones and Francophones, standing on opposite sides of the stage.
While the Anglophones were singing O Canada, the Canadian national
anthem, the surtitles faithfully reproduced the lyrics in French:

O Canada! / Our home and native land! / True patriot love in all thy
sons command. /
With glowing hearts we see thee rise, / The True North strong and
free! / From far and wide, / O Canada, we stand on guard for thee. /
God keep our land glorious and free!6
***
Ô Canada! / Terre de nos aïeux, / Ton front est ceint de fleurons
glorieux! / Car ton bras sait porter l’épée, / Il sait porter la croix! / Ton
histoire est une épopée / Des plus brillants exploits. / Et ta valeur, de foi
trempée, / Protégera nos foyers et nos droits.7

However, when the Francophones sang the same national anthem in

French, there were changes in the lyrics that evoked Quebec’s legendary
dissatisfaction within an Anglophone Canada: “O Canada / Accepte nos
adieux / Mon front est plein de sang pas trop glorieux. / Car mon bras s’est
fait dire de porter l’épée / pis j’avais pas trop l’choix / Notre histoire est
tout éclopée / par des esprits plutôt étroits / Et tes valeurs de sang trempé /
Redétruiront des foyers et des droits”.8 Despite these obvious changes, the
English surtitles faithfully reproduced the anthem’s lyrics in English. This
translative operation could be perceived as the inability or the refusal of
Anglophones to recognize or acknowledge the position of a francophone
Quebec within the Canadian federation. This irony escaped any member of
the audience who was not bilingual and therefore able to understand mes­
sages delivered in each language. The bilingual spectators thus benefited
from an additional meaning unavailable to their unilingual counterparts.
This playful translation, using surtitles to deliver various messages in
different languages, allows for the expansion of the model applied to sur­
titling by Yvonne Griesel. In this model, she has identified three possible
target audiences for a source-language production accompanied by surtitles:
a) target language audience, b) source language audience, and c) audience
with knowledge of source and target languages (6). In Griesel’s model, the
message remains the same for the three target audiences. However, when the
message conveyed in the target language does not reproduce what is con­
veyed in the source language, as is the case for playful surtitles, these three
target audiences receive different messages. And only the individuals who are
bilingual can appreciate the difference in the messages that are delivered in
124 Louise Ladouceur
each language. It is through the awareness and understanding of this differ­
ence that the bilingual spectator alone has access to an enhanced meaning.
Since playful surtitles multiply the manifestations of a difference accessible
only to bilingual spectators, they add to bilingual performativity.
Certain shows originating in minority francophone communities in
Western Canada have recently utilized this process that takes advantage
of Francophones’ bilingualism by presenting them with differing messages
in various languages. Thus, the play Boom presented in 2007 during the
Edmonton International Fringe Theatre Festival by Anna-Maria Lemais­
tre, Mireille Moquin, and Isabelle Rousseau included dialogue in English
and French, accompanied by English or French surtitles that provided an
approximate translation, as can be observed in the following dialogue and
its equivalent surtitle:

NARRATRICE: En Alberta / On déboise nos ravins / Pour bâtir des gros

condos / Ou bien des sites pavés / Que le monde y trouvent bien
beaux.9
SURTITLE: Alberta’s home / We cut down all the trees / To build our
booming cities / Or to make parking lots / For all the SUVs we’ve
bought. (qtd. in Nolette 2010: 204)

Only the bilingual members of the audience were able to understand the
irony contained in the juxtaposition of the dialogue and the surtitles. By
generating new messages that are superimposed over the messages conveyed
by the actors, the processes of playful translation foil the usual aim of the
translation. They subvert the primary function of imitation and in doing so
become a creative tool to explore new applications of bilingualism. Rather
than simply responding to the needs of a unilingual target audience, which
is the primary task of a translation generated by the bilingual individuals
in a minority context, playful translation strategies in performance offer up
an excess of meaning that only benefits the bilingual spectator.10

BILINGUAL AESTHETICS

In her work Bilingual Aesthetics: A New Sentimental Education, Doris

Sommer analyses “the ways that bilingualism can improve a range of pri­
vate and public moves—in aesthetics, politics and philosophy” (xi). With
different notions borrowed from literary criticism, she demonstrates how
bilingualism constitutes an “added value . . . a dangerous supplement to
monolingualism [resulting in] intellectual, artistic and ethical enhance­
ments” (xii). For example, the recourse to bilingualism confounds our
expectations and creates a defamiliarizing effect that, according to the
Russian formalist Victor Shklovsky, characterizes the literary text: “The
technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar,’ to make forms difficult,
Exploring a Bilingual Aesthetics through Translation in Performance 125
to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of
perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged” (qtd. in
Sommer 208). In this sense, “code switching prefers the surprise element
of an estranged (literally foreign) expression to the predictability of one
legitimate language; it values artistry over stable identity, and it invites an
acknowledgment of aesthetic agency over a politics of cultural recogni­
tion” (36–37). Still according to Sommer, if the bilingual speakers resort to
code-switching in response to the immediate needs of the instance of com­
munication, they can also call upon it to explore the aesthetic potentials
offered by the arrangement of various linguistic codes:

Everyone can experience language as arbitrary and slippery; but bilin­

guals can hardly avoid the (aestheticizing) risk/thrill of slippery speech.
Veering from one signifier to another, in ways that affect the signi­
fied, is a technique of disguise, or escape, or privileged association that
marks multilinguals even when we’re not trying to be funny. (68)

By the abundance and the interaction of linguistic resources that it calls

upon, the heterolinguistic text creates its own effects: “Surprise at what we
assumed was familiar is the trigger both for aesthetics, where it produces
an effect of estrangement, and for humor, where it ignites an explosion of
laughter” (33). The recourse to several sets of linguistic codes allows for
clever plays on words that are unavailable to unilingual individuals, thus
underlining certain privileges that multilingual speakers enjoy: “[H]umour
. . . points to the benefits of bilingualism shared among those on the lan­
guage border (I use the term in a sociological, not strictly geographical
sense). It can also, of course, become a pleasurable end in itself” (Heller
138). Bilingualism is thus looked upon as an added value instead of an
incapacity to restrict oneself to a dominant monolingualism, since “[m]ore
than one language is a supplement, not a deficiency” (Sommer XIV), espe­
cially in a period of globalization, when “[b]oth industrial and developing
nations are adjusting to mass migrations and to the external constraints of
international agencies and networks” (ibid.). From this point of view, the
playful exploration of the bilingual resources of Francophones in minor­
ity contexts highlights the value of their bilingualism and its advantages
in a manner that inverts the usual equation in which they fi nd themselves
marginalized vis-à-vis the unilingual Anglophone majority. Inasmuch as
the latter are unable to access the enhanced meaning conveyed by the code-
switching, they find themselves marginalized in relation to the benefits
attached to the enlarged linguistic capital of those who are bilingual.
The bilingual aesthetics highlighting an enhancement of meaning
enjoyed exclusively by those who are multilingual is even more pronounced
in the translated version of Prescott’s play. While the original production
was solely able to address a bilingual audience, the surtitled version targets
a twofold audience: unilingual Anglophone and bilingual. The enhanced
126 Louise Ladouceur
meaning that is available during the original production to those who are
bilingual is then redoubled by the translation that in turn provides English
messages endowed with an irony that only the bilingual spectator can cap­
ture. The performance of the bilingual text with English surtitles, some of
which diverge from the original and generate their own playful translation,
underlines the need for bilingual resources to be able to decode the entirety
of the messages conveyed during the show and, in doing so, accentuates the
bilingual aesthetic of the original play.

CONCLUSION

The emphasis placed on the performance of a bilingualism heightened by

translation strategies aimed at producing an enhanced meaning understand­
able only by those with bilingual competencies results in placing the unilin­
gual spectator in a position of deficit and thus challenges the hegemony of
monolingualism. For the small communities obliged to utilize bilingualism
to protect an often marginalized language, the exploration of a theatrical
aesthetic that highlights the benefits accrued through bilingualism acts to
subvert the dominant monolingual discourse.
Heightened by translation strategies that emphasise the linguistic abilities
of the bilingual spectators, the staging and the performance of bilingual­
ism in Western Canadian francophone theatres contribute to the affi rma­
tion of a new bilingual identity through performative acts that celebrate its
advantages and benefits. The Franco-Canadian creators are then able to
reach beyond the unilingual boundaries, whether they are those of Cana­
dian Anglophones or those of Francophones in Quebec, and explore their
own unique characteristics through a bilingual aesthetic that calls upon the
entire gamut of their linguistic and cultural resources.11

NOTES

1. This research is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research

Council of Canada.
2. From Plato to modern literary critics, the term ‘diegesis’ has evolved but its core
meaning remains “the formal or verbal aspects of narrative” (Hauch 534).
3. For a more detailed analysis, see Ladouceur and Liss (forthcoming).
4. The translator, Shavaun Liss, is a graduate student working on the use of sur­
titles in Canadian theatre. This production contributed to her research and
is discussed in her thesis “Le surtitrage du théâtre francophone de l’Ouest
canadien: Application et expérimentation”, MA thesis in Canadian Studies,
University of Alberta, Edmonton, 2012.
5. Certain information in this section is also discussed in Ladouceur
(forthcoming).
6. The anthem was first created in French in 1880 from a patriotic poem com­
posed by Sir Adolphe-Basile Routhier. It was translated in English numerous
Exploring a Bilingual Aesthetics through Translation in Performance 127
times before Robert Stanley Weir’s version was approved in 1927. This last
version bears minimal resemblance to the French version (Heritage Canada).
7. Here is a more faithful English translation of the original, published by
Thomas Bedford Richardson in 1906: [O Canada / Our fathers’ land of old
/ Thy brow is crown’d with leaves of red and gold. / Beneath the shade of the
Holy Cross / Thy children own their birth / No stains thy glorious annals
gloss / Since valour shield thy hearth. / Almighty God! On thee we call /
Defend our rights, forfend this nation’s thrall] (Heritage Canada).
8. Wren. Literal translation: [O Canada / Accept our farewells / My brow is
covered with inglorious blood / Because my arm was told to wield the sword
/ I didn’t have much of a choice / Our history has been crippled / by rather
narrow-minded people / and your blood-drenched values / Will redestroy
homes and rights].
9. Literal translation: [In Alberta / We deforest our ravines / To build huge con­
dos / Or even paved spaces / That people fi nd really beautiful].
10. For an analysis of supplement in co-lingual plays, see Nolette (2008).
11. Richard Lebeau translated this article from French to English, including the
original source material that appears in square brackets.

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128 Louise Ladouceur
Heller, Monica (1992) “The Politics of Code-Switching and Language Choice”,
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(2012) Dramatic Licence: Translating Theatre from One Offi cial Language
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(2007) “Parler, écrire et traduire dans la langue de Dalpé”, in Stéphanie
Nutting and François Paré (eds) Jean Marc Dalpé: Ouvrier d’un dire, Sudbury,
ON: Prise de parole, 97–112.
(2010) “Unilinguisme, bilinguisme et esthétique interculturelle dans les
dramaturgies francophones du Canada”, International Journal of Francophone
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ludiques dans les théâtres francophones de l’Ouest canadien”, Francophonies
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l’anglais en littérature contemporaire, Montreal: Éditions XYZ.
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Lemaistre, Anna-Maria, Mireille Moquin, and Isabelle Rousseau (2007) Boom,
text in French and English with English and French surtitles, Edmonton Fringe
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Blé.
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canadian: Application et experimentation”, MA thesis in Canadian Studies,
University of Alberta, Edmonton.
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Lucie Hotte (ed.) (Se)raconter des histoires: Histoire et histoires dans les littéra­
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(2008) “Traduire la dualité linguistique de l’Ouest canadien pour la
scène anglophone”, MA thesis in Canadian Studies, University of Alberta,
Edmonton.
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Boniface, MB: Les Éditions du Blé.
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(5–6 November 2009).
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franco-manitobain”, in Suite manitobaine, Saint Boniface, MB: Les Éditions
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ham, NC: Duke University Press.
Exploring a Bilingual Aesthetics through Translation in Performance 129
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adapted bilingual production, National Theatre School of Canada, Montreal
(25–30 October 2011).
8 Beckett, ‘Thou Art Translated’
Enoch Brater

Samuel Beckett’s stature as a bilingual European writer of the second half of

the twentieth century, and his unique role as self-translator of work originally
composed in English or in French, can raise any number of questions for the
performance theorist concerned with issues of adaptation, variation, and the
very act and purpose of translation itself. Here the famous dictum tradut­
tore, traditore is under an increasing pressure to stabilize itself in the practical
realm of theatre, where the challenge of mounting a script in stage time and
stage space is perhaps even more vexed, but also and at the same time more
concrete and multidimensional. As a point of departure for this discussion,
well might we ask: where do we begin to locate a specific Beckett text?
As early as Godot all sense of textual certainty, as well as the vain
search for the mot juste, has already begun to unravel. The playwright
composed the play in French, writing only on the right-hand pages of a
school notebook; when he ran out of space, he continued on the verso
sides he had skipped before. Unlike most of his manuscripts, the text
for Godot was written clearly, almost, it seems, without hesitation. “It
wrote itself”, he told Peter Lennon, “with very few corrections, in four
months” (qtd in Brater 2003: 10). Beckett first calls Vladimir “Lèvy”, a
name loaded with implications for post-Holocaust Europe; in the second
act he abruptly gives him the name by which he has become known to
generations of theatregoers. Today the famous French notebook, dated
“9 October 1948” and “29 January 1949” formerly kept in a bank vault
near Beckett’s Paris apartment, may be viewed in the Beckett Archive at
the University of Reading in England.
Beckett began work on the English translation several months later. But
can the title of Waiting for Godot in English, culturally and linguistically
speaking, ever sufficiently capture and contain the same temporal essence
“always already there” in a transaction like En attendant Godot? The latter
signals an inevitable and unenviable phenomenon more like “while waiting”,
“in the process of waiting”, or even (really going out on an Anglo-Saxon
limb) “during the time [I was] waiting”, but with no end in sight. There is
in this “case nought” (Beckett 261) a word, even a world, of difference, and
not as subtle as we may have initially supposed. What happens on stage to
DOI: 10.4324/9780203073506-9
 Beckett, ‘Thou Art Translated’ 131
a play like Happy Days, first composed in English with a title that suggests,
among other things, a familiar Irish toast (traditionally echoed by “Shed a
tear”), when it is vigorously transposed into French as Oh les beaux jours,
with its intertextual memory of a well-known line by Paul Verlaine? (In the
symbolist poet’s case the line is marked by an exclamation point, full of
nostalgia and post-Romantic yearnings.) Footfalls, the play Beckett wrote
for the actress Billie Whitelaw, is, perhaps, even more of a teaser. Follow­
ing his translation of Not I as Pas moi in French, Beckett reinvents English
Footfalls as the single-syllabled Pas; footsteps indeed—but also that noto­
rious French indicator of negation and nothing in particular, where gram­
mar reaches for its full metaphysical dimension. Beckett’s work in prose is
similarly complicated with regard to both provenance and perspective; he
transforms French Sans into an odd English neologism called, less elegantly
perhaps, Lessness (the German term he came up with, a grim Lösigkeit, is
equally problematic).
But titles are the least of the Beckett problem.
An encounter with Beckett in performance is, then, first and foremost a
study in linguistically based cultural migration, French to English or English
to French; and it should be noted here that in both instances that English is
a richly inflected Irish one, which the playwright spoke throughout his life
with an upper-class Dublin accent (shades of Protestant County Wicklow,
the site of his childhood home at Cooldrinagh). A famous fictional hero
in the trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnameable) reassembles
the idiolect of all three worlds and is called, not coincidentally, Jacques
Moran, pun (on morin/moron) intended. “Strange English” this (Brater
1994: 11)—and even stranger French. Trilingualism is very much in the
air, most especially so when we consider the profound impact the author
had on his collaborations with Elmar Tophoven, who gave him a German
voice. Translation in performance takes on still other dimensions when we
take into account Beckett’s work as director or advisor to directors of his
plays, after which, as his production notebooks make abundantly clear, he
steadily revised the original versions of his seminal play texts.
And then there is of course the case of Beckett translated into other
languages, non-European ones in particular, and the interpretation of such
refashionings into other national performance traditions. Additional migra­
tions loom large, as when the ‘play’ crosses the borders of one genre, one
performance medium, and moves, with or without the playwright’s permis­
sion, into another (film, television, radio, even music, opera, and dance).
Beckett’s work in the theatre therefore traverses and encompasses mul­
tiple interpretive discourses, multiple lifelines really, enriching our sense
of how a ‘play’ searches for meaning, affect and effect, and how a given
staging justifies its significance in an ever-expansive definition of ‘transla­
tion in performance’. In the comments that follow, I would like to outline
the several ways in which it seeks to do so, and the problems it is likely to
encounter along the way.
132 Enoch Brater

PLAY TEXTS, PROTO-TEXTS, AND

PRETEXTS FOR PERFORMANCE

Where will the producer of a Beckett play locate a workable text before
imposing his or her mark on the stage? As Stan Gontarski has recently
noted, the most pressing question here might very well be “which Becket­
tian text?”:

In the theatre especially the question can be reframed to ask whether

the Beckett text is located on the page or on the stage . . . Either answer
suggests multiplicity. Differences exist between not only French and
English texts of what [is] presumably the same work but among English
texts; and such dissimilarity is simultaneously astounding and inexpli­
cable. Currently two major and different texts for Waiting for Godot
in English, one American and one British, are available, but several
versions of the play in various stages of correction and revision are also
circulating . . . (2010)

Therefore, Gontarski asks, “Is ‘the Beckett text’ the one we happen to
pull off the shelf?” (ibid). In fact this is what has been happening histori­
cally. After Godot, Gontarski further argues, rehearsals would work as a
performative extension of the creative mechanism which on occasion would
allow Beckett himself to enjoy an inclusive and refined vision of the original
publication (ibid.). Even when such interventions seem minimal, as when
the prepublication text for Footfalls specifies seven paces for its ghostly
female figure—changed to nine when the playwright directed Billie White-
law at the Royal Court Theatre on Sloane Square in London in 1976—the
frame, the framework, the choreography, and the blocking—as well as the
possible references—change radically (seven and nine are both prime and
competing targets for critical interpretation, if you like that sort of thing).
The allusive texture falls where it may, but only as a consequence of specific
directorial choices made in rehearsal about what looked best from a practi­
cal point of view. Performance of a Beckett text—as opposed to “the Beck­
ett text”—suddenly reveals itself to be alive, ongoing, and negotiable, this
despite the fact that the Beckett estate likes to think it has a lock on it:

Directing himself would allow [Beckett] to implement and refine a per­

sonal creative vision, for as Roger Blin [the first director of Godot]
noted: ‘He had ideas about his play [in this case Fin de partie] that
made it a little difficult to act. At fi rst, he looked on his play as a kind
of musical score. When a word occurred or was repeated, when Hamm
called Clov, Clov should always come in the same way every time, like
a musical phrase coming from the same instrument with the same vol­
ume.’ As Beckett evolved from being first a playwright, then an adviser
on productions of his work, then a director taking full charge of its
 Beckett, ‘Thou Art Translated’ 133
staging, the board grew to be an extension of his writing desk, a plat­
form for self-collaboration through which he reinvented his own theat­
rical output in more decidedly performative terms. (ibid.)1

TRANSLATION TO PERFORMANCE

“My texts are a mess”, Beckett very rightly observed (ibid.). That “mess” is
even more in evidence when they move out of English or French into other
European languages. Yet here I think the word migration may be much
more to the point. In any instance of performance, theatre language, its
dialogue subject to translation and interpretation, can be a tricky sort of
chameleon. Adjustments are in order. And we might observe this, for exam­
ple, in one of the Spanish translations of Happy Days—in this instance
Los días felices—which intelligently substitutes Spanish classics for the
fractured allusions Winnie recalls in the original from a seemingly hap­
hazard library of English literary master-texts, most pointedly so to “Ode
on a Distant Prospect of Eton College” by Thomas Gray. Translators have
always taken such liberties when preparing a script for performance on a
different national stage. Hamlet, for example, has often been used in Eng­
lish-language productions of Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore in place of
the Sicilian melodrama-gone-wild so familiar to us as the special feature of
Pirandello’s play-within-a-play (if that is what it is). Anyone who explores
the rich history of Chekhov’s texts rendered into ‘playable’ English might be
able to observe a similar trajectory. In one of the most brutal exchanges in
all of Chekhov, Olga, the eldest of his ‘three sisters’ is chided by her upstart
sister-in-law, Natasha, for allowing an aged servant to remain with the
family. Here is the way various English-language playwrights have ‘sliced’
the same speech and translated Natasha’s rebuke:

What use is she? Why is she here? She’s . . . why is she here . . . ? She’s
a peasant, she shouldn’t be in the house. She should be in the country
somewhere. What are you playing at . . . ? A house must run on order.
Like a machine. Do you understand? It cannot have a superfluous part.
(David Mamet)

She’s absolutely useless. The woman’s about as useful in the house

as a field hand; she should be put out to pasture . . . that’s what you
get for being so easy on everyone. I like a house to be run with some
semblance of order, at least; you can’t have people doing nothing.
(Lanford Wilson)

She’s no use here. She’s a peasant—she ought to be living in her village

. . . It’s just pampering them! I like a little order in the house! There
shouldn’t be people in the house we don’t need. (Michael Frayn)
134 Enoch Brater
She’s of no use here. She’s a peasant. She should be in a village some­
where . . . Why spoil them? I like order in a house. I can’t have people
just taking up room. (Richard Nelson)

Good for nothing, that’s what she is here. A peasant. She should be
back living in the sticks. Why spoil her, why? Give me order about
the house. There’s no point in having useless people around. (Frank
McGuinness)

She’s no use anymore! She’s a peasant and that’s where she belongs—
out in the bogs! You have her spoiled! If this house is ever to be run
properly, we cannot carry old baggage like that. (Brian Friel)2

In these variations six prominent writers for the contemporary theatre

display their concern with inventing and developing a flexible line that works
on an American (Mamet and Wilson), a British (Frayn and the US-born
Nelson), or an Irish (Frayn and McGuinness) stage. Enhancing the line,
more true to its spirit than its letter, such reconfigurations reduce literalism
in the theatre to its secondary importance, though as these illustrations
show it never seems to fall completely by the wayside. Only the bilingual
Frayn was working from the original Russian; yet in each case stage lan­
guage has its eye on the practical application of access and performativity.
As does Beckett in his resonant opening line for En attendant Godot:
the eminently speakable “Rien à faire”. This adapts itself very nicely into
Italian and Spanish (they are, after all, closely related Romance languages,
hence the conversational “Niente da fare” and “Nada que hacer”). Curi­
ously enough, in some other languages rien à faire can be just as colloquial:
modern Hebrew, for one, renders this as kein molosot, an everyday throw­
away line. But Waiting for Godot’s English is another thing altogether.
“Nothing to be done”, the opener here, is somewhat awkwardly positioned
and poised; few English speakers would be likely to utter a formal phrase
like this when sitting on a mound and struggling to take off a boot. On
the other hand, the memorable English line does afford Beckett’s Vladimir
the opportunity to indulge himself in a key passage of hermeneutic re- and
self-fashioning: “I’m beginning to come round to that opinion. All my life
I’ve tried to put in from me, saying, Vladimir, be reasonable, you haven’t
yet tried everything. And I resumed the struggle”. The stage direction that
follows this is terrific: “He broods, musing on the struggle”.
Given the potential for dramatic irony Beckett’s variation on the open­
ing line so generously offers the actor playing in English (Vladimir’s rejoin­
der can be in production the first of many laugh lines)—I guess I’d have to
go with Estragon on this one: there is literally “nothing” else, especially in
terms of such a rich figurative stage possibility, that could be “done” quite
so well.
 Beckett, ‘Thou Art Translated’ 135

PERFORMANCE AS TRANSACTION

How have theatre practitioners reacted to such a vast panorama of tex­

tual instability? Those who worked closely with Beckett, of course, had the
advantage of a secure sounding board as they confronted the problematics
of authenticity in developing their own concept for staging his plays. Alan
Schneider, his most dependable American director, said that Beckett was
always a playwright of “essentials”. “My job”, he insisted, “is to make sure
the non-essentials don’t creep back in” (qtd. in Brater 1987: 4). Several
directors in Europe similarly relied on him as a frame of reference for their
own productions: Roger Blin in Paris, Antoni Libera in Poland, and Walter
Asmus in Germany, who assisted Beckett in 1984 at the Riverside Studios
in London when the playwright recreated in English the Warten auf Godot
he directed nine years earlier in Berlin. Actors, too, could take advantage
of his steadfast professional advice, and none more so than Billie White-
law. Her first role in a Beckett play cast her as one of the three figures in
Play stationed in identical gray urns, “Faces so lost to age and aspect as
to seem part of urns” (Beckett 147); later Beckett would direct her himself
in London as a Cockney-inflected Winnie in Happy Days. “Beckett blows
the notes”, she said during rehearsals for the world premiere production
of Rockaby, now under Alan Schneider’s direction, “I want them to come
out of me” (qtd. in Brater 1987: 174). Other practitioners may have been
less fortunate in their encounters with the playwright. When Jessica Tandy
traveled to Paris to ask Beckett how she might be able to find the motiva­
tion for creating Mouth’s tirade in Not I in another premiere by Schneider,
this one in New York at Lincoln Center in 1972, Beckett demurred: “I am
not unduly concerned with intelligibility. I hope the piece may work on the
nerves of the audience, not its intellect” (qtd. in Brater 1987: 23).
And yet the unique situation of working, however directly or indirectly,
with the playwright can be in this repertory as much a disincentive as a
privilege, at least as far as the creativity and inventiveness so much prized
in bringing any play to life. At times Beckett seems to have been aware
of this distraction himself, as when he admitted to his lead actress, after
putting her through her heavily restricted paces and posture in Footfalls,
“Oh Billie, what have I done to you?”.3 He deliberately chose to keep his
‘hands off’ her the next time around, when she prepared Rockaby with Sch­
neider in London and later in Buffalo, New York, where the play was fi rst
seen. Such discretion is, of course, case specific; in the theatre transactions
like this come with the territory. It might be hard to argue, for example,
that Brecht’s work with the Berliner Ensemble in any way undermined his
work’s huge potential for spontaneity in performance. But even here, Stre­
hler’s imaginative imprint on works like La buona anima di Setzuan for
the Piccolo Teatro in Milano may have been more Brechtian than Brecht
himself. Separating—liberating, really—the play from the playwright may
136 Enoch Brater
be, finally, when all is ‘said’ and ‘done’, the most distinctive and significant
act of translation itself.
That does not mean that in bringing Beckett to the stage we must neces­
sarily submit ourselves to the now rather tired discussion of ‘the death of
the author’, endorsing almost any concept on demand. Nor does it mean
that we must pay slavish attention to what we used to call the intention
behind ‘the intentional fallacy’. Beckett’s theatre lodges itself somewhere in
between the two, a fertile laboratory if there ever was one for examining
what may very well be our own preconceptions about just what constitutes
the potential for performance in any translation from stage to page. Per­
haps what Beckett brings to the table here is this: it is not what you put into
his play that matters, but rather what you take out of it.
Consider for a moment what I like to call, for want of a better term, ‘the
Godot variations’. In the midst of war and genocide Susan Sontag rein­
vented the play in the 1993 project she called Waiting for Godot in Sara­
jevo. “The tickets are free”, Erika Munk observed. “Everything else comes
at great cost” (qtd. in Brater 2011: 31). In the Haifa Municipal Theatre’s
highly controversial production, Lucky was cast as a subservient Israeli
Arab under the yoke of an imperial and insensitive right-wing master; dis­
tinctive Hebrew accents established marginalization, hierarchy, and char­
acterization all at once. In the United States the artist and activist Paul
Chan worked with the Classical Theatre of Harlem in New Orleans in
2007, presenting the play on various street corners in still-destroyed neigh­
bourhoods in Ward 9 after the failure of the Bush Administration to deal
with the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina. Years before, Brecht read the play,
too, for its harrowing political potential, where Lucky is the ill-treated pro­
letarian under the thumb of a merciless capitalist boss (back in Ireland
the self-important Pozzo might be recognized historically as the big-house
Protestant from “the manor” who wields a more than metaphorical whip).
Though Brecht did not live long enough to realize his ‘take’ on Godot, his
student, Peter Palitsch, later produced the play in the former Yugoslavia
with a sharp Brechtian overlay.
The history of Beckett in production therefore offers us much to think
about here in terms of variation, adaptation, and translation in perfor­
mance. JoAnne Akalaitis’s 1984 Endgame, which she sited in an aban­
doned New York subway car, may have gone too far in one direction, as
did Bruno Boussagol’s all-female Godot at the Avignon Festival in Aix,
one of several productions of the play attracted to cross-gender casting—
see Beckett’s well-known admonition: “Women don’t have prostates”
(qtd. in Brater 2011: 84–87). Deborah Warner may have also ‘lost’ sight of
the play when she imposed her own high-concept choreography on Fiona
Shaw in her controversial production of Footfalls at the National The­
atre in London. In Italy Giancarlo Cauteruccio’s production of L’ultimo
nastro di Krapp for Teatro Krypton in Scandicci, displaying two Krapps
and two recording machines, may have been similarly interventionist and
 Beckett, ‘Thou Art Translated’ 137
similarly misguided, as was Shivaun O’Casey’s Happy Days off -Broad­
way in New York. When she told the playwright that there were three
mounds on her stage, Beckett, who knew the director since childhood
(she is after all Sean O’Casey’s daughter) simply inquired, “What are
the other two for?” (qtd. in Brater 1987: 34; Brater 1994: iii). This is of
course the same playwright who advised “anyone who ignores my stage
directions” to proceed with something a whole lot more threatening than
caution: in the case of the Akalaitis Endgame at the American Repertory
Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he took legal action to try to shut
the production down (Ben-Zvi x).
And yet a too strict adherence to the grammar and geography of any ver­
sion of the written text may be just as deadly. For the play’s interests may
be quite different from the playwright’s. “No colour, no colour”, Beckett
kept repeating to his actor during rehearsals (in this case Whitelaw), even as
the line seemed determined to assert its independence by fi nding a reading
of its own. Asked by Jessica Tandy if the woman in the field mentioned in
Not I, “face in the grass”, had been raped, Beckett said he was surprised by
the question; he thought not (Brater 2003: 107). His text may think other­
wise. And when Beckett directed Krapp’s Last Tape, he omitted the figure’s
purple nose and “Surprising pair of dirty white boots, size ten at least,
very narrow and pointed”, as well as the vaudeville business of slipping on
a banana peel as being far too broadly comic. It is surely debatable whether
this opened up the play or shut the contrast in its various performance tex­
tures down (whether a playwright is the best director for his own work is
a highly questionable enterprise in the first place—though in Beckett’s case
it was always fascinating to see what he was up to). Innovative—but also
loyal—theatre practitioners might be puzzled by the playwright’s uneasi­
ness about performing Not I on a double-bill with That Time—he called
the latter “the brother” to the other (Brater 2003: 110); the fact that they
are so closely related in tone and mood and gesture, fragment and form,
might very well provide the rationale for doing so in the first place. In Ber­
lin Beckett himself was puzzled, too, when he saw what Mabou Mines, on
tour from America, had done with his prose piece The Lost Ones (Knowl­
son 555–56, 608), though most Beckett specialists continue to count this
the most successful translation of any of his works from prose fiction to
compelling drama. The title here would surely give any translator pause:
The Lost Ones in English takes its reader to a very different place from the
original Le dépeupleur, based as it is on a spectacular line from Lamar­
tine’s Méditations poétiques: “Un seul être vous manqué et tout est dépeu­
plé” (Brater 1994: 99).
“Thou art translated” in the theatre in spite of yourself, as Jan Kott so
wittily but also so cogently observed some time ago in The Bottom Trans­
lation, playing as he did with a famous trope from A Midsummer Night’s
Dream. “It’s inevitable” (there’s Godot for you all over again). Beckett’s
Winnie may have been surprised to find herself trapped in a Mittel-European
138 Enoch Brater
drawing room, buried up to her waist and then up to her neck in a pile of
heavy Empire furniture in the National Theatre of Prague’s highly imagi­
native undertaking; in Strehler’s landmark production, she may have been
equally shocked to find herself speaking so frantically and frenetically in
Italian, “submerged by the words”, all of this through Giulia Lazzarini’s
remarkable voice (Lazzarini 417). Was Beckett’s doomsday personality in
Eh Joe likewise taken aback when he found himself summarily transported
from a television screen to the mixed-media (in)action of Atom Egoyan’s
seamless stage adaptation starring Michael Gambon? Mark Rylance simi­
larly subjected Hamm to a new discipline for movement and meaning
following Simon McBurney’s stage directions for Endgame, which relied
heavily on a number of Complicite techniques (N.B., in French Hamm is
“Am” anyway, any way you try to say it—“Make sense who may”; Beckett
316). Robert Scanlan made something quite different of the television play
Ghost Trio when in Strasbourg; he sat his audience down in a makeshift
recording studio to see the play filmed live, in living colour, just as we
watched it transmitted simultaneously on two elevated black-and-white TV
screens. Louis le Broquy’s somber evocation of the lyricism in Waiting for
Godot in his set for the Gate Theatre in Dublin provided the audience with
a picture of a haunting world and its fading afterimage, one that lasts for­
ever. Each of these migrations—in language, in textual variation, in design,
in national theatre tradition—is an ongoing journey to find the play’s voice
in the many different ways the ‘praxis’ of theatre understands a term like
translation. Yes, Beckett, “thou art [indeed] translated”; but always with
the “helping hand” (Beckett 23) of those self-sustaining interpretive strate­
gies that constitute the lifeline of any and every performance. How it does
so, when it does so, and if it does so is always fated to be—what else?—the
Beckett ‘bottom’ line.

NOTES

1. See also Gontarski (2009).

2. For these variations on a speech from Three Sisters, see Gold (5, 22).
3. For the actress’s collaborations with the playwright, see Whitelaw.

WORKS CITED

Beckett, Samuel (1984) The Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett, New York:
Grove Press.
Ben-Zvi, Linda (ed.) (1990) Women in Beckett: Performance and Critical Perspec­
tives, Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Brater, Enoch (1987) Beyond Minimalism: Beckett’s Late Style in the Theater,
New York: Oxford University Press.
(1994) The Drama in the Text: Beckett’s Late Fiction, New York: Oxford
University Press.
 Beckett, ‘Thou Art Translated’ 139
(2003) The Essential Samuel Beckett, London: Thames & Hudson.
(2011) Ten Ways of Thinking about Samuel Beckett: The Falsetto of Rea­
son, London: Methuen.
Gold, Sylviane (1997) “Today’s Big-Name Playwrights Are Busy Translating the
Past’s”, The New York Times, 3 August.
Gontarski, Stanley E. (2010) Abstract for his presentation at the conference “Back
to the Beckett Text”, University of Gdansk, Sopot (6–10 May 2010).
(2009) “Revising Himself: Samuel Beckett and the Art of Self-Collabora­
tion”, in Anna McMullan and S. E. Wilmer (eds) Refl ections on Samuel Beckett:
A Centenary Celebration, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 153–72.
Knowlson, James (1996) Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett, New York:
Simon & Schuster.
Kott, Jan (1987) The Bottom Translation: Marlow and Shakespeare and the Car­
nival Tradition, Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Lazzarini, Giulia (2009) “Remembering Happy Days”, Angela Gibbon (trans.), in
Daniela Guardamagna and Rossana M. Sebellin (eds) The Tragic Comedy of
Samuel Beckett, Rome: Editori Laterza.
Whitelaw, Billie (1995) Billie Whitelaw . . . Who He?, New York: St. Martin’s
Press.
9 The Pirandellian mise-en-scène
and the Vanishing Translation
Sharon Wood

Drama, as an art form, is a constant process of translation: from

original concept to script (when there is one), to producer/director’s
interpretation, to contribution by designer and actor/actress, to visual
and/or aural images to audience response . . . there may be a number
of subsidiary processes of translation at work. (Gostand 1)

Drama, by definition, is the story of conflict. (Zatlin 1)

The object of theatrical semiotics is the performance, or the mise-en­

scène, not the literary text. (Eco 108)

Luigi Pirandello’s 1908 essay, “Illustratori, attori e traduttori” [Illustrators,

Actors and Translators],1 enumerates and illustrates the manifold ways in
which an author’s intentional creation can be betrayed, traduced and nulli­
fied. Taking an idealist position which drives a hierarchical wedge between
text and performance, Pirandello describes the creative act as simultaneous
thought and expression which sees creator and character as indivisible, insep­
arable, and to this extent unperformable and untranslatable: “l’espressione
unica, che non può esser che quella, propria cioè a quel dato personaggio in
quella data situazione; parole, espressioni che non s’inventano, ma che nas­
cono, quando l’autore si sia veramente immedesimato con la sua creatura”
[The single expression, which can be nothing other than what it is, in other
words it is absolutely right for that given character in that given situation;
words and expressions which are not invented but which are born, when
the author has truly identified with his creature] (Pirandello 1960: 214).
Illustrators seek a specific dramatic moment and depict it in a reductive
manner destined to disappoint in its difference from the reader/viewer’s
own imaginative evocation, while the actor’s failures are manifold. The
actor, the “terzo elemento imprescindibile” [the third element we cannot
do without] (ibid. 215) inserts him- or herself between the monogamous
chasteness of writer and character “nella materialità della rappresentazi­
one” [in the material moment of representation] (ibid.). While the actor’s
inalienable body can to some extent be made-up, disguised, covered, in
DOI: 10.4324/9780203073506-10
 The Pirandellian mise-en-scène and the Vanishing Translation 141
order to approximate to the author’s own aesthetic imagination, and its
actions can be disciplined in mimesis of authorial intent, the scène of the
actor’s craft, the limitations of the theatrical stage, can only ever gesture as
caricature to the superior, originating thought. Even with a great actor who
succeeds in divesting himself of his own individuality and entering into the
character he or she is playing, “l’incarnazione piena e perfetta è ostacolata
da ragioni di fatto irrimediabili” [reasons which are irremediable stand in
the way of a full and perfect incarnation] (ibid.), leaving the dramatic writer
“torcendosi come a un supplizio, per il dispetto, per la rabbia, per il dolore
di non veder rispondere la traduzione in realtà materiale, che dev’essere per
forza altrui, alla concezione e a quell’esecuzione ideale che son sue, tutte
sue” [writhing as if under torture, for anger, for rage, for the pain of seeing
that the translation into material reality, which is of necessity by another,
in no way corresponds to the ideal conception and execution which are his,
all his] (ibid. 216; my emphasis).
Pirandello is pragmatist enough to be aware that the actor, too, may be
suffering a similar anguish, “l’attore che vede e sente altrimenti e considera
a sua volta come una sopraffazione, come un incubo, la volontà e la visione
dell’autore . . . Anche per lui, insomma, l’esecuzione bisogna che balzi viva
dalla concezione” [the actor who sees and feels differently and in his turn
considers the will and vision of the author to be an abuse, a nightmare . . .
After all for him, too, the execution has to spring into life from the concep­
tion] (ibid. 216). We have here a foretaste of the tensions and contradictions
engendered by dramatic performance made so manifest in Sei personaggi
in cerca d’autore [Six Characters in Search of an Author], Pirandello’s mas­
terpiece of 1921.
With regard to linguistic translation, Pirandello concurs with Benedetto
Croce’s statement of the impossibility of translation. All translation neces­
sarily incurs loss, diminution, distortion: expression remains exclusively
bound to the original (Croce 213–14). Croce’s view is thus extended by
Pirandello to both the illustrator and the actor. “Ora, che fa l’attore?”
[What is it the actor does?] asks Pirandello:

Fa proprio il contrario di ciò che ha fatto il poeta. Rende, cioè, più reale
e tuttavia men vero il personaggio creato dal poeta, gli toglie tanto,
cioè, di quella verità ideale, superiore, quanto più gli dà di quelle realtà
materiale, comune; e lo fa men vero perché lo traduce nella materialità
fittizia e convenzionale della scena.

[He does exactly the opposite of what the poet has done. That is, he
makes the character created by the poet more real and yet less true,
divesting him of much of his ideal, superior truth inasmuch as he
bestows upon him common, material reality; and he makes him less
true because he translates him into the fictitious and conventional
materiality of the stage.] (1960: 218)
142 Sharon Wood
A similar approach is taken with linguistic translation, which for Piran­
dello, as for the idealist Croce, signifies less by semantic equivalence than
by its own formal qualities. Recalling Dante’s conviction in the Convivio
that any translation inevitably sacrifices all sweetness and harmony, 2 Piran­
dello anticipates later reception theories by placing the viewer/reader, too,
in the position of translator: the act of reading, including that of critics, or
of rethinking the written text becomes an act of (mis)interpretation.
Pirandello thus, in this essay, posits an irrevocable dichotomy between the
creative act and its translation onto the stage: “Altro è il drama, opera d’arte
già espresso e vivente nella sua idealità essenziale e caratteristica; altro è la rap­
presentazione scenica, traduzione o interpretazione di essa, copia più o meno
somigliante che vive in una realtà materiale e pur fittizia e illusoria” [The
drama is one thing, a work of art already expressed and living in its essential
and characteristic ideality; the theatrical representation is quite another thing,
a translation or an interpretation of it, a better or worse likeness which lives
in a reality which is material and yet fictitious and illusory] (224).
While in his subsequent writing Pirandello “continuously insisted on the
validity and necessity of the written text” (Santeramo 39), as both writer
and increasingly as theatre director he found himself facing an unresolved
dilemma, caught between “three aesthetic domains: the artistic elaboration
of the text by the author, the interpretation of the director, and the inter­
pretation on the actor” (ibid. 40).

Il Teatro non è archeologia. Il non rimettere le mani nelle opere antiche,

per aggiornarle e renderle adatte a nuovo spettacolo, significa incuria,
non già scrupolo degno di rispetto. Il teatro vuole questi rimaneggia­
menti, e se n’è giovato incessantemente, in tutte le epoche in cui era più
vivo. Il testo resta integro per chi se lo vorrà rileggere in casa, per sua
cultura; chi vorrà divertircisi andrà a teatro, dove gli sarà ripresentato
da tutte le parti vizze, rinnovato nelle espressioni non più correnti, ria­
dattato ai gusti dell’oggi.
E perché questo è legittimo?
Perché l’opera d’arte, in teatro, non è più il lavoro di uno scrittore
. . . ma un atto di vita da creare, momento per momento, sulla scena,
col concorso del pubblico.

[Theatre is not archaeology. Not to lay hands on ancient texts, to bring

them up to date and make them suitable for new productions is a form of
neglect rather than a scruple which should demand respect. The theatre
demands such manipulations and indeed has had constant recourse to
them in every age when it was most vibrant. The text remains intact for
those who wish to read it at home for their own personal culture. Those
who want to enjoy it will go to the theatre where it will be offered with
its old wrinkles smoothed out, its out-of-date expressions renewed, and
readapted to more contemporary taste.
 The Pirandellian mise-en-scène and the Vanishing Translation 143
And why is this legitimate?
Because in the theatre the work of art is no longer the work of a
writer . . . but an instance of life to be created, moment by moment, on
the stage, with the complicity of the public.] (Pirandello 1936: 25)

In sanctioning not only theatrical translation but root and branch adapta­
tion, Pirandello is not so much disavowing his former views but fi nessing and
complicating them. It is perhaps no accident that his essay on illustrators and
translators was written the same year as his seminal essay on “L’umorismo”
[Humour] which posits a dark, contradictory humour based on the ‘avverti­
mento del contrario’ [the realisation of the contrary] and the ‘sentimento del
contrario’ [feeling of the contrary]. His masterpiece of 1921, Sei personaggi
in cerca d’autore, in which theatre becomes translation bodied forth by the
actors, the director, and the audience, enacts the contradictory status of the
theatrical event, the hiatus between text and performance.
Six Characters begins with a stage empty except for a stagehand prepar­
ing for a rehearsal. Actors arrive and after bickering, dancing, and gossip­
ing begin to rehearse a play by Pirandello, Il gioco delle parti [The Rules
of the Game]. Their reluctant struggle to understand the play is interrupted
by the arrival of six Characters, differentiated in every way—clothing,
demeanour, purpose—from the Actors themselves. They declare their
desire to have their story acted out on stage (for their own author has aban­
doned them) and begin to tell their tale, each clamouring for their version
to be heard: for each Character, performance is the path to signification, to
having their interpretation hailed as dominant truth.
At first furious, on hearing fragments of the passionately dramatic tale
of abandonment, desire, and possible incest recounted by the Characters,
the Director is persuaded to allow a rehearsal and a simultaneous script­
ing of the action, turning himself from Director into Author. In the central
scene of the play the Characters finally act out their first story fragment,
which takes place in the shop of Madama Pace, who gives the Mother sew­
ing work and encourages the Stepdaughter to prostitute herself in order to
remedy the Mother’s poor work, and earn a little money. The tone is hushed
as the Stepdaughter negotiates with the highly theatricalised Madama Pace
and then meets with her client, none other than the Father himself. Squalid
drama modulates into tragedy in the final section of the play: the tensions
between the Characters are further heightened and one of the children,
unsupervised, drowns in the stage fountain, while the other shoots himself
with a gun. The Director, and with him the audience, are left puzzling as to
whether what has happened is indeed ‘reality’, or just ‘fiction’.
As part of Pirandello’s ‘theatre within theatre’ trilogy,3 Six Characters
itself reinterprets and translates onto the modern stage (indeed, arguably
creates the modern stage by retranslating) a well-established theatrical
technique. Shakespeare, Corneille, Fletcher, Lope de Vega, Goethe, and
Strindberg had confined the confrontation of two worlds and two realities,
144 Sharon Wood
stage and audience, to the stage itself: Pirandello’s step was to bring the
audience itself, as it were, onto the stage. No longer merely the recipient
of the drama, passive spectator, Pirandello requires his audience actively
to decode a non-existent message, to translate a constantly vanishing text.
Commenting on the extent to which he moves on from the modernism of a
writer such as Ibsen, Oscar Büdel notes that Pirandello

imposed upon the art form of theatre itself these principles of analytic
decomposition which Ibsen was still content to apply to human psy­
chology. Ibsen’s destruction of the illusion of an intact and indissoluble
human personality had occurred in a play and on a stage which, on the
whole, hardly differed from those of the preceding ‘illusionist’ period.
By going one step further, by imposing and practicing these principles
upon the hitherto unified whole of the art form of theatre itself, Piran­
dello destroyed—always within his humorous creed—the form and
structure of the play itself. (80)

Pirandello’s purpose in the elimination of fi nal signification, the non­

existence of an originating text within the play, the abandonment of one
script and the failure to complete another, the perpetual shift between dif­
ferent levels, or we might say different languages of the theatre, is, according
to Büdel, a “categorical rejection of one of the hitherto sacred character­
istics of drama, its intentional finality” (81). Pirandello’s play points to its
own absence of finalising meaning, the discourse of the absurd in theatrical
garb and transposed from stage to auditorium.
The central scene of the play lays bare the radical disjunction between
script and performance,4 gesturing to the authorial dissociation discussed
in Pirandello’s “Illustratori, attori e traduttori” as Father and Stepdaugh­
ter fail to recognize themselves in the Actors, foregrounding the idealistic
impossibility of a perfect translation from thought to stage, from theory
to praxis, from author to actor. The Father and Director, during the pre­
vious interval, have sketched out a plot. While this scene explores and
exploits Pirandello’s irritation with the limitations of conventional theatre,
its subservience to bourgeois morality, and its anxiety for seemliness, it
also shines a meta-ethical light not only on theatre itself, the “esigenze del
teatro” [requirements of the theatre] (ibid. 82) as the Director would have
it, but the business of translation itself (ibid. 82).
The Characters begin to perform their story fragment, summoning up
Madama Pace for the purpose, a character whose hybrid linguistic presence
(Italian and Spanish in the original, English and Spanish in most transla­
tions) serves as metonym for the hybrid essence of stage presence as creative
act. As Umberto Eco comments:

A human body, along with its conventionally recognizable proper­

ties, surrounded by or supplied with a set of objects, inserted within
 The Pirandellian mise-en-scène and the Vanishing Translation 145
a physical space, stands for something else to a reacting audience. In
order to do so, it has been framed within a sort of performative situa­
tion that establishes that it has to be taken as a sign. From this moment
on, the curtain is raised. (117)

The intersection of Characters and Actors performing and reperforming

(almost) the same script is a master class in multiple meanings and genres:
the dramatic intensity of the Characters is displaced by the humorous bou­
levard romp of the Actors, while the Director, who himself takes to the
stage in order to illustrate how he wishes the pièce to be performed, “con
un po’ di leggerezza” [with a little lightness] (89), adds an additional layer
of Hollywood suaveness.
Watching the Actor who is to play his part, the Father comments, “creda
che è una sofferenza orribile per noi che siamo così come ci vede, con questo
corpo, con questa figura” [Believe me, it’s a terrible thing for us, when we
are as you see us, with this body, this shape] (74). The Director’s reassur­
ance that make-up will disguise difference only adds another layer of mas­
querade to the question of performance as translation, and translation as
performance. The Father tries again to express his unease: “Sarà piuttosto
com’egli interpreterà ch’io sia, com’egli mi sentirà—se mi sentirà—e non
com’io dentro di me mi sento” [Rather, it’s how he will interpret me, how
he will feel me to be—if he feels this—and not how I feel inside myself]
(75). The Actors employ a standard translation strategy of emendation
and clarification, as stage directions indicate: the First Actor, “rifacendo
il gesto del Padre, di spiare cioè sotto al cappellino, ma poi esprimendo
ben distintamente prima la compiacenza e poi il timore” [repeating the
Father’s gesture, but then expressing distinctly first his pleasure then his
fear] (91–92). The iterated translation of the original leads to fundamental
loss, the baffled frustration of the Characters experienced by the audience
as humour, as tragedy mutates into a game of Chinese whispers.
The written script of the original play being rehearsed by the Actors,
Pirandello’s own The Rules of the Game, is discarded, but will be resumed,
we are told at the end of the play, the following day, despite its (somewhat
tongue in cheek) unintelligibility. The play fragment, the theatre within the
theatre of the Characters’ own (paradoxical) performance of their own per­
petual play, can be seen as the opposite of what David Johnston approaches
as “translator-practitioner”, “the text as written script and encrypted per­
formance” (13). In Pirandello’s play there is no written text, other than
the one which the prompter begins to note as the play within the play is
performed, and which the Director turned wishful author will pen at a
later stage; if the Characters themselves embody encrypted performance,
the theatre on the other hand can (only) offer “a diaspora of both form
and meaning” (ibid.). In their declared sketching out of the plot during the
interval, the Father has prevailed upon the Director to display his remorse,
to enact the mask which Pirandello’s stage directions suggest he should
146 Sharon Wood
wear, while the Stepdaughter wishes to perform her mask of vengeance by
publicly exposing his shame in wishing to continue in his role as brothel
client despite her mourning clothes and her ambiguous relationship to him.
The Characters embody, desire, and perform different moments, different
perspectives, different stories, even within a single fragment, which are then
multiplied and mutated through translation and performance.
Pirandello the essayist might agree with Samuel Beckett that the perfect
play is one in which there are no actors, only text, but as playwright and
theatre practitioner Pirandello must take account both of actors and of
audience. Six Characters marks this frontier between idealism and prag­
matism, where the pragmatic is raised to the level of the philosophical. The
absence of authorial signification, the generation of multiple meanings with
each transposition upon the stage, and the situatedness of the spectator
rather than writer as interpreter, decoder, and translator of a constantly
shifting message, mean the performance becomes metonym for translation,
and translation metaphor for performance. Rabkin’s comments about read­
ers and texts are pertinent also to the spectator charged with decoding the
theatrical message:

Meaning is created by the dialogue between reader and text. The act
of interpretation is not subsidiary to the production of meaning: it is
central. The text cannot be read without mediation. The nature of this
mediation is disputed by Marxist, feminist, psychoanalytic critics, but
all accept the shift to what Bakhtin calls a ‘dialogic’ model of commu­
nication in which the interpretive process is primary. (156)

A brief consideration of Pirandello’s plays in translation further illus­

trates the point made by the text itself in performance. Six Characters is
one of the most performed and constantly retranslated plays of European
theatre, repeatedly ‘manipulated’, as Pirandello recommended for classic
plays, adapted, updated, altered by both professional and amateur com­
panies. Baines, Marinetti, and Perteghella comment that translation is “a
paradigm for the exploration of blurred boundaries between national dra­
matic traditions, theatre histories and the set roles of theatre makers” (1).
When this play is translated into a different cultural, linguistic, and theat­
rical context, the openness of meaning which is itself the meaning of the orig­
inal, takes on further implications. A 2009 production in the UK by Rupert
Goold and Ben Power (originally for the Minerva Theatre, Chichester, and
subsequently transferred to the Gielgud Theatre London), for example, has
the characters come not to a theatre but to a TV editing suite, in which a
drama-documentary about assisted suicide is in post-production. The adap­
tation thus gestures to contemporary social concern, situating the action
within the present day, while the rhythms and speech patterns alert us to the
source text and culture: thus the production operates a temporal, technical,
 The Pirandellian mise-en-scène and the Vanishing Translation 147
and thematic shift, and the spectator is alerted to the doubleness of the play’s
identity as original text and translation/adaptation. A family, the Characters,
driven by sexual aberration and guilt, persuade the Producer (rather than
Director, in this technologically more collaborative age) to turn her camera
onto them. The final scenes of the play mark an even more dramatic depar­
ture from Pirandello’s text, as the Producer is herself drawn into the gap
between reality and illusion and tormented by these same Characters, filmed,
for the audience who remain in the theatre, as she seeks to escape, ending up
in the theatre next door and onto a different stage altogether. Extraordinary
stage craft perhaps supplants the philosophical questioning of the original
text, but this multimedia performance reinterprets in its complex technical
theatricality the hybridity inherent in Pirandello’s text. A play which regret­
fully highlights the limits of the theatre seems to challenge producers and
directors to elaborate solutions: we might recall that Pitőeff’s early produc­
tion in Paris, which launched Pirandello to an international audience, had the
Characters arrive on the stage by means of a lift.
Pirandello’s stage directions, suggesting that the Characters be masked,
both underlines their essential difference from the Actors and points to
the theatrical tradition from which his theatre emerges. A comparison
of two film versions of this play, Giorgio De Lullo’s 1965 version (with
Romolo Valli, Rossella Falk, and Carlo Giuffré in lead roles) and the
American version of 1976 directed by Stacy Keach (with Julie Adams
and Will Albert), illustrates the extent to which theatrical, literary, and
social traditions explicitly and implicitly affect performance. De Lullo’s
version, filmed as performed in an empty theatre where the spectators
are supplanted by the viewers of the film, is deeply rooted in Comme­
dia dell’Arte tradition: the theatricality of the performance is underlined
from the start with the opening of the stage curtains, and the physicality
of the theatre is constantly foregrounded. In black and white, it none­
theless portrays the whole gamut of profound emotion through facial
expression, gesture, movement, and use of space. Stacy Keach’s version
in which the domineering Director is transformed into a rather more
transparently ineffectual English gentleman (perhaps a historical politi­
cal point), and the Stepdaughter is played by a black actress in colour­
blind casting, emerges from the much more naturalistic, realist tradition
of Anglo-American theatre. The obsessively dramatic impact of the Ital­
ian version is lost in a performance which seeks to move away from per­
ceived melodrama and engage instead in more moderate rational debate,
where declamation cedes to a more modulated delivery. Moreover, in
this performance, the rehearsal of The Rules of the Game gives way to a
rehearsal of Shakespeare’s Hamlet—a gesture of domestication, in that
the play refers to the theatrical and cultural history of its new language,
but also perhaps, in this context, a further implicit moment of cultural
revolt against English imperialism.
148 Sharon Wood
Regarding translation for the theatre, Johnston comments that:

translation is not a filter between past and present, for the cultural
other and the located self; it is potentially a prism that releases, that
fi res off in different directions a series of intercultural and intertemporal
moments that challenge and enrich spectator reception and experience.
In that way, the translated play comes into its own; by not masquer­
ading as a piece of English theatre manqué, by asserting its newness
and originality in every major production, the translated play begins to
stake a claim for its own special place in the theatre today. What trans­
lation can do most powerfully in this regard is to promote hybridity,
a hybrid text that simultaneously moves between and across different
histories and geographies, locating and uprooting the historical and
cultural imagination of the spectator in a way that seeks to overcome
the twin separations implied by aloofness and subjection. (19)

Translations of Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore are, of necessity and

simultaneously, adaptations. More than the essential updating of a play
which has the lead actress rushing in late clutching her lapdog (her designer
shopping bag, her computer . . . ), this play, so deeply imbricated with the
multiple (im)possibilities of theatrical performance, seeks in both spectator
and each subsequent producer or director a renewed enactment of hybridity
which will foreground the impossible act of translation itself.
Pirandello concludes his 1908 essay on the impossibility of translation
by claiming that the only original work of art to be seen in the theatre is
an improvised Commedia dell’Arte sketch: “Se vogliamo trarre le ultime
conseguenze di questa indagine estetica, se non vogliamo una traduzione
più o meno fedele, ma l’originale, veramente a teatro, ecco la commedia
dell’arte, uno schema embrionale e la libera creazione dell’attore” [If we
want to draw out the final consequences of this aesthetic inquiry, if we
don’t want, in the theatre, a more or less faithful translation, but the origi­
nal, we should turn to Commedia dell’Arte, an embryonic sketch and the
free creation of the actor] (224).
Such works are dismissed in 1908 as trivial because they are improvised,
without “quella semplificazione e concentrazione ideale, caratteristica
d’ogni opera d’arte superiore” [that ideal simplification and concentration
which characterizes every superior work of art] (ibid.). But in 1921, with
Sei personaggi, the focus has shifted: an embryonic sketch is offered to the
spectator who must creatively perform his or her own translation and inter­
pretation of the non-existent text: the failure of translation becomes itself
the subject of the play. The myriad subsequent productions of Pirandello’s
play, glimpses of whose ingenious multiplicity can be found in the modern
technical shift from theatre to television to computer, are witness to the
continued preoccupation with translation as performance itself.
 The Pirandellian mise-en-scène and the Vanishing Translation 149

NOTES
1. Translations are mine.
2. “E però sappia ciascuno, che nulla cosa per legame musaico armonizzata si
può dalla sua loquela in altra trasmutare, sanza rompere tutta sua dolcezza e
armonia” (Alighieri 52).
3. The other plays in this trilogy are Ciascuno a suo modo [Each in His Own
Way] (1918) and Stasera si recita a soggetto [Tonight We Improvise] (1928).
4. “il copione è in noi, signore” [the script is within us], as the Father tells the
Director (Pirandello 1984: 32).

WORKS CITED

Alighieri, Dante (1966) Il convivio, Bologna: Riccardo Pàtron.

Baines, Roger, Cristina Marinetti, and Manuela Perteghella (eds) (2011) Staging
and Performing Translation, Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Büdel, Oscar (1966) Pirandello, London: Bowes and Bowes.
Croce, Benedetto (1912) Estetica come scienza dell’espressione e linguistica
generale: Teoria e storia, Bari: Guis. Laterzi & Figli.
Eco, Umberto (March 1977) “Semiotics of Theatrical Performance”, The Drama
Review 21 (1): 107–17.
Gostand, Reba (1980) “Verbal and Non-verbal Communication: Drama as Trans­
lation”, in Ortrun Zuber-Skerritt (ed.) The Languages of Theatre: Problems in
the Translation and Transposition of Drama, Oxford and New York: Pergamon
Press, 1–9.
Johnston, David (2011) “Metaphor and Metonymy: The Translator-Practitioner’s
Visibility”, in Roger Baines, Cristina Marinetti, and Manuela Perteghella (eds)
Staging and Performing Translation, Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Mac­
millan, 11–30.
Pirandello, Luigi (1960) “Illustratori, attori e traduttori”, in Luigi Pirandello:
Saggi, poesie, scritti vari, Milano: Mondadori, 207–24.
(1936) “Introduction”, in Silvio D’Amico, Storia del teatro italiano, Milano:
Mondadori, 4–28.
(2006) “L’umorismo”, in Pirandello: Saggi e interventi, Milano: Monda­
dori, 779–948.
(1984) Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore, Milano: Mondadori.
Rabkin, Gerard (1985) “Is There a Text on This Stage? Theatre/Authorship/Inter­
pretation”, Performing Arts Journal 9: 142–59.
Santeramo, Donato (1999) “Pirandello’s Quest for Truth: Sei personaggi in cerca
d’autore”, in Gian-Paolo Biasin and Manuela Gieri (eds) Luigi Pirandello: Con­
temporary Perspectives, Toronto: Toronto University Press, 37–51.
Zatlin, Phyllis (2005) Theatrical Translation and Film Adaptation: A Practitio­
ner’s View, Clevedon, Buffalo, and Toronto: Multilingual Matters.
10 Translator and Director
At Daggers Drawn?
Jean-Louis Besson

In his article “Le devoir de traduire”, director and translator Antoine Vitez
observed that “a good translation, being a genuine piece of literature,
already contains its mise en scène. The translation should ideally direct the
mise en scène, not be directed by it” (7; my translation).
Every translation, either good or bad, contains its own strategy of mise
en scène which, while complying with the author’s choices, also displays
its own choices. A translation is never a perfect copy, and like every other
text, it is a specific piece of writing; it cannot conceal its “fundamental oth­
erness in terms of language, time, space, sensibility, and knowledge, when
compared to the original” (Lassalle 12; my translation). Like the original, it
is linked to its context and to the specific production for which it has been
devised, and therefore it cannot claim absolute value when compared to it.
What makes it unique is the relevance of its choices and the quality of its
writing, both strongly depending upon the taste and the competence of the
translator at a specific moment in time.
The mise en scène itself is a form of translation and what makes it dif­
ferent from translation proper is that it is not interlingual but intersemi­
otic, since it concerns two different semiotic systems: a ‘generally written
medium’ (the ‘dramatic text’) and the stage, with its own particular lan­
guage. This is why the transfer from one to the other implies choices which
may conflict with those of the translator.
Each translation is only one of the possible texts that can be generated
out of the source text; it has a theatricality of its own and this makes it
liable to be rejected by the director since it may run counter to his or her
expectations. This is why some directors are convinced that each perfor­
mance requires a new translation. Both the translation and the performance
are only partial interpretations of the original text, both are offered to a
specific audience at a specific time, and these two conditions make them
similar on account of their equally ephemeral and unaccomplished nature.
All translation, however good it may be, is never eternally recyclable.
The idea that theatre translation is a specific activity aiming at adhering
to the original text while respecting the typically theatrical phrasing may
DOI: 10.4324/9780203073506-11
 Translator and Director 151
be assumed to have been born together with that of the mise en scène in the
first half of the nineteenth century, when the objective focus of the direc­
tor became responsible for the overall spectacle, orienting its meaning and
dealing with its various components: scenery, lighting, music, acting. At
that time the drama text acquired pride of place. In previous centuries pref­
erence was accorded to practices of ‘adaptations’, because what companies
mostly cared about was to adjust the plays to the audiences’ expectations.
It is not by accident, for instance, that until the eighteenth century in Ger­
many it was customary to play corrected versions of Shakespeare, where
Juliet married Romeo and Othello forgave Desdemona. But even the trans­
lations which, in those days, seemed to be most faithful to the original took
liberties which would be strongly condemned nowadays: they cut passages
that sounded too obscure or favoured clear meaning over the wording if it
appeared too complex. Yet, these translations had scenic advantages, since
they were not overburdened with what the audiences might have deemed
‘disturbing’. On the whole, theatre translators tended to privilege the liter­
ary qualities of the drama texts, convinced that a skilful and sophisticated
style would guarantee scenic progress.
Nowadays yet another shift of focus has clearly occurred in the the­
atre causing relative disregard for the literary qualities of the play texts
compared to their scenic potential. Directors often ask from translators a
script in which gestural and vocal rhythm is easily transferable to the stage,
which has led translators either to comply with the demands of specific
productions, or, on the contrary, to carry out their translations by taking
into account the literary and scenic specifics, beyond any detailed project
of mise en scène. In the following pages I will briefly discuss how each one
of these two tendencies has developed.

THE TRANSLATION FOR THE MISE EN SCÈNE

Some directors, eager to rely on a text which can support their dramaturgi­
cal choices—and suspicious of translators who may favour academic preci­
sion at the expense of the ‘imperative of the stage’—occasionally decide to
engage in translation themselves even if their interlingual competence is
often very poor. I will not linger on the inconsequentialities caused by these
practices and their comical effects, but will only bring the case of a direc­
tor who, in translating sketches by the comic Karl Valentin from Munich,
rendered “roter Radler” (which literally means ‘red cyclist’, a nickname
given to the delivery men who used to ride their bicycles across Munich)
as “un communiste à vélo” [a communist on the bicycle] (my translation).
Performances which in France rely on this kind of ‘translation’ normally
have a very French tone, since their authors, having only a vague idea of
the textual universe they are working on, tend to refer them back to their
own culture.
152 Jean-Louis Besson
Other directors, still wishing to translate the play text themselves, but
more aware of their own incompetence, may ask one or two usually anony­
mous specialists for a verbatim translation in order to later generate out
a fresh text for the performance. There are also cases of less scrupulous
directors who draw on one or more extant translations, often without the
translators’ consent, and produce a final version of their own, eventually
claiming exclusive authorship.
In both scenarios, these theatre practitioners normally misread profoundly
the play text they cope with, because, failing to access the source text, they
are unable to understand its materiality, energy, breath, gesture; in brief,
everything which is essential to theatre. A word-for-word translation, how­
ever good it may be, provides only information about textual meaning; a
palimpsest of translations, embellished with the director’s personal ideas,
destroys the style of each translator and, above all, of the same author.
Nonetheless, directors may also opt for a compromise solution, allow­
ing the translator to produce his or her own version according to his or
her own personal choices, as long as it is attuned to the director’s general
guidelines. The translation thus tends to remain close to the original, with­
out cuts, additions, actualizations, or anachronisms; with the translator’s
consent, the text is then revised and modified by the director and the actors
during rehearsal. In such cases the text which later goes into print is the
translator’s first version and does not coincide with the performed one,
which remains for internal use only. Thomas Ostermeier’s productions of
Ibsen’s Maison de poupée [A Doll’s House], Hedda Gabler, and Solness le
constructeur [The Master Builder] provide fit examples of this type of col­
laboration between translator and director.
For these three plays Ostermeier asked Hinrich Schmidt-Henkel to write
a first version which functioned as a source text. This first draft was not
neutral because it met the director’s requirement of a sober and clear lan­
guage, easily comprehensible by a modern audience. The idea was to com­
ply with Ostermeier’s desire to offer the same simple and effective language
which Ibsen had used in his time. Apart from this process of lingual actual­
ization, all other attempts to modernise the play were avoided. Here is what
Schmidt-Henkel wrote on this issue:

My aim with these new translations is to purge the text very carefully
and, at the same time, to remain as close to it as to recreate the inti­
macy characters have among them, without making it sound trite. His
own way, Ibsen did the same with the language of his time. Generally,
I am looking for an exceedingly sober, atemporal and clear way of
speaking. I believe that it is feasible and that one can remain very close
to Ibsen’s original. (my translation)1

Yet, whoever saw Ostermeier’s production had a totally different per­

ception of the language spoken by the characters. In Nora, for example,
 Translator and Director 153
the director moved the action to a loft in Berlin Mitte, and the characters
were transformed into well-off and trendy yuppies who today inhabit the
area.2 It should be noticed, however, that this kind of actualization was
not carried out primarily through language, but rather through the setting
materials (glass, teak, metal), the different stage levels (stairs, mezzanine),
and props, such as a large aquarium where exotic fish swam, as well as
through acting and gesture. This effect was achieved from the start, when
Helmer returns from his work in a bank, after buying a new digital camera:
he shows it to the au pair girl who is mopping the floor, takes a picture of
her and himself, and goes to his children’s room to take a picture of them
as well. Meanwhile Nora arrives with the purchases she has made during
the day and everything takes place without words being uttered or, if so,
in such a low voice that the spectator cannot hear what is being said. The
same occurs at the end of the play, when Ostermeier wished to shock the
contemporary audience as Ibsen had done in his day. While in the original
Nora abandons her children and husband, in Ostermeier’s version she kills
him with a series of gunshots, and he falls into the aquarium turning the
water red with his own blood before Nora leaves the house and the scene
falls silent again.
Also, the characters’ speeches were made utterly contemporary both in
structure and intonation, as well as in the vocabulary, which included fash­
ionable words and trendy expressions. This lingual modernisation was in
keeping with the actualization of the actions which were situated within a
decidedly contemporary milieu. Doctor Rank’s syphilis became AIDS and
the letter of accusation that Krogstadt put in the mailbox became an email
Helmer received on his computer, a Macintosh laptop. These changes were
agreed upon by the director and the translator in a collaboration which
lasted a month before rehearsals began; once started, these went on with
no need for the translator to be there.
The translator accepted this approach as long as he was admitted to par­
ticipate substantially in the making of the event, and yet, by publishing his
initial version separately, he also affi rmed the specificity of his own work
compared to that of the director. “My translations”, he said, “must work
well independently of all performances”, and added: “[A]ctually, [if it were
not so] they would soon look aged: no fashion passes so quickly as that of
the day” (Schmidt-Henkel 477; my translation).

TRANSLATING FOR THE THEATRE

What is the task of the theatre translator in such a rich and extremely varied
context? Obviously there are no set rules and everyone follows one’s own
sensibility in the given circumstances. All the same, I believe that transla­
tors are more useful to the directors when they challenge their projects
rather than when they comply with all their demands. This leads me back
154 Jean-Louis Besson
to the notion of literalness, which I do not take as an insipid word-for-word
type of rendition, but as a perceptive translation attentive to the ‘alarming
strangeness’ of the source text and careful to make it vibrate and resonate
again in the target language. It is the type of literalness Walter Benjamin
refers to when he claims that it must jostle the target language while driving
the source language beyond itself. It is not conveyed only through words,
but may be achieved through a thorough knowledge of the poet’s way of
writing, its peculiarity and context (this is the task of what I call the trans-
lator-playwright), and requires styling choices that work upon the target
language in unfamiliar ways.
Let me offer a personal example: the translation of Woyzeck that Jean
Jourdheuil and I have published with Éditions Théâtrales in 2004, reissued
in 2006, is primarily based upon the studies long made by German critics
on textual philology. 3 The translation was in keeping with the research
we were then carrying out—in particular my book on Büchner (Besson
2002)—which took into account not only Büchner’s literary output, but
also his essays and philosophical research. It also benefited from the famil­
iarity we had with his writing, since we had also translated La mort de
Danton [Danton’s Death] and Léonce et Léna [Leonce and Lena]—the
latter on two occasions.
The scrupulous investigation of Büchner’s production enabled us to
point out that the fragmentary character of Woyzeck, which had always
been evoked by the directors as an explanation for its different scenic mon­
tages, did not reside in its fragmentation as believed until then. As a mat­
ter of fact, manuscript analysis showed that, even though some incertitude
remained, the order of scenes in Woyzeck is not accidental.
The pages of the manuscript in fact are numbered, and the scenes are
related to each other so that their order, in each phase of the composition,
cannot be doubted. The play is made out of a series of tableaux whose
progression was devised by the author, and for this reason Woyzeck can­
not be considered as a lyric poem, nor compared, as Heiner Müller does,
to Kleist’s Robert Guiskard or to Brecht’s Fatzer (Downfall of the Egotist
Johann Fatzer), which were left as ‘fragments’ or were unfinished for politi­
cal and historical reasons (Müller 132).
The new version of Woyzeck we published recaptures its dramaturgical
composition by restoring the general structure of the play, the arrangement
of the scenes, the progression of the story as Büchner conceived them. For
this reason our translation does not question the fragmentary character
of Woyzeck, but transfers it from the general structure of the play to the
style itself. It postulates that it is the discontinuity in the dialogues, rather
than the collapse of the action, which gives the performance its fundamen­
tal structure and its incomplete look (Besson 2005a). Thus, one should no
longer linger on the organization of the fragments, but on Büchner’s phras­
ing, on its rhythms, on the fractures in the sentences, on the lacunas in the
thought, on the way the bodies enact the text, and this is exactly what has
 Translator and Director 155
been ignored so far by critics who have been focusing merely on questions
of structure.
Accordingly, our translation does not ‘flow’, it is not put in the actor’s
mouth already chewed, because its main concern is to re-establish the text’s
materiality, originality, deviations from the norm, implications, and what is
left unsaid in the original. The actors who played in Jean-Louis Hourdin’s
performance agreed to deal with this non-standard language,4 which con­
tributed greatly to the particular tone of the ensuing performance.
Our meticulous analysis of Woyzeck demonstrated that the syntax of
a text, its way of developing, and its breath, are all related to the body of
the character, and therefore also to that of the actor, as well as to the play’s
imaginative thrust. What is true for this drama text is also true for every
theatre translation, and therefore Woyzeck can be taken as a paradigm. It is
to the styling peculiarities of a foreign text, its harshness and incongruities,
that an accurate translation should be sensitive.
This shows that translating is not a simple word-transposition from
language to language, but a writing act proper which claims recognition,
which on occasion is literal and poetic, on others poetic and physical, none
of these options being mutually exclusive. The importance of literalness
which is here under discussion assumes that every author has his or her
own phrasing or some specific phrasings the translator cannot ignore. In
theatre—and I refer here to what I described a few years ago in an article for
the journal Critique (Besson 2005b)—this issue is in contrast with the idea
that a good text for the stage is a text properly put in the actor’s mouth, a
text that flows. This conception tends to standardise works, to cast them in
the mould of a ‘language of theatre’ which nobody really understands, but
which nowadays tends to conform to the effective and trenchant phrasing
of the dialogues of commercial cinema or television series. True, language
on stage has a specific oral and gestural quality, but it is not fixed once and
for all, and is particular to each author. Therefore it is open to continuous
reinvention, which is why literalness is a major issue for theatre transla­
tors. Not only must they account for the author’s writing style, but they
should also be perceptive about his or her acting suggestions (what I call
the language of the bodies). Speech and gesture go together, since for the
actor words have a ‘breath’ whose energy must be regained. In the case of a
translated drama text, this will not happen unless translators engage with
the ‘pneumatic’ of the text, unless they are sensitive to the rhythms, asso­
nances, alliterations, breaks, word-orders, melodic curves, inscriptions of
gesture within a sentence. In brief, it is the ‘interior movement’ of the text
which needs to be rediscovered.
Of course, this is a difficult goal to reach. No translation copies its origi­
nal. As I argued at the outset, it is bound to face ‘dislocation’, but—if so
conceived—it tries to endow the drama text with a language of poetry
attuned to the demands of the stage. The translation of atypical authors,
such as Büchner, or of contemporary authors who do not use traditional
156 Jean-Louis Besson
dramatic and linguistic structures, has contributed to highlighting these
new needs.
The type of translation I have been discussing is as ephemeral as any
other; its merit is to affirm styling choices, to offer suggestions regarding
an acting style based on the theatrical dynamic of the original text. It may
be accepted or not by the director, but if accepted it will pose the challenge
of a text which, in the name of theatricality, has not erased the asperities,
strangeness, and ambiguities of the original. Because of its essentially dif­
ferent textuality, any foreign text is itself ‘theatrical’. It is the “irreducibility
of the poet I am interested in”, Vitez has written, it is “everything which is
not translatable, everything which is not reducible to already well-known
forms. This I find interesting” (6). In other words, what is interesting is
everything which compels the theatre to go beyond itself, beyond what it
already knows how to do. It is on its degree of resistance that the value of a
text translated for the theatre should be judged.

NOTES

1. Hinrich Schmidt-Henkel (2006) “Postface”, in Nora oder Ein Puppen­

haus, Hedda Gabler, Baumeister Solness, John Gabriel Borkmann. Berlin:
Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, 476, qtd. in Pelechova (248).
2. Young urban professional, opposed to hippies.
3. Beginning with Werner R. Lehmann’s scholarly edition until Thomas
Michael Mayer and Burghard Dedner’s, published in 1999 with Reclam, and
those by Gerhard Schmid in 1981 (facsimile manuscript edition) and Henri
Poschmann in 1984, an organization was set, with a few notable exceptions.
This is based upon a precise philological study, which has emphasised in an
almost undisputable way the general structure of the play and the arrange­
ment of different scenes.
4. Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck directed by Jean-Louis Hourdin on 4 November
2003 in Massilly (Saône-et-Loire), France.

WORKS CITED

Benjamin, Walter (1980) [1923] “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers”, in Id., Illumi­
nationen: Ausgewählte Schriften, Siegfried Unseld (ed.), Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 50–62.
Besson, Jean-Louis (2005a) “La discontinuité du discours dans Woyzeck de Georg
Büchner”, Etudes théâtrales 33, Dialoguer: Un nouveau partage des voix, vol.
2: 11–18.
(2002) Le Théâtre de Georg Büchner: Un jeu de masques, Belfort: Circé.
(2005b) “Pour une poétique de la traduction théâtrale”, Critique 699–700,
Le Théâtre sans l’illusion: 702–12.
Lassalle, Jacques (1982) “Du bon usage de la perte”, Théâtre / Public 44, Traduire:
11–13.
Müller, Heiner (2000) “Histoire et drame: Entretien”, Geschichte und Drama
(trans. 1976), Frictions 3: 132–48.
 Translator and Director 157
Pelechova, Jitka (2011) “Le théâtre de Thomas Ostermeier: En quête d’un réalisme
nouveau; A l’appui de quatre mises en scène de pièces d’Ibsen”, PhD thesis, Uni­
versité Paris Ouest Nanterre la Défense, Paris.
Vitez, Antoine (1982) “Le devoir de traduire”, Théâtre / Public 44 (March–April),
Traduire: 6–13.
11 Dramatic Text / Literary
Translation / Staging
Guillermo Heras

In recent times diverse meetings and conferences have been devoted to a

discussion of the translation of dramatic texts; most of these have focused
on the translator’s task, a topic that I argue is fundamental. However, cer­
tain aspects of the relationship between the play text and the mise en scène
in terms of its on-stage performance have not been addressed till now. I am
thinking about the interaction between the author and the translator and/
or the author and the director, or about new literary forms for the mise en
scène (dance-theatre and contemporary libretti for opera). They need new
theoretical perspectives.
In the last few decades the topic of theatrical translation has been
increasingly under scrutiny, giving rise to European organizations which
have brought to the fore a renewed conception of the role of the translator
as essential for a full understanding of contemporary theatre. The work
of organizations such as La Maison Antoine Vitez, L’Atelier de la Traduc­
tion in Orleáns, OUTIS in Milan, United Artists in Portugal, Hispanité
Explorations in Paris, as well as of several freelance translators, on many
occasions and under strict conditions of self-exploration, have helped sig­
nificantly to promote contemporary theatre. If I emphasise the importance
of the contemporary scene, it is not because it looks to me different in terms
of the rigour and commitment that is required when it comes to translat­
ing the classics, but because the publishing and purely-dedicated-to-stage
production markets always prefer the prestige of time-honoured texts to the
risk involved in translating new ones.
The translation of a classic entails a number of specific issues regarding
the ‘dramatic structure’, the ‘semiotic codes’, and the ‘period language’,
which demand careful attention. A simple example would be the transla­
tion of the Spanish Golden Age’s wealth of play texts into another language.
The Spanish metrics, so different from, say, Elizabethan verse, would chal­
lenge the translation of a Lope’s or a Calderón’s work into English, or other
languages, especially when one comes to translate a sonnet or a quatrain or
an ottava rima. It should also be emphasised that many great playwrights,
such as Shakespeare or Molière, would always have regarded their works as
‘unfinished’, in need of completion by the actors during rehearsal and in the
DOI: 10.4324/9780203073506-12
 Dramatic Text / Literary Translation / Staging 159
actual performance. The fact that certain authors of the Romantic period
and, particularly, those of the early twentieth century considered their texts
as finished and self-sufficient is an anomaly in the general history of stage
practice. The reading of a Dario Fo book suffices to make one realize how
often play texts may derive from actors’ improvisations; this leads to the
conclusion that the order of the dramatic structure may depend on con­
ventional dramaturgical practices. This example, alongside the theatrical
renewal that issued from the early twentieth-century avant-garde, as well
as the creative explosion of the performing arts since the 1960s, constitutes
the current panorama, which, as will be seen, cannot be separated from the
work of the theatrical translator.
Given my strong connection to contemporary theatre as director and
playwright my understanding of a good theatrical translation is closely
related to the impeccable quality of the dramatic text, as well as to an
intelligent, useful, and imaginative adaptation of the play text to the spe­
cific context of the mise en scène. It may be argued that a translator is not
required to work out the possible staging. And yet it may also be argued
that if this is the case the staging potentialities of the translation thus end
up unaccomplished. Let us imagine that a director or a company wishes to
stage a specific translation of a foreign script. As I have argued elsewhere
(1994, 2003, 2011), the translator, like the stage manager, who may adopt
different strategies in mounting the actual production, has at his or her
disposal more than one option, which can be roughly distinguished into
an ‘academic’, or ‘faithful’, translation, and an ‘alternative’, or ‘unfaith­
ful’, one. Obviously, the author’s consent is required especially in the lat­
ter case, since his poetics may be disavowed by translational choices that
may be incompatible with his idea of the ‘theatrical text’. Therefore, if the
translator does not engage in a close dialogue with the author, the lat­
ter’s aesthetics—and ethics—may get lost or perverted. And here we should
remember Godard, who some time ago famously claimed that “Ethics are
the aesthetics of the future” (80).
When I refer to possible translation categories—‘academic’ and ‘alterna­
tive’—I am not judging them; I rather suggest that the choice depends on
the work, the author, the period, as well as on whether the translation is
meant for publication only, or also for the stage, or even exclusively for it,
as has been the case with the so-called ‘collective creations’ of the 1970s
and 1980s.
My interpretation of translation for the theatre is strongly linked with a
distinctive feature of the twenty-first-century panorama: ‘diversity’. There
no longer exist strict laws, but free choices which may or may not work well
on stage. I nevertheless think it extremely important that all translations,
at some stage, clarify what changes the source text has undergone in the
process. I am not talking about translations resulting from the collabora­
tion between the translator and the director or an author who wishes to
add a personal touch; rather, I refer to ‘free’ translations based on no such
160 Guillermo Heras
cooperation, which evidently affect the dramaturgy of the mise en scene.
When this is the case, it should be stated very clearly in the programme.
Today impunity continues to be commonplace in cases of plagiarism or of
deeply modified texts, especially those belonging to authors long deceased
and therefore out of copyright. These are cases of clear imposture. Like­
wise, there are ‘bogus translators’ who, while not knowing the original
language in which the text was written, appropriate somebody else’s trans­
lation, laying claims of translational authority and signing their names to
their new version. These are not translations but adaptations from transla­
tions carried out by somebody else.
In today’s theatre the complicity between translator and author is fun­
damental. It should take place in a continuous exchange of ideas, thoughts,
and discussions about whether or not to replace certain expressions or
words so that they may be better understood by the audience. But of course,
there may be authors who require their translators to provide a translation
as close to, or as similar to, the original as possible, that is, an ‘academic
translation’. Others may suggest a freer approach, taking more into account
the context where the play will be ‘heard and performed’ and the individual
audiences. In such cases, there is room for alternatives, especially with slang
and idiomatic expressions, which involve very laborious work.
Indeed, there may be more extreme cases in which authors even encour­
age their translators to work as freely as they wish and change the struc­
ture, the dialogue, and even the characters, depending on where the play
will be premiered. And in order to avoid being accused of suggesting an
unlikely hypothesis, I emphasise that this is the approach I have towards
my own plays, which, modesty aside, seem to be popular with translators.
When these plays are staged in Latin America, I always recommend that
they should be radically adapted to the specific context of the country or
city where the staging is to be carried out and premiered.
A curious anecdote is provided by María Chatziemmanoy’s Greek
translation of one of my texts, Rottweiler. It aroused the interest of a com­
pany in Athens, which asked leave to make several changes, including the
appearance of a character who was not in the original. The Greek company
improved my text and staged it wonderfully; it ran for more than a year and
a half in Athens and won several major awards in that country.
My case may be unusual, but I know other emerging Spanish play­
wrights, with whom I have worked as stage director, who do not mind
alterations being made to their texts when they come to be staged. They are
very flexible with their translators when they work together, which I regard
as essential in contemporary theatre, though I am of course aware that this
is not always feasible, because many twentieth-century texts or those of a
recently deceased author often cannot benefit from this live dialogue, and
in such cases, authorship requires the highest respect.
This is the way I have worked as a director on the many occasions on
which I could count on the magnificent translations by Carla Matteini. Her
 Dramatic Text / Literary Translation / Staging 161
commitment to the job in terms of textual competence and knowledge of
the context in which the plays were composed, her linguistic rigour, and,
most importantly, her understanding of theatrical dynamics—acting and
actors, the theatrical space, the role of the director—is a case in point of
how substantial links between the dramatic text, its literary translation,
and the staging may be established. We have dealt with plays presenting
different degrees of difficulty, but always of a very high quality, as those of
Pier Paolo Pasolini, Steven Berkoff, Sarah Kane, Dario Fo, and even Shake­
speare. In all of these projects, which, fortunately, we could see staged,
Matteini managed to find the right balance to render the original poetic
thrust, while being aware that her words would be uttered in a particular
context by actors whose individual actorial features would contribute to
translating the written text into living words on a stage with physical char­
acteristics of its own.
Stage costumes are the actor’s second skin representing what Brecht
called ‘Gestus’. In contemporary dancing the wrapping of characters in
a sonorous or luminous space symbolizing different moods may be called
fi sicidad or fi sicalidad. But what is most important is to establish a meta­
phorical style which is one of the distinctive features of contemporary pro­
ductions. Play texts, therefore, cannot be put on stage in an archaeological
or simply mimetic way if the aim is really to create a work of art for our
times. In other words, the play text and the mise en scène must be kept
quite distinct one from the other. The notion that every play text holds its
own mise en scène has increasingly been dropped even by the most conser­
vative minds.
If it had been otherwise, in the last decades we would not have seen the
wonderful Hamlet, Sigismund, Antigone, Lady Macbeth, Laurencia, Har­
pagon, Oedipus, Ubu, or Nora in different, suggestive, and admirable adapta­
tions by Peter Brook, Nekrosius, Declan Donellan, Peter Stein, Patrice Ceran,
and Carmelo Bene. These were theatrical productions of great imaginative
strength whose idea of performance was strongly associated with an ethi­
cal and aesthetic concept open to different subjective interpretations. There
is no doubt that all of these performances were based on a first translation
and a subsequent revision following actual staging directions. This is why I
claim that the translator is not a mere gear in the staging mechanism, but an
essential artistic component in the overall configuration of the production.
Therefore, the translator’s sphere of action should be situated in what Meyer­
hold understood as a democratic and linear construction of the production,
not within a pyramidal theatrical team structure.
With this degree of collaboration and over the years, my career as director
has always aimed at promoting new authors and plays that show concern for
contemporary issues and feature a contemporary language. And although I
confess that when directing a play I always prefer to count on the transla­
tor’s collaboration or, possibly, the author’s, it is true that sometimes I myself
have made a ‘version’ or ‘adaptation’—not a translation. By working side by
162 Guillermo Heras
side with the translator I have experienced many of the difficulties posed by
translating, and, above all, what I call ‘the choice tension’ when determin­
ing what sentence, turn of phrase, or word is the most appropriate so as not
to betray the author’s intention while being effective from a theatrical point
of view. If a play is to be mounted in Latin America, the translation choices
will depend on whether it will be staged in Buenos Aires, Mexico, or Santo
Domingo. As an instance of this I would cite the version that I made out
of Brigitte Aschwanden’s excellent translation of Heiner Müller’s Despoiled
Shore. Medea. Material. Landscape with Argonauts. I had read that text
in French, given my lack of knowledge of the German language, and I had
always found it fascinating. But time passed by and, despite the fact that very
good translations of other famous texts by Müller were becoming available
in Spain, this one seemed not to have aroused much interest. This is why I
needed a fresh translation, and therefore called Brigitte, who, apart from
being an actress and a director, had also studied literature and philology and,
of course, her mother tongue was German.
Müller’s published text, which is just ten pages long, is an open score
whose duration on stage can last from forty-five minutes to three hours,
as has sometimes been the case. However, the scope of Müller’s literary
language made us embark on an adventure that lasted several months until
we reached the final version, which was later published in the Primer acto
magazine. It was really on this occasion that my collaboration with the
translator allowed me to become fully aware of the merits of a good theat­
rical translation, because it made the literary material beautifully audible
and visible on stage. And as already mentioned, the continuous confronta­
tion with the author’s poetics translated into specific turns of phrases, lexi­
cal choices, and syntactical structures.
As a matter of fact, in Despoiled Shore there was a word that the transla­
tor failed to find in any current dictionary. I consulted an English transla­
tion of that text, and curiously the word did not even appear. The translator,
probably not knowing the meaning of the word, decided to omit it. Follow­
ing the trail of the French translation and thanks to Brigitte’s strenuous
work on it, we came to the conclusion that the word referred to a popular
brand of condoms used by the proletariat during the Weimar Republic.
What could we do then? Should we leave the word in German even though
no one would understand it in Spanish? Should we omit it as in the North
American translation? Should we replace it with a modern Spanish brand
of condoms? In the end, we decided to opt for the neutral word ‘condoms’,
although the German term is certainly much more accurate and effective.
Anyhow, we wanted it to be immediately understandable, and we did suc­
ceed. If a single word prompted such an exciting and extensive discussion
on translation strategies, one may figure out what happens when translat­
ing an ‘entire’ text for the stage!
As regards the present theatrical panorama, interesting issues concerning
the ‘literature/stage writing/translation’ topics are raised by post-dramatic
 Dramatic Text / Literary Translation / Staging 163
drama, which is a specific variant of certain twentieth-century experimen­
tation, situated between documentary theatre and performance or stage
installation. Rimini Protokoll’s artistic experiences, the Argentinian Lola
Arias’s and the Mexican Lagartija al sol’s, demonstrate that the ‘boundaries’
of the text are still hard to define today. To the same fertile ground recent
generations have contributed by carrying out researches on the so-called
‘technological stage architecture’ or in the ‘receptive immersion spaces’,
both visual and audible. These are trends that, albeit still emerging in the
performing arts, may represent a breaking point in cultural practices.
For the Rimini Protokoll group, for example, what really counts is the
presence on stage of ‘authentic’ people who ‘deliver’ theatrical speeches.
Therefore, real imams or charismatic people from Berlin narrate to the
audience their own experiences by setting them against the Western world.
The notion of ‘actant’, rather than ‘actor’, is here privileged since on stage
the actant should not represent a character but himself/herself.
In this case the very concept of ‘representing’ is questioned by both theo­
rists and practitioners, who prefer to say ‘presenting’. But far from entering
this debate, it may be recalled that post-dramatic shows use people instead
of actors, ‘representing’ or ‘presenting’ their own lives, and tend to des­
ert traditional theatrical spaces, offering loosely codified texts which make
room for improvisation, and using languages roughly based on ‘slang’ or
‘argot’. These play texts inevitably entail a revision of the traditional role
of translation, suggesting that a good job can possibly be carried out if the
translator attends the whole process of the mise en scène and some subse­
quent performances.
Current adaptations of plays in ballet form and operatic and interartistic
scripts have opened up fresh translation perspectives. New alternatives, for
example, are being developed in dance, whose notion of the post-coreutic
consists in not developing any planned movement of the body but only
what has been defined as ‘no-dance’, since it is situated on the borderline
between theatricality and performance.
These new ideas contribute to emphasising an important issue concern­
ing what a stage director mostly looks for in all translations for the theatre:
metaphors and images translatable for a living space.
I conclude by mentioning a book that addresses some of the issues that
are currently being focused on. The book is called Problemas de la traduc­
ción [Translation Problems], and has been published by the University of
Buenos Aires in the series edited by the Ricardo Rojas Cultural Centre. At
the end of her introduction, Luisa Borovsky points out that:

It is clear that the Academy is not enough. Fortunately, the transla­

tor cannot avoid the methodological doubt arising against ready-made
knowledge, unfounded axioms and the blaring truths. Why am I
translating it this way? Why did I start using this expression? Should I
observe this rule if I disagree with it? Should I opt for a free version at
164 Guillermo Heras
the risk of trying to find faults in the author’s work with unsuccessful
results? Menial translation? Should I sacrifice the form in favour of the
content? Does the argument only serve as a pretext for the language?
Is it possible to anticipate the reader’s reaction? How does the mean­
ing of a translation vary in time? How does the linguistic, cultural and
historical context in which it is received determine it? How could we
account for what the author wished to express and what was indeed
expressed, even unintentionally? (Gambolini et al. 2; my translation)

If all of these questions concern the purely literary translation, imagine

what may happen when it is made for a specific mise en scène. Fortunately
the subject under discussion is nothing more and nothing less than ‘art’,
where there are no mathematical rules, but only individual options. If the
hallmark of the performing arts of the twenty-first century is ‘diversity’,
cannot one such diversification affect also theatrical translation?

WORKS CITED

Gambolini, Gerardo et al. (2004) Problemas de la traducción, introduction by

Luisa Borovsky, Buenos Aires: Libros del Rojas.
Godard, Jean-Louis (1967) Le petit soldat, London: Lorrimer Publishing.
Heras, Guillermo (1994) Escritos dispersos, Madrid: CNNT.
(2011) Las estructuras dramatúrgicas actuales: Aproximaciones, Paso de
Gato (Cuadernos mexicanos de Ensayo teatral) 20.
(2003) Miradas a la escena de fin de siglo: Escritos dispersos II, Valencia:
Universitat de València.
12 Translating for the Audience
Plautus’s Captivi by the Accademici
Intronati (Siena 1530) and Goldoni’s
Adaptation of Voltaire’s L’Écossaise
(Venezia 1761)
Marzia Pieri

Theatre often appropriates previous narratives and translates them on stage

in the expressive language of bodies, voices, sounds, movements, and lights.
Italian Renaissance scholars knew this very well. In the name of an archae­
ological and philological approach, between the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries they gave birth to modern theatre by reinventing the ancients in
the light of the ludic and expressive demands of their own age. Their trans­
lation of Greek and Latin comedies and tragedies was only a starting point,
in fact, the starting point of an endeavour which distinguished them from
their European colleagues, who were more interested in translation theories
focusing on poetry and narrative. Translating Plautine and Terentian com­
edies or Senecan tragedies, or even ancient Greek plays, into the vernacular,
whether in prose or in verse, also meant coming to terms with questions
of performance (how they were to be acted out, recited, or even sung) and
reception, prompting issues which reach beyond an idea of literal faithful­
ness to the original and entail a more complex philological accuracy.
Among those who undertook translation, the promoters of too rigid
a philologism were forced in the long run to desist from their projects
of complete restoration of the ancient models; those who understood
the theatrical implications of dramatic writing, instead, adopted supple
approaches suitable to the requirements of various theatrical practices.
Among the former, the experimental tragedians of the Orti Oricellari
attempted to restore the Greek quantitative measures—as was the case
with Alessandro de’ Pazzi de’ Medici—or imitated the Greek structure,
as with Trissino. It is in the wake of these authors that the ‘monstrum’
experiment of Edipo tiranno [Oedipus the Tyrant] must be understood.
In 1585 the Accademici Olimpici prepared the staging of this tragedy,
which was translated into vernacular by Orsatto Giustiniani. Edipo
tiranno was performed in Vicenza, in a theatre built by Palladio following
Vitruvio, and was played by an ensemble of eight protagonists and ninety­

DOI: 10.4324/9780203073506-13
166 Marzia Pieri
three walk-ons, plus a chorus of fifteen. The Aristotelian indications on
choirs and music, strongly advocated by the inflexible choirmaster Angelo
Ingegneri, were strictly observed. It can be argued that this production
was a borderline case of ‘imaginary’ theatre, destined to fail from the very
beginning. While, on the one hand, it seemed briefly to fulfil a fascinat­
ing but unattainable intellectual dream of antiquarian restoration, on the
other, it revealed itself to be a dead end, lining up this group of extra-zeal­
ous philologists with those authors of comedies—Ariosto included—who
were ensnared in an excessive faithfulness to Latin models. These play­
wrights’ main concern was to preserve Plautine and Terentian polimetry
through a whole range of ill-chosen metrical options which proved highly
unsuccessful for the stage, such as triplets and octaves, as well as propar­
oxytone hendecasyllables: the former were typical of some late-fi fteenth­
century vernacularisations carried out in Ferrara, the latter of a group of
not at all memorable sixteenth- and seventeenth-century comedies.
What really worked in the theatre of the early sixteenth century was a
more flexible approach to the sources, as shown by Giovanni Rucellai and,
later, Giraldi Cinthio, whose tragic subjects combined Senecan and chival­
ric elements. This is also evident in the comedies which displayed novelistic
features, like those of Machiavelli or Bibbiena, two authors particularly
eager to abandon verse for the sake of verisimilitude and performative
effectiveness. In their prologues they even challenged the strict classicists to
evaluate the quality of their works.
In this period, the practice of vernacularisation, the experiments of mise
en scène, and the debates on poetics were part of one and the same theatri­
cal culture, demonstrating that theatre translation implied a whole range
of contiguous factors strongly determined by the taste and the sensitivity of
the addressed audience. From this perspective, risks of gross blunders were
of secondary importance, since they could prove unexpectedly productive,
as when the members of Camerata dei Bardi invented melodrama in an
attempt to re-create the theatrical experience of ancient Athenian tragedy.
Made at the expense of strict philological faithfulness, this modern rein­
vention of theatre was therefore characterized by a social and anthropo­
logical attention to the demands of the time. The ‘monstrous’ plays derived
from this new approach are often very interesting, as in the case of Guari­
ni’s exceptionally successful Pastor fido [The Faithful Shepherd]. This play,
accompanied by a hypertrophic Aristotelian paratext, had a huge and long-
lasting effect on the aesthetic legitimacy of the tragicomic genre.
Italian Renaissance culture thus offered to the rest of Europe long-lived
canons and models developed through reader-response processes, whose
mechanisms have been admirably explained by the theoreticians of the
Constance School (Holub). In this pioneering phase almost all issues were
laid on the table and it is interesting to notice the implications and results of
the first so-called translations of the classics, so unfaithful to the original,
and somewhat pretentious.
 Translating for the Audience 167
The collective experience of the first Siena-based Accademici Intronati is
a case in point. From the 1530s on, they incessantly wrote, translated, and
played various comedies for their fellow citizens and for some distinguished
guests. These comedies were chosen and adapted in the name of an ideal of
elegant aristocratic society, and the whole endeavour was tinged with a seri­
ous pedagogical commitment. By adhering to the Oratian poetic of miscere
utile dulci, they tried to combine the new demands for theatrical entertain­
ment together with a prudent political propaganda of pacification among
the factions which had been tearing apart the life of the Republic. Ideally
and symbolically they spoke to the city ladies in vernacular with the aim of
‘improving’ society, and to this end they engaged in numerous translations
from Virgil, Xenophon, Ovid, Horace, and many other Latin and Greek
authors. They were motivated by the idea that “to offer classics to as many
readers as possible is not to wrong them” (Dionisotti 160; my translation).1
The theatrical experience, which is the foremost aim of this very qualified
academic partnership, privileged the genre of comedy. Their carnivalesque
performances which every year marked the acme of the festivity in Siena (at
least until the tragic war events leading to the end of the Republic and the
definitive loss of independence) were inaugurated with a translation into
vernacular of Plautus’s Captivi, enitled I prigioni [The Prisoners], and most
likely played during the carnival festivities in 1530 (Newbigin).
Plautus’s Captivi was rediscovered by Niccolò Cusano in 1428 and pub­
lished between 1472 and 1530 in fourteen editions. It is not one of Plau­
tus’s most well-known compositions, and unlike Menaechmi [The Brothers
Menaechmus] or Amphitruo [Amphitryon], was not very successful on
late-fifteenth-century court stages. Nonetheless, its plot of war events and
imprisonments offers interesting links with the contemporary historical sit­
uation at a time when Siena saw the devastating consequences of the Sack
of Rome in 1527 and when the siege of Florence was still going on. It dis­
plays ‘serious’ feelings and values, rules out amorous issues, and tinges the
mistaken identity motif—presented in the episode of the master bargaining
for freedom in his servant’s guise—with heroic and moral hues. Deprived of
the usual love and comedic tricks, the play’s comic quality is largely abated,
so that extra erotic and musical touches were added in order to enliven the
bleak post-war carnival atmosphere, full of menaces and grudges.
Nerida Newbigin’s critical edition of I prigioni (for centuries existing
only in manuscript form) illuminates the fact that the authors had a thor­
ough knowledge of the original play from which they translated many cues,
while deeply modifying the structure and increasing the number of charac­
ters. However, the sycophant Ergàsilo—a well-known comedic ‘type’ until
the late seventeenth century, here renamed Godenzo—remained central
and easily recognizable. Of the 1036 lines of the original Latin, only 400
were literally translated. The plot was markedly altered, particularly in the
fourth act, with the addition of a female character, the prisoner Gostanza,
around whom the love affair unravels. Also several morescas were inserted
168 Marzia Pieri
to be either sung or recited, with the aim of livening up the performance.
Thus I prigioni epitomizes the creative character of the Italian theatre in
this historical phase, when a critical diagnosis of the contemporary politi­
cal situation, together with some entertainment based on ‘recognizable’
expressive models, such as morescas or multilingual pieces, made it appeal­
ing to the audience.
Some years earlier, in the neighbouring Florence, where Poliziano’s leg­
acy was still strong, Machiavelli likewise appropriated classical plays for
his pioneering theatrical experiments (now in part lost). The account pro­
vided by the nephew Giuliano de’ Ricci is worthy of attention:

[A]d imitatione delle Nebule et altre commedie di Aristofane [compose]

un ragionamento a foggia di commedia et in atto recitabile e lo inti­
tolò Le maschere che l’originale si ritruovò appresso di me fragmentato
et non perfetto et tanto mal concio che io non l’ho copiato sì come
ho fatto molte altre cose sue discorsi et lettere non stampate et credo
anche non lo volere copiare perché sotto nomi finti va lavorando et mal
trattando molti di quei concittadini che nel 1504 vivevano.

[In imitation of The Clouds and other comedies by Aristophanes, [he

wrote] a discourse in the manner of a comedy and suitable to be staged,
and he gave it the title of The Masks of which I had the original. This
was fragmented and so much battered that I did not copy it, as I have
done with many other things he wrote, like discourses and letters in
manuscript, and I also believe that I did not want to copy it because he
works under false names and maltreats many of those fellow citizens
who lived in 1504.] (Machiavelli ix)

His extant prose translation of Terence’s Andria [The Girl from Andros]
was also meant to enhance the “dialogo latino in funzione di una sua resa
vivace nel fiorentino parlato” [Latin dialogue towards its lively rendition
in the spoken Florentine] (Machiavelli vii). The analysis of the manu­
scripts confirms the hypothesis of a hurried work, amended and recopied
in fair copy only several years later. It may have been commissioned for an
imminent mise en scène which would require additions, cuts, and ongo­
ing changes. Machiavelli claimed as his own also the translation of Aulu­
laria [The Pot of Gold] as La sporta [The Bag]. According to his nephew’s
account, later endorsed by Lasca, Gelli may have taken possession of it and
claimed authorship. These were exercises preparatory to Mandragola [The
Mandrake] and Clizia (which was based upon Casina), two plays where
classical quotations are enormously reduced compared to the amount of
the rewritten material, as would soon be the case with I prigioni. Thus the
foundations were laid for successful new comedies, from Ingannati [The
Deceived] onwards. The history of modern theatre is scattered with spu­
rious and contaminated translations as well as thefts especially tailored
 Translating for the Audience 169
for the audience. The authorship was generally of secondary importance
(though the case of Intronati, who collectively signed the plays and were
happy to leave them unpublished, is an extreme one), while their derivative
nature was treasured and enthusiastically exhibited. Their evident depen­
dence upon classical models went beyond the linguistic and stylistic legacy,
and raised questions about the very idea of writing for the theatre. This
type of translation, in fact, reduplicates what Plautus and his colleagues
had done before them with the new Greek comedy. They adjusted it to the
taste of the Roman audience by eliminating the division into acts, trans­
forming the iambic trimeters into canticles, revising plots and characters,
and fixing the style into a sonorous and colloquial sermo urbanus.
There is yet another age in the history of Western theatre when transla­
tion contributed to laying the foundations of an aesthetic revision of theatri­
cal practices, this time favouring intercultural and international exchanges
rather than a reappraisal of the classics: the eighteenth century. In this age
for the first time theatre became truly European thanks to borrowings,
translations, and dramatisations of novels and pamphlets, thus creating
a culture of performance which was, broadly speaking, militant—a cul­
ture filled with ideologies and international passions and fashions. As far
as Italy is concerned, the appeal of foreign cultures—French and English,
among others—was the same as that of the classics in the sixteenth century.
And, as in the sixteenth century, a new division between theatre practitio­
ners was experienced. On the one hand, there was a handful of enthusiasts
for absolute faithfulness to the sources, who translated into martellian or
unrhymed verse the alexandrine of French tragedies, and naïvely restored
Renaissance classicism as the essential prerequisite of good taste; on the
other hand, there were adventurous ‘corsairs’, who promoted unscrupulous
practices of plunder while, at the same time, revitalizing and circulating
plays among new communities. They often smuggled as ‘translations’ what
actually were rewrites.
Among the latter, experienced actors and the so-called poeti di com­
pagnia (poets working for companies) were forced to grind out new reper­
tories by the greediness of a market ruled by a frenzied commercial logic. It
is not surprising therefore that they drew on Spanish tragicomedies, novels,
melodrama librettos, as well as on the evergreen plots of timeless classics,
from Pastor fi do [The Faithful Shepherd] to Don Giovanni, and even the
then disregarded Shakespearean theatre. ‘High’ theatre, especially, became
the ‘property’ of poets laureate, and was burdened with the new civiliz­
ing aims advocated by the European intellectuals. They believed that theo­
retical discussion and militant commitment in translating for the theatre
were of great importance, often with significant consequences: suffice it
to consider the role of Lessing in Germany, the anglophile divulgation of
Voltaire, or the elaborate experiments in the French translations of Shake­
speare. For the most sensitive theatre practitioners the responsibility of
translating—supported by a theoretical awareness which was fuelled by
170 Marzia Pieri
an often polemic critical and even journalistic debate—fulfilled the funda­
mental function of circulating texts of different languages and cultures. As
the quasi-professional Venetian translator Elisabetta Caminer realized, this
in turn contributed to increasing a common European culture of perfor­
mance: “[T]ranslating good foreign plays teaches one to create one’s own
plays . . . Italian theatre is not less dignified by receiving copies of a new
type of plays; this is the way to enable our wits to acquire the art that the
French handle so well” (Unfer Lukoschik 67; my translation).
During this period, the experienced translator considered himself a sort
of ferryman of good taste and civilization. He felt responsible to his audi­
ence and this is why he tried to decipher obscure passages in the transfer
from one language to another, purged polemical elements, cut redundan­
cies, adjusted the text to the tastes of the time, and bypassed interpretative
obstacles to prevent the menace of local censorship. Voltaire’s L’Écossaise
is a good example of how the practice of translating was subjected to the
omnipresent demands of the market economy.
A comedy of exceptional success, composed and initially performed in
France in 1760, it was immediately received in Italy as a juicy ‘best seller’,
and was translated and readapted by four different companies at the same
time. The staging in Paris on 26 July was preceded by the anonymous pub­
lication of the play, which was immediately and furiously criticized by a
journalist, Elie-Catherine Fréron. This enemy of the encyclopédistes was in
fact pilloried in the pièce as a scandalmonger. At the time, Diderot and his
collaborators were suffering the counterstrokes of the papal condemnation
of the Encyclopaedia and the polemical front was very hot, with frequent
journalistic interventions from both sides. Voltaire’s play, presented as the
translation of an English text by one M. Hume, dealt with the theme of per­
secuted virtue and thwarted love in two young people, victims of a family
feud. Published in an anonymous London edition of 1760 (actually printed
in Geneva—see Goldoni 2006), the comedy had a huge European success.
The first to translate and stage it (also in 1760) was Giacomo Casanova.
Starring the actor Pietro Rossi, the play was performed for five consecutive
days at the Sant’Agostino Theatre in Genoa. Abbot Chiari immediately
realized its potential, and drew from it a novel in two tomes, La bella pel­
legrina [The Beautiful Pilgrim Girl], which appeared in August and Sep­
tember 1761. He also composed a homonymous comedy in martelliani,
which was played at San Giovanni Crisostomo Theatre in Venice, on 26
October by the Medebac company and repeated for three nights. 2 In the
same month, the famous actor Sacchi played in La scozzese [The Scots­
woman] translated by Gasparo Gozzi, which ran for only two days at the
San Samuele Theatre. The Goldonian rewrite with the same title was staged
on 3 November, between Avventure della villeggiatura [Holiday Adven­
tures] and Ritorno dalla villeggiatura [Back from Vacation], and beat the
competition with fifteen further performances, proudly counted by the
author in Autore a chi legge [The Author to the Reader] in the Pasquali
 Translating for the Audience 171
edition and later boasted about in his Mémoires [Memoirs] (Chapter XLIV
of the second part, which erroneously dates the event to 1750).
On the night of 5 October 1761, Goldoni’s comedy was announced by
the leading actress Caterina Bresciani to the spectators in San Luca as one
of the new productions of the autumn season: a work, so it was claimed,
written by the Edinburgh minister M. Hume, brother to the philosopher
David, and already translated into French by Voltaire. Goldoni was alleg­
edly persuaded to reconsider this work as a result of the flattering quotation
in Voltaire’s preface (and for this venial weakness he apologised to his audi­
ence), 3 but he realized very quickly that, rather than a translation, a radical
revision along the lines of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela was preferable:

Abbandonò di traduttor l’impegno,

L’idea prendendo ed il pensier da quella,
E i caratteri primi, e l’argomento,
Lavorando l’intreccio a suo talento.
Appunto come di Pamela un giorno
Da parecchi volumi ha il pensier tratto,
Del romanzier, di mille vezzi adorno,
La lunga traccia abbandonando affatto;
Tal di quest’opra, a cui si pose intorno,
L’argomento gentil suo proprio ha fatto,
Qual sul disegno altrui suol l’architetto
Un palagio innalzar dal fondo al tetto.
Quanto dissi finor d’un’opra tale
Necessario è all’onor di chi l’espone,
Per isfuggir di furto il criminale,
E de’ suoi cambiamenti addur ragione;
E se quanto s’è detto imprimer vale
Il mio labbro nel cuor delle persone,
Confrontar si potrà da gente onesta,
E lodar quella, e non sprezzar poi questa.4

At the same time, Goldoni was already negotiating with the Comédie
Italienne his move to Paris, and he intended to exploit to the utmost the
reputation he had won with Voltaire’s praise. On 9 July of the previous
year, some Vers de M. Voltaire sur les talens comiques de M. Goldoni [Vol­
taire’s Verses on Goldoni’s Comic Talent] had appeared in the Gazzetta
Veneta and Goldoni had made a fuss about them, as summarized in the
1761 preface to his Pamela maritata [Pamela Married]. Voltaire and Gold­
oni were linked by a kind of distant bond, which they perceived differently:
the former paid homage to Goldoni in terms of professional admiration
and passionate sympathy; he showed enthusiasm about his works, whose
peculiar originality he was one of the few to recognize; he also saw in
Goldoni the reformer of the Commedia dell’Arte, the realistic painter of
172 Marzia Pieri
nature capable of mingling laughter and tears. In his view, Goldoni’s work
provided a perfect model to correct the excesses of the new French larmoy­
ante comedies while at the same time preserving the entertaining character
that the reformed and moralized theatre should, in any case, guarantee. On
the other hand, Goldoni, although intimidated by the stature of his inter­
locutor—an undisputed giant of contemporary culture and a famous and
hugely imitated dramatist—seemed to think very highly of his own abilities
as writer.5 He was even perhaps aware of the other’s relative weaknesses,
and confronted him on the grounds of comedy in a witty competition in
which he eventually gained the upper hand.
Over the years, they engaged in an intertextual game of mutual refer­
ences, borrowings, and reciprocal tribute. La scozzese, with its emphatic
paratext, is the most significant case in point. Goldoni advertised the
praises offered to him by the ‘great name’ (Goldoni 1991: 1378–81) and,
with appropriate but generic stress, in the Mémoires recalled the prestige
afforded by such an investiture, which providentially consecrated him as
a European playwright just before he left for Paris. At the same time, he
rewrote and corrected Voltaire’s work his own way, with substantial ame­
liorations and targeted omissions and corrections, as he had done in 1750
when his theatrical rewrite of Richardson’s Pamela was strongly influenced
by Nanine. In the writing frenzy of the year, when sixteen new comedies
were produced, a pathetic comedy without stock characters—almost an
exotic tragicomedy derived from a well-known European novel—could be
very risky, and Goldoni looked for support in Voltaire’s authoritative 1749
precedent. He represented for him an example of unscrupulous versatility
with genres and languages—something they shared on account of what
Goldoni claimed to be their common and intense relationship with Nature:
“[S]e è vero di me quello che vi compiacete di dire, ambi siamo figliuoli
della medesima madre, ma voi il primogenito ed io il cadetto” [If what you
are pleased to say about me is true, we are both sons of the same mother,
but you are the first born and I am the cadet] (Goldoni 1995: 185). A decade
later, with the appearance of Diderot’s Éloge de Richardson [Praise to
Richardson], everything appeared clearer and the revival of La scozzese
was for him too good an opportunity to miss. Just before his move to Paris,
and confident of the specific imprimatur received by Voltaire, he measured
himself against Chiari and Gozzi on a very popular text which, to some
extent, was congenial to him.
His approach was nonetheless biased: what he found interesting in
L’Écossaise was the intricate and pathetic plot, which was in keeping with
his ongoing dramaturgic experiments, while he glossed over its pamphle­
tary and satiric côté. Fréron/Frélon, so bitterly pilloried by Voltaire, was, in
turn, a prospective Parisian sponsor for Goldoni with Diderot, whose many
borrowings from his Vero amico [The True Friend] and Padre di famiglia
[The Father of the Family] he had identified and denounced. He was a
prestigious but troublesome patron who had immediately recognized some
 Translating for the Audience 173
passages in L’Écossaise as originating from Goldoni’s Bottega del caff è
[The Coffee Shop] (1750–1751). Therefore, not only was it not advisable
to antagonize him, but it was also necessary to be cunning and cautious,
which explains the prima donna’s explanatory words for the opening of the
season. The Goldonian choice of this particular comedy was neither neutral
nor accidental. As pointed out earlier, his other colleagues had already pre­
sented it in different ways: Casanova enhanced and exploited its passionate
character, Chiari expanded its adventurous plot, Gozzi attempted a literal
translation, with unappealing results. Goldoni proved to be a fi rst-class
theatrical professional by performing something significantly different:
he approached such a widely dealt with and tricky text by paying hom­
age, through Voltaire, to the same theatrical party which so strongly had
opposed him and at the same time to the opposite front, whose praise he
may also have benefited from. In other words, he moved the ‘game’ onto
the stage: he turned his translation into a proper adaptation and claimed
that this was required by the taste of the audience and the demands of the
market; in so doing he reaffirmed his own poetics, corrected mistakes, revi­
talized the plot, drew on his own repertoire on which Voltaire himself had
already drawn.
Many years later, when the philosopher passed away, Goldoni recorded
in his Mémoires a Solomonic and surprising recollection of what had hap­
pened. He claimed to have favoured neither of them, and he even stated
that he had tried to defuse the reasons for Voltaire’s and Fréron’s quarrel,
acknowledging Fréron’s critical acumen and competence as a reviewer and
citing Voltaire’s bad temper.
How this play came to be addressed to both a Venetian audience and a
wider theatrical and intellectual public opinion becomes clearer in the light
of the context in which it originated. If during the autumn of 1761 Goldoni
was perhaps unable fully to understand the implications of the ongoing
political battle in Paris (one which affected the future of the Encyclopae­
dia), he was nevertheless brilliantly intuitive in realizing the importance
of gaining, through Voltaire, the favour of the more advanced intellectual
front. The stage seemed to be the best way to show his qualities as a drama­
tist, since the two ‘giants’—Diderot and Voltaire—while being much more
experienced and universally acclaimed critics, compared to him were only
mediocre playwrights overburdened with ideology. In short, the Goldonian
candour and ‘understatement’ may be regarded with some reservations.
The challenge to rewrite (‘translate’) for the stage a story invented by some­
one else and give it a new life was, in this particular case, a legitimate form
of reappropriation of what was already his own.
Thus he revised the Voltairean materials (the coffeehouse as a suitable
setting for different gatherings, the gallery of good bourgeois, the virtuous
female heroine, the scandalmonger) and reduced the hack’s plotting against
a defenceless girl. The wicked Frélon became a ticklish and servile gossip
opportunely renamed Monsieur La Cloche: “Ho finalmente cambiato non
174 Marzia Pieri
solo il nome, ma il carattere ancora di Frelon; perché in Italia non ci sono,
come in Inghilterra, di tai foglisti” [Not only have I eventually changed
Frélon’s name, but also his character, since in Italy there are no such hacks
as there are in England] (Goldoni 2006: 73).
With an apparent, and even onomastic, faithfulness to the original,
Goldoni updated the events to a more Venetian milieu and worked on the
intrigue and the love plot from a psychological point of view. With the
addition of comic interjections, the dramatic and heroic climax of the plot
was significantly diminished and new details were offered to the audience.
He kept the implausible episodes as well as the events roughed out around a
polemical thesis, but polished the dialogues by linking passages together, so
as to preserve coherence. To organize and strengthen Voltaire’s sometimes
too defective and stiff comedy, he carefully modulated the rhythm of action
through counterpoint. He wisely alternated the lovers’ pathetic and high
tones, especially heightened in their mournful or furious monologues, with
the comic cues of the old men (Fabrizio and Friport) and of the surviving
zanni (the female servant). He set up on stage a virtuosic “giornata delle
stravanganze” [day of eccentricities] (III, 6), where entrances and exits,
emotions and twists were balanced with an accuracy that anticipated that
of Il ventaglio [The Fan] (1765). He was certainly less uninhibited than his
French counterpart in handling the passionate and ‘tragic’ passages, but
achieved more scenic cohesion, and exploited the qualities of the actors he
worked with in order to differentiate his play from his source. Compared to
the original, his protagonist Lindana brought on stage vitality and restless­
ness, refreshing the qualities that years before had been typical of the hero­
ines played by actress Teodora Medebac (an obvious model for Voltaire).
Several significant ‘passionate’ corrections were introduced to suit the new
prima donna, Caterina Bresciani, when she played the part. For example
in L’Écossaise I, 5, Lindane emphatically confessed her virtuous poverty
while Goldoni afforded his Lindana many more articulated passages where
she lied about her condition, blushed, became discouraged or indignant,
every time causing misunderstandings and suspense.6 The interior of the
inn was very different from Voltaire’s. First of all, it was less noisy and
more tranquil, without the London crowd of the gazetteers as a sort of
chorus anti-Frélon.7 The setting was typically Venetian and the action was
focused on small problems, while food was being served on stage and choc­
olates and coffees consumed in the peaceful ‘coffee cup and sugar bowl’
ritual. The innkeeper Fabrizio, the benign protector of this small world,
was associated with the figure of the merchant Friport, a deus ex machine
who played the role of a Pantalone. Friport was made into a phlegmatic
good-hearted grump, who combines strong moral firmness with grotesque
and almost surreal bouts of misanthropy and misogyny, emphasised well
beyond the requirements of the plot. Silences, pantomimes, as well as crafty
and almost autistic monologues are his modes of expression. The comic
effect of his ‘gags’ is guaranteed, as when he is repeatedly interrupted from
 Translating for the Audience 175
drinking his coffee, or when he puts an end to very difficult situations by
simply throwing his money into the mix. Diverse scenes are dedicated to
the Friport-Fabrizio couple (II, 1, 3; IV, 1, 2), whose effectiveness relied on
the resources of a proven team of actors particularly successful with the
audience. The second scene of the fourth act is a case in point. The mes­
senger from the court arrives to arrest Lindana, and Friport volunteers as
a guarantor: Goldoni masterfully revived Voltaire’s flat sequence (III, 4:
“Monsieur le messager, je dépose cinq cents guinées, mille, deux mille,
s’il le faut; voilà comme je suis fait. Je m’appelle Freeport. Je réponds de la
vertu de la fille . . .” [Messenger, here are five hundred guineas, one thou­
sand, two thousand if necessary. I am like this. My name is Freeport and
I here answer for the girl’s virtue]) to a great scenic effect by contrasting
the menacing inertia of the bureaucrat-policeman with the proud wit of
the merchant: “Ehi! galantuomo (se non isbaglio), venite qui . . .”; “Perdo­
natemi, signore, io non vi conosco.—Aspettate (tira fuori una lunga borsa)
Questi li conoscete? (mostrando la borsa piena d’oro)”; “Voi non vi fidate
di me; ed io non mi fido di voi: le depositerò al magistrato . . .” [Hey, you,
gentleman (if I’m not mistaken), come here; I’m sorry, Sir, I don’t know
you.—Wait (he shows a long bag) Do you know these? (He shows a bag full
of money); You don’t trust me; and I don’t trust you: I will entrust this to
the magistrate].
But it is Marianna, the servant, who is the real asset of the play, provid­
ing a continuous countermelody to the lady of the house. The artfulness and
the impetus of many of her ‘old colleagues’ are combined in her part, from
the proud wit of Colombina in the Famiglia dell’antiquario [The Antiquar­
ian’s Family] or in the Cavaliere e la dama [The Gentleman and the Lady]8
to the scathing wisdom of other more recent waitresses-confidantes.9 Hon­
est and faithful, but also sly and poor, impudent but easily frightened, she
is a traditional figure who powerfully turns Lindana’s restless affection and
suicidal inclination into a more human and ordinary rhetoric. It is she who
reveals to Milord Murray the true identity of the Scotswoman in the third
scene of the first act, invented ex novo by Goldoni and judged by him as
one of the best scenes of the whole play.
Goldoni’s dramatic maquillage aims at multiplying the misunderstand­
ings among the characters, thus improving, from a theatrical perspective,
the predictable original plot with added suspense, and rounding it off with
touches of Venetian bienséance. Thus, Lord Murray is both madly in love
with the modest and virtuous girl and deeply concerned about his aristo­
cratic honour. He is tied to Lady Alton, the rival, only through a family
commitment forced upon him by his father. As a consequence, the wicked
noblewoman is more annoyed than in love. The bourgeois benefactor is
absolutely immune from suspicion of love and he does not burst into the
girl’s bedrooms without being invited, as happens in L’Écossaise (II, 6).
The scandalmonger La Cloche is a ridiculous and in the end inoffensive
narcissist, quite easily got rid of. The Count is a good friend of Friport,
176 Marzia Pieri
and this enriches his profile, which Goldoni makes richer, when compared
to Voltaire’s flat character. Characters meet and conflict according to a
moralistic decorum which is more bourgeois than aristocratic, as shown
also by the heroine’s obsession with respectability. The action is rendered
coherent and plausible by the ingenious orchestration of the continual com­
ings and goings in and out of the bedrooms of the inn made possible by a
complex stage device—the real dramaturgical core of the comedy—already
successfully exploited in La bottega del caff è and destined to find its high­
est accomplishment in Il ventaglio.
These few considerations help clarify the origin of the text. We saw that
external circumstances led Goldoni to work with breathless haste between
the summer and the autumn of 1761 in order to prepare the prompt book
for the performance in late October. The comedy, as already mentioned,
had a huge and long-lasting success. After Goldoni left Venice on 22 April
1762 he seemed to forget this comedy. It was only many years later, in
1775, that he revived it for publication, collecting it in the thirteenth tome
of the Pasquali edition alongside the Persian trilogy, which he eventually
assembled in a coherent sequence.
The new version of the play was introduced by a long and detailed pref­
ace meant to reconsider—the dust having finally settled—the vicissitudes
of the whole affair, including the mystery of the anonymous author: “Ella
è presentemente stampata fra le Opere di Monsieur di Voltaire; e tutto il
mondo crede autore della commedia questo grand’uomo, il quale (dicono)
ha voluto celarsi nel pubblicarla, per una specie di bizzarria del suo fecondo
ed ammirabil talento” [It is printed among the Works of Monsieur Voltaire,
and everybody believes that this comedy is indeed written by this author,
who, for a kind of eccentricity typical of his fertile and commendable tal­
ent, preferred to hide his name] (Goldoni 2006: 69). By pretending igno­
rance of the truth at the time, Goldoni justified his perhaps too audacious
rewrite, which nevertheless proved extremely successful. The comedy was
thus offered to the readers with a detailed series of ‘instructions for use’,
and was specifically defined as a translation.
Goldoni’s presumption of authorial equality with Voltaire, only hinted
at in 1761, was then made more explicit: “l’autore ed io abbiamo avuto
ciascheduno la nostra parte di merito e di applauso in più teatri d’Italia”
[Both the author and myself have been rewarded and acclaimed in many
Italian theatres] (Goldoni 2006: 71).10 It is interesting to note that also in
the Mémoires, where the chapter dedicated to La scozzese mostly follows
the lines of this preface, Goldoni recognized in the French text some family
likeness to his own poetics—“je la trouvai même de ce genre de composi­
tions théâtrales que j’avois adopté” [I found it very similar to the genre that
I had adopted for my own theatrical compositions]—and reasserted with
conviction his own dignity as author and remaker blessed with enormous
and lasting success: “On savoit que le fond n’étoit pas de moi, mais l’art et
les soins que j’y avois employés pour la rapprocher de nos moeurs et de nos
 Translating for the Audience 177
usages, me valurent le merite de l’invention” [It was known that the content
was not mine, but the art I used and the efforts I made to bring the com­
edy closer to our custom and habits gained me the merit of the invention]
(2006: 429).

NOTES

1. Translations within square brackets are mine.

2. Chiari (176). The comedy was Chiari’s last play to be printed before he left
Venice, and was published in tome 10 of Commedie in versi dell’abate Pietro
Chiari bresciano poeta di S. A. Serenissima il Sig. Duca di Modana in Vene­
zia 1762, appresso Giuseppe Bettinelli, therefore before the Goldonian print
in 1775. The plot of the comedy vaguely recalls Goldoni’s and Voltaire’s with
evident concessions to common theatrical motifs: for example, Friport, here
made into the ‘Venetian shopkeeper’ Roberto, speaks in dialect as a Pan­
talone, and is assisted by his servant, an Arlecchino, starving and moody;
the story is more rambling and intricate, with scattered inconsistencies, for
example, the enmity among the two families caused by a past adultery of the
protagonist’s mother with the father of her lover. There are numerous false
deaths and letters which are lost and found; the protagonist’s maid, here
named Eufemia, is an older woman who looked after the girl after her father
had escaped many years before. The innkeeper Gaudenzio’s gnomic wisdom
survives.
3. “La comédie intitulée l’Ecossaise nous parut un de ces ouvrages qui peuvent
réussir dans toutes les langues, parce que l’auteur peint la nature, qui est
partout la même; il a la naïveté et la verité de l’estimable Goldoni, avec peut­
être plus d’intrigue, de force et d’intérêt” [The comedy entitled the Ecossaise
seems to be one of those works which can be successful in any language,
because the author paints the nature, which is the same everywhere; he has
the naivety and the truth of the respectable Goldoni, with perhaps more
intrigue, force, and interest] (Voltaire 209).
4. [He abandoned the work of the translator / From that the idea borrowing
and the concept, / The protagonists and the subject, / And worked on the
plot his own way. / Just as one day from Pamela’s / Many volumes the gist
he took, / With many ornaments embellished by the author, / His winding
course entirely leaving, / So of this work on which he set / The gentle subject
he made his own: / Thus from another’s design the architect / Raises a palace
from bottom to roof. / What I have said of such a work / Is necessary to the
honour of the speaker / To escape the charge of theft / And his own changes
justify; / And if my lip may imprint in others’ / Hearts what has been said, / It
will be seen by honest people, / who will praise that, but scorn not this]. This
“Nota storica” [Historical note] appeared at the beginning of the comedy
(Goldoni 1914: 251; my translation). The “Introduzione alle recite autun­
nali” appeared in print on 7 October, in Gazzetta Veneta, n. 69, and was
written by Chiari who, one month later, on 7 November (Gazzetta Veneta
n. 78), added a review to the performance, which acknowledged the quality
of the Goldonian intervention on Voltaire’s text: “[The Scotswoman] cannot
be considered only a translation, since Mr Goldoni added so much of his
own, and, in truth, improved it. The translation of the French version would
not have been so successful on our stages. The Author of this comedy drew
the story from the memoirs of a Scotswoman, from which I myself have also
drawn my novel, La Bella Pellegrina. As he explained, he wanted to create
178 Marzia Pieri
something in keeping with the taste of the Italian Comedies, but I do not
know how successful he was. No matter how, Italy can be proud to have a
comedy which serves as original for the stages abroad, whereas, unfortu­
nately, there are still many talented Italians who continue to imitate their
sources in a faithful way without accepting the challenge to discover unseen
and unknown countries” (Goldoni 1914: 252). This kindness is due to a
new phase of the Chiari-Goldoni relationship (both victims of the polemical
attacks by Granelleschi). This renewed bond persuaded Chiari to dedicate
his novel Bella pellegrina to his old enemy, Goldoni. Chiari also claims in the
Gazetta (n. 75) the chronological precedence of his novel La bella pellegrina
over Goldoni’s Scozzese.
5. “What distinguished Goldoni from the crowd of partisans of that famous
man from Fernet was his competence in a field—the comic theatre—where
Voltaire actually shone less than in others. On the contrary, Voltaire knew
that Goldoni’s greatness was as evident to him as it was unrecognized by the
majority of his well-educated fellow countrymen. . . . Voltaire has recognized
in Goldoni the most original and important comic author of the century”
(Fido, 141, my translation).
6. See for example the sequences dedicated to the piece of embroidery in I, 3
and 5, or Lindana’s skirmish with Friport in II, 5.
7. Goldoni eliminated the long scenes of the first act where Voltaire shows Frélon
in the full swing of slander and mercenary attacks, while various interlocutors
on stage speak at the same time as in a kind of comic opera concert.
8. Her speech on her father as “mastro di casa” [master], addressed to Fabrizio
in III, 1 (in Voltaire he is a baker), recalls Colombina’s pride about her
father’s job (a haberdasher) in L’Antiquario (I, 8). Her exceedingly mocking
comments and her proud ignitions of affection for her mistress recall instead
the faithful Colombina in Il Cavaliere e la dama.
9. For example, Lisetta in the Innamorati [The Lovers], or Brigida of the
Villeggiature.
10. In the Mémoires, he will sound even more dismissive: “Je demande pardon
à l’Auteur François d’avoir osé toucher à sa Pièce; mais l’expérience a prouvé
que sans moi elle n’auroit pas été goûtée en Italie, et cet illustre Poëte qui
fait honneur à sa Patrie doit faire cas des applaudissemens de la mienne” [I
ask pardon to the Author François for the changes I made on his work, but
experience has shown that without my intervention the play would not have
been appreciated in Italy, and this illustrious Poet, who is a credit to his own
country, should acknowledge my success] (Goldoni 1935: 430).

WORKS CITED

Chiari, Pietro (1761) La Bella Pellegrina, o sia Memorie di una dama Moscovita,
scritte da lei medesima e pubblicate dall’abate Pietro Chiari poeta di S. A. S. il
sig. Duca di Modona E dedicate al signor dottor Carlo Goldoni poeta di S. A.
R. S. il sig. Duca di Parma, 2 vols., Venezia: Domenico De Regni.
Dionisotti, Carlo (1967) “Tradizione classica e volgarizzamenti”, in Id. Geografi a
e storia della letteratura italiana, Torino: Einaudi, 103–44.
Fido, Franco (1995) Goldoni e Voltaire, in Id. Le inquietudini di Goldoni: Saggi e
letture, Genova: Costa & Nolan, 125–45.
Goldoni, Carlo (2006) La scozzese, Marzia Pieri (ed.), Venezia: Marsilio.
(1935) Mémoires, in Giuseppe Ortolani (ed.) Tutte le opere, Milano:
Mondadori.
 Translating for the Audience 179
(1914) Opere complete, G. Ortolani, C. Musatti, and E. Maddalena (eds),
vol. 19, Venezia: Edizione del Municipio.
(1995) Pamela fanciulla Pamela maritata, Ilaria Crotti (ed.), Venezia:
Marsilio.
(1991) Teatro, Marzia Pieri (ed.), Torino: Einaudi.
Holub, Robert C. (ed.) (1989) Teoria della ricezione, Torino: Einaudi.
Machiavelli, Niccoló (1979) Teatro, G. Davico Bonino (ed.), Torino: Einaudi.
Newbigin, Nerida (ed.) (2006) ‘I Prigioni’ di Plauto tradotti da l’Intronati di Siena,
Siena: Accademia degli Intronati.
Unfer Lukoschik, Rita (ed.) (1999) Elisabetta Caminer Turra (1751–1796): Una
letterata veneta verso l’Europa, Verona: Essedue Edizioni.
Voltaire, François-Marie Arouet (1974) Le Café ou l’Écossaise, comédie, in Jean
Truchet (ed.) Théâtre du XVIIIe siècle, Parigi: Gallimard.
13 “To act, to do, to perform”
Franz Heufeld’s and Friedrich Ludwig
Schröder’s Hamlet-Adaptations for
the German Stage
Peter Kofler

“Seems, madam? Nay, it is. I know not ‘seems’” (Hamlet I, 2, 76). In

answering his mother’s question about the reason why he is still persisting
in his “nighted colour” (I, 2, 68), Hamlet brings up a fundamental issue:
the relationship between reality and illusion. But as soon as this relation­
ship is explicitly discussed on the stage, we are already beyond theatrical
illusion, we can meditate upon the kind of reality contained in this illu­
sion, upon the ways this kind of reality manifests itself, upon the means
to perform it, and, moreover, we can ask ourselves about the difference
between signifier and signified, actor and character, stage and audience.
Hamlet describes the manner of his acting by assigning it to the realm of
illusion, pose, and dissimulation, these being only “the trappings and the
suits of woe” (I, 2, 86), nothing but decoration and disguise, things that
can be simulated, “actions that a man might play” (I, 2, 84). To these he
opposes something that goes beyond illusion: “I have that within which
passes show” (I, 2, 85).
Nevertheless, Hamlet appreciates the deceptive power of acting. This is
how he comments on the First Actor’s test performance in act II, scene 2:

Is it not monstrous that this player here,

But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,
Could force his soul so to his own conceit
That from her working all his visage wann’d,
Tears in his eyes, distraction in his aspect,
A broken voice, and his whole function suiting
With forms to his conceit? And all for nothing! (544–50)

In Shakespeare’s tragedy, besides ‘playing himself’, at times Hamlet also

takes on a dizzying variety of other masks. His deepest nature lies in this
incessant changing. He not only acts the part of the Prince of Denmark,
but also assumes the roles of a fool and of a theatre director. For him,
the stage is more than the medium and the space of his performance as a
DOI: 10.4324/9780203073506-14
 “To act, to do, to perform” 181
character. Under his guiding hand, the play becomes a means, the proper
instrument of his revenge. In spite of his tendency towards melancholy, the
Enlightenment Hamlet, in contrast to the German and English Romantic
ones, as well as Goethe’s (Huesmann), is not an indolent melancholic, he
simply plays the role (Schülting 541). Primarily, his actions are not deeds,
but words. The device by which Hamlet succeeds in unmasking Claudius as
the murderer of his father is the performed word, the play within the play:
“The play’s the thing, / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King” (II,
2, 599 –600).
As the grave-digger points out in his convoluted speech on Ophelia’s
death at the beginning of act V: “[A]n act hath three branches—it is to act,
to do, to perform” (V, 1, 11–12). Hamlet’s behaviour displays a defi ned and
well-considered purpose. He acts his part with a specific aim: to execute his
father’s order, he stages a play.
Despite an ongoing critical debate on Shakespeare in Germany, there
existed no translation of his plays suitable for the stage until the 1760s (Bob­
inger 334). Furthermore, until the 1770s, not only Shakespeare’s, but also
the plays of the young Sturm-und-Drang dramatists—which were strongly
influenced by the Elizabethan playwright—were generally not intended for
stage productions, but only for reading. In 1761 Christoph Martin Wie­
land, at that time chief officer in his Swabian hometown Biberach, began
his prose translation of twenty-two of Shakespeare’s plays, many of which
had never before been Germanized (Kofler 2005, 2007: 1732–33). Wie­
land himself repeatedly asserted that his translation was meant exclusively
for the page. However, adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays for the German
stage during the last three decades of the century were largely based on
Wieland’s seemingly reader-oriented translation and still continued to be so
at a time when, from 1797, the verse translation by August Wilhelm Schle­
gel and Ludwig Tieck was being published. Nevertheless, Shakespeare’s
works were mainly “given in adaptations designed specifically to appeal to
audiences raised on domestic drama” (Williams 51).
In 1765 Franz Heufeld (1731–1795) took over the direction of the Ger­
man-speaking theatre in Vienna. Despite the rigorous observation of the
neoclassical unities and the extensive suppression of the play’s “political
and metaphysical issues” (ibid. 69) in order to suit the severe guidelines
and the conservative taste of the Habsburg Court Theatre, on the one side,
and the deletion of several subplots and the happy ending in line with the
local bourgeois audience’s taste, on the other, his Hamlet-adaptation rep­
resents “a milestone in the field of adapting Shakespeare’s works for the
stage” (Häublein 71; my translation) for having largely renounced personal
additions to the play and for having instead closely adhered to Wieland’s
translation (ibid.).
The first edition of Heufeld’s adaptation, published in Vienna in 1772,
was entitled Hamlet Prinz von Dänemark: Ein Trauerspiel in fünf Aufzü­
gen nach dem Schakespear [Hamlet Prince of Denmark: A Tragedy in
182 Peter Kofl er
Five Acts Based on Shakespeare].1 The second edition, almost identical to
the first in wording and title, was issued one year later in Pressburg and
Leipzig. According to Alexander von Weilen, this was the version on which
the Vienna performances of the play were based (1908: 17).
Friedrich Ludwig Schröder (1744–1816) is one of the leading figures in
eighteenth-century theatre history. He started his career as a dancer; later in
life he became an actor and a playwright. As a dramaturge, he authoritatively
supported a new naturalistic presentation style. From 1771 to 1780, from
1785 to 1798, and for the last time in 1811–1812 he was director of the Ham­
burg Theatre (Hoffmann 11). It was during those years that many of Shake­
speare’s plays were transferred onto the German stage, among them Hamlet,
the performance of which was resoundingly successful (Häublein 56).
During a journey to Prague in the summer of 1776, Schröder saw a
staging of Hamlet in Heufeld’s adaptation given by the company of Johann
Joseph von Brunian (Daffis 17), which had been fi rst performed in Vienna
on 16 January 1773 (Bobinger 336). This experience led Schröder to begin
with an adaptation of his own (Schröder iv–v), based, like Heufeld’s (Weilen
1908: 15; Winds 153), on Wieland’s translation (Genée 237; Merschberger
214; Daffis 10; Hadamczik 20; Häublein 70).
The premiere of the first of Schröder’s Hamlet-adaptations took place
in Hamburg a few months later, on 20 September 1776, probably not yet
in Schröder’s own, but in Heufeld’s version (Bobinger 340; Williams 72).
For Simon Williams “[f]ew if any events in the introduction of Shakespeare
to the German theatre were more important than the production of Ham­
let given by the Ackermann company in Hamburg” (67). Since then, the
play “was given with uncommon regularity . . . and was quickly taken up
by almost every standing theatre and wandering troupe in Germany. By
the end of the decade the whole country had been gripped by a veritable
‘Hamlet-fever’” (ibid.). Nevertheless, the admirable success of the Ham­
burg staging “may well have been due more to the quality of the acting than
to the script” (74) and this reminds us to keep the gap between text and
performance always well in mind.
Since the audience wished to see also the grave-digger scene, which at
first had been omitted, from November 1776 Hamlet was staged in a six-act
version. But whereas the spectators highly appreciated the humour of the
dialogue between the grave-digger and his companion, many of the review­
ers saw this as a shameful concession to plebeian taste. This prompted
Schröder to reconsider; he restored the five-act version, which from 20 Feb­
ruary 1778 was taken as a basis for further performances (Merschberger
216; Winds 166). What is most astonishing for us today is the fact that both
in Heufeld’s and in Schröder’s versions Hamlet stays alive. But as Hansjür­
gen Blinn and Wolf Gerhard Schmidt rightly point out in the introduction
to their bibliography of German Shakespeare translations and adaptations,
a happy ending for tragedies was required by the majority of theatregoers
and was therefore common practice in those times (10).
 “To act, to do, to perform” 183
Both versions appeared in print. The first one, entitled Hamlet, Prinz
von Dännemark: Ein Trauerspiel in 6 Aufzügen [Hamlet, Prince of Den­
mark: A Tragedy in 6 Acts]2 and based both on Wieland’s translation and
on Heufeld’s adaptation, was published in 1777 in Hamburg. The second
one, also issued in Hamburg one year later, was based on the translation
by Johann Joachim Eschenburg (Weilen 1908: 30), who had amended and
completed Wieland’s work.3 This edition was entitled Hamlet Prinz von
Dännemark: Ein Trauerspiel in fünf Aufzügen; Nach Shakespear [Ham­
let Prince of Denmark: A Tragedy in Five Acts; Based on Shakespeare]4
and was characterized by a higher degree of intelligibility and speakability
(ibid. 34). Its premiere occurred on 6 February 1778 (Bobinger 342). Need­
less to say that the text spoken on stage differed to a greater or lesser degree
from the two printed versions (Merschberger 215, note 3). In the beginning
Johann Franz Hieronymus Brockmann (1745–1812) played the eponymous
role, while Schröder acted the part of the ghost (Merschberger 216; Weilen
1908: 36; Eigenmann 27). After Brockmann’s departure the part of Hamlet
was taken over by Schröder himself (Merschberger 217).
Williams asserts that nothing can “illustrate more fully the process of
adaptation Shakespeare’s plays had to go through in order to gain a foot­
ing in the German theatre than the transformations Hamlet underwent,
from Wieland’s translation through to Schröder’s final version of the play”
(Williams 68). A systematic analysis and comparison between these texts
has already been undertaken by Rudolph Genée (230–49), Alexander von
Weilen (1908), Adolf Winds (30–45), Hans Daffis (13–54), and Julius
Bobinger. I shall focus on the appearance of the ghost in act III, scene
4, which, acted by Garrick, Brockmann, and Schröder, raised an intense
debate among German critics, demonstrating deep concern about the right
way to act in order to produce certain reactions and emotions on the part
of the audience.
As it was the main basis of both Heufeld’s and Schröder’s adaptations, I
shall begin with Wieland’s translation:

(Der Geist läßt sich sehen.)

HAMLET: Ein zusammengeflikter Lumpen-König—Himmel! (Er starrt
mit Entsezen auf.) umschwebet mich mit euern Flügeln, ihr him­
mlischen Wächter!—Was will deine ehrwürdige Erscheinung?
KÖNIGIN: O weh! er ist wahnsinnig–
HAMLET: Kommt ihr nicht, euern trägen Sohn zu beschelten, der die Zeit
in unthätigem Gram verliehrend, das grosse Werk, das ihr ihm
anbefohlen habt, liegen läßt?
GEIST: Vergiß es nicht: Dieser Besuch hat sonst keine Absicht, als deinen
fast stumpfen Vorsaz zu wezen. Aber, siehe! Erstaunen ergreift
deine Mutter! O tritt zwischen sie und ihre kämpfende Seele: In
den schwächsten Körpern wirkt die Einbildung am stärksten.
Rede mit ihr, Hamlet.
184 Peter Kofl er
HAMLET: Wie steht es um euch, Gnädige Frau?
KÖNIGIN: O weh! wie steht es um dich? daß du deine Augen so auf einen
Ort ohne Gegenstand heftest, und mit der unkörperlichen Luft
Gespräche führst? Deine Geister schauen wild aus deinen Augen
heraus, und gleich schläfernden Soldaten bey einem plözlichen
Alarm, starren deine Haare, wie beseelt, empor, und stehen unbe­
weglich auf ihren Enden—O mein lieber Sohn, sprize kalte Geduld
auf das Feuer deiner Leidenschaft—Was schauest du so an?
HAMLET: Ihn! Ihn selbst!—Seht ihr den düstern Schein, den er von sich
giebt? Seine Gestalt und seine Sache zusammengenommen,
könnten Steine in Bewegung und Leidenschaft sezen—O sieh mich
nicht an, oder dieser traurige Blik verwandelt meinen frömmern
Vorsaz in Wuth—und macht hier Blut für Thränen fliessen.
KÖNIGIN: Mit wem redet ihr?
HAMLET: Seht ihr denn nichts hier? (Er zeigt mit dem Finger auf den
Geist.)
KÖNIGIN: Nicht das geringste; und doch seh ich alles was ist.
HAMLET: Hört ihr auch nichts?
KÖNIGIN: Nein, nichts als uns beyde.
HAMLET: Wie, seht nur dorthin! Seht, wie es hinweg gleitet! Mein Vater
in seiner leibhaften Gestalt! Seht, eben izt geht es durch die Thüre
hinaus.

(Der Geist verschwindt.) (Shakespeare 130–31)

Here is Shakespeare’s text, taken from the eighth volume of the Warbur­
ton edition of The Works of Shakespear, which Wieland used as source:

Enter Ghost.
HAMLET: A King of shreds and patches–
Save me! and hover o’er me with your wings,
(Starting up.)
You heav’nly guards!—What would your gracious figure?
QUEEN: Alas, he’s mad–
HAM: Do you not come your tardy son to chide,
That laps’d in time and passion, lets go by
Th’ important acting of your dread command?
O say!
GHOST: Do not forget: this visitation
Is but to whet thy almost blunted purpose.
But, look! amazement on thy mother sits;
O step between her and her fighting soul:
Conceit in weakest bodies strongest works.
Speak to her, Hamlet.
HAM: How is it with you, lady?
 “To act, to do, to perform” 185
QUEEN: Alas, how is’t with you?
That thus you bend your eye on vacancy,
And with th’incorporal air do hold discourse?
Forth at your eyes your spirits wildly peep,
And, as the sleeping soldiers in th’ alarm,
Your bedded hairs, like life in excrements,
Start up, and stand on end. O gentle son,
Upon the heat and flame of thy distemper
Sprinkle cool patience. Whereon do you look?
HAM: On him! on him!—look you, how pale he glares!
His form and cause conjoin’d, preaching to stones,
Would make them capable. Do not look on me,
Lest with this piteous action you convert
My stern effects; then what I have to do,
Will want true colour; tears, perchance, for blood.
QUEEN: To whom do you speak this?
HAM: Do you see nothing there?
(Pointing to the Ghost.)
QUEEN: Nothing at all; yet all, that is, I see.
HAM: Nor did you nothing hear?
QUEEN: No, nothing but ourselves.
HAM: Why, look you there! look, how it steals away!
My father in his habit as he lived!
Look where he goes ev’n now, out at the portal.
(Exit Ghost.) (211–12)

This is how Heufeld rendered the passage:

(Der Geist läßt sich sehen.) HAMLET, KÖNIGINN.

HAMLET: Ein zusammengeflickter Lumpen-könig—Himmel! (Er starrt
mit Entsetzen auf) Umschwebet mich mit euern Flügeln, ihr him­
mlischen Wächter!—Was will deine ehrwürdige Erscheinung?
KÖNIGINN: O weh! er ist wahnsinnig!
HAMLET: Kömmst du nicht deinen trägen Sohn zu schelten, der die Zeit,
in unthätigem Gram verliehrend, das grosse Werk, das du ihm
anbefohlen hast, liegen läßt?
DER GEIST: Vergiß es nicht, dieser Besuch hat sonst keine Absicht, als
deinen fast stumpfen Vorsatz zu wetzen. Aber siehe, Erstaunen
ergreift deine Mutter! O tritt zwischen sie und ihre kämpfende
Seele: In den schwächsten Körpern wirkt die Einbildung am
stärksten. Rede mit ihr, Hamlet.
HAMLET: Wie steht es um euch gnädige Frau?
KÖNIGINN: O weh, wie steht es um dich, daß du deine Augen so auf
einen Ort heftest, und mit der unkörperlichen Luft Gespräche
führest? deine Geister schauen wild aus deinen Augen heraus,
186 Peter Kofl er
deine Haare starren wie beseelt empor, und stehen unbeweglich
auf ihren Enden—O mein lieber Sohn, Was schaust du so an?
HAMLET: Ihn, ihn selbst—Seht ihr den düstern Schein, den er von sich
giebt? Seine Gestalt und seine Sache zusammen genommen
könnten Steine in Bewegung und Leidenschaft setzen—O sieh
mich nicht an, oder dieser traurige Blick verwandelt meinen
frömmern Vorsatz in Wuth, und macht hier Blut für Thränen
fießen.
KÖNIGINN Mit wem redest du?
HAMLET: Seht ihr denn nichts hier? (Er zeigt mit dem Finger auf den
Geist.)
KÖNIGINN: Nicht das geringste, und doch seh ich alles, was ist.
HAMLET: Hört ihr auch nichts?
KÖNIGINN: Nein, nichts, als uns beyde.
HAMLET: Wie? seht nur dorthin! Seht, wie es hinweg gleitet. Mein Vater
in seiner leibhaften Gestalt! Seht, eben jetzt geht es durch die
Thüre hinaus. (der Geist verschwindet.) (Weilen 1914: 50–51)

At first glance, there seems to be no difference at all between the two

texts, which confirms Heufeld’s adaptation being based on Wieland. But if
one takes a closer look, one may perceive some discrepancies in the queen’s
speech. Heufeld deletes the expression “ohne Gegenstand” (“on vacancy”,
III, 4, 117) and two images: “und gleich schläfernden Soldaten bey einem
plözlichen Alarm” [And, as the sleeping soldiers in th’alarm] (120) and
“sprize kalte Geduld auf das Feuer deiner Leidenschaft” [Upon the heat
and flame of thy distemper / Sprinkle cool patience] (123–24). Even if one
accepts that theatre translations were always more or less altered in perfor­
mance, these omissions must have aimed at a higher degree of speakability,
contributing decisively to the rhythm of the action.
Here is Schröder’s 1777 version:

Der Geist. Vorige.

HAMLET: Ein zusammengeflickter Lumpen-könig—Himmel! (Er starrt
mit Entsetzen auf.) Umschwebet mich mit euern Flügeln, ihr him­
mlischen Wächter!—Was will deine ehrwürdige Erscheinung?
KÖNIGIN: O weh! er ist wahnsinnig!–
HAMLET: Kömmst du nicht, deinen trägen Sohn zu schelten, der die Zeit,
in unthätigem Gram verlierend, das große Werk, das du ihm
anbefohlen hast, liegen läßt?
DER GEIST: Vergiß es nicht, dieser Besuch hat sonst keine Absicht, als
deinen fast stumpfen Vorsatz zu wetzen. Aber siehe, Erstaunen
ergreift deine Mutter! O tritt zwischen ihr und ihrer kämpfenden
Seele! Rede mit ihr, Hamlet.
HAMLET: Wie steht es um euch, Mutter?
 “To act, to do, to perform” 187
KÖNIGIN: O weh, wie steht es um dich, dass Du deine Augen so auf
einen Ort heftest, und mit der unkörperlichen Luft Gespräche
führest? Deine Geister schauen wild aus deinen Augen heraus,
Deine Haare starren wie beseelt empor, und stehen unbeweglich
auf ihren Enden—O, mein lieber Sohn, was schauest du so an?
HAMLET: Ihn, ihn selbst—Seht ihr den düstern Schein, der er von sich
giebt? Seine Gestalt und seine Sache, zusammen genommen,
könnten Steine in Bewegung und Leidenschaft setzen—O sieh
mich nicht an, oder dieser traurige Blick verwandelt meinen
frömmern Vorsatz in Wuth, und macht hier Blut für Thränen
fliessen.
KÖNIGIN: Mit wem redest du?
HAMLET: Seht ihr denn nichts hier? (Er zeigt mit dem Finger auf den
Geist.)
KÖNIGIN: Nicht das geringste, und doch seh ich alles, was ist.
HAMLET: Hört ihr auch nichts?
KÖNIGIN: Nein nichts, als uns beyde.
HAMLET: Wie, seht nur dorthin! Seht, wie es hinweg gleitet. Mein Vater
in seiner leibhaften Gestalt. Seht, eben jetzt geht es durch die
Thüre hinaus. (Der Geist verschwindet.) (Weilen 1914: 104–05)

Here, too, the affinity to Heufeld (and Wieland) is quite profound. Nev­
ertheless, yet another omission may be identified, this time in the speech of
the ghost: the sentence “In den schwächsten Körpern wirkt die Einbildung
am stärksten” [Conceit in weakest bodies strongest works] (III, 4, 114) is
left out, most likely for the same reasons as above. But it is another differ­
ence which shows the deep change Hamlet underwent by being relocated
to the German-language theatre. While in Wieland and in Heufeld Hamlet
addresses his mother by “Frau” [lady], in both of Schröder’s versions we
find “Mutter” [mother]. This substitution shows that Schröder, more delib­
erately and consistently than Heufeld, strived to meet the requirements of
domestic drama entirely focused on family relationships.
Finally, let us look at Schröder’s 1778 version:

Der Geist. Vorige.

HAMLET: Ein zusammen gefl ickter Lumpenkönig—Himmel! Er starrt
mit Entsetzen auf) Umschwebt mich mit euern Flügeln, ihr him­
mlischen Wächter!—Was will Deine ehrwürdige Erscheinung?
KÖNIGINN: O weh! er ist wahnsinnig!–
HAMLET: Kömmst du nicht, Deinen trägen Sohn zu schelten, der die Zeit
in unthätigem Gram verlierend, das grosse Werk, das Du ihm
anbefohlen hast, liegen lässt?
DER GEIST: Vergiß es nicht, dieser Besuch hat nur die Absicht, Deinen
fast stumpfen Vorsatz zu wetzen. Aber sieh, Erstaunen ergreift
188 Peter Kofl er
deine Mutter! O tritt zwischen ihr und ihrer kämpfenden Seele!
Rede mit ihr, Hamlet.
HAMLET: Wie steht es um Euch, Mutter?
KÖNIGINN: O weh, wie steht es um Dich, daß Du Deine Augen so auf
einen Ort heftest, und mit der unkörperlichen Luft Gespräche
führest? Dein Geist schaut wild aus Deinen Augen, Deine Haare
starren wie beseelt empor—O, mein theurer Sohn, was siehst Du
so an?
HAMLET: Ihn;—Ihn!—Seht Ihr den düstern Schein, den er von sich giebt?
Seine Gestalt und seine Sache, zusammen genommen, könnten
Steine in Bewegung und Leidenschaft setzen—O sieh mich nicht
an, oder dieser traurige Blick verändert meinen besten Vorsatz!
Entnervt mich! Thränen würden für Blut fl iessen.
KÖNIGINN: Mit wem redest Du?
HAMLET: Seht Ihr denn dort nichts? (er zeigt mit dem Finger auf den
Geist)
KÖNIGINN: Nicht das geringste, und doch seh ich alles, was ist.
HAMLET: Höret Ihr auch nichts?
KÖNIGINN: Nein, nichts, als uns beyde.
HAMLET: Wie, seht nur dorthin! Seht, wie es hinweg gleitet. Mein Vater
in seiner leibhaften Gestalt. Seht, eben jetzt geht es durch die
Thüre hinaus. (der Geist ab) (Weilen 1914: 178–79)

What is most surprising here is the improvement of the text’s deictic

power. Hamlet’s “Ihn, ihn selbst” is shortened to “Ihn;—Ihn!”, echoing
exactly Shakespeare’s “On him, on him” (III, 4, 125), which suggests a
perfect symmetry and simultaneity of word and gesture. Similarly, in the
1778 edition Hamlet, exactly as he does in Shakespeare, says “Seht Ihr
denn dort nichts?” [Do you see nothing there?] (132; my emphasis) instead
of “hier”, which is in accordance with the related stage direction: “(er zeigt
mit dem Finger auf den Geist)”—a stage direction which is famously miss­
ing in modern standard Hamlet editions, but which is contained in the
edition of Shakespeare’s plays used by Wieland, the eighth volume of The
Works of Shakespear (London 1747) edited by William Warburton (Kofler
2008: 394).
Brockmann’s guest appearance as Hamlet in Berlin from December
1777 to January 1778 was of historic importance. From that moment on
Shakespere’s tragedy met with constant success, playing in theatres all over
Germany (Weilen 1908: 57). Shakespeare became, so to speak, a German
author; beside Faust, Hamlet was destined to be the new myth of German
literature and Brockmann the first real star among German actors. But
the Berlin production not only won the German audience’s favour beyond
expectation, it was also twice documented: by the detailed descriptions of
Johann Friedrich Schink in Ueber Brockmanns Hamlet issued in 1778,
and by the famous German illustrator Daniel Chodowiecki, whose twelve
 “To act, to do, to perform” 189
Hamlet drawings were published in the Berliner Genealogischen Taschen­
kalender für 1779 (Voelcker 1).
Before returning to the scene discussed above, I shall cite Schink’s
description of Brockmann’s reaction to the appearance of the ghost in act
II, scene 5:

The ghost appears, Mister Brockmann crosses himself, throws down

his hat, stands with trembling knees, breathing heavily and bent for-
ward—and while the ghost approaches him, he addresses him in a
broken voice. Beautiful! Excellent! But allow me the following objec­
tion! The appearance of a ghost, the appearance of my father’s ghost,
in these circumstances, at the solemn midnight hour, with the pre­
monition of a concealed crime in my bosom: such an appearance, I
say, (even if perfectly arranged) cannot but raise the highest degree of
horror and surprise. Now I ask everybody if horror and surprise bend
the body forward or backward? The latter, I think. . . . So if I plaid
Hamlet, I would follow Mister Brockmann’s nice and natural idea
of crossing himself and throwing down his hat, but bend my body
backward; and as surprise always lames the tongue, I would maintain
this pose of silent surprise for three or four minutes, gradually bend
myself forward, gradually appear to regain the power of speech and
address the ghost in a broken voice like Mister Brockmann. (Schink
22–23; my translation)5

Brockmann’s movements and gestures in this scene were masterfully

recorded by Chodowiecki in the first of the above-mentioned engravings,
based, like Brockmann’s performance, on Schröder’s six-act version of 1777
(Voelcker 40) and subtitled Seht Ihr denn nichts hier? [Do You See Nothing
There?]. The illustration achieves a perfect intertwining of image and text, of
iconic and verbal signs. Chodowiecki’s draughtsmanship shows Brockmann-
Hamlet looking back at the figure of the ghost standing in the background,
stepping forward and outstretching both arms and forefingers towards him,
thus effectively demonstrating the deictic power of the body-sign.
Returning to act IV, scene 11, it is apparent that for Schink this scene
is “without doubt the strongest in Hamlet and, at the same time, the most
productive for an actor” (56). This is how Schink presents this scene and
comments on it:

HAMLET: . . . (indem der Geist auftritt, wie in Ekstase und halb gebroch­
nen Tönen) Himmel! Umschwebet mich mit euren Flügeln ihr
himmlischen Mächte! Was will deine ehrwürdige Erscheinung.
KÖNIGIN: O mein lieber Sohn, Was schaust du so an?
HAMLET: (Immer starr auf den Geist blickend.) Ihn, ihn selbst! Seht
ihr den düstern Schein, den er von sich giebt? Seine Gestalt und
seine Sache zusammen-genommen, könnten Steine in Bewegung
190 Peter Kofl er
und Leidenschaft setzen. (Mit dem Ton der Wehmut und des
durchdrungnen Herzens.) O sieh mich nicht an: oder dieser trau­
rige Blick verwandelt meinen frömmern Vorsatz in Wuth und
macht hier Blut statt Thränen fließen. (ängstlich die Mutter bey
der Hand ergreifend.) Seht nur dorthin—seht, wie es hinweg­
gleitet—mein Vater in seiner leibhaften Gestalt. Seht, eben jetzt
geht er zur Thüre hinaus.

Der Geist schwindet, Hamlet starrt ihm nach. In seinem Blick mischt
sich Wehmut und Staunen—sein Athem ist schwer, sein Gesicht bleich;
er scheint reden zu wollen, aber die Worte sterben ihm auf der Zunge.
(61–62)

In a long note, Schink points out:

On the whole Brockmann plays this scene admirably, even if he occa­

sionally misses the subtler changes from pain to grief, from wistfulness
to reluctance. The above remark on the first appearance of the ghost
applies even more to this scene than to the latter: surprise doesn’t bend
the body forward but backward. Here the appearance is so unexpected
and sudden that Hamlet must absolutely fall into a frozen posture . . .
If I take this scene as reality, if I imagine such a ghost staying in front
of me, I feel my whole body wincing in horror, feel all my limbs freez­
ing, my eyes popping out, my breath shortening, my knees trembling,
my voice ceasing. By these signs of horror and surprise the actor would
make the audience wince with him. But if an actor is not able to feel
such a situation, if this horror is not real, but only imitated, I can only
see the actor, not the man; I can only see Brockmann, not Hamlet. (61;
my translation)6

In England, David Garrick had been acting Hamlet, his most famous and
discussed role, in an adaptation of his own from 1742 to 1776 (Brunkhorst
1987: 152). The vast number of foreigners who attended his much-admired
performances included the German philosopher Georg Christoph Lichten­
berg, who in 1776 extensively and vividly reported on them in his Briefen
aus London for the Deutsche Museum. In a letter to Heinrich Christian
Boie dated 1 October 1775, Lichtenberg writes that he has seen Garrick
acting on eight occasions, two of them as Hamlet. He also tells his friend
that he has made Garrick’s acquaintance and is enjoying free admission to
the famous actor’s loge (534). Häublein suggests that Lichtenberg’s letters
from London, containing “an unequalled glorification of Garrick’s acting,
directly influenced Schröder’s Hamlet adaptation, for he started to work on
it just a few weeks after they had been published” (61; my translation; see
also Litzmann 191).
 “To act, to do, to perform” 191
Based on the performances of the 2 and 12 December 1774 (Weilen
1908: 47), Lichtenberg’s description of Garrick acting Hamlet is particu­
larly important and revealing. According to Häublein, the author developed
“a new technique of performance analysis: the ‘mimopraphic description of
acting’, offering a detailed account of all those means of expression of an
actor which are not actively provided by the text” (61; my translation).
Lichtenberg’s portrait of Garrick clearly proves that Schink was highly
influenced by the philosopher in his severe criticism of Brockmann’s acting
in the ghost scene of act I:

Hamlet enters dressed in black. Unfortunately, he is the only one at

court who is still dressing in black for his poor father, who died only
a few months previously. Horatio and Marcellus are with him in uni­
form; they are waiting for the ghost; Hamlet with extended arms and
hat lowered to the eyes; the night is cold, the time midnight; the Theatre
is dimmed and everyone in the audience keeps quiet, and all faces are
immobile as if they were painted on the walls of the theatre; everyone
stays in perfect silence. At once, Hamlet is in the background at the left
turning his back on the audience, Horatio winces: Look, Milord, there
it comes, he says pointing to the right, where the ghost has already
appeared before being noticed. At these words, Garrick suddenly turns
and in the same moment pounces back two or three steps while his
knees collapse, his hat falls to the ground, his arms, especially the left
one, are nearly extended, the hand as high as the head, the right arm is
rather bended and the hand lower, the fingers are spread and the mouth
is open; like this he remains stiff, held upright by his friends, who are
more accustomed to the ghostly appearance and who fear he may fall
down; the expression of horror in his face made me shiver several times
before he even started to speak. (Lichtenberg 542–43; my translation)7

The Berlin performance of Hamlet in 1779 with Schröder in the main

role perfectly reveals the influence of Lichtenberg’s mimetic depiction of his
acting. In a review published in the Litteratur- und Theater-Zeitung the
encounter between Hamlet and the ghost is thus rendered:

He [Schröder] tumbled back astonished while his hat fell down, his body,
breathing heavily and trembling all over, was still bending backward, he
maintained this pose for a few moments, then he bent gradually forward
again, listened to the ghost, and only then could he find words, which his
tongue could hardly utter. (Genée 249; my translation)8

The above descriptions are all closely related to what in eighteenth-cen­

tury Europe was called the art of gesture. Discussing the practices and prin­
ciples of acting at that time, Dene Barnett points out that this art “used a
192 Peter Kofl er
vocabulary of basic gestures, each with an individual meaning known to all
in advance, and all performed in accordance with given techniques and pre­
cepts of style” (7). Together with the style of their performance, these basic
gestures “correspond to the fundamental eighteenth-century distinction
between Nature and Art” (8). During the second half of this century, the
German theory of acting, too, focused on these concepts by adopting, even
more than in England, the Hamlet role as its main touchstone (Brunkhorst
1973: 38). ‘Natural’ was intended as opposed to ‘artificial’, to baroque and
neoclassical acting (Heeg 125). In his Ideen zu einer Mimik (1785–1886)
Johann Jakob Engel, aligning himself to this new tendency and building on
the “anthropological, psychological, ethical and aesthetical findings of the
time” (Heeg 310; my translation), developed “a broad two-fold division of
gestures”, dividing them into “depictive [malende] which included indica­
tive and imitative gestures, and expressive [ausdruckende] which expressed
the internal passions of the character” (Barnett 20). These expressive ges­
tures were performed “in imitation of nature but transformed in accordance
with the requirements of grace and bienséance” and “became standard
techniques for the representation of passions such as surprise, grief, fear,
etc” (ibid. 36). In addition to eyes and mouth wide open (ibid. 45), surprise,
together with terror, was expressed by “uplifted hands, spread fi ngers and
a backward step” (ibid. 46)—exactly what constitutes the theoretical back­
ground of both Schink’s and Lichtenberg’s descriptions.
In order to raise emotions in the audience, gestural signs had to repro­
duce faithfully the feelings of the human soul (Brunkhorst 1973: 40; Fis­
cher-Lichte 1999: 55–60). Accordingly, for Engel, the actor’s task consisted
in transforming “his body into a perfect sign of a character’s inner feelings”
(Fischer-Lichte 1999: 58; my translation). In his Lettres sur les sourds et les
muets, published anonymously in 1751 and translated into German by Got­
thold Ephraim Lessing, Denis Diderot had already defined “the language of
gesture as a ‘natural language’” (Fischer-Lichte 1992: 56; my translation).
Being both an admirer of Garrick’s acting and a follower of Diderot and
Lessing, Schröder took over their idea of a natural and illusionistic acting
style (Birkner 13) in directing the Hamburg theatre, but also, as the above
example shows, in acting Hamlet. The texts by the Elizabethan playwright,
being notoriously full of (verbal) action, were particularly challenging for
Schröder, because “in Shakespeare the actor is quasi compelled to convey
the subtext of the dialogue through facial expression and gesture” (Häub­
lein 66; my translation).
Heufeld’s and Schröder’s Hamlet-adaptations provide a telling insight
into the variety of problems connected with the relocation not only of the
play text, but also of the performance of Hamlet on the German stage dur­
ing the last third of the eighteenth century. Since the German audiences
were thoroughly accustomed to the aesthetics of domestic drama and to
an illusionistic-mimetic staging tradition based on a rigid subject-object
duality, theatre translators had to handle the source text’s hybridity and
 “To act, to do, to perform” 193
metatheatricality. In other words, they were compelled to cope with the
illusion-disturbing elements in order not to offend the spectators’ expec­
tations and taste. The high performativity of Shakespeare’s language
perfectly suited the truth-to-nature presentation style developed in those
years. Moreover, theatre reviews witness a certain degree of autopoietic
feedback between stage and audience. Finally, the fact that both Heufeld
and Schröder were not only theatre translators, but also, and at the same
time, directors, dramaturges, and actors, attests to the overall relevance
and centrality of translating at every step of the production process.

NOTES

1. This version was re-edited by Weilen (1914).

2. Hamlet, Prinz von Dännemark: Ein Trauerspiel in 6 Aufzügen. Zum Behuf
des Hamburgischen Theaters. Hamburg, in der Heroldschen Buchhandlung.
1777. New edition 1781 (Blinn and Schmidt 109) .
3. Johann Joachim Eschenburg, William Shakespear’s Schauspiele, 13 vols.
Zürich 1775–1782.
4. Hamlet Prinz von Dännemark: Ein Trauerspiel in fünf Aufzügen; Nach
Shakespear. Hamburg: J. M. Michaelsen, 1778. Reprint Mannheim: Schwan,
1781 (Blinn and Schmidt 109).
5. “Der Geist tritt auf, Herr Brockmann schlägt ein Kreuz, wirft den Hut
herunter, steht mit bebendem Knie, keuchendem Athem, und vorgebeugtem
Leib da—und indem der Geist näher tritt, redet er ihn mit gebrochner
Sprache und zwar mit halben Thönen an. Schön! vortrefl ich! Aber man
erlaube mir gleich hier eine Erinnerung! Die Erscheinung eines Geistes, die
Erscheinung des Geistes meines Vaters, von allen den Umständen begleitet,
wie hier, mitten im feyerlichen Gepräng der Mitternachtsstunde, mit dem
ahndenden Gefühl einer verdeckten Uebelthat in meinem Busen: eine solche
Erscheinung sag’ ich—(sey sie noch so präparirt!) kann, wenn sie nun auf
einmal vor mir daherschreitet, nichts anders, als den äußersten Grad des
Entsetzens und Erstaunens in mir erregen. Nun frag’ ich einen jedem, ob
Entsetzen und Erstaunen den Leib vorwärts, oder rückwärts biegt? Ich
denke das letztere. . . . Ich daher, wenn ich den Hamlet spielte, würde
allerdings Herrn Brockmann in dem schönen und natürlichen Gedanken
des Kreuzschlagens und Hutabwerfens folgen—aber meinen Leib rückwärts
biegen; und da Erstaunen allemal die Zunge bindet, in dieser Attitüde des
Erstaunens drey bis vier Minuten sprachlos bleiben, nach und nach mich
mehr vorwärts beugen, nach und nach Worte zu fi nden scheinen, und so den
Geist, wie Herr Brockmann in halben gebrochnen Tönen, anreden”.
6. “Im Ganzen spielt Brockmann diese Scene vortrefl ich, ob er sich gleich die
feinern Uebergänge von Schmerz zur Bitterkeit, von der Wehmut zum Unwil­
len nicht selten hat entschlüpfen lassen. Die Bemerkung, die ich eben bey
der ersten Erscheinung des Geistes gemacht habe, daß Erstaunen den Leib
rückwärts nicht vorwärts beugt, gilt auch hier: und hier noch mehr als oben.
Denn hier kömmt diese Erscheinung so ganz unpräparirt, überrascht so
auf einmal, daß Hamlet schlechterdings in das äußerste Erstarren gerathen
muß. . . . wenn ich mir diese Scene als wirklich denke, wenn ich in Gedanken
einen solchen Geist vor mir hintreten sehe—so fühl ich meinen ganzen Leib
vor Entsetzen zusammen fahren—fühle jedes meiner Glieder erstarren—mein
194 Peter Kofl er
Auge stärker hervorquellen, meinen Athem kürzer werden—meine Knie
beben—meine Sprache stocken, und nur diesen Symptomen des Schreckens
und Staunens dürfte sich der Schauspieler überlassen, und er würde jeden
Zuschauer so täuschen, daß er mit ihm zusammenführe. Wenn man aber eine
solche Situation nicht zu fühlen weiß, wenn dies Schrecken nicht wirkliches
Schrecken beym Schauspieler ist, sondern nur Nachäff ung des Schreckens,
so seh ich nur den Komödianten nicht den Menschen, sehe Brockmann, aber
nicht Hamlet”.
7. “Hamlet erscheint in einem schwarzen Kleide, dem einzigen, das leider! noch
am ganzen Hofe für seinen armen Vater, der kaum ein paar Monate todt ist,
getragen wird. Horazio und Marcellus sind bey ihm und haben Uniform; Sie
erwarten den Geist; die Arme hat Hamlet hoch ausgestreckt, und den Hut
in die Augen gedrückt; es ist eine kalte Nacht, und eben zwölfe; das Theater
ist verdunkelt und die ganze Versammlung von einigen tausenden, wird so
stille, und alle Gesichter so unbeweglich, als wären sie an die Wände des
Schauplatzes gemalt; man könnte am entferntesten Ende des Theaters eine
Nadel fallen hören. Auf einmal, da Hamlet eben ziemlich tief im Theater,
etwas zur Linken, geht und den Rücken nach der Versammlung kehrt, fährt
Horazio zusammen: Sehen Sie, Mylord, dort kommts, sagt er, und deutet
nach der Rechten, wo der Geist schon unbeweglich hingepflanzt steht, ehe
man ihn einmal gewahr wird. Garrick, auf diese Worte, wirft sich plötzlich
herum und stürzt in demselben Augenblicke zwey bis drey Schritte mit
zusammenbrechenden Knien zurück, sein Hut fällt auf die Erde, die beyden
Arme, hauptsächlich der linke, sind fast ausgestreckt, die Hand so hoch als
der Kopf, der rechte Arm ist mehr gebogen und die Hand niedriger, die Finger
stehen aus einander, und der Mund offen, so bleibt er in einen grossen aber
anständigen Schritt, wie erstarrt, stehen, unterstüzt von seinen Freunden, die
mit der Erscheinung bekannter sind, und fürchteten, er würde niederfallen;
in seiner Miene ist das Entsezen so ausgedruckt, daß mich, noch ehe er zu
sprechen anfi ng, ein wiederholtes Grausen anwandelte”.
8. “Erstaunungsvoll taumelte er hinter sich, im Zurücktaumeln stürzte ihm der
Hut ab, keuchend und an jedem Gliede zitternd bog sich sein Leib noch immer
rückwärts, er blieb einige Momente in dieser Stellung, dann beugte er sich
allmälig wieder vorwärts hin, lauschte dem Geiste entgegen, und nun erst
fand er Worte, die aber seine Zunge halb nur herauszubringen vermochte”.

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Century Acting, Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag.
Birkner, Nina (2007) “Hamlet auf der deutschen Bühne: Friedrich Ludwig
Schröders Theatertext, Dramentheorie und Auff ührungspraxis”, Das achtzehnte
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achtzehnten Jahrhunderts 31 (1): 13–30.
Blinn, Hansjürgen and Wolf Gerhard Schmidt (2003) Shakespeare—deutsch:
Bibliographie der Übersetzungen und Bearbeitungen; Zugleich Bestandsnachweis
der Shakespeare-Übersetzungen der Herzogin-Anna-Amalia-Bibliothek, Berlin:
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beider Länder in Geschichte und Gegenwart, München: Goldmann, 334–46.
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Brunkhorst, Martin (1987) “Garricks Shakespeare-Rollen: Formen ihrer
produktiven Rezeption in England und Deutschland”, Arcadia: Zeitschrift für
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Emil Felber.
Eigenmann, Susanne (1994) Zwischen ästhetischer Raserei und aufgeklärter
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Körper—Musik—Sprache, Göttingen: Wallstein, 53–68.
(1992) “Entwicklung einer neuen Schauspielkunst”, in Wolfgang F. Bender
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Stuttgart: Steiner, 51–70.
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14 “For the Newer Stage” and
“For Our Contemporary Emotion”
Suggestion and Emotion in
Hofmannsthal’s Drama Translations
Dieter Martin

Eine Übersetzung ist Sache einer Inspiration wie ein originales

Kunstwerk. Sie ist kein Gipsabguß, sondern eine freie Kopie. Dem
Künstler, der sie herstellt, muß die Verantwortung überlassen werden,
wie er die einzelnen Teile gegeneinander abwiegt und in Harmonie
setzt. Eine Identität mit dem Originalwerk, das ja weiter in seiner
eigenen Form und Art besteht, wird von dem künstlerischen Über­
setzer nicht angestrebt.

[Translation, just like producing an original copy, depends on inspira­

tion. It is not a cast, but a ‘free copy’. It lies in the artist’s responsibil­
ity to achieve a harmonious balance of all its parts. The translator’s
aim should not be to obtain a replica of the original, which continues
its independent existence in its own shape and genre].1

INTRODUCTION

Hugo von Hofmannsthal was always ‘a man of words’, as the sheer volume
of his poetical works, speeches, and essays, not counting the drafts and
alternative versions, attest. The bulk of his works, presented in the Hof­
mannsthal critical edition, fi lls more than thirty volumes. Hofmannsthal’s
enormous œuvre clearly indicates how intensely he was concerned with
both the written and the spoken word, how much the verbal code was his
constant medium of expression. Yet, there are well-known indications of
Hofmannsthal’s ‘discontent’ with language; suffice it to mention the fic­
tional letter written in 1902 in which Lord Chandos explained why he had
renounced his literary activities. He claimed to have “völlig die Fähigkeit
abhanden gekommen, über irgend etwas zusammenhängend zu denken oder
zu sprechen” [completely lost the ability to speak or think coherently about
anything] (Hofmannsthal 1975: XXXI, 48; Hofmannsthal 2008: 73). This
paradox—a character reflecting eloquently on his inability to speak—indi­
cates that Hofmannsthal’s preoccupation was less a ‘language crisis’ than a
deep scepticism about the capacity of language to signify through abstract
DOI: 10.4324/9780203073506-15
198 Dieter Martin
expressions. This led him to try to grasp “ein unnennbares Etwas” [an
unnameable something] that cannot be expressed in words, and to reach a
“Denken in einem Material, das unmittelbarer, flüssiger, glühender ist als
Worte” [thinking in a medium more immediate, more liquid, more glowing
than words] (Hofmannsthal 1975: XXXI, 54; Hofmannsthal 2008: 79; see
also Härter; Bomers; Günther).
The antinomical effort to get beyond words (Schneider 1990; Steiner;
Riedl) in order to express an ‘unnameable something’ drove Hofmannsthal
to intermediality. He employed the ‘magic writing of images’ by alluding to
works of the fine arts within his own written work in such a way that the pic­
tures themselves became meaningful within the written text (Renner-Henke;
Schneider 2006). He wrote libretti (Salvan-Renucci; Bayerlein), and designed
ballets and pantomimes focused on the mute eloquence of the body (Rutsch).
He looked for means of expression which could exceed the boundaries of the
verbal code, working repeatedly with and for the theatre. However, he was
neither a performing artist, nor a singer, nor a dancer, nor an actor or a direc­
tor;2 he neither wrote music nor was he a painter or a costume designer or a
stage architect. Hofmannsthal could only work with words. He interestingly
did not defend his literary profession against the performing arts. Instead of
vehemently presenting himself as an eloquent poet and master of words, he
time and again adapted and translated the works of other dramatists. His
own poetic creativity was left to fade into the background.

HOFMANNSTHAL’S TRANSLATION AESTHETICS

Before discussing Hofmannsthal’s aesthetics of translation for the theatre,

I shall offer a brief account of his main works in this field (a list is provided
in the Appendix) and of the aim and scope of his ‘theatrical calling’. Most
of his drama translations and adaptations were written for actual perfor­
mances, with the exception of a purely literary translation from Gabriele
D’Annunzio’s La Gioconda. The Italian author himself had asked to be
translated by a ‘poet’, and Hofmannsthal complied with this request, limit­
ing his translation to one scene which he published in a journal, presumably
never even considering a theatre production. 3 His thoughts were equally far
from the stage when, five years before, he had produced his fi rst translation,
which was of an ancient Greek play.4 The experiment had been prompted by
a university lecture on the Dramaturgie der antiken Tragiker [The Ancient
Tragedians’ Dramaturgy] delivered by Alfred von Berger in the winter
semester of 1893–1894. Hofmannsthal had taken up his suggestion to
translate Euripides’s Alkestis in order to release the play “aus maskenhafter
Starrheit” [from mask-like stiff ness].5 The explanation given in some of
the letters addressed to Marie Herzfeld and Elsa Bruckmann-Cantacuzène
regarding his attempt at “eine Art Bühnenbearbeitung der euripideischen
‘Alkestis’” [a sort of stage adaptation of Euripides’s ‘Alkestis’], and his hopes
 “For the Newer Stage” and “For Our Contemporary Emotion” 199
concerning a production,6 is more an indication of Hofmannsthal’s inclina­
tion to work for the theatre than an actual plan. Alkestis was performed
for the first time in 1916 and Hofmannsthal did not contribute to that
production (Hofmannsthal 1975: VII, 211). It is significant that, although
the idea to adapt a play from ancient Greece came from the Academia,
Hofmannsthal’s intention was far from such a notion. While the lecturer
proposed to deliver Alkestis “aus maskenhafter Starrheit” [from mask-like
stiffness], Hofmannsthal resolved to write “gar keine ehernen Verse” [no
iron verse at all] in order to make the drama “recht lebendig” [quite lively],
even if he judged the result “ganz ungriechisch . . . wenigstens unattisch”
[totally non-Greek . . . at least non-attic].7 Consequently, this “Vorversuch
antikmythisches neu zu gestalten” [attempt to recreate the ancient-myth]8
is not meant to reproduce faithfully the original but rather to make a vivid
contemporary adaptation.
As a general rule, the farther off in time the text Hofmannsthal was
working on was, the more contemporary he strived to make it, as shown by
two 1900 theatrical projects. Having witnessed a successful rendition of a
contemporary drama by Jules Renard in Paris,9 he wrote a faithful transla­
tion which left the structure of the play untouched. At the same time, he
also wrote a scenic prologue for the production of an older translation of
Sophocles’s Antigone,10 which was meant to take the spectators back to the
world of ancient drama. This prologue depicts a student who, having just
rehearsed “ein griechisch Trauerspiel” [a Greek tragedy] (l. 75), is prevented
from leaving the stage by a strange apparition, which he initially believes
to be an actress wishing to seduce him. Then he tries to convince himself
that he is merely dreaming, until the “Phantom” [phantom] (l. 88) proves
its sensual presence. When the tangible and “fürchterliche Gegenwart”
[fearsome presence] (l. 35) of the ancient ghost can no longer be denied,
his attempt to defend the external world against the fictional world of the
theatre proves abortive: “hier ist Wirklichkeit” [here is reality] (l. 115), the
apparition asserts, thus proving the timeless reality of the myth. The upset
student, who initially thought “Die Griechen . . . recht fern” [The Greeks
. . . quite far away] (1. 22), thus becomes aware of having turned into an
initiate, a “Teilnehmer an etwas Furchbarem” [attender at something hor­
rible] (ll. 178–79), and eventually feels the presence of the myth—at least
until he perceives the smell of decay from the body of Antigone’s unburied
brother. Immediately before the protagonist of Sophocles’s drama makes
her first stage appearance, the student sees her and acknowledges his being
“ich bin der schwesterlichen Seele nah, / ganz nah” [close to the sisterly
soul, / very close] (ll. 197–98).
The Antigone-Vorspiel [Antigone-Prologue] written in 1900 is not only
an important document regarding the aesthetics of reception, as it indicates
that Hofmannsthal considered the suggestive power of the theatre as a great
asset lost to closet drama; the scenic prologue is also the beginning of his
long-standing cooperation with Max Reinhardt. The Antigone project was
200 Dieter Martin
carried out by the Akademische Verein für Kunst und Litteratur [Academic
Association for the Arts and Literature],11 whose members had been students
of the famous Berlin classical philologist Ulrich von Wilamomitz-Moellen­
dorff. Their intention was to revive ancient drama and make it live again on
stage. One of the actors was Reinhardt himself, at the time still a member
of Otto Brahm’s ensemble, whose naturalistic ideals he would soon aban­
don. The erstwhile actor became one of the most renowned directors of the
first half of the twentieth century. Practically all of Hofmannsthal’s further
drama translations were for him (Fiedler 1974a), and they shared the same
opinions on what theatre should be like. Their first aim was to free ancient
drama from the “gipsernen Charakter” [plaster-like character] of historiciz­
ing productions. Instead of continuing the “Gypsgriechelei” [plaster imita­
tion of the Greek],12 they wanted to create anew “den Schauer des Mythos”
[the frisson of the myth],13 to turn the ancient world “aus einem Gegenstand
des Bildungsinteresses” [from an object of Bildung] into a “Gegenstand der
Emotion” [object of emotion],14 and to establish theatre as a counteracting
force to the academic treatment of antiquity: “Wenn Philologen Alterthum­
skenner etc. für die unbedingte Erhaltung des Alten sorgen, so muss auch eine
Instanz da sein, die unbedingt für das Lebendige sorgt” [If philologists and
classicists, among the others, are devoted to the preservation of the ancient,
it is necessary to have someone speak for the living].15
The revival of Molière’s works by Hofmannsthal and Reinhard during
the second phase of their cooperation (Mauser; Fiedler 1974b; Kohler) was
not primarily restorative. Instead of making ‘historical productions’ for the
sake of restoration alone, they opted for a “schöpferische Restauration”
[creative type of restoration] (Borchardt 1955: 230–53) that was both con­
servative and up-to-date (Fiedler 1974b: 57–58, 134 and ff.). Accordingly,
they did not intend a one-time reproduction of a museum showpiece when
around 1910 they staged some of Molière’s comédie-ballets written for the
Roi Soleil. Their aim was to revive the lost theatrical festival culture and
make it part of the contemporary repertoire. Hofmannsthal always put a
stress on this aspect of his theatre translations, emphasising that he did not
cultivate traditions in a retrospective manner. His objective was to make
them belong to the present:

Sophokles und etwa Euripides, Molière, Calderon, Lope: so steht es

mit all diesem ewigen Besitz, daß um ihn immer aufs neue gerungen
werden muß. Denn die lebendige Bühne ist dem Heute und dem Hier
zunächst untertan: das Fremde und Ferne kann ihr wohl gewonnen
werden, aber jede Generation muß es sich aufs neue gewinnen.

[Sophocles and, for example, Euripides, Molière, Calderon, Lope: the

lasting legacy of each of them must be continually reappropriated. Since
the living stage first of all obeys the rules of the ‘here and now’, it can
be endowed with the strange and the unknown, but each generation
must rediscover it in its own way.]16
 “For the Newer Stage” and “For Our Contemporary Emotion” 201
Hofmannsthal’s drama translations are strongly committed to ‘the here
and now’ of the stage. Yet, there are a few anachronisms both in his trans­
lation texts and in Reinhardt’s promptbooks:17 Molière’s court society does
not drive cars on Reinhardt’s stage, nor do mythical figures talk to each
other on the phone.18 Hofmannsthal’s proclivity for the primacy of a ‘liv­
ing stage’ is clearly suggested by his renouncing authorship to some extent,
thus defying philological attempts to locate his hand. When in 1903 he was
alternately working on Elektra and König Ödipus, he had not yet decided
that the former would become an original Hofmannsthal play, and that
the latter would remain Sophoclean and would be staged as such. The poet
translating both plays confessed to dealing “ganz pietätlos” [totally impi­
ously] with his sources because he wanted to do something “das auf Men­
schen unserer Zeit wirken kann und zwar nicht auf die Bildungsgefühle in
ihrem Kopf, sondern auf die gewöhnlichen menschlichen Gefühle” [that
can grab a hold on the contemporaries, on their ordinary human feelings,
rather than on their cultural feelings].19 Indeed, he reworked the source
texts to such an extent that some of his contemporaries even suggested
dropping the subtitle Frei nach Sophokles [Freely Adapted from Sophocles]
(Hofmannsthal 1975: VII, 310). Die Lästigen [The Mad] was published
as Komödie in einem Akt nach Molière [Comedy in One Act Adapted
from Molière], although little more than a few motifs are derived from the
original play. 20 The fact that ‘authorship’ did not concern Hofmannsthal in
theatrical matters is further proved by his plan to convert a revised contem­
porary French play, Ödipus und die Sphinx, König Ödipus after Sophocles,
and an original afterpiece by Hofmannsthal entitled Des Ödipus Ende,
into a trilogy (Hofmannsthal 1975: VIII, 674). Even the authorship of
the translations was of secondary importance: the subtitle of Hofmannst­
hal’s adaptation of Molière’s Le Bourgeois gentilhomme points out that
the text is Nach der Bierling’schen Übersetzung (1750) neu eingerichtet
[Adapted from Bierling’s Translation and Rearranged].21 König Ödipus
closely follows the German editions of Sophocles’s works available at the
time (Hofmannsthal 1975: VIII, 676) and his last translation, Caldéron’s
La dama duende, is based on the ‘old translation’ by Johann Diederich
Gries, 22 not on the Spanish play. The aim of Hofmannsthal’s stage transla­
tions is summed up both by the subtitles (Für die neuere Bühne eingerichtet
[Arranged for the Newer Stage] for König Ödipus or Freie Übersetzung
für die neuere Bühne [Free Translation for the Newer Stage] for Dame
Kobold) and by Hofmannsthal’s conviction that the aesthetic effect of the
plays written “für unser heutiges Gefühl” [for our contemporary emotion]
should rank foremost. 23

TREATMENT OF VERSE, SCENERY, DANCES AT THE FINALE

Hofmannsthal’s strategies, aimed at having an impact on the audience, can

be verified by looking closer at some of the main features of his theatre
202 Dieter Martin
translations: form and style, stage directions in the paratexts, and panto­
mimic encores, especially in the closing scenes.
Hofmannsthal’s adaptations, in particular those of mythological plays
“für die neuere Bühne” [for the newer stage] and “für unser heutiges
Gefühl” [for our contemporary emotion], entailed avoiding “antikisier­
ende Gelehrsamkeit und philologische Gräzisierung” [erudition trying to
be ancient, and philology trying to be Greek]. 24 Neither did Hofmannst­
hal care for the German Romanticist ideal of translating verse passages
into ‘similar verse’, that is, maintaining both the source text’s number of
lines and its metre. Instead of strictly adhering to the form and style of his
source, he used traditional German verse forms. 25
Hofmannsthal’s striving to create an analogous effect is most evident in
his translations of ancient drama. They are usually written in blank verse.
The unrhymed iambic pentameter had been introduced into German lit­
erature in the eighteenth century and had become the prominent metre of
classic German theatre: Lessing’s Nathan der Weise and Schiller’s Maria
Stuart spoke in blank verse, as did Shakespeare’s characters in the German
Romanticists’ translations. In the nineteenth century, Friedrich Hebbel and
the so-called epigones wrote plays in iambic pentameters. In 1900 blank
verse was still largely considered a paradigm for an elevated style in spite
of the naturalist doctrine of realistic language. Furthermore, Goethe’s ver­
sified Iphigenie and Schiller’s translation of Iphigenie in Aulis had set the
standard for ancient drama.
Hofmannsthal was aware of this long tradition, and that in the nine­
teenth century translators like Adolf Wilbrandt had followed it. Although
he did not experiment with metrics, he took advantage of the possibilities
offered by ancient drama, as, for example, shortening the parts given to the
choir or splitting them up into smaller units. These choices were not new
and rhymed choir songs had already been introduced by Schiller. Unlike
his predecessors, however, Hofmannsthal adopted the traditional blank
verse to psychologise and emotionalise his characters. Because of his flex­
ible handling of the metre and the continuous use of enjambments and level
stress, the metric pattern is indeed scarcely audible. It merely intensifies the
expression and elevates the play’s style.
The varied treatment of verse, however, is only the linguistic and liter­
ary basis for the theatre’s nonverbal tools, like props and stage architec­
ture. These are most impressively used at the beginning and at the end
of Hofmannsthal’s translations and contribute to the setting of the scen­
ery and the final scenes. The latter were subject to intensive discussions
and repeated revisions. Hofmannsthal’s designs for scenery—manuscript
notes as well as printed paratexts—again prove that in his translations for
the stage he did not distinguish between the revision of a play by another
author and his own creation. His thoughts on Elektra and Ödipus are
related by contrast. For Elektra, “[d]er Charakter des Bühnenbildes ist
Enge, Unentfliehbarkeit, Abgeschlossenheit” [the character of the scenery
 “For the Newer Stage” and “For Our Contemporary Emotion” 203
is narrowness, without any possibility to escape, seclusiveness]. 26 Sopho­
cles’s Ödipus is allotted more space: “Die Bühne hier so groß und weit als
in der Elektra eng und drückend, da hier ein ungeheueres Fortwandern
das Ende ist, und auch vorher ein Kommen von draußen her so unendlich
viel bedeutet” [The scene is as large and wide here as it is narrow and
oppressive in Elektra, since the ending consists in a massive exit off the
stage, and earlier also an entrance from off stage is of enormous signifi­
cance]. 27 In describing his own creation (Elektra) and Sophocles’s play
(Ödipus) as two sceneries that correspond with each other as if it were
one space Hofmannsthal shows how his adaptation works: his indica­
tions, presumably noted down years before Max Reinhardt directed Ödi­
pus in large arenas and became famous as a “Meister der theatralischen
Massenregie” [master of theatre mass direction], 28 clearly reveal that he
considered the symbolic import of scenery essential. Suggestiveness was
much more important to him than naturalistic or historical correctness:
“Dem Bühnenbild fehlen vollständig jene Säulen, jene breiten Treppen­
stufen, alle jene antikisierenden Banalitäten, welche mehr geeignet sind,
zu ernüchtern, als suggestiv zu wirken” [The scene is totally deprived of
those columns, those wide steps, all those pseudo-ancient repros which,
far from being suggestive, have a disenchanting effect]; 29 “Der Maler wird
dem Richtigen näher kommen—andeutungsweise—wenn er sich von der
Stimmung die der bevölkerte Hof eines Stadthauses an einem Sommera­
bend bietet—leiten lässt als wenn er irgend das Bild jener conventionellen
Tempel u. Paläste in sich aufkommen lässt” [The scenic designer will get
allusively closer to what is right by drawing inspiration from the court­
yard atmosphere of a crowded city tenement during a summer evening
rather than from the image of those conventional temples and palaces]
(Hofmannsthal 1975: VII, 379). The costume designer, too, was to avoid
“jedes falsche Antikisieren sowie auch jede ethnographische Tendenz”
[any false attempt to be close to the ancient as well as any ethnographi­
cal tendency] (Hofmannsthal 1975: VII, 381). Furthermore, much is said
about the lighting, which, again, was not meant to create a stage replica
of reality, but to suggest Electra’s mental disturbance. During her mono­
logue, for instance, lighting was intended to foreground the intensity of
Electra’s desire for revenge: “auf den Mauern, auf der Erde scheinen große
Flecken von Blut zu glühen” [On the walls, on the ground there seem to
glow big stains of blood] (Hofmannsthal 1975: VII, 380).
Hofmannsthal’s directions may have appeared very vague to those who
had to realise them. Nevertheless, he thought them through, as suggested
by his essay “Die Bühne als Traumbild” [The Stage as a Vision] published
in 1903 in Das Theater [The Theatre], a journal edited by Christian Mor­
genstern. 30 With a decidedly anti-naturalist stance, Hofmannsthal com­
pelled the scene builder to regard the scene as something both unreal and
wonderful (Hofmannsthal 1975: XXXIII, 40). The analogy between the
scenery and the vision drawn by him in the title consists in regarding the
204 Dieter Martin
stage as the site of symbolic signification, as the designer is equated to
the dreamer. Everything on stage is symbolic and suggestive (ibid.). If the
scene designer creates a symbolic world, he becomes a “Dichter unter den
Dichtern” [poet among poets]; if not, “das nackte Traumgebild des Dich­
ters” [the poet’s bare vision] will be “widerlich prostituiert” [disgustingly
shown up] (ibid.).
Hofmannsthal considered the non-linguistic theatrical codes as a perfor­
mative system proper. This is emphasised by his choreographic notes to the
first scene of König Ödipus. Oedipus’s unsettled and vagrant life is mirrored
by the enormous width of the scenery (Hofmannsthal 1975: 671) which
corresponds to the approach of an anonymous mass. The latter is described
like a dynamic phenomenon of nature: “Dumpfes Getös heraufdringend,
stark und stärker. Die Gesichter zuerst am Rande rückwärts; dann unter
dem Druck der Nachdrängenden fluten sie herein wie ein Gießbach; auf
einmal ist der Platz bis an die Stufen des Palastes überschwemmt mit ihnen”
[Dull roar approaching, stronger and stronger. At first the faces on the mar­
gins look back; then, under the pressure of the crowding mass, they flood
in like a torrent; at once the square is flooded up to the palace’s steps].31
The scene creates a strong sensual impression of Oedipus’s concern about
the expectations of his people. His grim investigation of himself is made
psychologically plausible even before a single word is uttered.
Hofmannsthal thus emphasised the potential of theatrical performance
rather than the verbal code, relying on the immediate emotive effect of
the former, especially at the beginning and at the end of his plays. This
is why he exploited modern ballet in order to intensify the expression of
feelings. Electra’s final dance—progressing from excited hysteria to deadly
numbness—met with immediate success. Her gestures conveyed both tri­
umph over her father’s murderers and despair for failing to revenge, in ways
inaccessible to words. Electra carries “die Last / des Glückes” [the burden
of fate] and knows that she can do nothing but “schweigen und tanzen!”
[remain silent and dance!]. Finally, after a few “Schritte des angespanntes­
ten Triumphes” [steps of strained triumph], she finally breaks down (Hof­
mannsthal 1975: VII, 110).
Hofmannsthal is also responsible for the pantomimic finale of Rein­
hardt’s 1908 Berlin production of Aristophanes’s Lysistrata. In the pro­
logue he wrote that a dramatist promotes the adaptation of an ancient
comedy as a vivid “Stück von heute” [play of today]. The text was delivered
on condition that the performance should close on a wild dance, “in dem
eine Gebärde ebensoviel wert ist wie ein Wort” [in which gesture and word
are of equal value].32
Unlike his well-known comedies, Molière’s comédie-ballets had been
largely forgotten. Being the expression of a mixed-genre, they could eas­
ily accommodate dancing scenes. Instead of restoring them to a courtly
and historical past, Hofmannsthal created lively plays in which archaising
 “For the Newer Stage” and “For Our Contemporary Emotion” 205
elements were both reflecting each other and ironically revitalizing each
other. His adaptations were thus distorting mirrors of the present time (Fie­
dler 1974b: 33, 115). The function of the ballet is clarified by a compara­
tively simple example: Die Heirath wider willen [The Forced Marriage]
was presented without the original interludes consisting in courtly dances
and divertissements, and the final dance of the closing scene was replaced
by one of Hofmannsthal’s design:

Musikanten spielen auf. Es treten auf Lykast und hinter ihm noch sechs
hübsche vornehme junge Leute seinesgleichen. Sganarell reicht seiner
Zukünftigen die Hand zum Tanz, diese geräth aber sogleich an den
Lykast und von diesem an den nächsten jungen Herrn und so fort.
Zugleich sind die beiden Zigeunerinnen abermals aufgetreten, haben
Sganarell tanzend und singend nach der anderen Seite herübergezogen.
Er will herüber zu seiner Frau, aber die beiden Philosophen, die mit
wilden Sprüngen hereingetanzt kommen, nehmen ihn in ihre Mitte.
Indem alle gleichzeitig singen und tanzen und Sganarell von den Zige­
unerinnen und den Philosophen abwechselnd hergenommen wird, fällt
der Vorhang.

[Musicians playing. Enter Lykast and behind him six more pretty and
elegant young people of his own kind. Sganarell asks his bride-to-be
for a dance, but immediately she moves on to Lykast and then to the
next young man and so on. At the same time the two gipsy women
enter again dancing and singing and forcing Sganarell to the other
side. He wants to get near his wife, but the two philosophers enter­
ing with wild jumps take him among themselves. While everyone is
dancing and singing and Sganarell is alternately grabbed by the gipsy
women and the philosophers, the curtain falls.] (Hofmannsthal 1975:
XVII, 379)

This new finale in the old style presents an inverted version of the action,
transforming the final speech on the “gesegnete Heirat” [blessed marriage]
(Hofmannsthal 1975: XVII, 378) into a pantomimic ‘play within a play’.
The continued separation of the newly wedded couple clearly shows that
Sganarell’s marriage is anything but a blessed one.
Although the ambiguous use of pantomime in comedies cannot be com­
pared to the recurrent and suggestive use of dance in tragedies, a distinctive
hallmark of Hofmannsthal’s translating practice can be stated: the poet
distrusts language and therefore seeks for immediate, that is, performative
evidence in order paradoxically to enfeeble and to enhance and thus to go
beyond words. Only in this way does translation for Hofmannsthal become
a “Sache der Inspiration” [matter of inspiration] and a work of art in its
own right.33
206 Dieter Martin
APPENDIX

First Print (FP)

Premiere (P)
Critical Edition in
Time Source Hofmannsthal’s Title Hofmannsthal 1975
1894 Euripides Alkestis Alkestis. Ein Trau­ partial prints
erspiel nach Eurip­ 1898/1909; complete
ides von Hugo print 1911 P 1916 vol.
von Hofmannsthal VII
respectively: Freie
Übertragung der
Alkestis des Euripides
1899 Gabriele D’Annunzio Die Sirenetta. (Erste FP 1899 vol. XVII
La Gioconda Scene des vierten
Aktes der Tragödie
“La Gioconda”) Von
Gabriele d’Annunzio
1900 Jules Renard Poil de Fuchs. Schauspiel in FP 1901 P 1901
Carotte einem Aufzug von vol. XVII
Jules Renard. Deutsch
von Hugo von Hof­
mannsthal
1900 Sophocles Antigone Vorspiel zur Antigone FP 1900 P 1900 vol. III
des Sophokles
1901/04 Calderón La vida es Das Leben ein Traum. partial prints
1918/19 sueño Fragmente einer freien 1907/1910/ 1918/1919
Bearbeitung von Hugo vol. XV
von Hofmannsthal
1903 Sophocles Elektra Elektra. Tragödie in FP 1904 P 1904 (Rein­
einem Aufzug. Frei hardt) vol. VII
nach Sophokles von
Hugo von Hofmannst­
hal
1903/06 Sophocles König König Ödipus. partial print 1907 com­
1909/10 Ödipus Tragödie von Sophok­ plete prints 1910/11 P
les. Übersetzt und 1910 (Reinhardt) vol.
für die neuere Bühne VIII
eingerichtet von Hugo
von Hofmannsthal
1904/06 Joséphin Péladan Ödipus und die Sphinx. FP 1906 P 1906 (Rein­
Œdipe et le Sphinx Tragödie in drei hardt) vol. VIII
Aufzügen von Hugo
von Hofmannsthal
1908 Aristophanes Lysistrata Prolog zur Lysistrata FP 1908 P 1908 (Rein­
des Aristophanes hardt) vol. XVII
 “For the Newer Stage” and “For Our Contemporary Emotion” 207

1909/10 Molière Le mariage Die Heirath wider Wil­ during H’s lifetime not
forcé len. Comödie in einem printed P 1910 (Rein­
Act von Molière. Neu hardt) vol. XVII
übersetzt von Hugo
von Hofmannsthal
1911 Molière La comtesse Die Gräfin von Escar­ during H’s lifetime not
d’Escarbagnes bagnas. Lustspiel printed not performed
in einem Akte von vol. XVII
Molière übertragen
von Hugo von Hof­
mannsthal
1911/12 Molière Le Bourgeois Der Bürger als Edel­ FP 1912 P 1912 (with
gentilhomme mann. Eine Komödie Ariadne auf Naxos;
mit Tänzen von Reinhardt) vol. XVII
Molière. Nach der
Bierling’schen Über­
setzung (1750) neu
eingerichtet
1916 Molière Les Fâcheux Hugo von Hofmannst­ FP 1917 P 1916 (Rein­
hal: Die Lästigen. hardt) vol. XVII
Komödie in einem Akt
nach Molière
1917 Molière Le Bourgeois Der Bürger als Edel­ FP 1918 P 1918 (Rein­
gentilhomme mann. Komödie mit hardt) vol. XVII
Tänzen von Molière.
Freie Bühnenbearbei­
tung in drei Aufzügen

NOTES

1. Hofmannsthal (1975: VIII, 683–84). The quotation is from a conversation

between Hofmannsthal and Hermann Menke about his stage adaptation of
König Ödipus (Spring 1912). All translations from German are mine if not
otherwise indicated within brackets.
2. See Hofmannsthal in a letter to Richard Strauss, 22 April 1912: “Das wird
Ihnen auch Reinhardt bestätigen . . .—was ich nicht habe, und weshalb ich
Reinhardt brauche, ist die Durchführung auf der Bühne, insbesondere das
Vormachen” [Be assured that there will be neither poet nor librettist in
Europe, whose directions for the stage design, be it even a detail of light or
the feather on a hat, are as accurate and technically precise as mine. Rein­
hardt, too, will acknowledge this . . .—what I do not have, and why I need
Reinhardt, is the performance on the stage, especially the demonstration]
(Strauss and Hofmannsthal 178).
3. For its origin and sources see Hofmannsthal (1975: XVII, 419–24);
D’Annunzio’s wish is reported by Hermann Bahr in his commentary about
the fi rst printed edition of Hofmannsthal’s translation (Hofmannsthal 1975:
XVII, 425–26).
4. For the European context of Hofmannsthal and the ancient world see Frick;
Uhlig (54–101).
208 Dieter Martin
5. Hofmannsthal (1975: VII, 244; diary entry, 18 January 1894). As for the
origin of the Alkestis translation, see Hofmannsthal (1975: VII, 203–25).
6. Ibid. (letters to Marie Herzfeld, 2 February 1894, and to Elsa Bruckmann-
Cantacuzène, 18 February 1894).
7. Ibid. (letters to Elsa Bruckmann-Cantacuzène, 18 February 1894, to Leopold
von Andrian, 21 February 1894, and to Richard Dehmel, 23 March 1894).
8. Hofmannsthal (1975: VII, 253; letter to Max Pirker, 13 April 1921).
9. For the origin and the sources of this translation see Hofmannsthal (1975:
XVII, 438).
10. Hofmannsthal (1975: III, 209–19; line numbers according to this edition).
See also Castellari (2006).
11. For the genesis see Hofmannsthal (1975: III, 721–26).
12. Hofmannsthal (1975: VII, 216; from a retrospective diary entry by Hermann
Bahr on the origin of Alkestis).
13. Hofmannsthal (1975: VII, 368; from Hofmannsthal’s notes “Vertheidigung
der Elektra”, 1903).
14. Hofmannsthal (1975: VII, 460; from Hofmannsthal’s notes “Das Spiel vor
der Menge”, 1911).
15. Hofmannsthal (1975: VII, 368; from Hofmannsthal’s notes “Vertheidigung
der Elektra”, 1903).
16. Hofmannsthal (1979: 245; from Hofmannsthal’s essay “Zur Krisis des
Burgtheaters”, 1918).
17. The promptbooks stored at the Max Reinhardt Archive (Binghamton
University Libraries; Vestal, NY, USA) have been analysed by the editors
of the critical Hofmannsthal edition mainly regarding the genesis of
Hofmannsthal’s text (see the hints to the production of König Ödipus in
Hofmannsthal 1975: VIII, 686, 689 and ff.). Apart from that, few of them
have received scholarly attention (see Reinhardt; Passow).
18. See Carl Sternheim’s claim for an even stronger modernisation of Molière in a
letter to Hofmannsthal (10 March 1911; Hofmannsthal 1975: XVII, 1217).
19. Hofmannsthal (1975: VII, 309; letter to Christiane Thun-Salm, 12 October
1903).
20. For the genesis of Hofmannnsthal’s version and its relation to the source see
Hofmannsthal (1975: XVII, 693–702) and Dangel-Pelloquin.
21. For the genesis and the sources see Hofmannsthal (1975: XVII, 486–501).
22. Hofmannsthal (1975: XV, 301). See also Hofmannsthal’s own, somewhat
nebulous, statement (Hofmannsthal 1975: XV, 36), Goff, and Pérez Varas.
23. Strauss and Hofmannsthal (381; Hofmannsthal to Strauss, 28 July 1917).
24. Hofmannsthal (1975: VII, 217; from the afterword by the editor Klaus E.
Bohnenkamp).
25. The fact that Hofmannsthal wrote his Caldéron adaptations in Hispanicising
trochees seems to contradict this statement. Four-footed trochees, however,
had been part of German theatre since Grillparzer’s Der Traum ein Leben
(1834). Hofmannsthal also employed them in his early dramas, for example
in Der Kaiser und die Hexe (1897).
26. Hofmannsthal (1975: VII, 379; “Authentische Vorschriften für die Insce­
nierung der Elektra”).
27. Hofmannsthal (1975: VIII, 671; Hofmannsthal’s notes on the “Inscenierung
des Oidipus”). See Nehring; Newman.
28. Hofmannsthal (1975: VIII, 682; from the afterword by Klaus E.
Bohnenkamp).
29. Hofmannsthal (1975: VII, 379; “Authentische Vorschriften für die Insce­
nierung der Elektra”).
 “For the Newer Stage” and “For Our Contemporary Emotion” 209
30. Hofmannsthal (1975: XXXIII, 40–43, printed version of “Szenische
Vorschriften zu ‘Elektra’”; 44 and ff.).
31. Hofmannsthal (1975: VIII, 133). See also Hofmannsthal’s further comments
on the fi rst scene. Some of them are noted down separately, others are con­
tained in the promptbook used by both Hofmannsthal and Reinhardt (Hof­
mannsthal 1975: VIII, 679 and VIII, 690).
32. Hofmannsthal (1975: XVII, 309, 1062; Hofmannsthal to Edmund Rein­
hardt, 1 January 1908).
33. Hofmannsthal (1975: VIII, 683). See the lengthy quotation cited at the very
beginning.

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frühen Opern von Strauss und Hofmannsthal, Hamburg: Kovač.
Bomers, Jost (1991) Der Chandosbrief: Die nova poetica Hofmannsthals, Stuttgart:
M & P, Verlag für Wissenschaft und Forschung.
Borchardt, Rudolf (1955) Reden, Marie Luise Borchardt et al. (eds.), Stuttgart:
Klett.
Castellari, Marco (2006) “‘Der schwesterlichen Seele Schattenbild’: Über Hof­
mannsthals ‘Vorspiel zur Antigone des Sophokles’”, Studia austriaca 14:
81–99.
Dangel-Pelloquin, Elsbeth (2002) “‘Das kleine Falsificat’: Ein Spiel von Original
und Fälschung in Hofmannsthals ‘Die Lästigen: Komödie in einem Akt nach
dem Molière’”, Hofmannsthal-Jahrbuch 10: 59–88.
Fiedler, Leonhard Maria (1974a) “Drama und Regie im gemeinsamen Werk von
Hugo von Hofmannsthal und Max Reinhardt”, Modern Austrian Literature 7:
184–208.
(1974b) Hugo von Hofmannsthals Molière-Bearbeitungen: Die Erneuerung
der comédie-ballet auf Max Reinhardts Bühnen, Darmstadt: Agora.
Frick, Werner (1998) ‘Die mythische Methode’: Komparatistische Studien zur
Transformation der griechischen Tragödie im Drama der klassischen Moderne,
Tübingen: Niemeyer.
Goff, Pinrith (1974) “Hofmannsthal’s Dame Kobold”, Modern Austrian Litera­
ture 7: 121–34.
Günther, Timo (2004) Hofmannsthal: Ein Brief, München: Fink.
Härter, Andreas (1989) Der Anstand des Schweigens: Bedingungen des Redens in
Hofmannsthals “Brief”, Bonn: Bouvier.
Hofmannsthal, Hugo von (2008) “The Letter of Lord Chandos”, Tania and James
Stern (trans.), in J. D. McClatchy (ed.) Hugo von Hofmannsthal: The Whole
Difference; Selected Writings, Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University
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(1979) Reden und Aufsätze II: 1914–1924, Bernd Schoeller (ed.), Frankfurt
am Main: Fischer.
(1975) Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Ausgabe, Rudolf Hirsch et al. (eds),
Frankfurt am Main: Fischer.
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mannsthal und Richard Strauss als Bearbeiter von Molières Le bourgeois
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Hofmannsthal: Freundschaften und Begegnungen mit deutschen Zeitgenossen,
Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 143–62.
210 Dieter Martin
Mauser, Wolfram (1964) “Hofmannsthal und Molière”, Innsbrucker Beiträge zur
Kulturwissenschaft. Sonderheft 20: 3–16.
Nehring, Wolfgang (1991) “Elektra und Ödipus: Hofmannsthals ‘Erneuerung der
Antike’ für das Theater Max Reinhardts”, in Ursula Renner and Gisela Bärbel
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des Grafen Harry Kessler für Max Reinhardts Inszenierung von Hofmannsthals
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Spanien und Österreich im 20. Jahrhundert: Direkte und indirekte Kontakte,
Anif, Salzburg: Mueller-Speiser, 187–203.
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Basilius-Presse.
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Seedorf (eds) Lied und Lyrik um 1900, Würzburg: Ergon, 47–61.
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Rombach.
15 Nogami Toyoichirō’s Noh
Translation Theories and the
Primacy of Performance
Beverley Curran

INTRODUCTION

Since his death in 1950, Nogami Toyoichirō is remembered primarily as a

Noh scholar, but his theorization of translation is worth close and sustained
critical scrutiny to understand not only his ideas about translation but also
how they register the cultural currents that prompted his obsessive return
to the topic throughout the 1930s. Further, his essay, “Noh Song Transla­
tion”, the twelfth and fi nal chapter of The Rebirth of Noh [nōnosaisei]
(Nogami 1935b), shows Nogami not only acting as a conduit for the circu­
lation of imported notions of translation in Japan, but also in the process
of formulating an affective theory of Noh translation based on the rhythm
of the Japanese language and performing body. This paper looks at “Noh
Song Translation” and traces how Nogami’s translation theory, based on
scholarly approaches to the translation of classic Greek and Latin works,
subtly morphs under the influence of key Noh performance principles to
emphasise the primacy of performance.1

NOH, TRANSLATION, AND ENGLISH LITERATURE

In 1934, a slightly shorter version of “Noh Song Translation” appeared as an

article under the title “Noh in English Translation” [eiyakusaretayōkyoku]
(Nogami 1934), indicating Nogami’s concern with the circulation of Japa­
nese works in translation rather than translation into Japanese, although his
own projects at that time include Japanese translations of George Bernard
Shaw’s Saint Joan (1932) and Shakespeare’s Macbeth (1938). In Nogami’s
essay, as well as in extended works such as Translation: Theory and Practice
[honyakuron: honyakunorirontojissai] (1938), the bulk of his references are
to English writers and translators. In fact, Nogami begins his preface to The
Rebirth of Noh by making a connection between Shaw and Noh. In a letter
to poet Katsue Kitasono in December 1940, Ezra Pound questions Shaw’s
knowledge of Noh and snorts, “WHEN did Bernie Pshaw [sic] ever see a Noh
play and why did he think he knew what it was driving at?” (Kodama note

DOI: 10.4324/9780203073506-16
212 Beverley Curran
13). Kodama Sanehide, who compiled Pound’s correspondence, notes that
Shaw “was taken to a specially-prepared nô sequence during a brief visit to
Japan in 1933, but famously slept through the performance” (ibid.). Nogami
remembers the encounter quite differently. At the request of the Kaizosha
publishing firm, Nogami arranged for Shaw to see the Noh play Tomoe and
the kyōgen Kazumo. He recalls that Shaw “watched the play with great inter­
est . . . I sat beside him with Mr. Yone Noguchi, who explained it to him”
(1935a: 11). Nogami adds, “Mr. Shaw said that he was more interested in
Noh than in anything else he saw in Japan” (12). 2 Although their versions of
this visit are very different (back in England, Shaw dismissed Noh drama as
“no drama”), it is evident that Nogami felt that it was important to introduce
the playwright to Noh in performance.
As a student, Nogami studied English literature at Tokyo Imperial Uni­
versity. His teacher, the famous writer Sōseki Natsume, was influential in
directing the attention of young writers to English literature, particularly
eighteenth-century satire and intellectual thought and nineteenth-century
realism; Nogami’s emergence as a translator from Sōseki’s literary circle is
one indication of the writer’s impact on the development and direction of
translation in Japan, particularly in terms of foregrounding English sources
(Yoshitake 192–93). Writer Nogami Yaeko maintains that her husband’s
English literary background was crucial to shaping his ideas on Noh:

Versed in English literature, he approached Noh with the Western meth­

odology. Analyzing it into the ‘why’ and the ‘how’ of the art, and organiz­
ing it into the systematized form of presentation, he finally succeeded in
establishing the aesthetics of Noh. (Matsumoto “Translator’s Notes”)

Nogami’s interest in methodology reflects a general trend in the history

of translation in Japan which took place in the late Meiji period. There was
a shift from the creative translation practice of Futabatei Shimei and Mori
Ogai, which had such an effect on Japanese literature, to a growing aware­
ness and application of foreign literary research methods.

HOW TO SEE NOH TRANSLATION

In the opening section of “Noh Song Translation”, Nogami refers in quick

succession to Alexander Pope, William Cowper, Frances W. Newman,
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Lord Curzon, reviewing their positions on
fidelity as the primary requisite of translation in order to foreground the
mutable meaning of the term. Nogami also quotes German classical philol­
ogist Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, “Jede rechte Uebersetzung ist
travestie” (1935b: 306), and cleverly translates the famous Italian expres­
sion ‘Traduttore traditore’ (honyakushaha hangyakusha), but these ‘conti­
nental’ references are drawn from Translation and Translations: Theory
 Nogami Toyoichirō’s Noh Translation Theories 213
and Practice (1922) by Cambridge classical scholar John Percival Postgate;
a comparative reading shows that the opening section of Nogami’s essay, as
well as concepts, terms, explanations, and examples are taken directly from
Postgate’s text.3 The derivative opening section of “Noh Song Translation”,
however, belies the striking implications of Nogami’s approach that emerge
later in the essay.
The translation of classic Greek and Latin texts and that of medieval
Noh songs differ in terms of their respective relationships with the trans­
lating culture, as well as the direction of translation. The study of classic
texts and their translation had long been a part of the curriculum of schools
in Britain, with Greek and Latin as the only languages usually taught in
schools in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Britain (Gillespie 35); the
study and translation of these ancient cultures and tongues was a way to be
a part of a cultural legacy seen as superlative. Classical poetic translation
in English presumed to be a part of a continuous “mystical line of descent”,
that was not “purely an English one [that] goes back all the way to the start
of the western canon in Homer” (ibid. 102). In the case of Noh, it too was
linked to a myth of unbroken cultural continuity at a time when Japan was
intent on constructing a national identity and exporting its culture to help
the world to understand it. When Nogami is looking at the translation of
Noh into English, part of his interest is in monitoring representations of
Japanese culture when they are not in Japanese hands.
In “Noh Song Translation”, Nogami calls for Japanese scholars to offer
their own translations of Noh, rather than leave it to foreigners. This may
suggest that he believes that expert guidance is necessary for foreigners to
understand Japanese cultural productions or indicate his confidence in the
cultural capital of Noh. However, Nogami’s critical attention to Noh in
English translation is more likely linked to a desire to see Noh “with new
eyes” and think about it “with a new head” (1935b: 3). In order to do this,
his project is to see Noh as if he were looking through the eyes and thinking
with the head of a foreigner (ibid.). What he wants to see and understand
is not definitive Noh, or even the changes in the Noh, but to discover ‘what
is making’ the changes as Noh circulates in time and space (4). Nogami
is considered one of the pioneers of historical research into Noh sources
(Ortolani 1995: 87); his interest in translation suggests that he may see it as
an alternative to history that provides a way to approach and understand
the problem of change.
At the same time that there is this expression of interest in circulating
Noh through translation, there remains an insistence on maintaining the
art as “something that only the Japanese could understand and appreciate
because of their inherent connection with the material” (Jortner 311). In his
preface to Honyakuron: Honyaku no riron to jissai (“Translation Theory
and Practice”), Nogami proposes the idea of a reading circle to describe the
circulation of ideologies and cultural productions in translation that over­
rides national boundaries—a reading circle in which Japan can participate.
214 Beverley Curran
The circulation of ideas includes those of communism and fascism; they
have, in fact, become reality (jijitsu). Those who do not wish to acknowl­
edge this actuality, and resist such ideas crossing the borders into Japan,
are, Nogami suggests, opting for a twentieth-century version of sakoku;
instead of trying to close the country to outsiders, they should remember
the consequences of earlier isolation policies and think about how Japanese
cultural productions can circulate and enrich those global currents. As part
of that reading circle, Japan has access to the works of Homer, Socrates,
Dante, Shakespeare, Ibsen, Molière, Tolstoy, and others, while making
available such works as Genji Monogatari and the Noh.
This notion of the reading circle is arguably a prescient attempt to recon­
ceptualize Japan as a translation locus, that is, “a local domain shaped
by the complex effects of an ongoing interaction between multiple linguis­
tic realms, some of which quite consciously point to other worlds beyond
its territorial borders” (Levy 3). At the same time, though, Nogami’s atti­
tude towards translation is compatible with the zeigeist of 1930s Japan,
and its interest in circulating cultural productions to assert and control its
representation. Earlier, colonial initiatives had promoted Japanese values
through such projects as the 1919 kabuki initiative in Korea, but by 1934,
distributing Japanese literature in colonized Asian countries had become a
low priority (Thornber 19). Instead, the government established the Koku­
sai Bunka Shinkōkai to export Japanese culture outside Asia; the following
year, the society published a small nine-page pamphlet in English, Masks of
Japan: The Gigaku, Bugaku and Noh Masks, written by Nogami. In 1934,
the Nippon Gakujutsu Shinkōkai, the Japan Society for the Promotion of
Scientific Research, appointed the Japanese Classics Translation Commit­
tee with the aim of “rendering . . . the Japanese classics into foreign lan­
guages as a means of acquainting the world with the cultural and spiritual
background of Japan” (Ichikawa vi). Noh translation was one of the earli­
est projects and Nogami was one of the “eminent authorities” gathered to
collaborate on an authoritative translation.
Within the country, the government circulated an ideological tract called
The Essence of the National Polity [Kokutai no hongi] in schools at every
level in order to unite the Japanese population (Tansman 150). Initially
drafted by an unnamed classical scholar, and then subjected to numer­
ous revisions by various committees, the document extolled an immutable
national essence: what it “had to say and the language it spoke were no
surprise to readers well versed in the rhetoric of Japanese spirit that had
inundated the nation in the form of scholarly tomes, mass media, political
exhortation, and . . . rarefied literature” (ibid. 151). In short, Nogami’s
work on Noh translation is embedded in a social context that appreciated
and produced a “performance consciousness” to engage the Japanese pub­
lic, the colonized, and Western readers in the imaginative construction of
new worlds. The notion of Noh translation takes shape as part of the per­
formance of an ideal art form that insists through repetition on the mythic
 Nogami Toyoichirō’s Noh Translation Theories 215
integrity of the nation; at the same time, however, there is friction between
the iteration of Noh as an unchanging and intrinsically Japanese art and
Nogami’s theories of Noh translation grounded in ephemeral performance
and an interest in what instigates change.

“NOH SONG TRANSLATION” AND THE

AESTHETICS OF NOH PERFORMANCE

Approaching Noh from a classical translation perspective implies treating

the songs as text, and in “Noh Song Translation”, Nogami subjects the
translations to a close reading. However, Nogami’s critical response to the
translations is always motivated by a sense of Noh song in performance.
Over the course of thirteen years, Nogami published three major works
on Noh, Noh: Research and Discovery [nōkenkyūtohakken] (1930); The
Rebirth of Noh, in which “Noh Song Translation” appears; and Noh’s
Yūgen and Hana [nōnoyūgentohana] (1943). In his preface to this last
work, he begins by noting that learned circles in Japan have yet to pay
much attention to any of the performing arts, including Noh. Motivated by
his own personal passion for the subject, Nogami draws attention to the
multiple perspectives taken in Noh research—historical, textual, philologi­
cal, hermeneutic, philosophical, aesthetic, sociological, and theatrical—but
emphasises that regardless of which direction or posture taken by research­
ers, Noh has to be understood artistically, culturally, and ethnographically,
as essentially a music drama (gakugeki) (Nogami 2009: 209). His criti­
cal approach in “Noh Song Translation” shows this abiding concern in its
attention to the fidelity to sound and rhythm:

The translator must not become too obsessed with the details of the
poetry or prose. For example, even if there are a few grammatical
errors, if the spirit of the original and its tempo can be captured, it is
better than a translation that is free of what is called ‘mistranslation’
[goyaku] but does not possess its tempo. If the original is swelling to
a crescendo, but the translation is lowering its voice; if the original is
doloroso, inducing dark emotions, and the translation is blithely cheer­
ful, that is a fatal flaw that far outstrips mistaken prepositions or idi­
omatic expressions. (1935b: 308)

Before he proceeds to an analysis of the tone of particular translations,

however, Nogami makes a quantitative assessment of the Noh plays that
have been translated. He counts the number of English translators (eight)
and the Noh songs they have translated (forty-two), and then assigns them
to one of five categories. Very simply, the five classifications are linked to
a character type, as well as to the order of a day’s programme of perfor­
mance, and the crucial ordering principle of jo (beginning) ha (breaking)
216 Beverley Curran
kyū (rapid), which identifies the degree of yūgen, and governs the flow of
time and changes in space in a Noh programme and a play’s composition,
as well as its rhythms in every phase. The first category, which belongs to
jo, is the kaminō, about gods; the second category of shuramono, or war­
rior pieces, is rhythmically ha; the kazuramono, or wig or woman pieces,
comprise the third category, which belongs to the developmental level of ha,
the highest degree of yūgen; the miscellaneous fourth category pieces, of
which the most important type of play is the monoguruimono, or lunatic
piece, also belongs to the ha level; and the final category, which closes a
programme, is the kyū level kirimono, about demons, which can symbolize
human wickedness.
After considering the plays that have been translated more than once,
Nogami calculates that of the fifty-two translations of forty-two Noh plays,
there are twenty-six translations of nineteen fourth-category pieces: “These
figures represent the plays chosen by foreigners, and these choices seem quite
natural given that of all the different kinds of Noh, plays in the fourth cate­
gory have by far the most dramatic shifts and entanglements” (1935b: 312).
Because “the essence of physical expression of Noh is in stillness” (Miyata
1997: 38), Nogami sees the interest in ‘dramatic shifts and entanglements’
as an indication of how little foreign translators understand the aesthetic
principles of Noh performance. He concedes that Japanese enjoy fourth-
category plays, as well—they are “interesting to us living in modernity”
and were also Zeami’s favourite (1935b: 313)—but also maintains they
are the only audience that can appreciate the more subtle Noh pieces in the
other categories: “We Japanese, of course, are receptive to the quiet and
elegant beauty (yūgen) of the third category, and can fully appreciate the
profound impression of the opening plays” (ibid.). Nogami is critical of the
guidance provided by Japanese to help foreign translators choose Noh plays
for translation and holds the Japanese advisors responsible for the lopsided
representation of Noh in translation. Nevertheless, he deems collaboration
as essential to the success of Noh translation, just as it is in the practice of
Noh performance.
Familiar notions of translation can be repositioned in surprising ways
when they are refracted through the lens of Noh principles of monomane
and yūgen. Although Nogami does not make any attempts to explicitly
connect these aesthetic concepts to his discussion on translation methods,
they are the elephant in the room. And, as can be seen, when he proposes
to measure “the extent to which the special expression of Noh songs can be
rendered in a foreign language” (1935b: 317), they tacitly function as his
yardstick. Thus, while Nogami uses an imported critical method to evalu­
ate English translations of Noh, he applies at the same time the criteria of
traditional performance practice based on bodywork, which is a process of
repetition that “internalize[s] aesthetic values of performance without hav­
ing to verbalize them” (Brandon 8).
 Nogami Toyoichirō’s Noh Translation Theories 217
These primary tenets of Noh were formulated in the fourteenth and fi f­
teenth century, by the legendary figures Kannami Kiyotsugu and his son
Zeami Motokiyo, who operated as actors, writers, stage managers, and
directors of theatrical troupes. Nogami defi nes monomane as “shajitsu­
shugi” [realism] (2009: 392), associates it with the actor’s transformation
into his stage role, and aligns it with Kannami’s style. The more nebu­
lous term yūgen is connected to an aesthetic involving emotion and beauty
(jōchotekinayuibishugi) and more characteristic of Zeami. Put very simply,
monomane means ‘realistic imitation’, and is associated with the actor’s
transformation into his stage role, while yūgen is more obscure, with
multiple shades of meaning. Initially a Buddhist term referring to hidden
meaning in the sutras, its meaning is connected to quiet movement that is
profound and revelatory, which, as Zeami theorizes it in terms of perfor­
mance, means that a “direct, inexplicable communication of . . . supreme
good is experienced through the ‘sublimity’ of the performer” (Ortolani
1972: 115).
Nogami explains the relationship between these theoretical concepts
in terms of visual art: “[I]mitation corresponds to the composition of a
painting and yūgen to its coloring” (1955: 60), but the colour of yūgen
tends towards a dark palette; in the twentieth century it has been likened
to the monochrome aesthetic of film noir (Thornhill 2007: 59). In his writ­
ing about translation, Nogami uses the term ‘monochrome’ or tanshoku­
hanteki to distinguish between translations of Futabatei (“Whatever he
translates, whether by Pushkin, Turgenev, Gogol, or Korolenko, it is all in
the same tone”; Nogami 1938: 217) and Mori Ōgai, which has no tone at
all, and finds the latter preferable.
Nogami also applies the term ‘colourless’ (mushokuteki) to Noh transla­
tion in a discussion in his Translation: Theory and Practice (1938: 99–100).
This, too, comes via Postgate, although it is encapsulated in a quotation
from Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve: “Theoretically the translation ought to be
achromatic” (Postgate 63), particularly in the case of classical translation.
Nogami concurs, in his turn, by suggesting this technique for the trans­
lation of Noh song and Japanese poetry into Western languages. While
never fully acknowledging Postgate, Nogami does hint at his source while
providing a rationale for the use of an achromatic translation as a way to
prioritize emotion:

Concerning my suggestions about the translation of Japanese literature,

an achromatic translation is an intellectual approach that concentrates
exclusively on rendering the original in meaning only, which enables
the taste of the original’s emotional expression to be savoured. How­
ever, this withholding is not my original idea. It comes from the trans­
lation method used in the translation of the Greek classics at Oxford
and Cambridge. (1938: 125–26)
218 Beverley Curran
In terms of Noh translation, Nogami’s interest in the notion of the mono­
chromatic and the colourless resonates in the fascination among writers
and thinkers in Japan in the 1930s with the aesthetics of ‘whiteness’:

For a number of writers in the 1930s, whiteness represented a moment

of simultaneity that cut across linear time, tacitly refuting the dictates
of Western historiography in favor of an aesthetic of Japanese authen­
ticity. It linked, in a single moment, the deepest past with the immedi­
ate present and distant future. The creation of whiteness depended on
a perception of simultaneity made possible by modern technology—the
techniques of montage in film and photography—alongside a poetics
informed by Buddhism, suggesting the interpenetrability of objects and
consciousness. (Tansman 106)

The colourless, or monochrome, beauty of whiteness is also found in

Zeami’s theories of Noh performance in the image of snow in a silver vessel
to describe the sublime beauty, or yūgen, of a performance ‘filled in’ by the
viewer (Ortolani 1972: 116). However, problems occur in English transla­
tions of Noh when the Japanese text is ‘filled in’ by the translator.

LESS IS MORE

In his critical assessment of even what he considers the best of Noh trans­
lations by Western translators, Nogami defines the primary problem as
excess, which in terms of language, is the demand for textual clarity that
prompts supplementation. In short, the spirit of the Noh is not found in
the words in the text but in their sonic, visceral, and emotional affect. A
foreign viewer who does not understand Japanese is better able to respond
to the performance emotionally than someone reading the libretto; for this
reason, Nogami insisted on taking Shaw to a performance of Noh. In the
extended quotation below Nogami explains the advantage of ‘not’ under­
standing the words but simply watching and listening to the performance:

[T]he Noh may be considered popular today, seeing that at every perfor­
mance in most Noh theatres in Tokyo it draws a full house. But if you
go to a Noh theatre, you will be surprised to find some of the audience
gazing at a libretto open on their knees, and rarely looking at the stage,
but following the actor’s recitation so that it may improve their own. In
olden times hardly any of the audience went to the theatre with a libretto.
In these circumstances I wonder if the Noh is really popular.
Foreigners accordingly, as they are unable to follow the libretto,
never attempt to follow uselessly the meaning of every word and phrase
in the utai, but merely watch the movements of the actors and listen
with a very incomplete understanding to the chorus and musicians.
 Nogami Toyoichirō’s Noh Translation Theories 219
Though this is their only method of appreciation, it is a wise one. This
is why the Noh appeals to intelligent foreigners . . . Japanese who are
ignorant of the symbolism in the production of Noh may feel it is rather
hard to understand. Foreigners, on the contrary, looking at it through
unprejudiced eyes, will be able to grasp its essence. (1935a: 8–9)

The essence of Noh is not the story—“the plot is simple, and a spectator
may easily grasp the theme with a few words of explanation beforehand”—
but its perfect beauty, which “can never be overlooked by anybody, either
a foreigner or a Japanese, whose consciousness of beauty is developed”
(Nogami 1935b: 9). In the text or its translation, the beauty of Noh can
only be approached through suggestion. If the text is explicit instead of
evocative, the beauty disappears.
Nogami also sees the ‘Western’ demand for a subject as problematic in
Noh translation and fi nds that fidelity, as it is theorized and performed by
English translators, can be a liability. In “Noh Song Translation”, when
he refers to Arthur Waley’s translations as “faithful and meticulously pre­
pared” [jūbunnichūjitsunashūtōnayōi] (1935b: 321), this is not unmiti­
gated admiration. In his discussion of Waley’s translation of Aoi No Uye
(aoinoue), Nogami acknowledges both the care taken in the choice of words
and structures to make correlations and maintain balance:

Waley’s faithful approach, which makes it impossible for him to ignore

even the ‘little’ in ‘little ox cart’, deserves praise, but in the case where
a complete song is divided into two different positions, we can see
his perplexity in his switching pronouns, trying to fend off disaster.
(1935b: 322)

In the song where the first three lines are sung by the miko, or sor­
ceress, and the following two lines by Rokujō, the vengeful spirit of an
angry woman, Waley is determined to not only make the exchange under­
stood but the respective positions of the two perfectly clear. However, as
Nogami points out, although the lines are understood as an exchange,
which necessitates the dialogic (kakeai) style, “this must be felt as one
unified expression of Rokujō’s wrath” (ibid. 324). Waley tries to sort out
the speakers by employing oppositional pronouns, quotation marks and
italics enclosed in brackets, whereas Nogami maintains that while the
kakeai style is indeed ambiguous, it is nevertheless a characteristic feature
found in many Noh plays that the translator does not need to manipulate.
That is, he feels that the translator’s quest for logical coherence is “an
obstacle in the way of achieving as a satisfying fusion of the Western and
the Japanese styles (at least, the Japanese style that precedes the Western
influence)” (ibid. 330).
The apparent lack of clarity caused by the elided subject in Japanese,
along with the intricate blend of active and passive expressions, can also
220 Beverley Curran
confuse the ‘foreign’ translator, who then tries to supply additional textual
support. The Japanese audience, on the other hand, intuitively grasps and
completely understands Noh plays, which by their very nature are sung.
Nogami examines a passage from Kumasaka translated by Waley and itali­
cizes all the words the translator has added for grammatical purpose: they
are almost all either names or pronouns used to identify the subject. He
then looks at the translation of the same passage by Ernest Fenollosa and
Ezra Pound, and again highlights where the implied subjects in the Japa­
nese text are now overt. While Nogami concedes that understanding the
translation might demand the addition of words referring to the subject, he
disagrees with it because he wants Noh, even in translation, to feel like a
“Japanese thing” [nihonnomono]:

I am afraid these expressions will be considered very ambiguous

[aimai]. For us, there is not a trace of this feeling, which must be due
to our innate awareness of how Japanese operates. However, in the
case of translation, these expressions make it appear strikingly differ­
ent so if Noh song translation is to feel like a Japanese thing, then, for
example, thought should be given to contriving the effect of the ellip­
tical subject, and as much as possible, implicit expressions should be
used. This will not guarantee that a Japanese thing will fi nd superlative
expression in a foreign language, but it is one method that might work
a little, at least. (ibid. 335)

In theorizing Noh translation, then Nogami places a strong emphasis

on affect, which in Noh is to be found in the sound and rhythm of its
performance; in short, a translation must be shaped by prior awareness
of Noh performance.
According to Nogami, the emotional power of the 5–7-5–7-7 rhythm in
Japanese cannot be reproduced in English, no matter who is translating,
although he believes that a “Japanese person who can freely use English
and possesses the poetic sensibility to express the emotions of Noh origi­
nals” (ibid. 338) is the ideal candidate for Noh translation. Citing a fun­
damental gap between English and Japanese language systems, Nogami
ultimately proposes an approach to translation that aims for an “accurately
sensitive” (kanseitekiseikaku) translation rather than linguistic or gram­
matical accuracy:

In the case of Noh, the emotional structure of Aoinoue and the emo­
tional structure of Kumasaka are far removed from each other. This
distance in the case of the two originals should also exist between the
translated Aoinoue and Kumasaka. (ibid. 337)

In proposing this affective translation theory, Nogami distances himself

from the textually monochrome translation that has long been considered
 Nogami Toyoichirō’s Noh Translation Theories 221
his definitive position. The Noh translation does not prioritize the text, but
the emotion that is released by the actor in performance.

NOTES

1. Quotations are from an unpublished translation of the “Noh Song Transla­

tion” by the author and Naganuma Mikako. I would also like to acknowl­
edge the support of a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (21520291) in
conducting this research.
2. Nogami mentions this visit in the preface to The Rebirth of Noh and in the
foreword to Nogami (1935a), published in English the same year. The lat­
ter includes a photograph of Shaw wearing the Noh mask of okina, the old
man.
3. Nogami’s use of Postgate’s text is discussed in Curran, and in Naganuma
(2010a and 2010b).

WORKS CITED

Brandon, James R. (ed.) (1997) “Introduction”, in Nō and Kyōgen in the Contem­

porary World, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 3–15.
Curran, Beverley (2008) Theatre Translation Theory and Performance in Contem­
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Gillespie, Stuart (2011) English Translation and Classical Reception: Towards a
New Literary History, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
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Gakujutsu Shinkōkai.
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bib/B/BK/bk082.html (last access 14 February 2012).
Levy, Indra (December 2008) “Introduction: Modern Japan and the Trialectics of
Translation”, Review of Japanese Culture and Society 20: 1–14.
Matsumoto, Ryōzō (1955) “Translator’s Note”, in Matsumoto Ryōzō (ed.) Zeami
and His Theories of Noh [Zeamitosonogejutsu shisō] (abridged), Tokyo: Hinoki
Shoten.
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Toyoichirō’s Discourse on Translation], Interpreting and Translation Studies
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(2010b) “Nogami Toyoichirō honyakuron: Honyakuno rironto jissai”, in
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(1938) Honyakuron: Honyakunorirontojissai, Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten.
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Industry, Japanese Government Railways.
222 Beverley Curran
(1935b) Nōnosaisei, Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten.
(2009) [1943] Nōnoyugentohana: Jogen, vol. 1 of Nōtohananika, Tokyo:
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16 Transforming Shakespeare
into a Kabuki Pièce for
the Modern Audience
Ninagawa’s Twelfth Night
Ayami Oki-Siekierczak

The end of the nineteenth century was a fortuitous time for the Japanese
to be introduced to Shakespeare, fostering a fit environment for the devel­
opment of a distinctively Japanese Shakespearean culture. The Victorian
style of acting that Japan encountered owed more to Garrick and Victo­
rian melodrama than to the Elizabethan Shakespeare’s mixture of tragedy
and bawdy comedy. It was well received in Japan, which had only recently
opened up to the world. In a society that held decency and modesty in
esteem, the Victorian Shakespeare seems to have been in high demand,
favoured for its toned-down bawdiness and the prestige of the playwright
himself as one of the ‘great European figures’. Eventually, the Bard’s work
began to appear outside foreign quarters: in 1885, The Merchant of Ven­
ice became the first Japanese-language production of Shakespeare. Titled
Sakuradoki Zani no Yononaka, or A Time of Cherry Blossoms: The World
Where Only Money Mattered, the play was adapted to conform to a Japa­
nese setting and the kabuki style for the benefit of a Japanese public unac­
customed to Western dramatic styles, having only experienced the dramatic
paradigm of traditional theatre. The texts continued to be delivered in the
style of traditional drama, as exemplified by Shōyō Tsubouchi’s admired
inpon (the style used for traditional drama, such as The Curious Tale of
Caesar: The Sword of Freedom and the Sharpness of the Afterglow, 1884).
Japanese translators applied the rules of Japanese poetry, composing lines
in seven/five syllable metre (or an approximation of it) to replicate the effect
of iambic pentameter. Certainly, the seven/five syllable metre was consid­
ered to be the closest Japanese poetic form to the English iambic pentam­
eter. However, the Japanese language does not have stress accents and may
therefore sound monotonous and grating, lacking the continuous rhythmic
changes caused by accentual patterns and enjambment. Freeing his work
from such restraints, translators, including Tsubouchi himself, started to
tend towards translating Shakespeare’s language without transplanting the
text into Japanese metrical forms.
DOI: 10.4324/9780203073506-17
224 Ayami Oki-Siekierczak
A theatrical revolution occurring at the end of nineteenth century intro­
duced Western values and practices into Japanese theatrical culture, includ­
ing the performance, in some productions, of female roles played by women.
During the early part of the twentieth century, a new dramaturgy contrary
to kabuki’s emerged, in which new dramatic genres based on Western natu­
ralism were developed. Shimpa (new school of drama) often dramatised con­
temporary material concerning events around the Meiji period, and shingeki
(new drama) evolved through performances of Euro-American plays on the
Japanese stage. Shingeki took extreme measures to appear Westernised not
only in the acting style and accuracy of translations, but also in the looks of
actors. Artificial noses and make-up were applied to transform flat, orien­
tal faces into the more rugged features of their Western counterparts. After
the Second World War, scripts were rewritten in the spoken vernacular, and
audiences experienced for the first time a Shakespeare undistorted by native
traditions. Due partly to the abolishment of peerage and patrimony in 1947
and to Japan’s exposure to foreign cultures during the Tokyo Olympics in
1964, the populace experienced a change in social values. 1964 happened to
be the first Shakespeare Jubilee the Japanese had ever experienced and the
main events were exhibitions and lectures organised by the Tsubouchi Memo­
rial Theatre Museum, Waseda University under the co-sponsorship of other
organisations: these events juxtaposed Shakespeare and the Japanese ways of
interpreting Shakespeare. Around the same time, a new theatrical movement
developed, known as angura (an abbreviation of the Japanese phonetic trans­
lation of ‘underground’, andāguraundo) and led by young directors such as
Shūji Terayama (1935–1983; cf. Tenjō-sajiki), Tadashi Suzuki (b. 1939; cf.
Waseda-shō-gekijō), Jūrō Kara (b. 1940; cf. Jōkyō-gekijō), Makoto Satō (b.
1943; cf. Kurotento); Yukio Ninagawa (b. 1935) was also active in the move­
ment. In the 1970s, the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) embarked on
their first tour of Japan; it is possible that by watching English productions
the Japanese began to appreciate and understand Shakespeare within their
own cultural context. In 1988, Arata Isozaki designed the Panasonic Globe
Theatre in Tokyo. Overall, the past 130 years have witnessed the increasing
prominence of Shakespeare in Japan, and although there has been no official
dramaturge to assist this development, translators have assumed this role and
been principally responsible for Shakespeare’s reception in Japan.
Nonetheless, as the Japanese audiences’ attitudes toward Shakespear­
ean plays have evolved, the established conventions and language used in
kabuki performances of his plays went out of fashion. ‘Localising Shake­
speare’ was rediscovered. However, in the light of the tradition and history
of the Japanese reception of Shakespeare, the production of Shakespearean
works not simply in the kabuki style or as an experimental revival of early
Japanese adaptations, but as full kabuki performances, might be regarded
as anachronistic. Does the modern Japanese audience consider such works
to be contemporary and relevant to them? Kikunosuke Onoe, acting in
Ninagawa’s production of Twelfth Night (2005, 2007, and 2009), claimed
that the aim was not merely to perform Shakespeare in kimonos but to
 Transforming Shakespeare into a Kabuki Pièce 225
enact Shakespeare in the kabuki form, integrating kabuki elements and
contemporary nuances with the old-fashioned language of the poet.
Research into the Japanese reception of Shakespeare has been widely and
strongly pursued. Tetsuo Kishi, Graham Bradshaw, Daniel Gallimore, and
Kaori Ashizu have all studied the Japanese translations of his plays, while
Minami Ryuta, Ian Carruthers, and John Gilles have explored their per­
formance history in Japan. This paper reassesses the significance of kabuki
productions of Shakespeare, focusing on Ninagawa’s version of Twelfth
Night (TN). It is the first study to examine individual performances of
the aforementioned play in close connection with the play text, and thus
stands in contrast to the researches of Kaori Kobayashi, Sēji Furuya,
Michiko Suematsu, and Yumi Satō, who have focused on the qualities of
the performances (Kobayashi).
Ninagawa Jūniya was first performed at the Kabuki-za theatre in 2005
and then repeated in 2007; the play was reproduced in both England and
Japan in 2009. The text was transformed into a kabuki script by Toyoshige
Imai, who preferred Yūshi Odashima’s translation to Shōyō Tsubouchi’s—
whose renditions of Shakespeare are considered old-fashioned for modern
audiences—and Kazuko Matsuoka’s, although Matsuoka’s work since
1998 has been frequently used in Ninagawa’s Shakespearean project.
Odashima’s translations, especially those of Shakespeare’s plays, are liberal
in ways that enable the audience to appreciate the humour and discover
contemporary relevance in the jokes. Significantly, Ninagawa Jūniya was
presented through multiple dramaturgic filters: in addition to the transla­
tor’s guidance, there was the influence of the kabuki expert, Imai, who ful­
filled the role of the kyōgensakusha (the playwright/adapter and supervisor
in kabuki productions) because of his knowledge about kabuki pièces and
their background, somewhat like a dramaturge for the kabuki genre.
The first step in creating a new kabuki pièce is to determine the sekai—
the world or setting of a play. Ninagawa’s Twelfth Night is set in the
Nanboku-chō period, the period of the Northern and Southern Courts
(fourteenth century), when a culture of elegance and grace was emerging
in the midst of an unstable political situation and a divided government. In
addition, Ninagawa presented a number of distinctive kabuki conventions,
relating to costume, character, and acting style. Sebastian’s equivalent is
Katsuyori Takeda, a legendary Japanese figure with an identity similar to
that of the characters in Honchōnijūshikō; in Ninagawa’s production, fur­
thermore, this character wears kabuki-style costumes and a wig. Olivia’s
equivalent is similarly presented as an akahime, a conventional naïve girl
who has grown up sheltered from the world. Finally, the relatively young
leading actor, Kikunosuke Onoe, presented a style of acting reminiscent
of the wakashū-kabuki, a genre banned in the mid-seventeenth century in
order to enforce moral discipline. Here I will explore the ‘contemporary’
elements in the scripts and the conventional elements in their production,
and to this end, the focus will be laid especially on passages of mockery
featuring within the subplot of Twelfth Night.
226 Ayami Oki-Siekierczak
In addition to interweaving Shakespearean characters and kabuki fig­
ures, Ninagawa sought to bridge Shakespeare and kabuki both visually
and verbally through the scenery and the actors’ voices. The scenographer
Yūichirō Kanai had worked on kabuki productions in the Metropolitan
Opera House in New York, initially as a part-time employee in 1983 and
then as a full member of staff in 1985. Thanks to his background in archi­
tecture, he became deeply involved in a number of productions—sometimes
even taking overall responsibility—during his internship under the Metro­
politan’s technical director, Joe Clerk. On his return from the US, Kanai
worked for Super Kabuki, a company inclined to modern rather than tradi­
tional theatre, with the exception of acting styles and music. He further cre­
ated properties for Hēsē Nakamura-za, a kabuki troupe that has performed
in Tokyo and overseas, as well as for contemporary-style productions. The
company that his family runs has produced kabuki properties for genera­
tions and thus is known as Dōguya (tool seller). Despite this background,
Kanai perceives theatrical productions from a global standpoint. In an
interview of October 2008 by Performing Arts Network Japan, he recalls
that Ninagawa announced in the press conference of Ninagawa Jūniya that
he wanted to work with Kanai, who, according to Ninagawa, knew every
inch of the Kabuki-za theatre; however, Kanai knew nothing about it, as
he had never previously worked for it. Yet it might be argued that Kanai’s
lack of experience had an unexpectedly positive effect. Realising that this
was Kanai’s first production at the Kabuki-za theatre, Ninagawa asked him
to create properties that fulfilled two criteria: maintaining the fundamen­
tal elements of kabuki and incorporating mirrors. Kanai interpreted this
not as suggesting the “kabuki formula” but rather as “factors that do not
contribute a sense of strangeness to the kabuki stage” (Performing Arts
Network Japan). Accordingly, Kanai created as the centrepiece of the set a
gigantic half-mirror that reflected almost the whole auditorium, embracing
the underlying motif of the comedy, which revolves around a pair of twins
and the confusion about their identities.1
One of the factors that made Ninagawa Jūniya relevant to the mod­
ern audience may have been the director’s varied theatrical experience in
underground playhouses, huge commercial theatres, and overseas. In 1955,
Ninagawa joined the theatre company Sēhai (Green Thespians) and in 1968
established the company Gendaijin-gekijō (Theatre for Modern People) as
director. He disbanded this company in 1971 and in the next year founded
Sakura-sha (Company of Cherry Blossoms); although this underground the­
atre flourished, he dissolved it in 1974, when he directed Romeo and Juliet,
his first Shakespearean play at the Nissē-gekijō theatre, in collaboration
with the theatre and film production and distribution company Tōhō, who
typically produced large-scale, commercial performances. This play was fol­
lowed in 1975 by a performance of King Lear, his second Shakespeare, at the
same theatre and again under Tōhō. In 1978, he directed the first of his many
Hamlets, with Mikijirō Hira as Hamlet at the Tēkoku-gekijō theatre (Impe­
rial Theatre), once again under Tōhō. Following this production, he explored
 Transforming Shakespeare into a Kabuki Pièce 227
other translations of the same play, taking as his leading actor Ken Watanabe
(1988), Hiroyuki Sanada (1995), Masachika Ichimura (2001), Tatsuya Fuji­
wara (2003), Michael Maloney (2004), and Satoru Kawaguchi (2012).2
Another turning point was Ninagawa Macbeth, which brought Nina­
gawa’s work to an overseas audience. Originally performed in 1980, and
reproduced almost constantly for nearly twenty years, Ninagawa Macbeth
was set in late-sixteenth-century Japan, with Scottish warriors transformed
into samurais and Great Birnam Wood into a forest of Japanese cherry blos­
soms. Ninagawa’s Macbeth, framed by a type of Buddhist altar traditionally
maintained in Japanese households, still demonstrated the striking influ­
ence of shingeki theatre, with its characteristic pastiche of Western drama.
However, it is Ninagawa Jūniya that stands out among Ninagawa’s Shake­
spearean productions, because it renders Shakespeare in kabuki rather than
merely ornamenting his work with kabuki-style elements. Instead of merely
directing Shakespeare in a conventional kabuki theatre, Ninagawa added
layers and double images to the characters, enlisted Kanai, using his train­
ing in both Japanese and Western theatres to design the set, and employed
a kabuki scriptwriter to revise Odashima’s translation of the play.
In what follows, I will discuss Ninagawa’s method of selecting a transla­
tion on which he based his script. Since 1974, the director has made over
sixty Shakespearean productions (as listed in the Appendix), including
reproductions of the same Shakespearean play (but not cases in which the
same production was simply transferred to a different location). The very
Japanese productions of Shakespeare, Ninagawa Macbeth and Ninagawa
Jūniya, have not formed part of Ninagawa’s Sainokuni Shakespeare proj­
ect, which is well known in Japan, and which intends to produce Shake­
speare’s entire dramatic corpus, staging its twenty-fi fth play, Cymbeline,
at the World Shakespeare Festival in London in 2012. Within this project,
Ninagawa has typically used the translations of Kazuko Matsuoka (see
Appendix), while for Shakespearean productions outside the project, he has
sometimes employed Yūshi Odashima’s translations. Indeed, this had been
custom with him prior to 1995, when he first used Matsuoka’s work in his
Hamlet (1995), following John Retallack’s Romeo and Juliet (1994), which
constituted the first performance of a translation by Matsuoka, before the
initiation of her Shakespeare series (1996–).
Of the productions listed above, Hamlet (1988, 2003, and 2012), A
Midsummer Night’s Dream (1995, 1996, and 2000), Ninagawa Macbeth,
and Ninagawa Jūniya were all based on irregularly chosen texts. Incor­
porating the illusion of the Japanese doll festival, Hamlet (1988) exhib­
ited hybrid literary and contemporary linguistic registers, starting from the
eloquent but old-fashioned translation of Tsubouchi and drawing closer
to a modern understanding through Odashima’s contemporary Japanese.
Alongside the gradual transformation of the language, the form of the per­
formance evolved as well. In 2002, Ninagawa again created a mélange of
Western and Japanese motifs with his use of kimono-based costumes in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream (MND). In 2003 and 2012, he based two
228 Ayami Oki-Siekierczak
further productions of Hamlet on Shōichirō Kawai’s translation, in both
cases using young actors early in their career. These examples, illustrat­
ing how Ninagawa has chosen different translations for his performances,
demonstrate the importance of the text to Ninagawa’s theatrical vision.
Imai decided to transform Odashima’s translation of Twelfth Night into
a kabuki performance. Why did Ninagawa and Imai not use Matsuoka’s
translation as the basis for his Shakespeare-kabuki production? Each Japa­
nese translator has his or her own distinctive characteristics, and this may
be the key to understanding Ninagawa’s decisions about which dramaturge
or interpreter to follow.
Ninagawa has predominantly availed himself of the translations of
Odashima, Tsubouchi, and Matsuoka, who had each translated, or intended
to translate, all Shakespeare’s dramatic works. The history of Odashima’s
translations began in 1975, with the establishment of a theatre company,
Shakespeare Theatre, led by Norio Deguchi. This company aimed at stag­
ing all Shakespeare in monthly performances. By 1981, Odashima had suc­
cessfully rendered every play into Japanese for the purpose of this project;
the director framed Shakespeare’s masterly eloquence and rich, textual
imagery with simple costumes and sets, thus gaining the epithet of “Shake­
speare in jeans”. 3 Meanwhile, Tsubouchi had been educated at the Uni­
versity of Tokyo, and his expertise had gained him a position as professor
at one of the leading private universities in Japan. Through his theatrical
practice, he had been encouraged to investigate Shakespeare’s work and to
become active in theatre. Even after abandoning the traditional inpon style,
Tsubouchi continued to employ slightly obsolete word endings, in order to
create a subtle distance and alienation between the audience and the Bard’s
works. The translations of Kazuko Matsuoka (b. 1942), on the contrary,
are distinctive in their openness with regard to traditionally taboo subjects,
thereby rendering Shakespeare’s language into a more natural and modern
Japanese. Ninagawa, who was ahead of his times, had already started to
use the translations of Odashima and Matsuoka in his productions.
Daniel Gallimore has argued that there are significant differences
between the period prior to the work of Odashima and that following
the emergence of Matsuoka. While translation theory in the 1980s was
dominated by the post-modern principle of the “autonomy of the trans­
lated text” (Gallimore 64), the subsequent generation focused on closely
reproducing the original and was heavily oriented towards the universality
of Shakespeare. However, although Odashima’s rendition certainly reflects
his liberal approach, his method, as the intention of Shakespeare Theatre
demonstrates, is to convey the essence of Shakespeare’s texts to a Japanese
audience. Odashima’s tactful handling of Shakespeare’s words is suggestive
of how the play may be interpreted, directed, and acted. As Shakespeare’s
plays contain indirect stage directions embedded within the cues, Odashi­
ma’s translation bears more dramaturgical indications than what emerges
from later translators’ efforts. The 1980s appreciated and emphasised the
autonomy of translated works; nevertheless, Odashima was not, I believe,
 Transforming Shakespeare into a Kabuki Pièce 229
inclined to create original works neglecting Shakespeare, but he preferred
to convey Shakespeare’s words for the modern stage by distinguishing verse
from prose and concentrating on the linguistic nuances of jokes rather
than on their meanings. On the one hand, most of the examples and jokes
in English are altered so as to be immediately clear to the Japanese. For
instance, the line in which Malvolio reports to Olivia that Viola insists that
she will not move without seeing her, even if she turns into “the supporter
to a bench” (TN, I, 5, 123), is rendered by Odashima as even if her “足に根
が生えようと”[legs grow roots] (my translation) and by Matsuoka as even
if she “ベンチの脚になっても” [turns into the legs of a bench] (my transla­
tion). Thus, Odashima’s version translates the nuance whereas Matsuoka’s
tries to recapture the meaning of the original words. On the other hand,
essential ambiguity is emphasised: when Olivia asks what kind of man the
visitor is, Malvolio replies, “Why, of mankind” (TN, I, 5, 126). The line
becomes “見たところ、どうしても人間の感じです” [As far as appearance
goes, some kind of man] (my translation) in Odashima’s text, and “要する
に男の部類です” [In short, he falls into the category of male] (my transla­
tion) in that of Matsuoka. Furthermore, Odashima visually distinguishes
between Shakespeare’s verse and prose by breaking the lines and skilfully
constructing elaborate puns. Thus, he enables modern audiences to experi­
ence Shakespeare’s different registers and styles. Similarly, employing an
old-fashioned translation to modify Shakespeare for kabuki may deliver
the kabuki’s nuances but not its modern relevance.
It was with the aid of such a translation that Imai successfully transformed
the original work into a kabuki play. I do not seek to prove that Odashima’s
rendition is the best among all existing translations, but that his attempt to
deliver the nuances of the text in Japanese is crucial in reconstructing Shake­
speare’s language for the kabuki form. Although, as will be explained later
in this paper, there are a few minor variations in the text, including character
names, items (such as the mirror that replaces the ring given by Olivia to
Viola/Cesario), and colours (such as “ukon[-iro]”, the colour of turmeric,
instead of “ki-iro”, the equivalent of yellow, for Malvolio’s socks), most of
the lines and scenes were retained in their correct order, without addition or
manipulation, in accordance with Ninagawa’s request that Imai preserve and
deliver the original Shakespearean text (Programme 30).
Let us now turn to Odashima’s translation of the taunts against Malvo­
lio in act II, scene 5 (ll. 19–84), when Maria drops the letter and Malvolio
picks it up. In examining the morality of self-indulgence, Elliot Krieger has
argued that Maria wishes to be rewarded for her labour and its quality
rather than gain her mistress’s favour and step outside her own social class,
whereas Malvolio dreams of rising above his current status not through
labour but by gaining the love of his mistress (Krieger 23 and ff.). The
trick that leads Malvolio into imprisonment stands in contrast to Maria’s
mentality and attitude. In the characters’ prose commentary on Malvo­
lio’s aggravating and fulsome delusion, Odashima’s careful composition
of boundary-pushing lines that extract the nuances of the original jokes
230 Ayami Oki-Siekierczak
is distinctive, especially since his usual technique is to transplant Shake­
speare’s poetry into a Japanese style. To illustrate this, the table below lists
various translations that have been produced for certain lines from the
aforementioned passage.
Act II Scene 5 English Lines and Their Translations

English Translation of
English Translator Translation the Japanese Line

Tsubouchi そこにさうしといで。 Lie thou there. For here

今こゝへ、腮の下をく comes a trout that
すぐって捕へなけりゃ must be caught by tick­
ならん鱒が一尾やって ling under its scale.
来るんだからね。
Lie thou there;
Odashima そこで待っているんだ Wait you there. When a
for here comes
よ。カモがきたらうま duck comes, reward it
the trout that must
くネギらって料理して well and cook it.
be caught with
おしまい。
tickling (18–19)
Matsuoka そこで待ってなさい、 Wait there. A pig will
今すぐブタが来るから come right now, so
ね、おだてて木でも cajole it and make it
壁でも登らせちゃう climb trees or walls.
のよ。
Tsubouchi 悪党め、うぬぼれきっ Villain, he doth flatter
てゐやがる！ himself!
Here’s an over­
Odashima 畜生、うぬぼれやがっ Zounds, flattering
weening rogue!
て― himself!
(25)
Matsuoka この野郎、己惚れやが You bastard, flattering
って！ yourself!
Tsubouchi しッしッ！あの仔細ら Shh, shh! The preten­
しい様子が、まるで七 tious attitude resem­
面鳥よろしくでさ。翼 bleth to a turkey. How
をおッ立てゝ、のさ doth he appear with his
ばり歩く様子はどう wings erect, his pomp­
O peace! Contem­ です？ ous walk?
plation makes a Odashima シーッ。もっともらし Shh! He contemplates
rare turkey-cock く考えこんで、まるで plausibly; he looks
of him; how he 七面鳥ってとこだな、 like a turkey when
jets under his 羽根をおっ立てて気 he walks, holding his
advanced plumes! どって歩いてるとこ feathers erect.
(26–27) ろは。
Matsuoka シッ！妄想にとっつか Shh! Caught up in delu­
れて、まるで七面鳥 sion, he looks like a
だ。羽根をおっ立て turkey. He is erecting
そっくり返って歩い his feathers and swag­
てら。 gering.
 Transforming Shakespeare into a Kabuki Pièce 231

Tsubouchi ヂェザベルの馬鹿野郎 Jezebel, the dumb fel­

め！ low!
Fie on him,
Odashima くたばるがいいんだ、 Do better to drop dead,
Jezebel! (36)
鬼ばばァ！ hag!
Matsuoka けしからん淫婦だ。 Downright slut.
O, peace! Now he’s Tsubouchi しッしッ！いよいよ本 Shh, shh! Finally, he
deeply in. Look 芸に取りかゝりまし hath started to deal
how imagination た。己惚れで膨きれさ with the main enter­
blows him. (37) う、てのはそのこッ tainment. He is almost
です。 swelling with self-
admiration.
Odashima 鬼じじィでしょう。シ That should be fiend.
ーッ。そうら、ますま Shh! See? He is hooked
す深みにはまりこんで deeper and deeper.
いきますよ。ごらんな Note that attitude,
さい、妄想で思いあが pompous in its delu­
ったあの態度。 sion.
Matsuoka いいから黙って！ほ O, shut up! See, he is
ら、どんどんハマって falling more and more.
ますよ。妄想でパンパ He swells up with delu­
ン、破裂しそうだ。 sion.
Now is the wood­ Tsubouchi そら、山鷸が網へ寄っ Look, now is the wood­
cock near the gin. て来たぞ。 cock coming.
(69)
Odashima いよいよカモがネギを Finally, the duck is bit­
噛もうとしてますよ。 ing the spring onion.
Matsuoka そうら、アホウドリが See, now the short-
罠に近づいてく。 tailed albatross is going
closer to the trap.

Take, for example, lines 19–20, when Maria says, “Lie thou there, for
here comes the trout that must be caught by tickling”. Whereas Tsub­
ouchi’s translation concentrates on the literal meaning of the English line,
Odashima and Matsuoka both focus on raising the audience’s expectations
for the comedy to come. When Odashima’s Maria says, “When a duck
comes, reward it well and cook it”, she creates a pun on negi-rau (reward)
and negi (spring onion) and references the idiomatic Japanese expression,
“A duck comes bearing a spring onion”, which carries a double-meaning:
1) good things happen at the same time, and 2) an easy victim comes with
something beneficial (“Kamo”, Nihon-Kokugo-Daijiten). Matsuoka simi­
larly employs an idiomatic phrase, using the image of a pig, which may
emphasise the character of the person coming. As already said, the point
here is not to determine which translation is the best (although Odashi­
ma’s is certainly very witty and entertaining) but to draw attention to the
232 Ayami Oki-Siekierczak
different approaches that each of the three translators have adopted. In
Odashima’s translation, the image of the duck with its spring onion is clev­
erly echoed in line 69 (see Table 16.1).
Fabian’s line, “O peace! Contemplation makes a rare turkey-cock of
him: how he jets under his advanced plumes!” (26–27), contains sexual
undertones in the use of the word “turkey-cock”. All three translations
retain this nuance by describing the “erection” of the turkey’s feathers.
A similar method is used in “O, peace! Now he’s deeply in. Look how
imagination blows him” (37). While Tsubouchi and Matsuoka focus on the
carnal image of a swelling body part, Odashima’s rendition is more subtle.
When it comes to Sir Toby’s complaint, “Here’s an overweening rogue!”
(25), Tsubouchi and Matsuoka both use strong words to refer to Malvolio
(“[v]illain” and “bastard”, respectively), while Odashima mentions his flat­
tering attitude, but remains, again, softer than the other translations.
“Fie on him, Jezebel” (36), also spoken by Sir Toby, raises a problem for the
Japanese translator, as the name ‘Jezebel’ is unfamiliar to the Japanese audi­
ence. Culture-bound terms and names of well-known figures, such as Jezebel,
pose impediments to the translator. For those who are not well versed in the
Bible, the line’s meaning is inevitably enigmatic. In a translation carried out for
reading purposes, the line may be accompanied by side notes and a commen­
tary to aid the readers’ understanding. When it comes to the stage, however,
how can the translator facilitate the audience’s comprehension? Tsubouchi
bravely retained “Jezebel”, while the others provided interpretations of what
“Jezebel” might mean: “hag”, Odashima, and “slut”, Matsuoka.
Imai has explained that he prioritised expressive nuances and humour
over literal faithfulness to the original. It was not considered desirable
to deliver what Shakespeare wrote in a word-by-word translation, as the
words themselves would not be very entertaining for the Japanese audience
as they would be for English ones (Programme 28).
Many existing scripts by Imai are available to the public in the Shōchiku
Ōtani Library: in the script for Ninagawa Jūniya (specified by the shelf mark
K49 I43 IA), lines 18–19, “Lie thou there, for here comes the trout that must
be caught with tickling”, were translated as “仕上げをご覧じませ。やぁ参りまし
た。さぁ、お隠れなされませ、[お隠れなされませ]。” [I, prithee, see the finishing
touch, for here he cometh. Come, hide yourselves, hide yourselves] (my transla­
tion). For this scene, sand mountains resembling those in the Silver Pavilion at
Kyoto were constructed on the stage, and the equivalents of Maria, Sir Toby,
Sir Andrew, and Fabian were directed to hide behind them to observe how the
trick played out. Maria’s line “Here’s an overweening rogue!” was modified
as “ウヽム、自惚れ者め。” [Mm, a self-flattering fellow!] (25; my translation),
while the two sexually explicit lines were toned down as follows: “呆れ果てた
る阿呆振り。” [Such egregiously foolish behaviour] (26–27; my translation) and
“愚か者め、どうしてくれよう。” [A foolish fellow, what shall I do with him?] (37;
my translation). Furthermore, there is no mention of “Jezebel”, “hag”, “slut”,
or any other implication of an indecent female figure. Odashima’s nuance can
be found, finally, in the translation of “Now is the woodcock near the gin” as
 Transforming Shakespeare into a Kabuki Pièce 233
“いよいよ鴨が葱を背負いまする。” [Now doth the duck bear the spring onion
on its back] (69; my translation). Since the image of Malvolio as a “duck” was
established in setting the scene, its echo here is effective.
Although Imai’s text adapts some of Odashima’s ideas, and although
Imai respects Odashima’s approach to translation, the bawdy aspect seems
to have completely disappeared from the new script. What made its removal
necessary? In order to understand this, it is important to consider how a
cultural taboo may affect adaptation of a text from another society. Sexual
matters are not openly discussed in Japanese society, and jokes predicated
on a sexual subtext are therefore treated with caution, since they have the
potential to be viewed as an indication of the speaker’s character. Thus,
while avoiding bawdiness may remove the original structural complex,
creating an adequate rendition of sexually explicit humour poses further
challenges for the translator. Imai seems to have intentionally excluded sen­
suality from the jest, in order to create an appropriate kabuki atmosphere.
Besides these changes, Imai modified several other aspects in his script,
such as music, which plays a crucial role, particularly in Ninagawa’s pro­
duction. From the very beginning of Ninagawa Jūniya, music is the hinge
connecting the two cultural backgrounds, creating a bizarre synthesis of
Western and Japanese elements, and relocating the Shakespearean universe
into the temporally and spatially open world of the kabuki form; the set­
ting is suggestively defined and lends further evocative import to the music.
The cultural mixture in both music and backdrop introduces the complex
matrix of a play translated into modern Japanese, and then modified back
into the old style of Japanese language.
The name of the heroine, Viola, is transformed into Biwa hime, Princess
Biwa. Just as the viola is a stringed instrument familiar in Europe, the
biwa is a short-necked, Japanese lute, imported along with Buddhism from
Continental Asia (“Biwa”, Kokushi-Daijiten). Its length varies from 60 to
90 centimetres, and the player strikes the strings with a plectrum (“Biwa”,
Nihon-Kokugo-Daijiten). It is also notable that a biwa is attributed to the
goddess of music (Benzaiten or Saraswati). As David Schalkwyk has pointed
out, music was believed to affect human senses with lust and desire not
only metaphorically but also physically (81). In Musicking Shakespeare: A
Conflict of Theatres, Daniel Albright examined the role of music in Shake­
speare’s plays. Concentrating on the different effects and uses of music, he
interpreted references to music in Twelfth Night as being directly related
to money and commerce (Albright 2). In the opening scene, three children
enter the stage and sing a song in Latin, providing music using a cembalo.
They appear in Western dress—capes with ruffs, the costumes of young
singers, similar to those imported to Japan during the sixteenth-century
influx of Western culture.4 The scene projects a time and space open to
other cultures, an atmosphere continuously presented through setting and
properties such as art deco furnishings inside a traditional Japanese room.
One object that could not be seamlessly introduced onto the kabuki
stage was a ring. One of the most frequent items in Shakespeare’s texts
234 Ayami Oki-Siekierczak
(146 recurrences in total), rings never appeared in kabuki performances,
and no exchange of rings occurs to indicate an intimate relationship. Imai’s
text, therefore, had Olivia’s equivalent give a mirror to Biwa in disguise.
Mirrors are characteristic items in Ninagawa’s productions, and typically
bear symbolic significance, especially with reference to the mirror imagery
in Hamlet. Many of Ninagawa’s productions also incorporate a gigantic
staircase into the fundamental structure. Stage sets are often multilayered,
for instance including stair-like structures allowing different views from
different levels and conveying symbolic meaning, such as social hierarchy.
Stairs are also present in the huge, on-stage mirror (Senda 65–66). The cen­
trality of a mirror to the set design, in connection with the theme of double­
ness and mistaken identities, makes the replacement of Shakespeare’s ring
with Ninagawa’s mirror impressively effective.
A further alteration involved the term “yellow” for the colour of the cos­
tume worn by the equivalent of Malvolio. In his back-translation of lines
in the subtitle for performances at the Barbican Centre, Ronald Cavaye
maintained the original: “My favourite colour is yellow / Wear a yellow
costume, yellow socks, / yellow trousers, a yellow headdress / And when
you come to me always smile” (K49 I43 IA 2–8). In fact, “yellow” had
been changed into “ukon-iro”, although Tsubouchi, Odashima, Matsuoka,
and all other major translators had rendered it as “ki-iro” (the equivalent
of yellow). Ukon-iro is the term for the colour extracted from the root
of turmeric, and specifies a bright and deep yellow (“Ukon 2”, Kokushi-
Daijiten). In English, yellow is the colour term that may replace gold; and
therefore, Shakespearean expressions such as “perfect yellow” (The Two
Gentlemen of Verona IV, 4, 180; MND I, 2, 76), “yellow gold” (MND
III, 2, 393), and “What is here? Gold? Yellow, glittering, precious gold?”
(Timon of Athens IV, 3, 25–26) conjure up the colour of gold, while the
description of the colour of “sands” (The Tempest I, 2, 375; MND II, 1,
126) evokes the image of sand reflecting beams of the sun. The same is true
of the Japanese ki-iro. Yellow, however, may also convey more negative,
even odious meanings. For instance, along with green, it is used as a colour
of melancholy (TN II, 4, 109) and insult: “This yellow Giacomo” (Cymbe­
line II, 5, 14). By selecting the term ukon-iro, and dressing Malvolio all in
ukon, Imai wanted to emphasise this negative tone.
Although the attempt to integrate Shakespeare with kabuki perfor­
mance seems at first anachronistic, closer examination reveals that this
hybrid form nonetheless contains something of relevance to the modern
Japanese audience. Shakespearean texts highlight the ambiguity of bound­
aries between source and target languages and cultures, partly because of
uncertainty concerning the authenticity and origins of the original texts.
In the creation of performances combining different cultural backgrounds,
Shakespeare becomes not so much a source text as a pretext for design­
ing unique works, rather than exploring the contexts and translations of
the original (Bharucha 1–4, 27). The convention of sekai, outlined at the
 Transforming Shakespeare into a Kabuki Pièce 235
beginning of this paper, establishes the background and setting for a pro­
duction. As long as it follows the rules of sekai, the story can follow its
own course, without any restriction. In this sense, kabuki has the capacity
for performing Shakespeare’s works and is able to offer relevance and self-
reflective projections to the modern audience within its form.
Thus, although Ninagawa’s effort to produce Shakespeare in full kabuki
might seem an anachronistic manner of presenting Shakespearean plays,
it nevertheless develops a distinctively Japanese Shakespeare in contrast to
the English. The difficult part of such production is to make the modern
Japanese audience feel empathy towards the characters portrayed in the
old-fashioned language of kabuki. By adapting Odashima’s translation,
and by enlisting Imai to modify it for kabuki theatre, Ninagawa success­
fully inscribed both conventional and traditional Japanese theatrical modes
into Ninagawa Jūniya, ensuring the relevance of this performance to con­
temporary Japan.

APPENDIX

Ninagawa’s Shakespearean Productions, and the Translations Used for Each

Promoter Titles Year Translator

Tōhō Romeo and Juliet 1974 Yūshi Odashima

Tōhō King Lear 1975 Yūshi Odashima
Tōhō Hamlet 1978 Yūshi Odashima
Tōhō Romeo and Juliet 1979 Yūshi Odashima
Tōhō Ninagawa Macbeth 1980 Yūshi Odashima
Tōhō Ninagawa Macbeth 1985 Yūshi Odashima
Tōhō The Tempest: A Rehearsal 1987 Yūshi Odashima
on the Noh Stage in Sado
Tōhō Ninagawa Macbeth 1987 Yūshi Odashima
Spiral Hamlet 1988 Shōyō Tsubouchi,
Yūshi Odashima
Tōhō The Tempest: 1988 Yūshi Odashima
Point Tokyo Ninagawa Macbeth 1989 Yūshi Odashima
Point Tokyo Ninagawa Macbeth 1990 Yūshi Odashima
Tokyo Globe King Lear 1991 Yūshi Odashima
Point Tokyo Ninagawa Macbeth 1992 Yūshi Odashima
Point Tokyo The Tempest 1992 Yūshi Odashima
Point Tokyo The Tempest 1993 Yūshi Odashima

(continued)
236 Ayami Oki-Siekierczak
The Committee for A Midsummer 1994 Yūshi Odashima
the Performance of Night’s Dream
“A Midsummer
Night’s Dream”
Shōchiku Othello 1994 Yūshi Odashima
Point Tokyo + Thelma A Midsummer 1995 Yūshi Odashima
Holt Ltd. Night’s Dream
The Ginza Season Hamlet 1995 Kazuko Matsuoka
Theatre
Point Tokyo + Thelma A Midsummer 1996 Yūshi Odashima
Holt Ltd. Night’s Dream
Point Tokyo Ninagawa Macbeth 1997 Yūshi Odashima
Saitama Arts Theatre Romeo and Juliet 1998 Kazuko Matsuoka
+ Horipro: Sainokuni
Shakespeare Series 1
The Ginza Season Hamlet 1995 Kazuko Matsuoka
Theatre
Saitama Arts Theatre Twelfth Night 1998 Kazuko Matsuoka
+ Horipro: Sainokuni
Shakespeare Series 2
Point Tokyo Ninagawa Macbeth 1998 Yūshi Odashima
Saitama Arts Theare + Richard III 1999 Kazuko Matsuoka
Horipro: Sainokuni
Shakespeare Series 3
Saitama Arts Theatre + King Lear 1999 (English) *Created
Horipro + Point Tokyo: with the RSC
Sainokuni Shakespeare
Series 4
Sainokuni Shakespeare A Midsummer 2000 Yūshi Odashima
Series 5 Night’s Dream
Sainokuni Shakespeare The Tempest 2000 Kazuko Matsuoka
Series 6
Saitama Arts Foundation Macbeth 2001 Kazuko Matsuoka
+ Horipro: Sainokuni
Shakespeare Series 8
Saitama Arts Foundation Hamlet 2001 Kazuko Matsuoka
+ Horipro: Sainokuni
Shakespeare Series 11
Point Tokyo A Midsummer 2002 Yūshi Odashima
Night’s Dream
Horipro Macbeth 2002 Kazuko Matsuoka
Saitama Arts Foundation Pericles 2003 Kazuko Matsuoka
+ Horipro: Sainokuni
Shakespeare Series 12
(continued)
 Transforming Shakespeare into a Kabuki Pièce 237

Bunkamura Hamlet 2003 Shōichirō Kawai

Horipro Richard III 2003 Kazuko Matsuoka
Saitama Arts Foundation Titus Andronicus 2004 Kazuko Matsuoka
+ Horipro: Sainokuni
Shakespeare Series 13
Saitama Arts Foundation As You Like It 2004 Kazuko Matsuoka
+ Horipro: Sainokuni
Shakespeare Series 14/All
Male Series 1
Thelma Hold Ltd. Hamlet 2004 (English)
Horipro Romeo and Juliet 2004 Kazuko Matsuoka
Shōchiku Ninagawa Jūniya 2005 Yūshi Odashima
Saitama Arts Foundation The Comedy of Errors 2006 Kazuko Matsuoka
+ Horipro: Sainokuni
Shakespeare Series 15/All
Male Series 2
Royal Shakespeare Titus Andronicus 2006 Kazuko Matsuoka
Company
Saitama Arts Foundation Coriolanus 2007 Kazuko Matsuoka
+ Horipro: Sainokuni
Shakespeare Series 16
Saitama Arts Foundation Love’s Labour’s Lost 2007 Kazuko Matsuoka
+ Horipro: Sainokuni
Shakespeare Series 17/
All Male Series 3
Shōchiku Ninagawa Jūniya 2007 Yūshi Odashima
Saitama Arts Foundation Othello 2007 Kazuko Matsuoka
+ Horipro: Sainokuni
Shakespeare Series 18
Saitama Arts Foundation King Lear 2008 Kazuko Matsuoka
+ Horipro: Sainokuni
Shakespeare Series 19
Saitama Arts Foundation Much Ado About 2008 Kazuko Matsuoka
+ Horipro: Sainokuni Nothing
Shakespeare Series 20/All
Male Series 4
Saitama Arts Foundation The Winter’s Tale 2009 Kazuko Matsuoka
+ Horipro: Sainokuni
Shakespeare Series 21
Shōchiku Ninagawa Jūniya 2009 Yūshi Odashima
Saitama Arts Foundation Henry VI 2010 Kazuko Matsuoka
+ Horipro: Sainokuni
Shakespeare Series 22

(continued)
238 Ayami Oki-Siekierczak

Saitama Arts Foundation The Taming of the Shrew 2010 Kazuko Matsuoka
+ Horipro: Sainokuni
Shakespeare Series 23
Saitama Arts Foundation Anthony and Cleopatra 2011 Kazuko Matsuoka
+ Horipro: Sainokuni
Shakespeare Series 24
The Next Theatre Hamlet 2012 Shōichirō Kawai
Saitama Arts Foundation Cymbeline 2012 Kazuko Matsuoka
+ Horipro: Sainokuni
Shakespeare Series 25
Saitama Arts Foundation Troilus and Cressida 2012 Kazuko Matsuoka
+ Horipro: Sainokuni
Shakespeare Series 26

*Sainokuni Shakespeare Series 7, 9, and 10 were not directed by Ninagawa. 7: The Winter’s
Tale directed by Peter Harness (a production of the Oxford University Dramatic Society); 8:
The Merry Wives of Windsor directed by Shōji Kōgami; 9: Love’s Labour’s Lost (a production
of the Oxford University Dramatic Society).

NOTES

1. For Ninagawa Jūniya, the director did not employ his regular staff (with
the exception of Tamotsu Harada for lighting and Yasuhiro Kasamatsu for
music), which highlights his distinct attitude towards the making of the “Jap­
anese Shakespeare” that has his own name in its title.
2. Ninagawa’s 2012 Hamlet is to be performed by Next Theater, a company
that Ninagawa established in 2009 for young stage actors early in their
career. The average age of the actors is twenty-five, while the actors in Nina­
gawa’s other company, Gold Theatre, are all over sixty.
3. http://www2.odn.ne.jp/shkspr-thr/index.html (last access 20 February 2012).
4. In the mid-sixteenth century, Portuguese and Spanish travellers brought
Namban Bunka—so-called southern, barbarian culture—along with Chris­
tianity. The Portuguese brought guns in 1543 and the Spanish Christianity
in 1549.

WORKS CITED

Albright, Daniel (2007) Musicking Shakespeare: A Conflict of Theatres, Roches­

ter: University of Rochester Press.
Bharucha, Rustom (2004) “Foreign Asia/Foreign Shakespeare: Dissenting Notes
on New Asian Interculturality, Postcoloniality, and Recolonization”, Theatre
Journal 56 (1): 1–28.
“Biwa” (1979–1997) Kokushi-Daijiten, Tokyo: Yoshikawa-Kōbunkan.
(2000–2002) Nihon-Kokugo-Daijiten, Tokyo: Shogakukan.
Gallimore, Daniel (2010) “現代日本におけるシェイクスピア翻訳―新しいパラダイムに
向けて” [Translations of Shakespeare in Modern Japan: Towards a New Para­
digm], in Kaori Kobayashi (ed.) 日本のシェイクスピア上演研究の現在 [The Present
of Studies on Shakespeare Performances in Japan], Aichi: Fubaisha, 64–78.
“Kamo” (2000–2002) Nihon-Kokugo-Daijiten, Tokyo: Shogakukan.
 Transforming Shakespeare into a Kabuki Pièce 239
Kobayashi, Kaori (ed.) (2010) 日本のシェイクスピア上演研究の現在 [The Present of
Studies on Shakespeare Performances in Japan], Aichi: Fubaisha.
Krieger, Elliot (1987) “Malvolio and Class Ideology in Twelfth Night”, in Harold Bloom
(ed.) William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, New York: Chelsea House, 19–26.
Lindley, David (2006) Shakespeare and Music, London: Thomson Learning.
Performing Arts Network Japan, The Japan Foundation, http://www.performin­
garts.jp/J/art_interview/0809/3.html (last access 15 March 2012).
Schalkwyk, David (2008) Shakespeare, Love and Service, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Schiffer, James (ed.) (2011) Twelfth Night: New Critical Essays, Abingdon, Oxon
and New York: Routledge.
Senda, Akihiko (2011) 蜷川幸雄の劇世界 [The Theatrical World of Yukio Nina­
gawa], Tokyo: Asahi Shinbun Publications.
Shakespeare, William (2005) Cymbeline, Martin Butler (ed.), Cambridge: Cam­
bridge University Press.
(2003) A Midsummer Night’s Dream, R. A. Foakes (ed.), Cambridge: Cam­
bridge University Press.
(2002) The Tempest, David Lindley (ed.) Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
(2001) Timon of Athens, Karl Klein (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge Univer­
sity Press.
(2004) Twelfth Night or What You Will, Elizabeth Story Donno (ed.), Cam­
bridge: Cambridge University Press.
(1990) The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Kurt Schluecter (ed.), Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
“Ukon 2” (1979–1997) Kokushi-Daijiten, Tokyo: Yoshikawa-Kōbunkan.

THE ITEMS REFERRED TO IN THE ESSAY

K49 I43 IA: 2009 Script of Ninagawa Jūniya with annotations (Shōchiku Ōtani
Library)
K49 I43 IB: 2009 Script of Ninagawa Jūniya (Shōchiku Ōtani Library)
K49 I43 ++A: 2009 Script of Ninagawa Jūniya with a separate text containing sub­
titles (Shōchiku Ōtani Library)
K49 I43 ++B: 2009 Script of Ninagawa Jūniya with a separate text containing sub­
titles (Shōchiku Ōtani Library)
K49 I43 ++: 2009 Script of Ninagawa Jūniya with a separate text for subtitles (not
final draft) (Shōchiku Ōtani Library)
K20 Ka21 B: 2009 Program of Ninagawa Jūniya (Shōchiku Ōtani Library)
02607-2-1988-01: 1988 Hamlet-related materials (courtesy of Tsubouchi Memo­
rial Theatre Museum)
00134–2-1995–09: 1995 Hamlet-related materials (courtesy of Tsubouchi Memo­
rial Theatre Museum)
00134–2-1998–01, 2: Hamlet-related materials (courtesy of Tsubouchi Memorial
Theatre Museum)
00753–3-2001–01, 2, 9: 2001 Hamlet-related materials (courtesy of Tsubouchi
Memorial Theatre Museum)
00745–3-2003–05: 2001 Hamlet-related materials (courtesy of Tsubouchi Memo­
rial Theatre Museum)
Contributors

Paola Ambrosi is Associate Professor of Spanish Literature at the University

of Verona (Italy). She has studied baroque and contemporary literature
and has worked extensively in the field of translation. Her publica­
tions include a critical edition of Lope de Vega’s La pastoral de Jacinto
(Reichenberger 1997), a translation into Italian of his Novelas a Mar­
cia Leonarda (Marsilio 1991), as well as essays on modernism (Darío,
Baroja) and drama (Valle-Inclán, Unamuno, García Lorca). She has also
published El prólogo en la concepción dramática lorquiana (ALEC
1999), her own translation of Ramón del Valle-Inclán (Il defunto va di
gala, ETS 1999), works on Bergamín (ed., Teatro de Vanguardia: Una
noción impertinente, Pre-textos 2004; La sangre de Antígona, Alinea
2003), on the Compañía Teatro del Astillero (Madrid), and has recently
translated Mayorga’s El jardín quemado (Plectica 2011).

Jean-Louis Besson is Professor of Theatre Studies at the University of Paris-

Nanterre (France). He has recently edited Philoctète by Heiner Müller
(de Minuit 2009) and has studied Georg Büchner’s theatre, editing La
mort de Danton un drame (ed., Théatrales 2005) and publishing Le
théâtre de Georg Büchner: Un jeu de Masques (Circé 2002), Georg
Büchner, des sources au texte: Histoire d’une autopsie des essais de
jeunesse à La mort de Danton (Peter Lang 1992). He has also worked
on performance studies publishing L’acteur entre personnage et perfor­
mance: Présences de l’acteur dans la représentation contemporaine (ed.
with Antoine Pickels and Anne Wibo, Centre d’études théâtrales 2003).
Translations into French include works by Heinrich von Kleist, Karl Val­
entin, Georg Büchner, Heiner Müller, Botho Strauss, Frank Wedekind,
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing.

Silvia Bigliazzi is Professor of English Literature at the University of

Verona (Italy). She has studied the poetry of Rupert Brooke (Il giullare
e l’enigma, ETS 1994), and has extensively worked on literature and
the visual arts (Il colore del silenzio: Il Novecento tra parola e immag­
ine, Marsilio 1998; Collaboration in the Arts from the Middle Ages to
242 Contributors
the Present, ed. with Sharon Wood, Ashgate 2006). She has also stud­
ied textual performance (Sull’esecuzione testuale, ETS 2002), Shake­
speare (Oltre il genere: Amleto tra scena e racconto, Edizioni dell’Orso
2001; Nel prisma del nulla: L’esperienza del non-essere nella dramma­
turgia shakespeariana, Liguori 2005), and with Alessandro Serpieri has
edited and translated into Italian John Donne’s major poems (Poesie,
Rizzoli 2009). Her recent publications include studies on Renaissance
England (ed. Distraction Individualized: Figures of Insanity in Early
Modern England, Cierre grafica 2012), the Italian translation and critical
edition of Romeo and Juliet (Einaudi 2012), and the Italian translation
of Double Falsehood (Theobald’s adaptation of Shakespeare-Fletcher’s
lost Cardenio, Rizzoli 2012).

Enoch Brater is Kenneth T. Rowe Collegiate Professor of Dramatic Litera­

ture at the University of Michigan. His seminal works on Samuel Beckett
include Beyond Minimalism: Beckett’s Late Style in the Theater and The
Drama in the Text: Beckett’s Late Fiction, both from Oxford University
Press. The author of more than fifty essays on modern and contemporary
drama and theatre, his most recent publication is Ten Ways of Thinking
about Samuel Beckett: The Falsetto of Reason (Methuen Drama).

Beverley Curran (PhD in English and Comparative Literature, Murdoch

University, Perth, WA) is a professor teaching linguistic, cultural, and
media translation in the Department and Graduate School of Global
Culture and Communication at Aichi Shukutoku University in Nagoya,
Japan, and the editor of the Journal of Irish Studies. Current research
projects include “‘Littoral’ Translation: Circulating Theories, Linguistic
Presences, and Performances of Translation around the Pacific Rim”,
supported by a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research; and the range of
ways translation operates in hybrid cultural productions and graphic
narratives. Publications include Theatre Translation Theory and Perfor­
mance in Contemporary Japan: Native Voices, Foreign Bodies (Saint
Jerome 2008); “Citizenship Interrupted: The Dialogic Interpreter in
Obasan” in West Coast Line 58 (2008); and “The Gull: Intercultural
Noh as webwork” in Words, Images and Performances in Translation
(Continuum 2011).

Eva Espasa is Senior Lecturer at the Universitat de Vic (Catalonia/Spain),

where she teaches stage and audio-visual translation. Her publications
focus on stage translation, audio-visual translation, and gender and
translation. She has published a book on stage translation in Catalonia
(La traducció dalt de l’escenari, Eumo 2001) as well as articles and book
chapters on stage translation (Trans 2009; John Benjamins 2005; Saint
Jerome 2000). With Francesca Bartrina, she has researched into wom­
en’s theatre in Catalonia, and curated a related exhibition (Dones de
 Contributors 243
teatre, Eumo 2007). She has also published research on audio-visual on
translation (John Benjamins 2004, 2005; for The Translator, 2011) and
on translation training related to audio-visual translation and advertis­
ing (Comares 2012; Eumogràfic 2011; Octaedro 2009; John Benjamins
2005). She is a member of the board of referees of MonTi (Monographs
in Translation and Interpreting) and of Capsa de Pandora, a collection
of books on gender studies of Eumo Editorial.

Guillermo Heras is a Spanish actor, director, and dramatist. He was a

member of Grupo Tábano (1974–1983), director of Centro Nacional de
Nuevas Tendencias Escénicas (1983–1993) and of Alicante’s Muestra de
Teatro Español de Autores Contemporáneos since 1993, as well as one
of the founding members of Compañía Teatro del Astillero. He is the
current coordinator of Programa Iberescena. He staged plays by Koltés,
Pasolini, Nieva, Del Amo, Berkoff, Belbel, Mayorga, Sarah Kane, Ares,
Sirera, Brecht, J.R. Fernández, Maqua, Moreira da Silva, Bergamín,
Alberti. He is also editor of numerous series of publications on theatre
and author of more than thirty plays (Muerte en directo, Rottweiler,
Ojos de nácar, Inútil faro de la noche, Cicatriz etc.) and short dramatic
texts (De piezas breves, Avispa 2003). He has been awarded several
prizes, including the Premio Nacional de Teatro in 1994 and the Premio
Lorca de Teatro in 1997.

Peter Kofler is Associate Professor of German Literature at the University of

Verona (Italy). He has worked extensively on Christoph Martin Wieland
(Ariost und Tasso in Wielands “Merkur”, edition sturzflüge 1994; “Wan­
derschaften durch gedruckte Blätter”: Italien in Wielands “Merkur”,
edition sturzflüge 1997), on intercultural relationships between Ger­
many and Italy (Die Italianistik in der Weimarer Klassik: Das Leben
und Werk von Christian Joseph Jagemann [1735–1804], ed. with Jörn
Albrecht, Gunter Narr 2006; Herzogin Anna Amalia von Sachsen-Wei­
mar-Eisenach und die Italien-Beziehungen im klassischen Weimar, ed.
with Thomas Kroll and Siegfried Seifert, edition sturzflüge 2010), on lit­
erature and the visual arts (Ekstatische Kunst—Besonnenes Wort: Aby
Warburg und die Denkräume der Ekphrasis, edition sturzflüge 2009),
and on the history and theory of translation. His publications include
the edition of Jagemann’s German translation of Dante’s Inferno (edi­
tion sturzflüge 2004) and essays on Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Theodor
Fontane, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Robert Musil, Franz Kafka, and
Paul Celan.

Louise Ladouceur is Professor at the University of Alberta (Canada),

where she is in charge of the French Theatre Studies Program and
the theatre company Théâtre au Pluriel. She is also Editor-in-Chief of
L’Annuaire théâtral. Her research and publications focus on theatre
244 Contributors
translation, Canadian drama, and the francophone drama repertoire
of Quebec and Western Canada. She published Making the Scene: La
traduction du théâtre d’une langue officielle à l’autre au Canada (Nota
bene 2005), recipient of the Prix Gabrielle-Roy and the Ann Saddle­
myer Book Award, and its English version Dramatic Licence: Trans­
lating Theatre from One Official Language to the Other in Canada
(University of Alberta Press 2012). She co-authored the book Plus d’un
siècle sur scène! Histoire du théâtre francophone en Alberta de 1887
à 2008 and recently launched the website Théâtres francophones de
l’Ouest canadien. She is now completing a book on the translation of
plays by renowned Quebec playwright Michel Tremblay. Since 1986,
she has translated seven plays and supervised the English surtitles of
eight plays produced professionally in Quebec and Alberta. A graduate
of the Conservatoire d’art dramatique de Montréal, she previously was
active in theatre, cinema, and television productions before involving
herself in experimental feminist theatre.

Cristina Marinetti is Lecturer in Translation Studies at Cardiff University

(UK) and is Assistant Editor of the translation studies journal Target.
She has published on cultural approaches to translation, the theory and
practice of translation for performance and theatre history with a spe­
cialization in Goldoni, commedia dell’arte, and Italian grotesque the­
atre. She is currently editing a special issue of Target on translation in
the theatre and her co-edited book Staging and Performing Translation:
Text and Theatre Practice was published by Palgrave in 2010. Recent
projects explore meeting grounds between translation and performance
in multilingual, migrant theatres. She is also a theatre translator. Her
translations of contemporary British playwrights Kwame Kwei Armagh,
Rani Moorthy, and Gareth Armstrong have been published and per­
formed in Italy and she is currently translating two Pirandello plays for
Oneworld Classics.

Dieter Martin is Professor of Modern German Literature at the Albert-Lud­

wig-Universität of Freiburg (Germany). He has worked on the German
verse epic in the eighteenth century (1993), on the reception of Baroque
around 1800 (2000), on Dürrenmatt’s Die Physiker (2010), and Schil­
ler’s Kabale und Liebe (2011). As co-editor, he has published Ariosto:
Die Historia vom Rasenden Roland (2002); Zigler: Die Asiatische Ban­
ise (2011); the anthologies Mythos Ikarus (1999) and Mythos Pygmalion
(2003); the miscellanies Gefühlskultur in der bürgerlichen Aufklärung
(2004), Philipp von Zesen (2008), and Lied und Lyrik um 1900 (2010);
and the series Klassische Moderne and Bibliothek des Literarischen
Vereins. He has also published articles on the history of German litera­
ture from the sixteenth to the twentieth century and on the relationship
between music and literature.
 Contributors 245
Lucia Nigri teaches Early Modern English Literature at the University of
Hull (UK) and at the University of Manchester (UK). She holds a Euro­
pean Doctoral Degree in English Studies from the University of Rome
‘Tor Vergata’ (Italy), and has written articles on intertextuality in John
Webster’s plays (2007), on maternal misrecognition in early modern
tragedies (2010), on the notion of identity in Shakespeare and his con­
temporaries (2011), and on Arden of Faversham (2012). She has also
extensively written on the figure of the malcontent in early modern lit­
erature (2012). She is co-editor of the special issue of the Renaissance
Studies journal on “(Un)Covering Hypocrisy in Early Modern England”
(forthcoming).

Ayami Oki-Siekierczak, after graduating from the University of the Sacred

Heart (MA in English, 2007 / PhD in Literature, 2011), University Col­
lege London (MA in English, 2008), and finishing her training at Toyo
Institute of Art and Design (2011), joined the Tsubouchi Memorial The­
atre Museum, Waseda University in 2011 as Research Associate. She is
also Research Fellow of the University of the Sacred Heart and a part-
time teacher at the University of the Sacred Heart and at Meiji Univer­
sity. Her current research is focused on the reception of Shakespeare
in Japan, and her recent publications include Finding Shakespeare:
On Shakespeare Receptions in the UK and Japan (Tsubouchi Memo­
rial Theatre Museum, Waseda University, 2012), “Translating Mercu­
tio: His Kaleidoscopic Colours in Tsubouchi’s 1910 Translation” (in The
Text Made Visible: Shakespeare on the Page+Stage and Screen, Sairy­
usha 2011). She has also translated subtitles for the theatre (Your Room,
Nobody Knows, Niwagekidan Penino 2012; Brook by Brook, “Screen­
ing and Talk Session” 2012) and, as part of a translation team in Japan,
for Shakespeare’s plays produced by the International Theatre Company
London since 2009.

Marzia Pieri teaches Performing Arts at University of Siena (Italy). She is

a former Fellow of Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance
Studies and currently contributes to the journals Belfagor, Rassegna
della Letteratura Italiana, and Indice. She has worked on the history of
theatre from the Middle Ages to the Contemporary Age, on the philology
of dramatic texts, on radio plays, on the iconography of performance,
on media and journalism. She published several monographs (La scena
boschereccia nel Rinascimento italiano, Liviana 1993; La nascita del
teatro moderno, Bollati Boringhieri 1989; Commedie di Goldoni, Ein­
audi 1992, 3 vols.) and prepared the official critical edition of Goldoni’s
La sposa persiana: Ircana in Julfa, Ircana in Ispaan and of Scozzese by
the same author (Marsilio 1997 and 2006). She also edited Ingannati
degli Accademici Intronati di Siena (Titivillus 2009) and Lo Strascino
da Siena e la sua opera poetica e teatrale (ETS 2010).
246 Contributors
Alessandro Serpieri is Professor Emeritus of English Literature at the Uni­
versity of Firenze (Italy). His critical volumes include studies on Hopkins,
T.S. Eliot, Auden, the rhetoric and semiotic of theatre (Come comunica
il teatro, Milano 1978; Retorica e immaginario, Parma 1986; On the
language of drama, Pretoria 1989), Webster, Shakespeare (I sonetti
dell’immortalità, Milano 1975; Otello: L’Eros negato, Milano 1978; Poli­
fonia shakespeariana, Roma 2002). To the plays of Shakespeare he has
devoted various collections of essays, including Shakespeare: La nostal­
gia dell’essere (ed., Parma 1985); Mettere in scena Shakespeare (ed. with
Keir Elam, Parma 1987); L’Eros in Shakespeare (ed. with Keir Elam,
Parma 1988); Nel laboratorio di Shakespeare: Dalle fonti ai drammi
(et al. Parma 1988, 4 vols.). He also edited and translated into Italian
numerous works by Conrad, Meredith, Carroll, T.S. Eliot, Shakespeare,
and, very recently, John Donne. He was also awarded several prizes for
his translations.

Sharon Wood is Professor of Modern Languages at the University of Leic­

ester (UK), where she teaches Italian and Translation Studies. Publica­
tions include Woman as Object: Language and Gender in the Work of
Alberto Moravia (London 1990); Italian Women Writing (ed., Man­
chester 1993); Italian Women Writers 1860–1994 (London 1995); A
History of Women Writers in Italy (ed. with Letizia Panizza, Cambridge
2000); Under Arturo’s Star: The Cultural Legacies of Elsa Morante
(ed. with Stefania Lucamante, Purdue 2005); Collaboration in the Arts
from the Middle Ages to the Present (ed. with Silvia Bigliazzi, Alder-
shot 2006); The Challenge of Modernity: Essays on Grazia Deledda
(ed., Market Harborough 2007), translated as Sfida alla modernità (ed.,
Cagliari 2012). Translations include works by Primo Levi (L’assimmetria
e la vita); Romana Petri (Alle Case Venie, Dagoberto, and La donna
delle Azzorre); Dacia Maraini (Passi aff rettati); and Susanna Tamaro
(Per voce sola).
Index

A BärbelSchmid, Gisela 209, 210

Aaltonen, Sirkku 7, 10, 11, 21n9, 22, Barile, Laura 94, 95
29, 37, 40, 57, 98, 99, 108n5, Barnett, Dene 191, 192, 194
109 Barthes, Roland 5, 22
Ackermann, Konrad Ernst 182 Bassnett, Susan 3, 4, 5, 8, 10, 11, 12,
Akalaitis, JoAnne 136, 137 22, 23, 28, 33, 37, 38, 47, 50,
Albright, Daniel 233, 238 59, 98, 108, 109
Alighieri, Dante 149 Basso, Beatrice 103, 109
Allaire, Gratien 112, 127 Bayerlein, Sonja 198, 209
Ambrosi, Paola 9, 14, 15, 16, 75, 76 Beckett, Samuel 17, 18, 94, 130–39,
Andrian, Leopold von 208 146
Anouilh, Jean 63 Bedford Richardson, Thomas 127
Appia, Adolphe 69 Ben-Zvi, Linda 137, 138
Ardito, Carlo 102, 103, 107, 109, 110 Bender, Wolfgang F. 195
Arias, Lola 163 Bene, Carmelo 161
Ariosto, Ludovico166 Benjamin, Walter 154, 156
Aristophanes 168, 204, 206 Benshalom, Yotam 40, 45, 47
Aschwanden, Brigitte 162 Bentley, Eric 101, 104, 109
Ashizu, Kaori 225 Bergamín, José 16, 62, 63–69
Asmus, Walter 135 Berger, Alfred von 198
Auger, Roger 114, 127, 128 Bergman, Ingrid 63
authorship (and authenticity), 2, 4, 6, Berkoff, Steven 161
13–14, 18–20, 39, 152, 160, Berman, Antoine 97, 98, 109
201, 168–69, 201–2; co-author­ Bertinetti, Paolo 83, 94, 96
ship, 11; see also translation: Besson, Jean-Louis 8, 14, 18, 154, 155,
co-translation 156
autopoietic feedback (between stage Bezzola Lambert, L. 25
and audience), 1, 2, 19, 75, 193 Bhabha, Homi K. 35, 37
Bharucha, Rustom 43, 47, 234, 238
B Bibbiena, Antonio 166
Bacarisse, Salvador 63 Bigliazzi, Silvia 8, 9, 14, 15, 16, 22, 78,
Bachmann-Medick, Doris 33, 34, 37 94, 95
Bahr, Hermann 207, 208 Birch, David 41, 47
Baines, Roger 2, 22, 29, 32, 36, 37, 45, Birkner, Nina 192, 194
47, 48, 146, 149 Bisicchia, Andrea 101
Bakhtin, MichailMichajlovič 84, 146 Blin, Roger 132, 135
Baldini, Gabriele 83, 92, 94, 96 Blinn, Hansjürgen 182, 193, 194
Bandello, Matteo 75 Bloom, Harold 239
Barba, Eugenio 27, 37, 43, 47 Bobinger, Julius 181, 182, 183, 194
248 Index
body language, language body: 8–9, Casanova, Giacomo 170, 173
16, 18, 29, 81, 189, 192, 204, Casanova, Pascale 112, 127
216–17; art of gesture, 19, Cascetta, Anna Maria 75, 76
191–92 Castellari, Marco 208, 209
Bohnenkamp, Klaus E. 208 Cauteruccio, Giancarlo 136
Boie, Heinrich Christian 190 Cavaye, Ronald 234
Bomers, Jost 198, 209 Ceran, Patrice 161
Bond, Edward 79, 80 Ceriani, Carlo 64
Borchardt, Marie Louise 200, 209 Chan, Paul 136
Borchardt, Rudolf 200, 209 Chatziemmanoy, María 160
Borovsky, Luisa 163, 164 Che Suh, Joseph 3, 46
Boulanger, Pier-Pascale 98, 110 Chekhov, Anton 29, 133
Bourdieu, Pierre 112, 127 Chiari, Pietro 170, 172, 173, 177, 178
Bradley, Jack 29, 36 Cinthio, Giraldi 166
Bradshaw, Graham 225 Claudel, Paul 63
Braga Riera, Jorge 75, 76 Clerk, Joe 226
Brahm, Otto 200 Cocteau, Jean 63
Branchadell, Albert 47 Coelsch-Foisner, Sabine 23, 24
Brandon, James R. 216, 221, 222 Colombo, Rosamaria 11, 22
Brater, Enoch 14, 16, 17, 130, 131, Cortés Gabaudán, Helena 75, 76
135, 136, 137, 138 Cowper, William 212
Brecht, Bertolt 12, 23, 29, 47, 55, 63, Crotti, Ilaria 179
135, 136, 154, 161 Curran, Beverly 9, 14, 20, 46, 47, 221
Bresciani, Caterina 171, 174 Curzon, George (Lord) 212
Brockmann, Johann Franz Hiero­ Cusano, Niccolò 167
nymus 19, 183, 188–90, 191, Cuttitta, Lia 16, 88, 89, 91, 92, 96
193–94nn5–6, 195
Brook, Peter 80, 161, 245 D
Broquy, Louis le 138 D’Annunzio, Gabriele 198, 206, 207
Brouster, Douglas 77, 84, 93, 96 Dalpé, Jean Marc 115, 119, 128
Bruckmann-Cantacuzène, Elsa 198, 208 Dangel-Pelloquin, Elsbeth 208
Brunian, Johann Joseph von 182 Davis, Geoff rey 37
Brunkhorst, Martin 190, 192, 195 De Beaugrande, Robert 59
Brunswick, East 95 De Filippis, Simonetta 105, 109
Bruster, Douglas 77, 84, 93, 96 De Filippo, Eduardo 17, 101, 102, 104,
Büchner, Georg 18, 154, 155, 156, 241 107, 109, 110
Burnham, Douglas 95 De Martino Cappuccio, Alessandra
Butler, Judith 21n1, 22, 93, 95, 117, 102, 108, 109, 110
118, 127 Dedner, Burghard 156
Butler, Martin 239 Deguchi, Norio 228
Dehmel, Richard 208
C Delbono, Pippo 108
Caird, John 93 Delille, Jacques 97
Calabrò, Giovanna 25 Déprats, Jean-Michel 6, 9, 22
Calderón de la Barca, Pedro 62, 76, Derrida, Jacques 2, 21, 23
158, 200, 201, 206, 208, 210 Dewolf, Linda 119, 127
Cameron, Derrick 25, 43, 47 Di Franco, Fiorenza 101, 102, 105,
Caminer, Elisabetta 170, 179 108, 110
Cappuccio, De Martino 102, 108, 109, dialect, translating, 14, 16, 100–104;
110 translating in, 104–7; versus
Carlson, Marvin 34, 37, 117, 120, 122, standard language, 17; minority
127 language, 107, 114–15, 124–25;
Carruthers, Ian 225 vernacular language, 113,
Carvalho Homem, Rui Manuel G. de 25 165–67, 224
 Index 249
Diderot, Denis 170, 172, 173, 192 Frayn, Michael 133, 134
Dillon, Janette 6, 23 Fréron, Elie-Catherine 170, 172, 173
Dionisotti, Carlo 167, 178 Frick, Werner 207, 209
domestication 2, 4, 12, 16–17, 19, 62, Friel, Brian 134
97–107, 147, 187, 193, 223, Fuchs, Anne 37
232–33; translator’s invisibility, Fujiwara, Tatsuya 227
11, 40, 105; dislocation and Furuya, Sēji 225
cultural relocation, 2, 9, 19, Futabatei, Shimei (pseud. of Tatsuno­
107, 187, 192, 233; see also suke Hasegawa) 212, 217
foreignisation
Donellan, Declan 161 G
drama text, 6, 8, 14–15, 77–79, Gabrielli, Renato 48
150–51, 155–56, 219; play text, Gallimore, Daniel 225, 228, 238
proto-text, pretext, different Gambolini, Gerardo 164
stages of revision of, 17, 132, Gambon, Michae 138
164; see also performance García Lorca, Federico 62, 76, 241
Garrick, David 19, 183, 190, 191, 192,
E 194n7, 195, 223
Eco, Umberto 5, 23, 149 Geertz, Clifford 1, 23
Egoyan, Atom 138 Genée, Rudolph 182, 183, 191, 195
Eigenmann, Susanne 183, 195 Genette, Gérard 78, 94, 95
Einaudi, Giulio 104, 109 Gentzler, Edwin 33, 37
Elam, Keir 5, 23, 77, 95, 246 Giaccherini Enrico 95
Engel, Johann Jakob 192 Gilbert, Miriam 35, 37, 79, 80
Engler, Balz 25 Gilles, John 225
Erspamer, Francesco 94nn9–10, 95 Gillespie, Stuart 213, 221
Eschenburg, Johann Joachim 183, 193 Gissenwherer, Michae 21, 23
Espasa, Eva 4, 7, 13, 14, 15, 23, 39, 43, Giustiniani, Orsatto 165
45, 46, 47, 75, 76 Glass, Elisabeth 24, 60, 96
Esposito, Edoardo 101, 110 Gobard, Henri 113, 127
Euripides 198, 200, 206 Godard, Barbara 38, 47
Ewbank, Inga-Stina 77, 95 Godard, Jean-Louis 159, 164
EzpeletaPiorno, Pilar 75, 76 Godbout, Jacques 114, 127
Godbout, Laurent 112, 127
F Godiwala, Dimple 37
Farrell, Joseph 12, 23 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 75, 143,
Fenollosa, Ernest 220 181, 195, 202
Fernandes, Alinne Balduíno Pires 2, Goff, Pinrith 208, 209
23, 109, 110 Gogol, NikolajVasil’evič 217
Ferretti, VíctorAndrés 75, 76 Gold, Sylviane 138, 139
Fido, Franco 178 Goldoni, Carlo 12, 19, 23, 165, 170,
Fiedler, Leonhard Maria 200, 205, 209 171, 173–75
Fiennes, Ralph (Nathaniel Twisleton- Gómez Montero, Javier 76
Wykeham-Fiennes) 93 Gooch, Steve 41, 47
Findlay, Bill 12, 23 Gostand, Reba 140, 149
Fischer, Donatella 105, 109, 110 Gottlieb, Henrik 107,110
Fischer-Lichte, Erika 1, 10, 21, 23, 47, Gozzi, Gasparo 170, 172, 173
192, 195 Gray, Thomas 133
Fo, Dario 159, 161 Gregor, Keith 40, 48
Foakes, Reginald A. 239 Greiner, Norbert 3, 5, 7, 23
foreignisation, 2, 4, 16–17, 20, Griesel, Yvonne 123, 127
62, 97–107, 220; see also Grillparzer, Franz 208
domestication Gross, Alex 38, 41, 47
Fraud, Nina 31 Grutman, Rainier 118, 127
250 Index
Guardamagna, Daniela 139 Ichimura, Masachika 227
Guarini, Guarino 166 identity(linguistic and cultural) 115,
Günther, Timo 198, 209 117, 118, 125
Imai, Toyoshige 225, 228, 229, 232–35
H Ingegneri, Angelo 166
Haag, Ansgar 7, 23 interculturalism, multiculturalism, 10,
Hadamczik, Dieter 182, 195 14–15, 20, 33–34, 42–43, 45,
Hale, Terry 2, 11, 25 233–35
Halio, Jay L. 95 interdiscipline, 3, 9–10
Hall, Willis 108 interdiscursivity, 102, 108. See the­
Hampton, Christopher 31, 32 atrical discourse, as cultural
Harada, Tamotsu 238 circulation and interpretation
Hare, David 12, 23 of stage conventions, 13, 16,
Harel, Simon114, 127 45, 78–80; interpretative dis­
Härter, Andreas 198, 209 courses, 131
Hasenclever, Walter 63 intertextuality, 13–18, 77–93, 131,
Häublein, Renata 181, 182, 190, 191, 172; transtextuality and archi­
192, 195 textuality, 78–79, 82–85
Hauch, Linda 126, 127
Heeg, Günther 192, 195 J
Heinz, Jutta 195 Jakobson, Roman 55, 60, 82
Held, Phoebe von 47 Jänis, Marjia 42, 47
Heller, Monica 115, 125, 128 Jekutsch, Ulrike 9, 23
Heras, Guillermo 14, 16, 18, 19, 63, Jenkins, Andrew 3, 5, 7, 23
64, 75, 164 Jennings, Alex 93
Herder, Johann Gottfried 97 Jettmarová, Zuzana 10, 22, 25, 109
Hermans, Theo 22, 42, 44, 47 Johnston, David 11, 12, 23, 40, 45, 47,
Herzfeld, Marie 198, 208 49, 145, 148, 149
Heufeld, Franz 19, 180, 181–82, 183, Joost, Ulrich 195
185–86, 187, 192–93, 196 Jortner, David 213, 221
Heuvel, Michael Vanden 2, 23 Jourdheuil, Jean 154
Hira, Mikijirō 226
Hirsch, Rudolf209 K
Hoenselaars, Ton 25 Kaindl, Klaus10, 22, 25, 109
Hofmannsthal, Hugo von 20, 197– Kanai, Yūichirō226, 227
206, 207nn1–4, 208nn8–29, Kane, Sarah 161
209nn-30–33, 210 Kara, Jūrō 224
Holland, Peter 24 Kasamatsu, Yasuhiro238
Holm, Ian 93 Kawaguchi, Satoru227
Holmes James 108 Kawai, Shōichirō 228, 237, 238
Holub, Robert C. 166, 179 Kishi, Tetsuo 225
Homer 213, 214 Kitasono, Katsue 211
Honneger, Arthur 63 Kittel, Harald 23, 24,195
Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus) 167 Klein, Holger 23, 24
Hörmanseder, Fabienne 9, 11, 23 Klein, Karl 239
Hotte, Lucie 128 Kleist, Heinrich von 154
Hourdin, Jean-Louis 155, 156 Klitgård, Ida 107, 110
Huesmann, Heinrich 181, 195 Knapton, J. and P. 196
Humboldt, Wilhelm von 97, 98 Knowlson, James 137, 139
Kobayashi, Kaori 225, 238, 239
I Kodama, Sanehide 211, 212, 221
Ibsen, Henrik 18, 29, 104, 144, 152, Kofler, Peter 1, 19, 195
153, 157 Kohler, Stephan 200, 209
Ichikawa, Sanki 214, 221 Korolenko, Vladimir Galaktionovič 217
 Index 251
Kott, Jan 137, 139 Marchante Moralejo, Carmen 75, 76
Kowzan, Tadeusz 5, 23 Marinetti, Cristina 2, 13, 14, 15, 18,
Krieger, Elliot 229, 239 22, 29, 32, 36, 37, 45, 47, 48,
Krömer, Wolfram 210 99, 146, 149
Kruger, Loren 37, 48 Marivaux, Pierre Carlet de Chamblain
Kuhiwczak, Piotr 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, de 29
110 Marlowe, Christopher 84,139
Kuhn, Ortwin 194 Marowitz, Charles 80, 93, 96
Marroni, Francesco 24
L Martin, Dieter 9, 14, 19, 20, 210
Labrie, Normand 115, 128 Mate Martínez-Moralejo, Marta 75,
Ladouceur, Louise 14, 16, 17, 112, 76
115, 118, 119, 126 127, 128 Matsumoto, Ryōzō 212, 221, 222
Lamarsh, Michael 32 Matsuoka, Kazuko 225, 227–31, 234,
Lamartine, Alphonse Marie Louis de 236–38
Prat de 137 Matteini, Carla 160, 161
Lappin, Biller 93 Mauser, Wolfram 200, 210
Larson, Mildred L. 47 Mayer, Thomas Michael 156
Lasca (pseud. of Anton Francesco McBurney, Simon 138
Grazzini) 168 McClatchy, J. D. 209
Lassalle, Jacques 150, 156 McGann, Jerome 2, 24
Lavia, Gabriele 51 McGuinness, Frank 134
Lazzarini, Giulia 138, 139 McKellen, Ian 93
Leclerc, Catherine115, 118, 128 McMullan, Anna 139
Lehmann, Hans-Thies 35, 37 Medebac, Teodora 170, 174
Lehmann, Werner R. 156 Medici Pazzi, Alessandro de’ 165
Lemaistre, Anna-Maria 124, 128 Mendelsohn, Katherine 45, 48
Lennon, Pete 130 Menichetti, Aldo 75, 76
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 169, 192, Menke, Hermann 207
202 MeoliToulmin, Rachel 94, 96
Léveillé, Roger 112, 128 Merschberger, Georg F. 182, 183, 195
Lever, J. Walter 54, 60 Meschonnic, Henry 98, 110
Levy, Indra 130, 214, 221 Meth, Jonathan 45, 48
Libera, Antoni 135 Middleton, Christopher 38, 48
Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph 190, Mines, Mabou 137
191, 192, 195 Miyata, Osamu 216, 221
Lindley, David 239 Molière, (pseud. of Jean-Baptiste
Lindsay, Jennifer 46, 48, 210 Poquelin) 20, 29, 112, 158, 200,
Link, Franz H. 24 201, 204, 207–10, 214
Liss, Shavaun 126, 128 Montagnani, Cristina 69, 76
Littau, Karin 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 110 Montale, Eugenio 16, 83, 88–92,
Litzmann, Berthold 190, 195 94nn8–10, 95, 96
Lombardo, Agostino 11, 22, 25, 83, Moquin, Mireille 124, 128
94, 96, 109, 110 Morgenstern, Christian 203
Lotman, Jurij Michajlovič 1, 24 Mori, Ogai (pseud. ofMoriRintarō)
212, 217
M Morini, Massimiliano 25
Machiavelli, Niccoló 166, 168, 179 Muir, Kenneth 95
MacLaren, Ann 38, 48 Müller, Heiner 154, 156, 162
Maddalena, Edgardo 179 multilingualism, 4, 14–17, 33–36,
Maeterlinck, Maurice 48 168; bilingualism, 13, 17, 33,
Makaryk, Irena R. 127 130–31, 134; trilingualism,
Maloney, Michael 227 17, 131; heterolinguism, 115,
Mamet, David 133, 134 118–20, 125
252 Index
Munk, Erika 136 Pelechova, Jitka 156, 157
Musatti, Cesare 179 Penalva Candela, Gonzalo 76
Musatti, Maria Pia 94, 96 Percival Postgate, John 213, 222
Pérez Varas, Feliciano 208, 210
N performability, 4, 8, 13, 15, 32, 38–39,
Naganuma, Mikako 221 45–46, 50–51, 54–57 154;
Nehring, Wolfgang 208, 210 gestic, acting subtext, 6–8, 16,
Nekrosius, Eimuntas 161 18, 28, 50–59, 61, 77, 192,
Nelson, Richard 134 228; as music score, 7, 41–42,
Newbigin, Nerida 167, 179 45, 77–78, 132; unperformabil­
Newman, Frances W. 212 ity, 45, 140, 145, 148; see also
Newman, Lindsay Mary 208, 210 speakability
Nida, Eugene Albert 98, 108, 110 performance, 2, 9, 12, 17–18, 20,
Nigri, Lucia 14, 16, 17, 21 27–28, 34–35, 38, 46, 67, 78,
Nikolarea, Ekaterini 7, 21, 24 81–82, 84–5, 117–22, 126,
Ninagawa, Yukio 20, 108, 223–29, 131–33, 147–48, 153, 161, 163,
233–38, 238nn1–2, 239 165, 167–68, 170, 180–82, 186,
Niranjana, Tejaswini 43, 48 189, 191–2, 198, 204; Noh,
Nogami, Toyoichirō 20, 211, 212–20, 212–18, 220, 224; kabuki, 223–
221nn2–3, 221 35; versus drama text, 2–4, 19,
Nolette, Nicole 124, 127, 128 35, 77–79, 140, 143–44, 158,
Nutting, Stéphanie 128 161, 182, 191, 199, 214, 218;
and drama text, 10, 15, 77–79,
O 225–35; versus mise en scène,
O’Casey, Sean 137 5; and identity, 34–36, 41, 45;
O’Casey, Shivaun 137 performance space, 6, 117;
Odashima, Yūshi 225, 227–36 stage time and stage place, 130;
Oki-Siekierczak, Ayami 14, 20, performance text, 2, 6, 14; per­
Olivier, Kerr Laurence 93 formance theorist, studies, 1, 17,
Onoe, Kikunosuke 224, 225 130; as art, 1; as multimedial
Ortega Arjonilla, Emilio 24 and multisemiotic event, 5–6; as
Ortega y Gasset, José 75, 76 transaction, 135–38; as transla­
Ortiz García, Javier 10, 24 tion, 18, 38–39, 140–48, 150;
Ortolani, Benito 213, 217, 218, 222 culture of, consciousness of, 13,
Ortolani, Giuseppe 178, 179 19, 169–70, 214; primacy of,
Ortony, Andrew 39, 48 211; post-dramatic, 19, 35–36,
Ostermeier, Thomas 152, 153, 157 162–63; interpretation of, as
Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso) 167 translation, 18, 146, 148
OyonoMbia, Guillaume 48 performative turn, 1, 2, 3, 35–36, 77
performativity, 4–5, 7–8, 13, 15–16,
P 62, 78, 81, 84–85, 117–18, 124,
Page, Ashley 31 133–34, 166, 193, 204, 205;
Pagetti, Carlo 24 aesthetics of, 1; of rehearsals
Palitsch, Peter 136 upon play texts, 132
Palladio, Andrea 165 Perteghella, Manuela 2, 9, 10, 22,
Palmer, D. J. 95 24, 29, 32, 36, 37, 45, 47, 48,
Paré, François 128 109nn18–21, 110, 146, 149
Pasolini, Pier Paolo 161 Petrarca, Francesco 75
Pasquali, Giorgio 170, 176 Pieri, Marzia 9, 14, 19, 178, 179
Passow, Wilfried 208, 210 Pirandello, Luigi12, 18, 23, 133,
Pavis, Patrice 4, 5, 7, 8, 24, 29, 37, 43, 140–48, 149
48 Pirker, Max 208
Peja, Laura 75, 76 Plautus, Titus Maccius 19, 165, 167,
Péladan, Joséphin 206 169
 Index 253
Pöchhacker, Franz 10, 25 Russell Beale, Simon 93, 96
Poirier, Guy 128 Rutsch, Bettina 198, 210
Poliziano, Angelo 168 Rylance, Mark 34, 93, 138
Pomorska, Krystyna 60 Ryuta, Minami 225
Pope, Alexander 212
Poschmann, Henri 156 S
Postgate, John Percival 213, 217, 221, Salvan-Renucci, Françoise 198, 210
222 Sanada, Hiroyuki 227
Pound, Ezra 59, 60, 211, 212, 220, 221 Sarno, Giovanni 108
Poyatos, Fernando 25, 96 Satō, Makoto 224
Prescott, Marc 17, 115–18, 120–22, Satō, Yumi 225
125, 128 Satz, Aura 46, 47
presence (performance) versus absence Savarese, Nicola 27, 37
(text), 2, 27–29, 32, 36, 44 Scanlan, Robert 138
Profeti, Maria Grazia 76 Schalkwyk, David 233, 239
Pshaw, Bernie 211 Schechner, Richard 1, 6, 24, 65
Pujante, Ángel-Luis 40, 48 Schiller, Friedrich 202, 244
Pushkin, Aleksandr Sergeevič 217 Schink, Johann Friedrich 188, 189,
Pym, Anthony 21, 24, 97, 98, 110 190, 191, 192, 195
Schjoldager, Anne 107, 110
Q Schlegel, August Wilhelm 181
Quarantotti, Isabella 105 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 97, 98, 107
Schluecter, Kurt 239
R Schluecter, Kurt 239
Racine, Jean 28 Schmidt-Henkel, Hinrich 152, 153,
Radspieler, Hans 196 156
Radspieler, Johanna 196 Schneider, Alan 135
Ranke, Wolfgang 7, 10, 24 Schneider, Jost 198, 210
Reddy, Michael J. 39, 42, 48 Schneider, Sabine 210
Reinhardt, Edmund 209 Schoeller, Bernd 209
Reinhardt, Max 199, 200, 201, 203, Schöne, Albrecht 195
204, 206, 207, 209, 210 Schönert, Jörg 195
Renard, Jules 199, 206 Schröder, Friedrich Ludwig 19, 180,
Renner-Henke, Ursula198, 210 182, 183, 186, 187, 189–93,
Retallack, John 227 194, 195, 196
Ricci, Giuliano de’ 168 Schuh, Willi 210
Richardson, Samuel 171, 172 Schülting, Sabine 181, 195
Riedl, Peter Philipp198, 210 Schultze, Brigitte 3, 6, 10, 23, 24
Riffaterre, Michael 78, 96 Scolnicov, Hanna 9, 24
Riley, Josephine 21, 23 Sebellin, Rossana M. 139
Ritchie, David 5, 24, 77, 82, 96 Seedorf, Thomas 210
Rivers, Bryan 114, 128 Segre, Cesare 108, 110
Rojas, Ricardo 163, 164 semantics, 6, 15–16, 30, 50–59, 62,
Ronder, Tanya 108 65, 68, 70, 83, 90, 100, 142
Rose, Margaret 48 Senda, Akihiko 234, 239
Rossellini, Roberto 63 Serpieri, Alessandro 5, 6, 7, 8, 14, 15,
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 212 24, 25, 51, 60, 77, 82, 83, 84,
Rossi, Pietro 170 94 96, 108, 110
Round, Nicholas 38, 46, 48 Shakespeare, William 2, 15, 16, 17, 20,
Rousseau, Isabelle 124, 128 22, 23, 25, 33, 34, 35, 37, 50,
Routhier, Adolphe-Basile 126 51, 53, 54, 55, 57, 59, 60, 62,
Rucellai, Giovanni 166 76, 79, 83, 84, 87, 90, 94, 95,
Rudy, Stephen 60 96, 99, 100, 105, 106, 109, 110,
Rumelhart, David E. 39, 48 122, 139, 143, 147, 151, 158,
254 Index
161, 169, 180, 181, 182, 183, Tate, Nahum 79, 80
184, 188, 192, 193, 194, 195, Terayama, Shūji 224
196, 202, 211, 214, 223–30, Terence (PubliusTerentiusAfer) 168
232–38, 239 Tessier, Jules 114, 129
Shaw, Fiona 136 theatrical discourse, as cultural cir­
Shaw, George Bernard 211, 212, 218, culation and interpretation of
221 stage and acting conventions,
Shepherd, Simon 21, 25 13, 16–17, (playability) 45,
Sher, Antony 93 78–80, 84, 131
Shklovsky, Victor 124 Thornber, Karen Laura 214, 222
Simon, Sherry 33, 37 Tieck, Ludwig 181
Snell-Hornby, Mary 7, 10, 21, 22, 25, Tolstoy, Lev Nikolayevich 214
78, 96, 99, 107, 109, 110 Tomaiuolo, Saverio 105, 106, 109, 110
Socrates 214 Toschi, Paolo 64, 76
Sommer, Doris 124, 125, 128 Totzeva, Sophia 6, 7, 25
Sontag, Susan 136 Toucatt, Ralph 81, 96
Sophocles 199, 200, 201, 203, 206, translation: drama/theatre, page/
209 stage, 5, 18, 77–79, 82, 136,
source / target language, text / perfor­ 181, 225–35, 7; and textual
mance approach, 4–6, 8–14, 16, interpretation, 2, 9, 13, 14, 16,
18, 20, 32, 40–1, 45–46, 62, 133; and simultaneous inter­
81–82, 146, 234 pretation, 14–15, 36, 46; literal
speakability, breathability, 6–9, 13, 15, translation, 10, 12, 18, 30–32,
45, 50–54, 85, 134, 155, 183, 92, 105, 134, 152, 232; and
186; see also performability and literalness, 154–55; literary
stageability translation, 161, 164, 198; faith­
Spivak, Gayatri 38, 48 fulness versus unfaithfulness,
St. André, James 39, 41, 42, 45, 47, 48 12, 20, 32, 39, 61–62, 133, 159,
stageability, 7 165–66, 169, 199, 212, 219,
Stanley Weir, Robert 127 229, 232; and authenticity, 135,
Stein, Peter 161 234; as adaptation, version,
Steiner, Uwe C. 198, 210 variation, rewrite, 2, 3, 4, 9,
Stern, James 209 12–13, 17, 19–20, 130, 133,
Stern, Tania 209 136, 142–43, 146–48, 151–53,
Sternheim, Carl 208 161, 165–77, 180–93, 199–205,
Stoppard, Tom 16, 80, 81, 85–88, 90, 223, 225–35; academic and
91, 93, 94, 95, 96 alternative translation, 159–160;
Story Donno, Elizabeth 239 self-translation, 16, 17, 130;
Strauss, Richard 207, 208, 209, 210 co-translation: as collaboration
Strehler, Giorgio 11, 22, 25, 135, 138 between translators, 13, 16, 18
Strindberg, Johan August 29, 143 19, 88–93, 105, 154, 214, 216;
Suematsu, Michiko 225 as collaboration between trans­
Suh, Joseph Che 3, 7, 21, 25, 46, 48 lator and playwright or drama­
surtitling, 13, 16–17, 99, 119–24 turge for surrogate translation,
Suzuki, Tadashi 224 2, 11–14, 18, 30–32, 151–52,
Svendsen, Zoë 45, 48 160, 216; pseudo, ‘bogus’, and
syntax (rhetoric and style), 15, 16, improvised, 12–13, 18, 151,
50–59, 81–85, 92, 155 160; as collaboration with the
company in/for the perfor­
T mance, 1, 10–13, 17–19, 29,
Taber, Charles R. 108, 110 40, 45, 120–22, 131, 152–53,
Tara Arts 34–35 158–59, 160–63, 193, 225; as
Tandy, Jessica 135, 137 performance, 1, 14, 18, 38, 146;
Tansman, Alan 214, 218, 222 as writing act, 10–11, 154–55;
 Index 255
affective theory, 220–21; glo­ Vivis, Anthony 40, 49
balization, effects on, 14–15, Voelcker, Bruno 189, 196
33–34, 43, 114, 125, 214, 226; Voltaire, François-Marie Arouet 19,
as transmediation, 131, 148; 165, 169–76, 177, 178, 179
and intermediality, 13, 191,
198, 217; as cultural migra­ W
tion, 17, 131, 133–34, 138; as Waley, Arthur 219, 220, 22
culture: cultural production, Wallis, Mick 21, 25
promotion, mediation, negotia­ Walter Lenschen 22
tion, transaction, (re)creation Warburton, William 184, 188, 196
of meaning(s), 2, 13–15, 18, Warner, Deborah 136
32–36, 45; studies, 3–4, 10, 32, Watanabe, Ken 227
36, 38, 61; sociology of, 10 Waterhouse, Keith 108
Trim, Richard 110 Watts, Richard J. 25
Trissino, Gian Giorgio 165 Weidmann, Urs 25
Truchet, Jean-René 179 Weilen, Alexander von 182, 183, 186,
Tsubouchi, Shōyō 223, 224, 225, 227, 187, 188, 191, 193, 196
228, 230, 231, 232, 235, 239 Weimann, Robert 77, 84, 93, 96
Tucci, Maria 108 Wertenbaker, Timberlake 108
Turgenev, Ivan Sergeevič 217 West, Martin Litchfield 47
Whitelaw, Billie 131, 132, 135, 137,
U 138, 139
Ubersfeld, Anne 5, 7, 25, 60, 77, 96 Wieland, Christoph Martin 181, 182,
Uhlig, Kristin 207, 210 183–84, 186, 187, 188, 195, 196
UnferLukoschik, Rita 170, 179 Wilamomitz-Moellendorff, Ulrich
unilingualism, 12, 17, 46, 115–16, Friedrich Wichard von 200
118–19, 123–26 Wilbrandt, Adolf 202
untranslatability, 15, 18, 57–59, 104, Williams, Simon 181, 182, 183, 196
108, 140–41, 148, 156; resis­ Wilmer, S. M. 139
tance to translation, 20, 46, Wilson, Lanford 133, 134
220–21 Winds, Adolf 182, 183, 196
Upton, Carole-Anne 2, 11, 23, 25, 40, Wood, Sharon 14, 18
45, 47, 48 Worthen, William B. 2, 3, 26, 33, 34,
Uspensky, Boris Andreevič 1, 24 37, 77, 78, 96
Wren, Jacob 123, 127, 129
V
Valentin, Karl 151 X
Vega Carpio, Felix Lope de 143 Xenophon 167
Veltrusky, Michal 50
Venuti, Lawrence 21, 25, 38, 49, 97, Y
98, 99, 106, 108, 110 Yang, Wenfen 108, 110
Verlaine, Paul 131 Yoshitake, Yoshinori 212, 222
Verma, Jatinder 34, 37
verse (metre, rhythm, sound), 9, 15, 16, Z
20, 28, 56–57, 61–75, 80, 83, Zabini, Nicoletta 16, 63
86, 92, 158, 165–66, 169, 181, Zacchi, Romana 25
201–2, 223, 229 Zatlin, Phyllis 11, 26, 140, 149
Virgil (PubliusVergilius Maro) 167 Zeifman, Hersh 86, 96
Vitez, Antoine 150, 156, 157 Zuber-Skerritt, Ortrun 1, 7, 24, 26,
Vitruvio (Marcus Vitruvius Pollio) 165 38, 49, 96, 149