Poetic Drama: Theatricality, Performability and Translation

Abstract

This chapter focuses on translations of Greek tragedies by canonical Anglophone modernists (T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, W. B. Yeats) and reads these within the broader context of modernist poetic drama. The concept of translatability is borrowed from Walter Benjamin and read as parallel to the concept of performability, introduced and theorised in this chapter, underlining the demands these sometimes difficult translations place on performance, but also the potentiality they usher for future performance. Translatability, performability and theatricality are read as forming a constellation of ideas that expand the limits of what we understand as source/mother tongue and target language, creating a new performance text that is not simply an adaptation, but unearths a potentiality that asks us to also re-read the original play-texts. In this context these modernist translations are read as contributions towards a quintessentially modernist mode of reception.