Theatre and Translation, Again

Abstract

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

• Theatre and Translation, Again
• Avishek Ganguly

In 2007, Jean Graham-Jones coordinated a special issue of Theatre Journal dedicated to the topic of translation vis-à-vis theatre and performance. To my knowledge, it still remains the only occasion when a substantial discussion of that topic has taken place in the pages of the journal, including the recently published seventy-fifth anniversary issue. This brief essay is an effort to revisit that earlier, groundbreaking issue in the spirit of how Laura Edmondson ends her extensive editorial comment for the recent anniversary issue: as a coarticulation of “critique with desire,” a wish list for what might appear in the journal over the next seventy-five years.¹

Graham-Jones has long been interested in theatre and translation, but the explicit point of departure in her editorial vision for that special issue of Theatre Journal was the contemporaneous developments in the fields of translation theory and practice. In what follows, I attempt to offer not just a review but also a reading, necessarily telegraphic, of what Graham-Jones variously calls “the complexity” intrinsic to “theatrical translation practices,” or “translation in performance,” to suggest that in any attempt to think “theatrical translation in performance,” the underlying, not always productive, disciplinary tension between the fields of theatre studies and performance studies might necessarily come undone.²

The translational turn in comparative literature and cultural studies and the cultural turn in translation studies in Anglo-US academia in the 1990s were marked by an extra- ordinary flourishing of theoretically inflected writing on the practice of translation that continued well into the next decade. Consider the following examples: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s now classic essay “The Politics of Translation” was published in 1992, as was Tejaswini Niranjana’s field-shaping book Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial Context; Lawrence Venuti’s The Translator’s Invisibility was published soon after, in 1995, followed by Naoki Sakai’s influential Translation and Subjectivity in 1997. Among the most prominent books on the topic to appear in the following decade were Susan Bassnett’s widely read introduction to the field, Translation Studies (2002), Emily Apter’s The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (2006), and Sandra Bermann and Michael Wood’s coedited volume Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation (2006).³ These attempts at theorizing translation would often but [End Page E-11] not always appear under the sign of poststructuralism and deconstruction, a pattern that can perhaps be traced a few years earlier to the publication of the English translation of what remains of Jacques Derrida’s most significant essay on the topic, “Des Tours de Babel” (1985).⁴

Even as this transdisciplinary conversation around translation was flourishing, the field of theatre and performance studies remained curiously hesitant to engage with it in a direct and substantial manner. Most discussion about theatre and translation would focus either on the literal act of transmitting a playtext from one language into another for publication or on the proverbial transfer from “page to stage,” a metaphor for the act of performing a written playscript. One exception to this trend, however, was an ongoing conversation about theatrical adaptation and its possible relationship with translation, which occasionally veered toward exploring some of the more philosophical assumptions behind those practices. Conversely, scholars primarily based in comparative literature or translation studies, such as those cited above, were mostly focused on prose fiction as the paradigmatic cultural form for thinking about the dynamics of translation. They analyzed primarily the novel—and occasionally the short story or, less occasionally, nonfiction or scholarly treatises—and directed insufficient attention to other literary forms like drama or poetry. It was in this state of affairs that the “Theatre and Translation” special issue of Theatre Journal offered an intervention in 2007.⁵

In laying the foundation for collaborative collections, whether a book or a special issue of a journal, the editorial introduction typically can play at least two roles: it can either scan the constituent essays for trends in the field and summarize them as a way of highlighting, post facto, the contribution of said collection, or it can demarcate a scholarly domain and set an intellectual agenda in advance...