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B. Translating Performance![]()
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Performability in Translation
Speakability? Playability? Or just Saleability?
EVA ESPASA
Abstract. This essay examines the changing notion of performability in stage translation, a concept which is analysed from textual, theatrical, and ideological perspectives. From a textual point of view, performability is often equated with ‘speakability’ or ‘breathability’, i.e. the ability to produce fluid texts which performers may utter without difficulty. From a theatrical viewpoint, the need or will to appeal to audiences usually involves a tension between foreignization and domestication. Such decisions find their way into performance as textual strategies (e.g. dialect) or audio-visual signs (e.g. body language, design, sound, and music). Performability is also determined by the theatrical ideology of the company, and is related to questions of status. Performability involves negotiation, but should not be rejected as a concept. Rather, the essay seeks to place theatre ideology and power negotiation at the heart of performability, and make speakability and breathability relative to it.
In this essay I use the term ‘performability’, rather than ‘theatricality’, to avoid essentialist questions about what is intrinsically theatrical and what is theatre.1 ‘Performability’, instead, leads us to the performance, to the mise en scène. And anything which is performed becomes performable, even a telephone directory (Aleu et al. 1995:17). If we keep for a second within the – maybe extreme – example of the performability of the telephone directory, we will see that it would be absurd to analyze a priori, looking at the written text of the directory, the theatrical potential of the text. To my mind, it would be more fruitful to look at what theatre directors and performers do to the text so that it becomes performed, and then look at the criteria that have made it performable. Susan Bassnett, whose writings on translating for the stage will be analyzed below, has altogether rejected the term performability: “It seems to me a term that has no credibility, because it is resistant to any form of definition” (Bassnett 1998:95). What I intend here is to look at different definitions of performability and other related terms (‘theatricality’, ‘speakability’, ‘playability’) and consider their strategic value as working definitions, including Bassnett’s statements as they have evolved through time.
‘Performability’ and ‘theatricality’, as well as ‘theatre specificity’ are often interchangeable, as Patrice Pavis has pointed out, “[t]heatricality is sometimes synonymous with theatre specificity, a notion which is aesthetically and ideologically loaded, and about whose definition it is impossible to agree” (Pavis 1983:471).
Pavis has also exposed the ambiguity behind the adjective ‘theatrical’ which – for a naturalistic theatrical presentation style – has positive connotations of total illusion (of the text or spectacle) or negative connotations, when the adjective ‘theatrical’ is applied to a performance which is considered to be too artificial, which constantly reminds us that we are in the theatre (Pavis 1983:468). For a Brechtian style of presentation, though, it is the contrary which would be valid. I am well aware that the binary illusionistic/anti-illusionistic is too simplistic nowadays and does not account for many multicultural and/or postmodernist theatre practices. But this dichotomy has played a historical role, and theatre practitioners, as we will see, often base their performance/translation criteria on this unspoken duality.
Pavis admits that the concept of theatricality is “somehow mythical, too general and even idealistic” (Pavis 1983:468). So as to attempt to define ‘theatricality’ more precisely, Pavis groups together the associations of the term ‘theatre’ in the following three blocks. Firstly, from the Greek etymology of the term theatron, theatre is equated with ‘point of view’, as a place from which the audience observes an action which takes place in another place: “Only through the shift of the relation between the look(ing) and the object beheld does [theatre] become the place where the performance takes place” (Pavis 1983:469).
Secondly, in the classical language of the 16th and 17th centuries, the term ‘theatre’ refers to the scene proper. Thirdly, due to a second metonymic translation of the Greek term, theatre has become synonymous with the following concepts: dramatic genre, institution, repertoire, and the works by a specific author (Pavis 1983:469).
It is important to keep in mind this multiplicity of meanings that ‘theatre’ and ‘theatricality’ may have because such meanings are closely interrelated, and also because they are usually taken into account – though not necessarily in an explicit manner – when talking about performability.
In the above criteria, performability is analyzed either from a textual viewpoint, or from a theatrical one, in relation to the mise en scène. In the article ‘Ways through the Labyrinth’ (1985), Susan Bassnett comments on the wide spectrum covered by the term ‘performability’. This concept is usually applied to:
- (From a textual viewpoint) the intention of underlining the fluency of the translated text, so that performers can utter it without unwanted effort. This is often equated with ‘speakability’ or ‘breathability’;
- (From the viewpoint of the mise en scène) a whole set of strategies of cultural adaptation, such as replacing dialectal features of the source language by others of the target language, or omitting passages which are considered to be too rooted in the cultural linguistic context of the original (Bassnett 1985:90-91). Thus, from the viewpoint of theatrical practice, playability, or actability, are used as synonyms for performability.
From a theatrical viewpoint, the need or will to appeal to audiences usually involves decisions related to cultural adaptation: a tension between foreignizing and domestication (Venuti 1995), decisions which find their way into theatre performances in the form of textual strategies (e.g. the use of specific dialects) or the whole gamut of audio-visual signs which are interchangeable with the written text (e.g. body language, performers’ external appearance, stage design, sound and music).
For example, in a Catalan production of Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey, in the first rehearsals there was a heated debate about the domestication of songs. On the one hand, there was an overall strategy of foreignizing, in that the temporal and spatial parameters of the original play were kept. On the other, performers expressed their will to win over audiences, and therefore the need to adapt songs. The final decision was to keep the songs “as foreign as possible”, but in translation. This involved a whole gamut of strategies, among which were the following:
- Incorporating new music into the translated text;
- Omitting the music (and incorporating its words into the drama text), due to dramatic tension/due to the lack of a stage direction specifying that certain words are a song;
- Humming a song, or singing it to “la”;
- Creating a new song (which ‘sounded’ foreign, with the inclusion of English proper names):
El meu millor amic és el little John
però el meu tresor és l’Stevie Wing.
Entre John i Stevie … prefereixo en Sam,
són ocells de camp.
Quan els veig venir nets i clenxinats,
amb els seus barrets tots tres tan mudats:
John i Stevie són el meu amor,
però en Sam és el meu tresor.
[My best friend is little John
but my “treasure” is Stevie Wing.
Between John and Stevie … I prefer Sam,
they are “country birds”.
When I see them come, …
with their hats, …
John and Stevie are my love
but Sam is my “treasure”]2
According to Pavis (1992:145-146; see also Mateo 1995:24-25) there are two opposite views about theatre translating. The tension between translating for the page or for the stage often involves separate distribution circuits which condition the translation strategies used. On the one hand, if the act of translating is considered as prior to and autonomous from the mise en scène, the translator will seek not to offer a specific interpretation of the text, thus attempting to convey the ambiguities and different readings in the translated playtext. This tendency is preferred in translations for the page, if only because of publishing policies and for financial reasons (one ‘authorized’ translation, which can be used for many productions, is bound to be more profitable than a translation per production). However, as Pavis points out, even though it is very important to take into account the deliberate ambiguity in a text, no reading, no translation, can avoid ‘interpreting’ it. The very intention of trying to maintain the indeterminacy, the mystery of a text, implies a positioning towards it, and will condition a specific reading, mise en scène, and reception of the text. Thus, on the other hand, translating can be seen as intrinsically related to mise en scène, and therefore as an operation already containing an interpretation. This view is usually defended by theatre practitioners and theoreticians: “Translation or mise en scène: the activity is the same; it is the art of selection among the hierarchy of signs” (Antoine Vitez, in Pavis 1992:146). I agree with this latter view, but this is not to deny the existence of translations intended primarily for the page. The page/stage controversy is useless if the expression ‘page/stage’ reflects just different (sometimes compatible) distribution circuits, rather than two aesthetic, ideological practices.
In short, what is interesting in these two views on theatre translation is that they generate two different types of translation, according to two notions of performability, one, more related to the text, and the other, to the specific style of presentation of the company. The following definition by Pavis of theatricality is perfectly applicable to the views on performability which are explored here:
Theatricality does not manifest itself […] as a quality or an essence which is inherent to a text or a situation, but as a pragmatic use of the scenic instrument, so that the components of the performance manifest and fragment the linearity of the text and of the word. (Pavis 1983:471, my italics)
According to this pragmatic use of the “scenic instrument”, we cannot talk about an abstract, universal notion of performability; rather, this will vary depending on the ideology and style of presentation of the company or the cultural milieu:
Any theatrical semiotics which presupposes that the dramatic text has an innate theatricality, a matrix for production or even a score, which must be extracted at all costs and expressed on the stage, thus implying that the dramatic text exists only when it is produced, seems to be begging the question. Those who hold that position would contend that every play has only one good mise en scène already present in the text. (Pavis 1992:26)
And this, as we will see, seems to be Bassnett’s (1991; 1998) objection to performability, if performability is understood as the impossible task of looking for an acting subtext which will unfold in translation (Bassnett 1998:90-92).
Let us focus now on the style of presentation and its relation to performability. It is only from a naturalistic view of theatre, which focuses on the psychological ‘vraisemblance’ of characters, that the concern for a translation that will maintain this characterization is usually defended by different translators. Consequently, for Lars Hamberg, the translated dialogue, “must characterize the speaker and thus seem genuine; […] an easy and natural dialogue is of paramount importance in a dramatic translation, otherwise the actors have to struggle with lines which sound unnatural and stilted” (Hamberg 1969:91, 92). Hamberg also refers to the relation between characterization and the rhythm of the utterances. Susan Bassnett (1978), in an early article on drama translation, applied the notions of Stanislavskian theatre practice to translation, and stressed the importance of rhythm in scenes, which she thought ought to be transmitted to the translation. George Wellwarth emphasizes the similarities between the translation of poetry and drama, and asserts that for both types of translation a sense of rhythm is essential. Specifically, the translator of drama texts “must have a sense of the rhythm of speech patterns”, and in translating, one has to take into account “speakability […], the degree of ease with which the words of the translated text can be enunciated” (Wellwarth 1981:140). His affirmation that the translation must not falsify the intention of the original (Wellwarth 1981:140) is in keeping with Gogol’s definition of the ideal translation, to which Wellwarth subscribes: “the ideal translation [is] one that is like a completely transparent pane of glass through which people can see the original without being aware of anything intervening” (Wellwarth 1981:146). Here we can see that Wellwarth is explicitly defending the transparency or invisibility of translation, which can be linked to a will to be ‘faithful’ to the ‘intention’ of the original. It is from this view that we can understand the importance which is usually given to fluid utterance in translation. It is paradoxical that the ‘ideal translation’, so as to be ‘good’ as a translation, does not have to look like a translation but like an original; translation should remain invisible, hiding in the alleged ‘naturality’ of the target language.
Thus, the tension between ‘artificiality’ and ‘naturalism’ in theatre practices is parallel to the tension in translation studies about the fluency of the translated text. When literary critics comment on the quality of a translation, they tend to do so in terms of fluency. They tend to praise a fluid, transparent, invisible translation, which hides the fact that it is...
