Theatre Translation

Theory and Practice

Massimiliano Morini

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781350195646
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Translating & Interpreting
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Translation for the theatre is often considered to hold a marginal status between literary translation and adaptation for the stage. As a result, this book argues that studies of this complex activity tend to take either a textual or performative approach. After exploring the history of translation theory through these lenses, Massimiliano Morini proposes a more totalizing view of 'theatre translation' as the sum of operations required to transform one theatre act into another, and analyses three complex Western case histories in light of this all-encompassing definition. Combining theory with practice, Morini investigates how traditional ideas on translation – from Plautus and Cicero to the early 20th century – have been applied in the theatrical domain. He then compares and contrasts the inherently textual viewpoint of post-humanistic translators with the more performative approaches of contemporary theatrical practitioners, and chronicles the rise of performative views in the third millennium. Positioning itself at the intersection of past and present, as well as translation studies and theatre semiotics, Theatre Translation provides a full diachronic survey of an age-old activity and a burgeoning academic field.

Part I

Theory

1

The translation of theatre before Translation Studies

Up to the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, there is very little in translation theory that is directly related to dramatic writing and theatrical activity. It is sufficient to scroll through any historical anthology (such as Robinson 1997) to discover that the bulk of theory is developed by thinkers and practitioners whose chosen fields were oratory (Cicero), poetry (Horace, John Dryden, the German romantics), philosophy (Leonardo Bruni) or religion (Jerome, William Tyndale, Martin Luther). When dramatic writing gets mentioned by some of these theorists, it is usually as a literary category rather than as the starting point for performance.

In this apparently barren panorama, however, it must be noted that theatre translation is a very ancient activity, and that in the Roman world there are testimonies of some kind of reflection on its processes and results which pre-date Cicero’s famous pronouncements in De optimo genere oratorum (c. 46 BC) by more than a century. If this reflection (§1.1) cannot be said to amount to a full-fledged theory of translation, it is worth remembering that Cicero’s own translational thinking was episodic and tangential, and that no actual theory of translation was formulated in the West until Leonardo Bruni and the early fifteenth century.

It was at that time, and during the Renaissance, that a heavily text-centric (and quite often source-oriented) view of translation was developed by humanist thinkers and rapidly accepted throughout Europe (§1.2). The central tenet of this theory is that when converting a text from one language to another, the translator has to recreate the elocution but leave the invention and disposition of the source intact. In the field of theatre translation, this meant that while many playwrights continued to freely appropriate their sources, these appropriations could not be considered as proper translations – and therefore, whenever a theatre translation got published, the emphasis was on its relationship with – and dependence on – its textual source (§1.2, 1.3). This state of affairs remained virtually unchanged until the 1950s and 1960s, when translation theory began to metamorphose into an academic discipline. At this time, while linguists and computer scientists were attempting to do away with human translators, the theorists of literary translation were only tangentially interested in theatre translation – and even then, mostly in its textual manifestations (§ 1.4).

1.1 Performance-centric beginnings: Roman practices and theories

It is quite probable that the earliest recorded instances of theatrical production in Rome were translations from the Greek (Albini and Petrone 1992: 433; Brown 1995: 49–50). Whether or not that is the case, it is certain that from the late third century to the first half of the second century BC, a great number of Greek texts were translated and brought to the Latin stage, many of these belonging to New Attic Comedy – a relatively recent genre (c. 320–260 BC) which focused on private rather than public life, and whose best-known authors were Menander, Philemon and Diphilus. In Rome, Plautus (c. 254–184 BC) and Terence (195/185–c. 159? BC) borrowed themes, plots, characters and often lines from these Greek works, thus producing fabulae palliatae, i.e. Roman plays set in Greece.

Plautus and Terence were different playwrights working at different times – the former being more inclined to farce and more linguistically and metrically inventive, the latter a more cultured and less explosive kind of writer. Given this distance and these differences, it is all the more significant that they both treated their Greek sources in much the same manner, at least if contemporary sources – and the playwrights themselves – are to be believed. Though very little is left of the Greek plays that Plautus used as starting points for his own, he ‘is credited at least with formal changes, structural modifications, the elaboration of stock characters, the addition of metatheatrical elements and the insertion of Roman touches’ (Manuwald 2011: 229); and the one Greek fragment that can actually be compared to a passage from Plautus’ Bacchides shows that even when he retained the general sense, the Roman playwright brought modifications which were relevant both on the micro-linguistic and macro-theatrical levels of performance (Manuwald 2011: 229–30). Analogously, and with stronger textual evidence, it can be said that Terence used his sources rather freely in order to create new plays that would be effective on the Roman stage (Terentius 1989: 10): on occasion, for instance, he condensed two of Menander’s comedies into one of his own; or, even more spuriously, he used a Greek source but also took his bearings from preceding Latin treatments by Plautus and Gnaeus Naevius (Terentius 1989: 264). In short, both playwrights can be said to be theatre translators in a performance-centric sense: they used all materials at their disposal in order to create a spectacle that would gain them popular success (Plautus) and/or erudite praise (Terence).¹

That these two playwrights considered themselves translators is evident from what they wrote about their art. Plautus usually concluded his prologues by declaring that the play was dependent on a certain Greek source: in his Trinummus, for instance, he had the actor speaking the lines say that ‘this was written by Philemon and translated by Plautus into Barbarian’ (‘Philemo scripsit, Plautus vortit barbare’; Plautus 1784: 6).² As for Terence, what we know about the mixing and matching techniques outlined above also depends on our knowledge of his prologues, where he felt he had to defend himself against those who accused him of contaminating too much (‘isti […] disputant / contaminari non decere fabulas’; ‘they say that contaminating is not decorous in plays’; Terentius 1989: 10; McElduff 2013: 87–9), as well as those who had noted his borrowings from former Latin authors (‘magistratus […] exclamat furem, non poetam fabulam / dedisse’; ‘the appointed magistrate exclaims that it was a thief, not a poet, that presented the play’; Terentius 1989: 264). However, while he was defensive about his use of sources, Terence was, like Plautus, completely open about the fact that his plays were translations of Greek originals (‘Graeca est – Menandru’; ‘this play is Greek and belongs to Menander’; Terentius 1989: 135).

It is also important to note, however, that Plautus and Terence were both considered playwrights in their own right, as well as translators – and Terence certainly presented himself as an author in his prologues, where he often complained about accusations of plagiarism or wrongly assumed authorship (Terentius 1989: 138).³ In Rome, the translatio of Greek culture and literature was so wholesale and central to the canon that it could be seen to amount to original writing (Lockwood 1918: 1–3; Even-Zohar 2000: 193; McElduff 2013) – and with such performance-driven translations of Greek plays mixing and matching scenes from different sources, implanting Roman situations and characters into Attic settings, the conflation of the roles must have been even easier. In point of fact, there is plenty of evidence that even in the following centuries, Roman culture continued to see these writers as serving both a foreign master and themselves. Between the first and second centuries AD, for instance, Suetonius characterized Terence as the author of six comedies (‘scripsit comoedias sex’; Suetonius 1914: 454), the beginning of whose Adelphoe was rated by Varro above that of Menander’s comedy of the same title (‘nam “Adelphorum” principium Varro etiam praefert principio Menandri’; Suetonius 1914: 456). On the other hand, Suetonius goes on to report that Cicero had a high opinion of the playwright as the translator who alone had been able to give Menander a Latin voice:

Tu quoque, qui solus lecto sermone, Terenti,

Conversum expressumque Latina voce Menandrum

In medium nobis sedatis vocibus effers,

Quiddam come loquens atque omnia dulcia dicens. (Suetonius 1914: 463)

Only you, Terence, with your high style

Convert and express Menander in a Latin voice

In our midst, with your quiet utterance,

With a certain grace and a sweetness in every word.⁴

What is particularly interesting here is the insistence on ‘voice’ (‘Latina voce’; ‘sedatis vocibus’), which prefigures the interest in the quality of ‘speakability’ displayed by a lot of twentieth-century theory (see, for instance, Snell-Hornby 1984; Mateo 1994). It must not be forgotten that this is the same Cicero who proclaimed that he would, in his versions of Greek public speeches, attempt to preserve the rhetorical force (vim) of the source words rather than the words themselves, and that he would not count the source words in his readers’ hands like coins, but pay them their weight in gold (verba appendere, rather than enumerare; Cicero 1973: 41). In the Roman world,⁵ translating was posited at the interface between creativity and imitation, and was always seen in performative terms – whether the arena in which the translators had to prove their mettle was a podium, a marketplace or the public theatre. It is, therefore, not surprising that such translating techniques as those of Plautus and Terence were allowed, and that these writers were considered to be both original playwrights and translators.⁶

1.2 A text-centric theory of translation: Humanism and the Renaissance

Though its textual traces are relatively rare, it seems safe to affirm that the stage- and audience-centric approach observed in Plautus and Terence continued until the end of the ancient Graeco-Roman world: a Byzantine tragedy called Christos Paschon, for instance, variously dated from the fourth to the eleventh century, derives the greater part of its text from seven plays by Euripides, and is actually the modern source for many Euripidean passages (Sticca 1974: 26). Just like Plautus or Terence, the author of this late classical and biblical pastiche had no hesitation in putting his ancient Greek sources to the service of his own vision, and would probably have had no great interest in discriminating between passages of translated and original writing.

After the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West, however, theatrical activity became submerged – and while there is evidence for the existence of travelling groups of players in the early Middle Ages (mainly from Christian authorities that were radically opposed to their activity; Brockett and Hildy 2003: 75; Mullini and Zacchi 2003: 16), very little is known about their repertoire. It is, therefore, impossible to trace the history of theatre translation theory between Roman times and the early Renaissance: even in the late Middle Ages, when liturgical and mystery plays began to be produced, the only reason why these could be called translations was a general reliance on biblical sources (Molinari 1983: 67–85; Mullini and Zacchi 2003: 16–21; Happé and Hüsken 2016).⁷

Between the fourth and the fifteenth centuries, as a matter of fact, very little translation theory was produced in the West in any field. The few practitioners who commented on their own or others’ activity were either religious translators or, when humanism set in, translators of serious philosophical works and respected epic literature. This meant that translation theory, which had arguably been performance-centric and target-oriented in the Roman world, became heavily text-centric and source-oriented in Christian Europe. Towards the end of the fourth century, Jerome interpreted Cicero’s comments on his own versions from the Greek as a defence of ‘sensum […] de sensu’ translation, and praised Terence and Plautus for their free versions of Greek theatre – but then added that in rendering Scripture, even word order is a mystery (‘et verborum ordo mysterium est’; Migne 1859: Hieronymus LVII, v). Ten centuries later, the Italian humanist Leonardo Bruni produced a treatise called ‘On the Correct Way to Translate’ (De interpretatione recta; c. 1426) that castigated earlier translators of Aristotle for their omissions and imprecisions, and propounded his own more painstaking philological methods (Bruni 1996: 152, 160, 162; Morini 2006: 9–10). Between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Europeans began translating Virgil in their several vernaculars – mostly with a degree of attention to detail which was unprecedented for secular literature (Morini 2013a). In all these cases, the translators showed (and often declared) an awed respect for their source texts which was a very far cry from the liberties taken by Cicero with his Greek orators – not to mention the cutting-and-pasting techniques displayed by the Roman playwrights.

In this context, it comes as no surprise to learn that when people start translating theatre again, and comment on their own efforts, the emphasis is textual rather than performative. Many of the theatre translations that went into print in the Renaissance were, after all, guided by the same impulse that drove Leonardo Bruni, who translated Greek philosophy into Latin to make ancient knowledge available for the contemporary scientific community. One of the earliest and most famous theatre translations of the period, for instance, is Erasmus’ Latin edition of two tragedies by Euripides (Hecuba and Iphigenia in Aulis; completed 1502–6, published in Paris in 1507 and by Manutius in 1508). These versions would then go on to be translated in the various vernaculars and staged, either in Latin or in the modern tongues, all over Europe – but there is no trace of a performance-centric intent in the learned translator’s presentation of his works. Erasmus writes that he has dabbled with Euripides in order to practise his Greek (McCallum-Barry 2004: 52), and it is arguable that he decided to produce a Latin version of the Greek playwright’s work for pedagogical reasons (Wilson 1973: 87). These sentiments and intentions are echoed by Latin and vernacular theatre translators throughout Europe: many of the Senecan ‘Englishers’, for instance, declare in their very title pages that they embarked on their enterprises ‘for the profit of young schollers’ (Heywood 1561; see also Braden 2010a; for similar treatments of Seneca in the rest of Europe, see Ziosi 2007). The same fate was incurred by Roman comedy: Maurice Kyffin, for instance, defended his choice of Terence’s Andria as translating material by praising the purity of the Latin playwright’s style, and added to his paratexts the preface ‘To all young Students of the Latin tong (for whose onely help and benefit this Comoedie is published)’ (Kyffin 1588: sig. A3; see also Braden 2010b). In all of these versions there is little or no mention of performance, or of any alterations to the text that have been made with a view to presenting the play on stage.⁸

This general text-centric tendency is reflected in the most important pedagogical and literary treatises of the day, all of which categorize theatrical writing as a literary genre and generally define the playwright as a poet.⁹ In Roger Ascham’s The Scholemaster, for instance, Plautus’ and Terence’s plays are considered as appropriate learning material rather than theatrical works, their lines to be usefully turned into English like those of any other Latin poet (Ascham 1570: 15, 31). The same attitude is found in works on literary language and poetics. Joachim du Bellay, in his Défense et illustration de la langue française, includes theatrical writing in his section on ‘which kinds of poems the French poet must choose’ (‘Quelz genres de Poëmes, doite elire le Poëte Francoys’), where choosing involves not only genre but also the models and source texts which are appropriate for imitation, and invariably hail from the classical world (Du Bellay 1549: 27v, 29r). In England, both Sidney, in his impassioned Defence of Poesie (before 1583), and Puttenham, in his more technical Arte of English Poesie (1589), treat comedies and tragedies as special cases of poetical writing which happen to be intended for the stage.

All this does not mean, of course, that plays were only meant to be read: on the contrary, the theatre flourished again throughout Europe during the Renaissance, and people like Du Bellay, Sidney and Puttenham were well aware that this particular form of ‘poetry’ was also spoken on stage (see, for instance, Du Bellay 1549: 29r; Sidney 1966: 65; Puttenham 1589: 20). In Spain, Italy, France and England in particular, theatrical activity was robust and varied, embracing as it did the world of popular entertainment as well as the courtly sphere, not to mention private performances in aristocratic houses (Helou 2003: 27) and the academic circles where classical works were staged in Latin and Greek (Helou 2003: 17;¹⁰ Saudis 2015). Just as happened in other forms of fictional writing, many of the plays that were being staged were translations – with the balance between original and derivative writing decidedly tilting towards the latter in the less culturally powerful areas (Prandoni 2019). Also, ‘original’ playwrights like Shakespeare freely appropriated bits and pieces from innumerable texts and traditions, acting like de facto interlingual or intralingual translators. However, when actual translations got published, and when their authors decided to comment on them in writing, the emphasis was almost invariably on textual fidelity rather than performative efficacy. A good example of this is offered by the many European translations of Giovan Battista Guarini’s Pastor fido (1590; see chapter six): even those versions which were arguably or explicitly conceived for the stage, like the 1602 Dymock edition or the Spanish version by Suárez de Figueroa (1602, 1609), make no performance-centric claims in their paratexts. Suárez de Figueroa, for instance, laments the fate of the translator who has to ‘paint from the life rather than at his pleasure’ (‘retratar al vivo y no pintar a gusto’), though he himself claims that the tragicomedy was acted out at least once in front of a courtly audience (Suárez de Figueroa 2007: 13, 276). Thus, whether or not translators have some actual or potential performance in mind, their explicit theoretical bias is textual and source-bound.

1.3 From the Renaissance to the Romantic period: Theatre, text, canon

After the Renaissance, and with the cultural impact of humanistic notions of language, translation was identified as a form of ‘contrastive rhetoric’, as L. G. Kelly (1979: 223) has it. Up to the late twentieth century, the idea prevailed that translators had to leave the inventio and...