Theatrical Translation and Film Adaptation

A Practitioner's View

Phyllis Zatlin

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781847695482
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Translating & Interpreting
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Translation and film adaptation of theatre have received little study. In filling that gap, this book draws on the experiences of theatrical translators and on movie versions of plays from various countries. It also offers insights into such concerns as the translation of bilingual plays and the choice between subtitling and dubbing of film.

Chapter 1

In Theatrical Translation, There is
No Lack of Conflict

Nothing is more difficult and less appreciated than a good translation

Paul Claudel1

Drama, by definition, is the story of conflict. No conflict, no drama. In that respect, the practice of literary translation presupposes dramatic action, for translators may anticipate from the outset the conflict stemming from the widely held belief that they are traitors who invariably betray the source text. With the old adage, traduttore, traditore, the translator is cast as Iago.

We can, of course, object to such a negative view by citing innumerable examples of fine translations that capture well the meaning and style of their source texts. In theatrical translation, however, some betrayal is a necessity. As Ortrun Zuber succinctly observes, ‘a play is dependent on the immediacy of the impact on the audience’ (Zuber, 1980: 92). Readers who are committed to learning more about another culture may have no problem with translated novels that offer explanations in footnotes or that inspire them to research unfamiliar references. Spectators in the theatre must grasp immediately the sense of the dialogue. Readers may delight in the recreation of antiquated language within a narrative text, but, as Hamlet maintains, actors on stage must be able to speak the speech ‘trippingly on the tongue’. Clifford Landers correctly states: ‘Even style, which is by no means unimportant in dramatic translation, sometimes must yield to the reality that actors have to be able to deliver the lines in a convincing and natural manner’ (Landers, 2001: 104). To achieve speakable dialogue, theatrical translators can and do adapt.

I am not making new discoveries here. Previous essays on translating for the stage repeatedly establish these points. Robert W. Corrigan affirmed that theatrical translators, like playwrights, must know how writing for the theatre differs from literature and must be trained in the practice of theatre: ‘Without such training the tendency will be to translate words and their meanings. This practice will never produce performable translations, and that is, after all, the purpose of doing the job in the first place’ (Corrigan, 1961: 100). Two decades later, George Wellwarth (1981) insisted on the importance of style with this warning: ‘No audience will give its full attention to a play whose dialogue is stilted’ (Wellwarth, 1981: 142). Rick Hite (1999: 304) advised theatrical translators to become actors and listen to their work so that they may perceive ‘the problems of translating from spoken text to spoken text’ and ‘become more sensitive to the vocal idiosyncrasies of both languages, of their inherent rhythms, patterns, and stress’.

Corrigan, Wellwarth and Hite refer specifically to the modern American stage. Their comments could be applied equally well to the British, French and Spanish stages but are not necessarily universal today nor applicable to earlier periods. Geneviève Ulmann, who has for many years headed an international literary agency in Paris, states that in Belgium, Germany, and the Scandinavian countries, spectators accept translations that sound like translations.2 In France translations are not considered stageworthy unless they flow like original texts.

It is this latter goal, of producing texts that flow, that we shall have in mind throughout this book. That goal is consistent with a final declaration on minimal requirements for theatrical translators that was issued in January 1998 by the Ariane Literary Network, a project of the European Union. Those requirements encompass linguistic competency, theatrical experience, and writing talent (European Union, 1998).

In the early decades of the 20th century, American audiences apparently were as amenable to stilted dialogue as Ullmann believes contemporary Belgian, German and Scandinavian spectators are still. A number of plays by Nobel prize winner Jacinto Benavente and other Spanish authors reached the Broadway stage with ease in translations by John Garrett Underhill that today we might kindly call ‘wooden’. Underhill's absolute fidelity to his source, coupled with his failure to recognize idiomatic expressions, resulted in the kinds of passages that give translators a bad name. Consider, for example, this one sentence spoken by the Captain in an early scene of Benavente's internationally acclaimed metatheatrical farce, The Bonds of Interest:

Because we were defeated in the late wars – more through these base traffickers who govern us and send us to defend their interests without enthusiasm and without arms, than through any power of the enemy, as if a man could fight with his whole heart for what he did not love – defeated by these traffickers who did not contribute so much as a single soldier to our ranks or lend one single penny to the cause but upon good interest and yet better security; who, as soon as they scented danger and saw their pockets in jeopardy, threatened to make common cause with the enemy – now they blame us, they abuse us and despise us, and seek to economize out of our martial misery, which is the little pay that they give us, and would dismiss us if they dared, if they were not afraid that some day all those whom they have oppressed by their tyranny and their greed would rise up and turn against them. (Benavente, 1929: 50)

The original Spanish – believe it or not – has comic flair. A good translation would allow us to ‘hear’ the voice of a talented comic actor delivering this monologue. But with Underhill's language, any bonds of interest that a potential director today might feel up to this point in the script would rapidly unravel. No wonder Lorenzo Mans decided to do a new translation of Benavente's Los intereses creados (The Art of Swindling) for the 1996 staging in Atlanta.

Poor translation is a serious matter if one is trying to get a play staged. Theatrical directors are not likely to go beyond the title and the opening pages if those lack ‘sparkle’. In my experience, directors tend either to love a play on first sight or to reject it with the same speed. This is so in large part because even the smallest professional theatre is likely to be inundated with hundreds of unsolicited manuscripts a year. Well-established, large theatres are likely to reject all unsolicited manuscripts automatically and let literary agents do their initial screening for them.

Why are Underhill's translations no longer acceptable? In general the approach to translation has changed radically in the post Chomsky era.3 Comparative linguistics has provided a framework for translation theory, and the new theory has inspired more dynamic recreations of source texts. We are now aware that each language has its own stylistics and that theatre conventions vary from country to country. A wise translator takes those differences into account.

In making the adjustments to a dramatic text that today we find essential, translators are by no means alone in adapting and interpreting their source. From the perspective of theatre practitioners, staging a play always involves translation of many kinds. Reba Gostand notes:

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, 1980: 1)

Spanish playwright and director Ernesto Caballero similarly states that the process of staging a play, particularly one that is not a contemporary work from the same country, is a process of translation that inevitably implies betrayal because it is impossible to take a literal approach to a ‘text that belongs to another period or another culture’ (Caballero, 2001: 68).4

Zuber affirms that translators, like playwrights, should write for actors. In an ideal arrangement, ‘the translator's manuscript would first be tried out on the stage and discussed and changed in rehearsals, and only then published for future performances – or for readers’ (Zuber, 1980: 93). Because the required transformation from page to stage is complex, most experienced theatrical translators wish to be involved in the dynamics of rehearsals, standing in as the author's surrogate. But far too frequently, the translator is shunted aside. Even the role of Iago, the villain, is better than being written totally out of the script: of being forgotten not only in the process but also in programme credits and play reviews.

In her book on drama translation, Sirkku Aaltonen (2000) titles one of her chapters ‘The Translator in the Attic.’ The intertextual reference to Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) is provocative: like the monstrous women characters hidden away in such 19th-century novels as Charlotte Bronteës Jane Eyre, the translator could be described as ‘the author's double, an image of her own anxiety and rage’, a mad creature who reflects ‘uniquely female feelings of fragmentation’ (Gilbert & Gubar, 1979: 78). Should we view the author-translator relationship as conflictive aspects of a split personality?

Perhaps this comparison to a psychotic, socially unacceptable character from a Gothic novel is a bit melodramatic, but it is often true that translators, rather than getting equal billing with the authors, may be invisible.5 In 1996, I was delighted that The New York Times chose to review Ubu Repertory's staging of Eduardo Manet's Lady Strass; if you read D.J.R. Bruckner's positive criticism (Bruckner, 1996), you will learn the names of the director and the actors, but you will not discover that the translation of the French play was mine. I have at hand four reviews from an April 2003 staging in Madrid of Michael Frayn's Copenhagen; only one of the critics makes any reference to the quality of Charo Solanas's Castilian version of the British play (Críticas Copenhague, 2003). One can readily find other examples of this phenomenon. The translators’ attic is a crowded place.

Aaltonen with reason wants to move translators from the attic to stage centre. She therefore agrees with Lawrence Venuti that literary translators should share copyright with the original authors: ‘Venuti's proposal is particularly justifiable in theatre translation, where adaptation ties the translation even more closely and visibly to the target society’ (Aaltonen, 2000: 110). We shall deal further with the question of royalties in the next chapter.

If they are involved in the rehearsal process, the translators’ contribution may be similar to that of a dramaturg: a consultant to a theatre company who knows the text well and can clarify details for the actors and director. André Ernotte, the director of Lady Strass, in fact invited me to go to New York and attend a rehearsal. I found nothing to clarify; the reading that Susanne Wasson, Paul Albe, and Robert Jimenez were giving the text coincided completely with my own. When I expressed amazement at this coincidence, I was told that the theatre's artistic director, Françoise Kourilsky, had given them copies of my detailed scene-by-scene notes on the play's action.

Before translating Manet's play, I had prepared those notes at the request of a potential director. The project fell through. Some years later, I found that analysis in my file and sent it on to Ubu Repertory without giving the matter any thought. More months passed, and by the time I got to the rehearsal, I had forgotten about the notes. The experience at Ubu showed me that a translator-dramaturg, even a forgetful one who does not live in the same city, can participate productively in the process. Unwittingly, I had fulfilled the role that Patrice Pavis has outlined: ‘The translator is a dramaturg who must first of all effect a macrotextual translation, that is, a dramaturgical analysis of the fiction conveyed by the text’ (Pavis, 1989: 27); that analysis should provide ‘a coherent reading of the plot as well as the spatio-temporal indications contained in the text’ and stage directions (Pavis, 1989: 28). The reviewer for The New York Times may have been oblivious to my existence, but the director and actors were not, thanks to my pre-translation analysis.

There is another cure for the psychological fragmentation that theatrical translators may suffer. How can one simultaneously be true to the author and yet reach the target audience? The following comment by Louis G. Kelly provides us with a way out of the attic: ‘Fidelity will mean either collaboration or servitude’ (Kelly, 1979: 207). The servitude of total fidelity is undesirable for all concerned: even if it were possible, it would yield unstageworthy results. Collaboration with living authors is not always easy: the give and take of any interpersonal relationship may be complicated by an author's unwillingness to accept modification to a beloved text. But if the author respects the translator's judgement and open dialogue is possible, collaboration is ideal.

In my contact with authors as editor and translator, I have invariably found a willingness to work for viable solutions to problems the translator has identified. Such problems have ranged from the title of the play to the names of the characters and to intertextual references to movies, songs, and other items of cultural significance. Did the author have an alternate working title that might translate more gracefully? Could a character's name be changed to one that is more easily pronounced by our actors and/or does not carry an undesirable connotation? Are there other movies or songs, better known to our target audience, that would serve as well? How can we fill a particular cultural gap most effectively? The authors have quickly supplied an answer they already had contemplated, or have thought the problem through and come up with a workable idea, or have given the translator and/or editor carte blanche for coming up with something original. Perhaps the secret to assuring collaboration is to couch the problem as a question.

Playwright José Luis Alonso de Santos, who recently headed the National Company for Classic Theatre in Madrid, has prepared or directed a number of modernized adaptations and understands well the translator's role. From its beginning, this theatre has set out ‘to connect with the sensibilities of today's spectator’ (Cuadernos de Teatro Clásico 16, 2002: 21). In his programme notes on adapting a Golden Age play by Agustín Moreto, Alonso de Santos explicitly suggests that he collaborated with the long-deceased dramatist: ‘Taking the liberty of reincarnating myself for a while in the 17th century, I asked the author for advice about my questions’ (Cuadernos de Teatro Clásico 16, 2002: 38). Alonso de Santos’ comment echoes Pavis’ assertion that ‘in order to find out what the source text means, I have to bombard it with questions from the target language's point of view’ (Pavis, 1989: 26).

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