Fifteen Eighty Four

Feminist philosopher and activist María Lugones described dancing the tango as an act of mutual intention – “I ask, intimate, propose; you respond.”  I find that her co-constructed tango practice better encapsulates my own theatrical translation experience, as a US-based actor, director, spectator, and –yes—translator, than translator Katherine Gregor’s asymmetrical ballroom-dance analogy which positions the translator as “dancing backwards” to the author’s lead. I have long argued for acknowledgement of the translator’s labor and artistic contributions. Our peers in narrative translation have achieved deserved recognition; it is time for theatre translators to be recognized as full participants.

In my recently published book, Contemporary Performance Translation: Challenges and Opportunities for the Global Stage, I extend my collaborative call beyond the play-text to regard translation and the translator as active participants in all aspects of theatrical and other performance engagements. This collaborative relationship, which I term “translational” in a nod to Walter Benjamin’s assertion of a translation’s unavoidable relationality to the translated text, is fluid, dynamic, and multidirectional. (Note that I do not employ the one-way source/target dyad.) The translational not only involves the textual but also embraces the multifaceted collaborative process between translators and other theatre artists, such as –to take only a few examples developed in the book– thinking through culturally specific performance styles and the limits of “American realism” when staging a play in English translation, considering the performer as self-translator and translational site, reconfiguring actor-spectator empathy as translationally co-constructed, and regarding the rehearsal space and classroom as (to borrow Kate Eaton’s term) translational laboratories.

Despite translation’s etymological roots, translators, and most assuredly performance translators, are not simply invisible interlingual, intercultural transporters. Rather than dropping off a translated script to a producer or director and never to be contacted again, we theatrical translators should be involved in the entire creative process. Indeed, my most positive experiences as a translator, actor, director, spectator, and educator have involved translational collaboration: developing decades-long relationships with Argentinian playwrights through translating their work; building performance languages with fellow actors with disabilities; working with US directors on new translations as “new plays”; reconsidering my own spectator’s expectations through engagements with translated surtitles, actors’ self-translations and even refusals to translate; and weaving into my US-based directing projects and academic syllabi considerations of culturally different actor-training, casting, rehearsal, and reception practices.

I therefore take it as a great compliment when I’m told that you can tell my translation has come from somewhere else. It signals to me that the speaker has perceived the translational at work at this site of theatrical encounter with its never-ending negotiations and mutual intentions.

Translation is neither metaphor nor method. As an artistic practice and process, it stands in co-constructive relation and tension to other texts, performances, and bodies. Translation is productively everywhere in performance if you look translationally.