Introductory Remarks:
The Visibility of Theatre Translation

A metalanguage is always terrorist.
- Roland Barthes

This epigraph is from Roland Barthes's conclusion to his 1961 review of Michel Foucault's Histoirede laFolie.1 In his provocative text, Barthes defines metalanguage as reductive and thus terrorist and violent. In The Translator's Invisibility, Lawrence Venuti applies Barthes's statement to his definition of translation and argues that forcing a text into a foreign language is an act of violence: "Translation is the forcible replacement of the linguistic and cultural difference of the foreign text with a text that will be intelligible to the target audience."2 Venuti suggests that translation has the power to construct representations of foreign cultures and establish canons for the interpretation of these cultures, and calls for the visibility of the translator and for the preservation of "foreignness," in opposition to "domestication," in the translated work. Translating then is an act of transforming as well as an act of interpreting. Moreover, the translation of a dramatic text is a double act of cultural transformation: that of the literary text and that of the performance text at the same time. Translating a theatrical text involves an awareness of multiple codes: how to bring out different levels of cultural meaning, how to re-construct the identities of the characters, how to underline conflict, achieve emotional intensity, motivate the dramatic action. Luigi Pirandello argues that translators "falsify" the original text by re-interpreting it, because faithfulness is an impossible concept. Nonetheless, he accepts that there is no alternative to this "paradox."3 Gogol, on the other hand, defines the ideal translation as a completely transparent glass through which one can see the original.4 Walter Benjamin also suggests that "it is not the highest praise of a translation . . . to say that it reads as if it had been originally written in that [original] language."5 Thus translation becomes mediation; it becomes a bridgeóit both unites and marks the separation. It takes place between two cultures and two languages. It is, at the same time, double alliance and double infidelity.

In many ways, translation falls within the larger framework of representation and mimesis: like translation, theatre itself is double-talk, both present and not present, both reality and fiction. Similarly, when we read, produce, or teach a dramatic text in translation, we face major problems of definition: what is the in-between space where translation takes place? What is the original and what is its relationship to the translated text? Is it a relationship of faithfulness, unfaithfulness, or perhaps a different kind of "marital" agreement which defies notions of fidelity? Is there such a thing as "literal" translation? What is the difference between translation and adaptation? Should the translated text point out the cultural, linguistic, and temporal differences, the "strangeness" of the original text, as Venuti suggests? Or make it familiar to the circumstances of its target culture, language, and traditions? Can theatricality and meaning be carried and transmitted through translation from one dramatic text to the other, from one culture to the other? And is translation a copy or is it an interpretation?

As someone who lives her life and projects her identity in translation (having come to the United States from a "foreign" language and culture), I decided to test this last question in my classroom a few years ago. Three of my students took over the task of comparing three different English translations of Racine's Phèdre and of determining how the different translations may suggest different interpretations of Phaedra's character on the stage; the results were astonishing. According to the first student, Phaedra was a madwoman; according to the second, she was a dignified queen; to the third student she was just a woman who suffered because of circumstances that were beyond her control. The translation in this case was not a copy but the first and only experience my students had of the text. To these students, the original of Phèdre was always already interpreted, and thus interpretation preceded the original: interpretation had become the original.

The Spring 2001 special issue of Metamorphoses invited submissions on all aspects of theatre translation (theory and practice), including cultural transmission and mediation, adaptation, performance, and specific plays or playwrights. It also invited submissions of original translations of dramatic texts into English. We received many papers, including a few whose first version was presented and debated in the special Seminar, ". . . words of so sweet breath compos'd: Translating the Dramatic Text," which I organized and chaired for the 2000 Conference of the American Society for Theatre Research in New York City. The papers we received for the special issue delved into translation theory as well as the practical aspects of translating, adapting, or using a translated text for production or in the classroom. We also received translations of dramatic texts (or excerpts of texts) from different original languages into English. All the papers and translations were evaluated anonymously by specialist reviewers, whose comments were forwarded to the authors of the papers and the translators.

This volume continues the discourse on Theatre Translation, that started only recently in the fields of Theatre and Performance Studies. It contains essays by scholars from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada that deal with problems of theatrical translation from the point of view of diverse cultures, different languages, and distinct historical periods. In her essay on Lysistrata, Lynne Conner discusses the problem of interpreting translation in a pedagogical context and offers her own classroom experience as a case study intended to demonstrate how translation theory can be applied as a kind of "sideways" pedagogy. Katharine B. Free explores the rules and guidelines for translators and adapters of Ancient Greek tragedies for the contemporary stage and offers a description of the artistic processes and intentions behind her own adaptation of Euripides's Helen, entitled Helen After Troy. Nina Scott introduces us to her translation from the Spanish of the seventeenth-century Mexican nun, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz's loa to El DivinoNarciso. Erik Weissengruber, in his account of early translations of G. E. Lessing's MinnavonBarnhelm, suggests that Lessing's eighteenth-century British translators also became Lessing's censors, by attempting to make him acceptable to conventional British literary and theatrical tastes and by masking Lessing's liberal ideas and artistic innovations. In her discussion of Carlo Gozzi's Orientalism in Turandot, Patricia Gaborik contends that the play's most problematic "othering" comes from its English translations rather than from Gozzi's Italian text. Joel Berkowitz and Jeremy Dauber explore cultural and practical issues raised by their translating of Yiddish comedies of the Jewish Enlightenment, which, being rich in linguistic devices, present the translator with the special challenge of preserving the liveliness of the dramatic texts without sounding overly literal. John Hamilton argues that Hölderlin's translations of Sophocles's tragedies, although they continue to generate a sizeable amount of scholarly studies, are rarely discussed with any real regard for dramaturgy or in relation to the possibility of dramatic performance. David Ball introduces his translation from the French of Alfred Jarry's Ubu the King, and explains the complex cultural and linguistic choices that he had to make. Rhonda Blair approaches Anton Chekhov's The Seagull through the idea of speech as embodied, as a physical act coming out of and being directed toward bodies, and investigates how translation can affect the sense of embodiment and action for the actor. In his discussion of Luigi Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author, David Escoffery explores English-language translations of Pirandello's play as belonging to a space between two cultures, appropriate to Pirandello's own explorations of the fluidity of meaning in his dramatic works. William Grange examines productions of translations of plays by Carlo Goldoni and Oscar Wilde in the Third Reich and argues that, in the Nazi dictatorship's heavy emphasis on cultural distinctions, these productions resulted in a primordial "multiculturalism," which further merchandised and formulated Nazi propaganda. In his analysis of Peter Brook's The Mahabharata, John Hellweg discusses the exigencies of intercultural and intersemiotic translation and emphasizes Brook's pursuit of a form of theatre which would be maximally accessible across cultural divides and unhindered by a reliance on contextual representation. Jennifer Renee Danby introduces her and Roxana Huhulea's translation from the French of Hélène Cixous's Tambourssur ledigue, a play first produced by Ariane Mnouchkine's Théâtre du Soleil. Lastly, Maura Chwastyk and Kevin Wetmore propose a phonomorphological model for the study of intercultural theatre and argue that theatre translators may build upon this model and use it as a conceptual framework for the generation of cultural meaning in their translations.

As it has perhaps become evident, this volume is not exhaustive of the topic of Theatre Translation and the essays it contains employ different methodologies to different purposes. What they share, however, is their concern about theatre translation and cultural transmission as well as the significant contribution they make to a field that is just beginning to grow and, to use Venuti's terms, become visible. Moreover, they are intended to stimulate and provoke further discussion on Theatre Translation in the twenty-first century and promote it as a legitimate scholarly discipline for research and inquiry.

My thanks and gratitude go to the all of the authors in this volume for the excellent work they have done, to the Editor-in-Chief of Metamorphoses, Thalia Pandiri, for her support and vision, to all the anonymous reviewers and referees for their valuable comments, to Edwin Gentzler and the University of Massachusetts Translation Center for their technical assistance and advice, to Joel Tansey, Ellen Kaplan, and Alex Forman for all their help, and to Lauren Ciancio, Assistant Production Editor, and Alyssa Chase and Alexandra C. Kissel, Editorial Assistants, who devoted a lot of valuable time, thought, and energy to putting this volume together. I dedicate this volume to my parents Alexandra and Christos.

Notes

1 Roland Barthes, "Taking Sides," Critical Essays, trans. R. Howard (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1972) 163-70.
2 Lawrence Venuti, The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation (London, 1995) 25.
3 See T. Hermans, ed., The Manipulation of Literature (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1985) 93.
4 See Marilyn Gaddis Rose, ed., Translation Spectrum (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1981) 146.
5 Walter Benjamin, "The Task of the Translator," trans. Harry Zohn, Illuminations, ed. Hanna Arendt (Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1982) 69-82.