NT : Go Backstage : Platform Papers : On Translation
On Translation
Chair: Christopher Campbell
Panel: Penny Black, Laura Gribble, Philippe Le Moine, Joshua Sobol, Colin Teevan
Olivier Theatre, 11 November 2003
CC To start chronologically: Colin, you translated Bacchai for Peter Hall's production in this theatre a couple of years ago, and I wondered if you could start by talking a bit about your experience of translating ancient Greek authors.
CT I think what's interesting about the Greeks is that there are so many translations of their plays – the opposite problem to the contemporary playwrights of which there are no translations. Auden said that every society creates an Ancient Greece in their own image. I was working from the ancient Greek itself, and what I found interesting was the layers of translation that one had to go through – not simply my direct relationship with Euripides, but my relationship with all the various interpretations of Euripides that go back to the Victorian period. One aspect is the traditional dictionary of Ancient Greek called the Liddell and Scott (Henry Liddell being the father of Alice Liddell of Alice in Wonderland – that's what her dad was doing while she was off playing with Lewis Carroll). Liddell spent about 40 years putting together this dictionary, died just before the end, and Mr Scott came in and finished it off. I was having to get my contemporary dictionary and translate his translations, because I was translating through a veil of Victoriana. Which leads to a question about how we look at the Greeks. The great age of Greek scholarship in Britain was when the Greeks were seen as the tool of Empire. The Bacchai was not produced in Britain until 1903; it was deemed an aberration in Euripides' otherwise acceptable canon, an obscene play. There were some people who felt I had put jokes into my translation, but actually Euripides is very darkly funny; the Victorians had taken the jokes out because they didn't fit with the Victorian idea of Ancient Greece as the tool and education of the upper classes, and a code of conduct for running an empire. Euripides was a massively popular artist, the Spielberg of his day. We had the great fortune of taking Bacchai to Epidaurus where there were 10,000 people seeing the show each night. Euripides used to regularly fill these places with all classes of people. And if in a town of 50,000 people, which Athens then was, you can put 10,000 in the theatre, that's a lot. There was no gap between high and low art; that's a very contemporary thing. In some ways Ancient Greek theatre is more akin to Shakespeare's theatre, which has something for everyone.
CC That Euripides you did for Peter Hall was the third in his series, in a way, wasn't it? Tony Harrison did Aeschylus' The Oresteia and Ranjit Bolt did the Sophocles Oedipus plays. Were you conscious of those two precedents?
CT They were vastly different translations. There's almost a metronomic beat to a Tony Harrison translation, which suits Aeschylus very well. I don't know the Ranjit Bolt Oedipus, but he worked in rhyming couplets, didn't he? That's very different to how I'd do it. I used iambic pentameter for the actual scenes, the Choruses were much freer. Euripides varies his meters. Our experience of the Penguin translations, the voices all appear very samey, because they're all largely Philip Vellacott's(?), but actually the voices of the three tragedians are so different that I think often the writer needs to find a translator. It's interesting that Peter Hall chose three different translators for the three different Ancient Greek writers; I suppose he was looking for the writer he felt echoed what he hoped to find.
CC With Iphigenia, what you did was to update it.
CT It's more difficult in that it's a corrupted text. (This is a version of Iphigenia called Iph, which I did specifically for Northern Ireland). When you go down through the layers of Iphigenia in Aulis, which was presented in the same trilogy as Bacchai in Ancient Greece, there were only fragments of the Euripides. So I rebuilt from that, using bits of The Oresteia, and I had a much stronger idea about placing it in an Irish context. It was written for Irish voices, but when we did a reading in the Cottesloe last year, just after the first female suicide bombers in Palestine, people were very affected by that resonance.
CC Do other countries revive the Ancient Greeks as often as we do here? Are there so many productions in France, Philippe?
PL Yes, but often it's a revival of your Greeks, and in France the Greeks belong to a slightly different period, probably a bit earlier. They've all been rewritten in France as well.
CC I was watching one at the Gate, the Electra, which is part of a Greek season of updated translations. The Electra is just like a French play, except they've got Greek names.
LG I wonder whether the Greeks are specially suitable for a modern writer to use for their own version or their own poetry. For example we did the Ted Hughes version of the Oresteia a few years ago, which was very much a Ted Hughes experience.
CT Essentially Henry Liddell's dictionary quotes every usage of a word and then approximates a variety of meanings that this word might have; it wasn't that anyone in Ancient Greece wrote a dictionary into modern English. So we have a very loose idea of what these words mean. We can only tell because it's used in x y and z context. Which leaves a huge amount of room for a writer to take a line of ideas and develop that through a translation. I think this is why translations of the Ancient Greeks can be so vastly different. One different stress or emphasis, when you're translating abstract words… even their idea of ideologies can be so different. I've translated contemporary Italian (Manfridi's Cuckoos) which is a vastly different kettle of fish. You have far less options than with the Ancient Greeks because they allow you the freedom to pick your line through it, though you obviously still have to be consistent. I had to pull myself up from using the word “sin” in my first draft of Bacchai. Someone said to me that sin was a very Christian idea. You could translate the Greek word as sin, but it carries all this moral baggage, which Ancient Greek theology would not have have had – the black and white Christian morality.
CC That sort of thing is absolutely at the heart of talking about translation – is there a single word that you can translate straight from one language to another? I doubt it. Everything we say has so much history and echo and nuance.
Let's move on, and come right up to date. Joshua, you're over here working on a translation of one of your plays right now. Could you talk a bit about the process you're going through?
JS It's a play which is a sequel to Ghetto, called Adam. It tells the story of the leaders of the resistance movement in the ghetto, confronted with the tragic choice they are given by the Nazi authorities: deliver the commander of the underground movement into the hands of the Gestapo or the entire population of the ghetto will be exterminated. They are faced with a choice which doesn't allow them any moral possibility at all. It brings the characters into a zone of extreme activity, where they have to cope with the issue of either betraying their credo or betraying their people. The only thing they can do is debate, and find out what they should do. Each character has their own very special way of expression. I wrote it in Hebrew, and was aware that each of the characters forges their own language. I made a literal translation into English, then it was worked on by an American dramaturg, and it was done in the USA. Then an English director, Sarah Chew, was interested in doing it here and we started to collaborate. We went into a workshop on the text with a group of young acting students, spent two weeks doing readings and discussions and suggesting ideas. It was very interesting and rewarding for me as a playwright because it opened up my own imagination and sensitivity to the fact that if the characters were to have spoken English originally, they would have had some nuances which they didn't have in the Hebrew original. I rediscovered my characters, in a way. I discovered, for instance, that the commander of the underground had some histrionic characteristics which I was not aware of when I wrote the part in Hebrew. I discovered that he's a man who likes to change identities, or is forced to change identities, because he's playing a role and that role is going to cost him his life. In that situation you become aware that probably every person is playing a role and the roles they are playing are fatal. During the workshop process it was revelatory for me when I understood that the character was not a tragic hero but a hero of the absurd. I had an exchange with Sara Chew about which direction to develop the character, and I discovered that to do justice to him and to the situation, the character should be developed in the direction of a tragic hero of the absurd. This is something I did not even imagine when I wrote the play in Hebrew.
CC So this was a discovery you made through the process of translating.
JS Probably because English offers you a much richer variety of nuance of expression when you have to express feelings, attitudes. The English language has been alive for so many hundreds of years. Hebrew is a language which was alive some two thousand years ago, and then revived some hundred years ago. In between is a huge gap where it was not used as a living language. So we don't have all these layers. You can write modern Hebrew in a very lively way, it's a very active language, but when you come to expressing nuances of attitudes or feelings and go from Hebrew to English, you discover that English offers you a much wider spectrum of possibilities. This is what made me discover some characteristics of the characters which I did not suspect originally.
CC Penny, you translate mainly from German. Would you say there are characteristics in a language which mean that all German plays have to make a certain kind of change into English?
PB No, I wouldn't say that but I would say that English is such a broad language, with very very few rules, and this is what makes translating into English very difficult. German is a very structured language, as you know, so the plays are written in a very structured fashion. Then about 20 years ago Werner Schwab burst on the scene, an Austrian playwright who deconstructed the language, deliberately played around with it and put words in the wrong order. Everybody knew what the sentence meant, but they also knew that to make jokes or to play with the language, he had deconstructed it. I translate contemporary playwrights, a Horváth of 1930 is the oldest I've translated. I don't translate the classics. I've been dealing with the younger playwrights who have started writing in this deconstructed way. That's phenomenally difficult to translate because the line between a wonderfully extravagant English sentence and non-English is very fine. It's like those television manuals you sometimes get: you read it, press the buttons, and suddenly realise it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.
PL Also there's the question of having been used to using a stage language that new plays comment on. If you have no idea of that structured language, how are you going to translate plays that play with it, or comment on it? There have been plays recently that play a lot with the whole backlog of theatre and theatre writing. The French language, like the German, is quite structured and fairly neutral, there's a delight to be had and a novelty in playing around with it, which, as you said, in English is a normal thing.
LG There's also almost a necessity, in German at least, to play with the language on stage, because the language is so structured that if it's not tampered with it sounds odd on stage. That doesn't happen with English; English is much more easy going, and easier for dialogue, even if it's artificial language.
CC English is also extremely robust. An English sentence will retain its meaning almost no matter how much you muck it about. Something we've come across, trying to translate between French and English, is that if you have an English writer who uses an amusingly contorted phrase, you put it into French and it becomes meaningless. It doesn't look like a contorted or creative change, just like a meaningless error. We were trying to translate the phrase “tight as a duck's arse” last year, in a play where somebody says “This plan is as tight as a duck's arse”. I think we would all understand more or less what that means. Trying to translate that into French, at the first mention of a duck's arse they're away up the wrong path. And even the word “tight”, in what sense is it “tight”? So already you were lost, in the French.
JS I think it's worthwhile taking all the pains possible to translate a text like this, because what happens with such a text is that it brings to the stage a language which is very active, and has much to do with what happens. Where there is a strong conflict between layers of culture in a certain cultural field, it is so interesting to find the equivalent when you translate it into your own language, which means you have to identify in your own culture where that kind of friction is taking place. Listen well, with your inner ear, to the colloquialisms that are being developed, and I'm sure you can find it. For me the most challenging kind of translation would be to translate American black rap. The rappers' language is so full of anger, of frustration, of revolt, because it comes from a certain area in the American culture where there is the greatest tension you can imagine. Take it into your own language and find where is that tension taking place and you will discover things that you don't know about your own culture, that there are already corners (in our culture, in Israel for instance) where these tensions exist and we ignore them, because we didn't think of using rap in order to express them. But once we think of using rap, we will discover things about our society. So translation is sometimes a very good guide into all these hidden places where the language is happening.
CC If you do a Hebrew rap, I would very much like to hear it.
JS I used a Hebrew rap in a recent play, which is now playing in Tel Aviv, and it functions very well.
CT One of the things that intrigues me is that there is often a choice in other languages, but there are so many Englishes. In German and French and Italian, I know from experience that there is perhaps a more unified sense. Black American slang is probably the most joyous and creative of all the Englishes at the moment. James Joyce apparently used to give away the rights to translate Ulysses to anyone who wanted them, he just said it's untranslatable. What he wanted to do, as he says in Ulysses, was to take the English language, smash it to pieces, and give it back to the English. Joshua was talking earlier about working on a play in America which he's now working on with an English director. There was a play I did a few years ago, an adaptation of Svejk for the Gate, which we've just been working on in New York. The question is do we translate my translation between English-English and American-English? My English-English version was written in a mixture of English-English and Irish-English because the original story is about the tension between Czech and Hungarian, the Czech people as a small part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. I came up with an English equivalence of English and Irish. Svejk and his friend are very much in the tradition of beer-drinking story-tellers of Ireland, although they were played by English people. When we took it to America, suddenly it started to sound like something else. Apparently when I read extracts it sounds like Father Ted, when English people do it, it sounds like Monty Python, then suddenly when American people do it, it sounds like Sergeant Bilko. It's extraordinary those gaps between our Englishes. Joshua, is there an American version of the same play? And was that experience different from doing an English version?
JS Yes, I believe one can build in a lot more self-irony into the English version, and this is what brought me to the conclusion that my protagonist has this histrionic characteristic – he's very much using self-irony, but I was not aware of it when I was writing it.
Audience member
I was interested in what Joshua Sobol was saying about the fact that in rewriting his play he discovered new things about the characters. What does this mean for a translator working on a play by a dead playwright, who finds in the process that somehow the characters are rewriting themselves in the new language? How far can they go with that, and what's their responsibility to the original play in the original language?
JS I once translated Tartuffe from the French into Hebrew. We were going to produce it in the Haifa theatre in the 1980s. We decided to do it because at that time in Israeli society there was huge tension between religious parties who tried to influence our daily life and the secular Israeli way of life. The most natural thing was to take Tartuffe because it was written at a time when French society was torn apart by the devout elements who wanted to influence the king, and Molière wrote the play as a protest. It was a huge scandal when it came out in France. Reproducing the play many times doesn't create a scandal, so then you say “What happened to the play?” When I had to translate Tartuffe, I said to myself, if Molière lived today, in Israel, how would he have written the play? How would he have used the language so that it would bring out the zealots or the bigots from their hiding places? I decided to translate it into Rabbinical Hebrew, the language used by Rabbis when they are preaching. The result was that the audience was laughing a lot. It became very satirical and aroused a lot of protest. Many people said “You can't do this to Molière, it's blasphemous”. I answered that I believed that if Molière lived today, he would have done it better than me, but he would have used that kind of language to stick the thorn into the right place. For me it was a great lesson. When you translate a playwright who is no longer with us, you have to make of him a playwright who is with us, who is very much present, here and now. I think this is the great challenge for translators when they deal with classic work.
CC Yes, it's different, isn't it, if you are an advocate for a new writer or someone who hasn't been translated before.
CT There's an interesting distinction here between the academic translation and the theatrical translation. I think as a theatre practitioner, you have to make it work, on stage, now. Manfridi's play Cuckoos is, briefly, a satire of the Oedipus story, except that it's a 20-year-old guy, stuck in a sexual position with a 40-year-old woman for the entirety of the play, under a parachute. It transpires that this is his mother, and that his father, who is a gynaecologist…
CC Don't spoil the end!
CT There was a translating gem-cum-nightmare in it. In the Italian, as the story unfolds (Manfridi is fantastic at giving the audience just enough so that they're about half a page ahead, all the time), we get it, but the boy is a bit thick and doesn't get it. Manfridi has this pun, so that the boy keeps saying “And then? what happened then?”, which in Italian is “E di poi” (which is Oedipus in Italian), and the mother is meanwhile shouting at the father “You only ever played with me, you toyed with me” (Jacasti me???). So the two are reaching climax, shouting “Oedipus!” “Jocasta!” – and how do you translate that? Manfridi has translated several of my plays and I just say to him, “Do what you need to do,” I trust him as a writer to make it work in Italian. So he said “Make it work”. I had to twist the English, but I had her say something about the “Edifice of our illusions” on the first page, so that she could repeat it later, saying “The edifice is wrecked” and he could go “Edifice wrecked!” In one sense I felt it was being true to Giuseppe's spirit and comedy, although I had to change all the words. To have been literal and academic would have been to miss the joke. I think that's why it's good to have stage writers work with dead authors and to make something new and living and to have the same impact it did in the original.
LG If you translate a play that has been translated many times before, and which people know, I feel you can be much freer. If it hasn't worked, you didn't wreck someone's career. It is a lot more difficult with new plays because they probably only get that one chance.
CC Theatre writers will almost always want it to work, they'll want the laugh, the effect, and will be quite happy to sacrifice scrupulous accuracy if it's going to work better.
Audience question
I'm very interested in the conjunction between people who do literal translations and playwrights who don't have the original language who are going to make the formal version? And why did the National commission a new version of Tales from the Vienna Woods?
LG I think the term “literal translator” is wrong. There's no such thing as a literal translation. The way we try to do it here at the National is that the translator who does the first translation, and who knows the language, does as accurate a translation as possible without worrying too much about making it work as a stage play. The person who then does the stage version would ideally work quite closely with the person who did the literal. In this case, I have worked quite closely with David Harrower [on Tales from the Vienna Woods]. He would ask me every time he wasn't entirely sure what an attitude was, how something was meant in the text, what the characters were like, and we would try to reach a solution together.
CC You can't translate literally, as you rightly say. I translate from the French, and what you try to do is to make as few definitive choices as possible, and if there's something which could go three different ways, you indicate all three, so that the person doing the version has an idea. And in an ideal world you work with them. I once did a literal for a director who couldn't speak French, though his writer could. The director commissioned a secret literal translation, so that he would know what his writer was up to. Not an ideal relationship!
Audience question
A “version” to me indicates that there was some guiding idea, that you might produce a Chekhov or an Ibsen in such a way that a particular interpretation was generated that wasn't genuinely there.
LG People who do the stage version have different attitudes, to this. Sometimes you find that a translation would sound very much like that playwright, and sometimes they go to great pains to try to get it as right as possible, and get researchers on board and have different attitudes to handling that.
CC We have something of that going on at the moment – a version of Cyrano, being done by the Irish poet Derek Mahon, that's likely to end up being an Irish Cyrano. We also have one at an earlier stage – a 19th-century boulevard comedy by Labiche for which I've done the literal, and which is being written by Mark Ravenhill. He's written the first draft and already you can tell it's Mark Ravenhill. So, very often the writer you give it to will be dictated by what sort of version you have in mind.
PL Also you have to keep in mind that that's what's often expected of them. It's less of a problem in France because it's not the translator or the writer but the director who makes the choices. In that case you could nearly say “directed by Mark Ravenhill” because he's going to make very strong decisions about characters the way he sees it. Very often when you look at classics, the translation work is one step towards directing and has a very strong effect on what the final production's going to be about. For example, I used to be at the Gate and pretty much for every production we did, we commissioned a translation. In most cases the writer would work hand-in-hand with the director of the piece, and in most cases their decisions were very much linked to the production they had in mind and that they'd agreed upon. That translation is probably only going to be used for that production, and that version is a step towards direction rather than what you'd call a universal translation.
CT It's interesting that translations actually go out of date much faster than plays. Doing the Bacchai, I was interested to see what Wole Soyinka did for the National in 1972, and it's very good but very much of its time. The translation is a series of choices. While I was doing my translation of Bacchai, after I'd written the second draft, 9/11 happened. Bacchai is a play about East conflicting with West – and suddenly all that jumped out of the text without my actually pointing it up. But that version will probably be seen to have been very much of its time, although the decision to do it was taken earlier. I think that's an interesting question: why a translation goes out of date – probably because a lot of decisions are associated with a specific production. Joshua, post-1989, has anyone asked to re-translate Ghetto?
JS It has been re-translated for the production in the United States. Some have used the David Lan version but others preferred an American translation.
PB Coming back to the literal/adaptation question. I think what you two are talking about is very specific, it's all in-house. Chris, you and Mark Ravenhill aren't walking down different corridors and not talking to each other; Laura explained how she was working with David Harrower. It seems to me there are two dangers to literal translations outside the larger theatres. One is that the literal translator hands over to a writer and there is no further communication. Then who is looking after the play? You very rarely commission a translation without some sort of idea of where the play is going to be put on and, working with a director. In-house, this relationship can work well, but outside a play can get very far from its source. Because we don't have dramaturgs in this country, really, there is nobody to look after the play through the rehearsal and production process. Then there is the difference between working with classics and contemporary plays. British plays are being exported all over Europe; a few years ago I was in Essen: in an ordinary municipal theatre, and of the eight plays on there, seven were from Britain and five of those from the Royal Court. We have this unbelievable explosion going outwards, we do not reciprocate in quite the same way, though people like Philippe are trying to counteract that. There is a reason why we don't take back European plays – because they're not British. That sounds obvious but it's very key. Because they're difficult, not character-driven, because they want to make a point. I think we have to be very careful in this bringing back of contemporary European plays, not to try to anglicise them, because we are not going to have an audience who are able to go and see a different way of writing.
INTERVAL
CC To come back to the question about why we commissioned a new translation of Tales from the Vienna Woods, the simple answer is that we always do that when we stage a foreign play, it's just policy.
PB The Christopher Hampton translation was written 25 years ago, and when you read it, it's full of idiom of the 1970s, you can almost hear the flares and the love beads coming through. Particularly for this play, which uses so much idiom, it would have sounded so dated. It doesn't mean it's a judgement evaluation, it's just to get to the audience now. Particularly in English, the language develops. You hear a word on television in January and it's in the Oxford English Dictionary by December. It can also work the other way. When Katie Mitchell did The Machine Wreckers a few years ago, she went back to an original translation of the period so that she could get the whole period feel.
CC The other side of that is that other countries re-translate our classics when they do them. Shakespeare, for example, is frequently re-translated in foreign countries, which is an obvious thing, but I find it mind-boggling that you'd go to see a new version of Shakespeare on a regular basis.
LG When I was at school in Germany, you always got the same translation, which is a very good one, but a 19th-century one. It's a very recent thing that classics are re-translated. There was an attitude that if there was a good translation, you stick with it, but after a while some translations don't work any more.
CT In one sense it's quite a new thing, but it's also quite old in theatre, going right back to Seneca, through Racine and Shakespeare – they continually lifted, adapted, translated wholesale from work that had been done before. In one sense the 19th century can be seen as an aberration – that idea that you can ossify a translation in time and say “That is the original version” – because actually every Greek writer did a version of the same story: Seneca is a re-writing of the Greeks, and Racine is lifting Seneca, who's lifting the Greeks. It's almost like carbon-dating. I think the aberration was the museum attitude to classics that arose from the 1780s to the 1950s.
CC It was also the discovery that a lot of these classics needed to be cleaned up for family consumption. If you read the 19th-century translations of Dante, for example, some of the sins are very vague indeed.
PL The big revolution in France has been the re-translation of Shakespeare. Suddenly they were funny characters. For us Shakespeare was what you saw on Sunday afternoon on the Third Channel, which were awful bland, one-rhythm things. Then suddenly there were these plays you went to see in theatre which had lots of life.
CC We should translate one of those – re-translate one into English!
CT I know this is probably sacrilege, but some of the most exciting versions of Shakespeare I see are not in English, because there isn't that problem of the monument of the language. I don't know if you saw Ninagawa's version of Pericles on this stage, but it was extraordinary. I think it's something the RSC should set about doing, start having the same attitude Shakespeare had to the classics of his time.
JS The famous Hamlet monologue is translated into Hebrew, and in all the translations that I know they use the same phrase for 'To be or not to be' – a literal translation. There was a student production in Tel Aviv University, and when it came to that point, they translated that phrase as “To be or to stop being”. It was like an electric shock. Suddenly everyone was alert. It made me realise that 'not to be' was something very active, whereas the old translation somehow doesn't awake you any more, it is used up.
CC The most thrilling version of that soliloquy I've ever heard was when the actor dried. It had the same effect. The actor came on, said “To be or not to be....” nothing. The audience's hair was on end.
CT For all the faults in the verse-speaking, what made the Baz Luhrman Romeo and Juliet so exciting was that we suddenly saw it as if it was new again, like it was rock'n'roll.
PB One of the most successful Shakespeare productions at the moment has been that Romeo and Juliet set in a boarding school in Canada which has apparently brought the whole thing to life again.
Audience question
Could you talk about the shameful British reluctance to stage plays from a foreign language? I also sense at the National that there are fewer foreign plays staged than before, or am I wrong?
CC Well, I'm not here to defend the National, but yes, you are wrong as it happens. We are doing more. But I'm going to ask Philipppe to talk about the Channels initiative that he is involved in.
PL Channels is a translation project – contemporary plays, by playwrights who are alive – and a way of accessing plays from another country, but also a way for me to put playwrights together. It's an exercise for foreign playwrights to discover the beautiful and wonderful world of British playwriting or theatre-making, but also a good opportunity for a British writer, who is often under huge pressure from a theatre about the way he should be writing, to discover a text from a completely different cultural background and be able to exchange. So it's about a group of people trying to broaden their horizons about their own art. We started the project nearly three years ago with France (guess why!), and decided to translate five plays written in the last five years in France. Maybe some of you came during the Transformation season when we staged rehearsed readings of those five plays in the afternoon, and published the texts. So far one play has gone on to be produced at the Gate, the only theatre which has a brief to produce international theatre. The project has been successful and has broadened everybody's horizons. It has been a wonderful meeting ground for writers from very different backgrounds. This weekend we have some Hungarian writers arriving, and four Hungarian plays are in the process of being translated.
The first phase is to look at plays we are interested in and think are good. The second phase, if we're not able to access the plays in the original, is to commission literal translations so that people who don't speak the language can access the plays. (And I disagree with Laura. I think there is such a thing as a literal translation. I think it's a very specific exercise which requires a lot of knowledge and technique but a very different set of skills from a stage version.) The next stage is to go and meet the playwrights in the country of origin; to go one step beyond just reading the text, to be interested in the writer as well, what kind of person he is, how he works, what influences him. Once we've met someone, it's much easier for us to try and identify in Britain which writer we think suitable for that playwright, and who would benefit most from being paired with them. The matchmaking is a very crucial stage and we don't, as a rule, look for British playwrights who can speak the language, nor, as a rule, do we look for British playwrights who have done such translation work before. As it happens, in most cases the playwrights that we identified didn't speak the language – French or Hungarian, or Spanish (because we've also done an Argentinian project) – but people whose universes we thought were likely to match. So far it's been successful. Then we come back and commission the playwright, give him the literal and tell him to write the first draft. Once that is done, which is the stage we're at for Hungary at the moment, we invite the foreign playwright to come here and work for a week with the British playwright and with the literal translator. That week is not only a wonderful moment to meet, it's also an amazing shortcut into solving problems – to be able to say to the original writer “What do you mean?” Of course we talk about the text and specific words, but very often it allows the discussion to go into territories which would be very difficult and subjective without having the two playwrights together. “What's most important in that scene?” “Who's your favourite character here?” “When would you like that joke to happen?” “Why do you use that word?” Well, because in my language it rhymes with that other word, or because I like it, or because my grandmother used it all the time. There are so many different reasons for a playwright to use a word, and its meaning is only one of them. I think that process allows the two playwrights to go into each other's brains and find a level of trust that will allow the British playwright to go away and – not anglicise the play – but understand it from the inside and then present it in a way that is not a version (as far as I'm concerned), and serve the intentions of the original playwright as best he can.
CC I think the question of anglicising things is something we have to talk about a bit more. I've been involved with that process as a literal translator, and it was fascinating to me that the first time we had the French and the English playwrights together, I think the first question all the British playwrights asked was “What class are these people?” They were asking for linguistic reasons because, as Shaw said, no Englishman can open his mouth without making ten other Englishmen despise him. Tone of voice is absolutely crucial for a British playwright, and all the French writers said, “Oh, I don't know, I hadn't thought” because French can have a class neutrality that English is virtually incapable of. It was fascinating to see, straight away, this huge gap. Then you have to decide what you do with that – present a neutral English or choose a social class. There was a line in one of the English plays where a guy boasting about his car said, “I tell you, it's not a Vauxhall Cavalier”. We had a fascinating discussion about how to translate that line into French. A Vauxhall Cavalier is quite a good example of a car which has a certain baggage with it, we know what that car means. Well, after hours of discussion, we decided the equivalent was a Renault 21. But there was also the option of putting Vauxhall Cavalier with a footnote saying, “During the mid-80s, this car was associated with a certain...”
LG But you can't translate and have a note!
CC I agree with you, but the French attitude was that it was more important to get textual accuracy, then in production the director will take care of it.
CT I had an experience with another Italian playwright, at the Gate. He wrote this play Maratona di New York, which we translated as Marathon. This was already an act of translation because of what he wanted to signify. It's two guys running for an hour, they're going for a run at night, and this very class issue came up. I did a faithful translation and Mick Gordon, the director, and Philippe came to see the reading and they said “This is dreary”. There are two guys and they're just not talking the way British men of that class would talk. I said I can make it work, but you've really got to cut loose because we have to give them a class. We started throwing around how two guys would talk on a football field, or running, and it's pretty fruity language. Suddenly the whole thing came alive. There were also some interesting social conventions – in this play the two 32-year-old guys still live at home, which doesn't really happen here. So we made them younger, to try and make the situation work. The play then did work, but the playwright was very very unhappy because he consulted his dictionary, and when he looked up “c-u-n-t”, it didn't say “A term of affection in common parlance between men” which is how it was being used. It's almost impossible to explain the richness of British slang and also the class associations with it. He wants a different translation for America but in Australia and New Zealand they want this translation because they have got echoes of the British class system. In America I can see it wouldn't work because they don't have the class associations, which was the very thing that made it come alive.
CC It's particularly interesting your decision to make them younger because their age has a social significance to us that it wouldn't have in Italy. Penny, is that unacceptable British-ifying of a foreign play? Should we say, these are Italian men, they live at home and that's normal in Italy?
PB That's a very unfair question...
CT There was also the fact that they kept going on about the InterMilan-Celtic match, when Celtic won the European cup in 1969. There was a very interesting date-line in that play. The play was ten or twelve years old, the guys were 32, so it was stretching right back… I translated it in 1999. Do I make it 1980s, and they're remembering that very specific detail? Those are the questions that you have to make a choice on. You can't sit on the fence and hedge your bets. Naturalistic work will have details like this, like your Vauxhall Cavalier, and this is the question of making it work. As soon as you put in the literal truth you break the suspension of disbelief and ruin the whole effect of the play.
PB The first question the British actors always ask with a contemporary German or French play, is “What class are the characters?”. Then you have to go through the whole class system and how it works, and make choices. There was a play written recently in Germany, in which a rather unpleasant character has a very lively sexual relationship with a girl who's somewhat backward. The language is very neutral. I did two versions to show the problem to other translators. In one he was slightly upper class, a bit dilettante, and he came out as a complete sadist. In the other I made him a bit more of a door-to-door salesman and the inferences were extraordinary. But what I was talking about in terms of anglicising – I work quite a lot at the Royal Court, and I'm often with the writer in the rehearsal room. British actors are trained so differently about the through-line of their character. That's what you have to work against, sometimes to back away one space, in order to give the actors an opportunity not to say “Ah, this man had bacon for breakfast – that's the key!” I think the danger is that if we have a Ravenhill version (absolutely no prejudice) and he makes it his way, everyone thinks “Ah. Mark Ravenhill, we know how to do this”, and will ignore all the other stops in the play.
CC I think that's a critical point; I've certainly come across that attitude among British theatre people – that foreign writers set out to try and write a British play, but fail, in various interesting ways. I slightly caricature it, but only slightly. They do think some things are a mistake, when they're obvious cultural characteristics.
JS An Israeli poet once said that listening to a translated play is like being kissed through a handkerchief. I think the great challenge for the translator is to take away the handkerchief. One of the things is that the language must be immediate, there shouldn't be a moment when the audience wonders what is meant by a phrase. I think this is the great difference between translating for the stage and for the page. When you translate for the page, you give the reader enough time to think it over, to taste the language, to get into it. In the theatre the phrase is said, and it is gone, and if it was not clocked, then it is dead. I believe that it is almost a must when you translate any play, contemporary or classic, to take care that there shouldn't be a handkerchief between the lips of the audience and the lips of the actor. One example – in Hebrew, there is an expression “A waste of time”. If someone asked about a show and I said “It's a waste of time”, what would you understand?
CC Not worth going to, no good.
JS It's the opposite. The direct opposite. In contemporary Hebrew, when you say something's a waste of time, it's the greatest compliment you can give. It means you shouldn't waste a word about it. It's a waste of time speaking about it, go and see it.
PB But I would say therefore that it wouldn't be translated as “a waste of time”, and that's not quite the same as anglicising it. It's not to do with language so much as the foreignness of seeing a foreign play. For example the French play Habitats by Philippe Minyana [translated by Steve Waters] that was put on at the Gate – it didn't have a through-line, didn't have a character. It was a piece of theatre, but the anglicisation I'm talking about is in terms of giving the play the British through-put.
CC One of the critics of that play said it wasn't a play.
CT A lot of the criticism of Jon Fosse is that his work isn't theatre. Jon Fosse is a major international playwright whose plays are done all over Europe. He's had a play done at the Court and at Edinburgh and he's told “This is not theatre”. It's an extraordinary critical position to take, to say: You 400 million people over there have got it all wrong. We know, this is not theatre. The truth of the statement is that this is not British theatre, which is exactly the exciting thing about it. Why bring in theatre that looks exactly like our theatre?
CC Because people don't watch it.
LG It's not just the translation and using the text, because very often those texts need actors who are differently trained, or directors who work differently, use a text differently from the way directors like to use text here.
PL To go back to the “waste of time” there is an attitude in British writing that I think is dangerous, that for a play to work you must eliminate the “waste of time”. We did have one failure in the French Channels project when we gave a play to a playwright who set about correcting it. The writer wrote very long monologues and very complicated things which made sense in his mind. But for the British writer it became “How am I going to be able to edit this play down to an hour and twenty minutes, which I know is what everybody is expecting me to deliver.” Why I like involving British playwrights in the exercise is that I hope they will change as well. They are the best ambassadors of playwriting and they might start writing a bit less what's expected of them and start realising, “It's just words”.
Audience question
Do certain languages lend themselves more readily to describing certain sorts of things or emotions or experiences?
PL I was not brought up in the English language; I try to speak it as well as I can, but I think in a very different way. There was a point when I was getting more fluent in English but things were still coming in French, and then you start to understand more about how the British mind works.
JS I grew up with Hebrew and Yiddish and whoever has some knowledge of Yiddish knows that it's a very strange and funny language that the more pompous you try to be, the more ridiculous you become. I once used Hamlet's monologue in a play of mine, translated into Yiddish, and it became so funny! Unbelievably funny. I did a literal translation of the monologue, not trying to have a comic effect at all. There are certain expressions in Yiddish that I cannot translate into any other language without losing a lot, because I believe that every language has its mentality, in a way. We cannot overcome it. It's very strange. There is a saying in Yiddish, for instance: “it's so difficult to die that it's already better to live”. There's something there which is very difficult to translate which has to do with the mentality of the language. Maybe when we translate, we have to somehow find how to express the mentality of the language and to bring it out in the translation.
LG I think there are some languages which are closer than others. When I see Chekhov in English or German, I always think it retains a bit of “high art” about it, remains a little bit remote. But I've seen Chekhov in Greek, which is my third language, and it feels very natural and earthy. The languages are not related but there are certain expressions, endearments, a certain mentality, apparently, which are very similar and work very easily.
CT I think one of the reasons Irish people speak English differently and do different things is that historically we have a different language underneath it. There's no verb to have in Irish, you start with the verb, then you have a subject, then you have the object; there's a very simple line. The French say “I have hunger”, the English say “I am hungry” which is an odd, existential statement. And in Irish you would say “There is hunger on me”, which is seeing hunger as something outside. The whole relationship with the world is completely different. There was an extraordinary article written by an insurance assessor in America in the 50s, called 'Language, Mind and Reality'. He was a specialist in about ten Native American languages. He shows very simply how a different language is a different reality. It's not simply the words, it's the syntax; you position yourself differently in the world. In terms of translation, the first play I wrote, The Big Sea, was based on a medieval French play. It was in what I thought was a commedia style, and then it was translated into French and I was astonished because it seemed very philosophical and existential. Then Giuseppe Manfridi did a translation into Italian and it suddenly became this larger than life commedia play, like pantomime. The translating revealed the different theatrical languages that are inherent in a piece. When the French got Dario Fo to direct Molière, he could bring the whole commedia tradition to Molière.
CC It can reveal the whole state of society, as well. I remember seeing Greg Burke's Gagarin Way here at the National. As some of you will remember, at the beginning of that play, a violent criminal and a security guard are in a tense, silent stand-off. In the first line of the play, the security guard says “What was it you were saying about Jean-Paul Sartre?” It got a huge laugh in the Cottesloe; it's not a huge laugh in France – more of a “Hmmm. I wonder what it was he was saying?”
PB I've just come back from seeing a Finnish version of a Torban Betts play, called A Listening Heaven, which is one of those fantastic British plays where nobody says anything that means anything to each other and it ends with the father's breakdown. The actors played the sub-text, weeping and laughing all the way through. But Finnish has no word for “Excuse me”. They do have a sort of word for “Sorry” which they don't use very often. This being a play about the British middle class who say “Sorry” all the time – not just “Sorry I bumped into you” but “I'm sorry that I exist” – became deeply aggressive-sounding chorus, with the repetition of “Anteeksi, anteeksi”. In English you could see this couple's marriage dissolving in front of your eyes, but in Finnish it became like a boxing match. So then you have to come to the question, would the translator have been better off changing that word to something else.
Audience question
What are the merits of having a literal translation done and then handing it to a writer to make a theatrical version? Is that done elsewhere in the world?
LG We do it because we like the stage version to be written by a playwright, and there aren't that many playwrights that have other languages. I don't think it's as common in other countries. We have another project which is a European network with people who also support new writing in their countries. I've just had a conversation with a partner in Austria, and they have just started doing this as well, as experience for their writers. In France and Germany it's quite common that translators are highly trained for that specific job. I think there are some issues between translators and the theatre establishment.
PL The French have a national centre for translation.
Audience question
Isn't there a serious risk that the status of the translator is very under-rated? I often search through theatre programmes to find out who did the literal translation to find it listed under who did the cleaning backstage. We live in a country where only 3% of books in bookshops are translated, we underrate translators all the time, but in theatres, where you have the opportunity to put something on a public stage, surely you should be saying that this is Laura's or Chris's translation, which Mark Ravenhill or whoever, has assisted, but you're actually selling it through Ravenhill or Harrower.
PB As somebody who is a translator and not a playwright (although I have just written my first play), I think it is economically dodgy. We're not talking about the National because the National is an in-house scenario, but outside that the literal translator usually gets £500, that is the going rate. Then you put the playwright's work, which is probably £3,000 to £5,000 on top of that, that means the work of the translator is not only undervalued but underfinanced as well. As a translator, you spend ages building up a technique and a skill that, when you get to the bigger theatres, nobody wants. I'm slightly less militant about this than I was about a year ago, but in theatre, which is so particular about casting, costume designing, directing, we have this blanket approach that a playwright will always be the best for each play. I think it's a fashion which will probably re-establish itself, because sometimes a playwright can do a better job but sometimes a translator can. This year, two of the more successful contemporary plays in London were both translated by translators. One was Through the Leaves by Anthony Vivis, who discovered Kroetz for the Coventry Belgrade about fifteen years ago, and another was one that I did [what was that?]. I think if we're not very careful we will end up losing the thread to the original.
PL I think there's a way back. I came at it from a maybe naive point of view, but there's a complete misunderstanding between the theatre world and the way translators are trained. Often the only way you are going to be able to make a living out of it is to do translating not for the theatre, because theatre generally underpays most of the people that are part of it. Also theatre is so much about building relationships with people over a period of time. I think there is a way of trying to link much closer academic training for translating with real theatre practice. If a young director starts to work early on with a translator and they develop a relationship, trust each other, grow up together, that director is always going to call on that translator. In the theatre world, where you have high commercial pressure, very short rehearsal time, often the artistic team tend to know each other before they start, so they have enough short cuts before they start to be able to deliver what they're asked to deliver.
CC It's interesting to think how odd it would be if we got novels translated and then given to Julian Barnes or Martin Amis for the final version, which is in effect what we do in theatre.
CT I have to say the only time I worked with a literal, I found if very difficult and felt very translated because to me the joy of translation is the language thing. However imperfectly one might do it, it is engaging a fifth sense. One thing I believe very strongly is that all good stage writing is written in a rhythm. There's a rhythm to the thought, the delivery, the sound of the language. I think the one thing that doing a version does is lose that direct access. I've enjoyed plays in languages I don't know because you can hear that rhythm, judge the pacing, almost like music in a well-constructed piece. I felt I couldn't engage with the texture. What you're doing is reinterpreting a translator, and I think the woman who'd done the literal felt equally frustrated because she wanted to make choices.
PB I do think it's a very interesting time at the moment for this whole subject. There have been three major features in the Guardian in the last six months, precisely about this. It seems to me that what everybody in the end wants is a fantastic play; that is the key issue, and the question is how we get there in a language that most of Europe thinks it knows how to speak. If you're working with young playwrights they often think they know the translation solutions. I was working the other day on a German play about an office, the German used this word [“mobe???”, “Ich war gemobt??”]. I asked what it meant and they said “Oh, you know, it's an English word”. I said I thought filmstars were mobbed, not office workers. It turned out to mean sexual harassment in the work place. So we're in a situation where English is being absorbed into the language incorrectly – or in a new way.