In 2007, Jean Graham-Jones coordinated a special issue of Theatre Journal dedicated to the topic of translation vis-à-vis theatre and performance. To my knowledge, it still remains the only occasion when a substantial discussion of that topic has taken place in the pages of the journal, including the recently published seventy-fifth anniversary issue. This brief essay is an effort to revisit that earlier, groundbreaking issue in the spirit of how Laura Edmondson ends her extensive editorial comment for the recent anniversary issue: as a coarticulation of “critique with desire,” a wish list for what might appear in the journal over the next seventy-five years.1
Graham-Jones has long been interested in theatre and translation, but the explicit point of departure in her editorial vision for that special issue of Theatre Journal was the contemporaneous developments in the fields of translation theory and practice. In what follows, I attempt to offer not just a review but also a reading, necessarily telegraphic, of what Graham-Jones variously calls “the complexity” intrinsic to “theatrical translation practices,” or “translation in performance,” to suggest that in any attempt to think “theatrical translation in performance,” the underlying, not always productive, disciplinary tension between the fields of theatre studies and performance studies might necessarily come undone.2
The translational turn in comparative literature and cultural studies and the cultural turn in translation studies in Anglo-US academia in the 1990s were marked by an extra- ordinary flourishing of theoretically inflected writing on the practice of translation that continued well into the next decade. Consider the following examples: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s now classic essay “The Politics of Translation” was published in 1992, as was Tejaswini Niranjana’s field-shaping book Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial Context; Lawrence Venuti’s The Translator’s Invisibility was published soon after, in 1995, followed by Naoki Sakai’s influential Translation and Subjectivity in 1997. Among the most prominent books on the topic to appear in the following decade were Susan Bassnett’s widely read introduction to the field, Translation Studies (2002), Emily Apter’s The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (2006), and Sandra Bermann and Michael Wood’s coedited volume Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation (2006).3 These attempts at theorizing translation would often but not always appear under the sign of poststructuralism and deconstruction, a pattern that can perhaps be traced a few years earlier to the publication of the English translation of what remains of Jacques Derrida’s most significant essay on the topic, “Des Tours de Babel” (1985).4
Even as this transdisciplinary conversation around translation was flourishing, the field of theatre and performance studies remained curiously hesitant to engage with it in a direct and substantial manner. Most discussion about theatre and translation would focus either on the literal act of transmitting a playtext from one language into another for publication or on the proverbial transfer from “page to stage,” a metaphor for the act of performing a written playscript. One exception to this trend, however, was an ongoing conversation about theatrical adaptation and its possible relationship with translation, which occasionally veered toward exploring some of the more philosophical assumptions behind those practices. Conversely, scholars primarily based in comparative literature or translation studies, such as those cited above, were mostly focused on prose fiction as the paradigmatic cultural form for thinking about the dynamics of translation. They analyzed primarily the novel—and occasionally the short story or, less occasionally, nonfiction or scholarly treatises—and directed insufficient attention to other literary forms like drama or poetry. It was in this state of affairs that the “Theatre and Translation” special issue of Theatre Journal offered an intervention in 2007.5
In laying the foundation for collaborative collections, whether a book or a special issue of a journal, the editorial introduction typically can play at least two roles: it can either scan the constituent essays for trends in the field and summarize them as a way of highlighting, post facto, the contribution of said collection, or it can demarcate a scholarly domain and set an intellectual agenda in advance such that the contributions that follow function as responses to and extrapolations of that charge.6 Graham-Jones’s approach in her introduction to the “Theatre and Translation” special issue skews more toward the latter. This too, I would argue, is a result of the specific burden of her editorial project: to stage conversations that had at best been uneven, if not entirely absent, between the practice and theory of translation on the one hand and between theatre and performance on the other. Her editorial comment, titled “The Stakes of Theatrical Translation,” begins with three epigraphs on translation by Apter, Spivak, and Jacques Lezra, in that order. Graham-Jones then observes that such exemplary emergent scholarship in related disciplines was beginning to highlight how accelerated globalization had complicated any simplistic notions of translation as either innocent intercultural exchange or derivative literary practice that is forever tripping up on questions of originality and fidelity. This is followed by a few brief theoretical conjectures. The first of these states how questions of translation get amplified and complicated when one leaves the domain of the exclusively literary and ventures into theatre and performance, where writing becomes only one among multiple artistic mediums. Or, as Graham-Jones puts it: “Nor do the standard categories of translation, adaptation, and version accurately account for the complexity inherent in theatrical translation practices, given that the written text is only one possible functional component in the total performance process.”7 This seemingly obvious remark, I would argue, contains the germ of a significant rethinking of translation in a manner that is expansive, transmedial, and even beyond writing, which is a shift I will continue to track throughout this essay.
For now, let’s stay with the report on the state of the field a little longer. Literary studies scholars (in contrast to, say, enthusiasts of machine translation working with standardized languages) have been arguing two important points for some time: First, linguistic translation can never be just a communication of meaning or transfer of content owing to the unique nature of language as its operating medium. The limits as well as possibilities of working with verbal language are figured in Spivak’s astute reminder that “the idiom does not go over” in translation.8 Second, translation does not necessarily exist in a hierarchical relationship with the so-called original, and it in fact could be thought of as retrospectively producing the notion of the original in the first place. Graham-Jones builds on these insights and draws on a range of translation thinkers—as early as Walter Benjamin and as recent as Jonathan E. Abel—to suggest that “[t]heatrical translation in performance, in which we so often sense the presence of two or more texts,” too becomes an instance of “relationality.”9 Graham-Jones does not cite Édouard Glissant here, but we can hear resonances of the latter’s influential work around relationality and opacity in her concerns with accessibility—for instance, when she wonders, “Do we [theatrical] translators make the play accessible to the audience, or do we make the audience accessible to the play?”10 Working from and with the (postcolonial) Caribbean, Glissant would argue for a “right to opacity” in translation, a refusal even to make oneself and one’s work “accessible” to the demands of a dominant viewership.11 Naoki Sakai, again, working outside dominant Euro-US cultural assumptions—in his case, modern Japan—would argue for translation as a means of figuring difference rather than commensurability.12 Emily Apter has also written about “the untranslatable” operating as both the horizon and limit of translation.13 Graham-Jones chooses to address this conundrum in the case of playtexts for performance and publication by turning to Lawrence Venuti’s argument about “domesticating” (i.e., making the translated text “smooth” and thereby accessible for its new audience) versus “foreignizing” (i.e., retaining the “unevenness” of the translated text and thereby making it uneasy for the audience) translations—underlining how translation choices have consequences far beyond notions of lexical equivalence upheld by dictionaries.14
Valorizations of equivalence over incommensurability, sameness instead of difference, have long been the troubling touchstones of acts of translation. Such claims are perhaps haunted in no small measure by the myth of the Tower of Babel, in which the act of communicating across languages gets framed as an attempt to grapple with an originary lack, a retribution for transgressing a monolingual condition where once we all supposedly understood each other. These very attributes, however, have also conversely served to anchor an ethics and politics of translation, especially in the work of some of the theorists and practitioners discussed herein. Within the Euro-US academy, the politics of translation is still entangled with lingering questions of disciplinarity—for instance, which departmental syllabi are translated texts destined for?—and, in turn, with that of notions of canon formation. In a typical college classroom, literary texts (including theatrical ones) from the rest of the world continue to get treated as anthropological “evidence” of difference instead of being “read” as works of fiction mediated by imagination. Theatre and performance studies scholars continue to grapple with versions of unexamined culturalism in their own attempts to uneasily globalize their disciplinary concerns. There is also the additional problem of what Graham-Jones in her editorial aptly calls “commercialized internationalism”15—the repeated circulation of a handful of texts, playwrights, directors, and ensembles (and “stars”?) in translation and/or with sub- and supertitles, again with a pronounced bias toward the Anglo-Atlantic, that keeps the theatre festival circuit alive and sustains an impression of a thriving global practice of theatrical translation.
Let us examine in some depth one such prominent situation: that of translating into Englishes in general, and the not unrelated practice of translating texts specifically from and of the no less monolithic notion of the Global South. Graham-Jones rightly seeks to complicate the notion of a Global English as an emergent example of dominant translatese, but she also highlights the potential of what she calls a “decolonizing intra-linguistic bilingualism” in its usage that goes beyond conventional code-switching (for instance, in Spanglish).16 And then, to emphasize how something like this might take place in theatrical translation, she cites Spivak on the “thinking of trace rather than of achieved translation.”17 Spivak has often brought up the question of trace when talking about nonliterary modes—“the visual,” for instance—so this move by Graham-Jones, I would argue, links up with her own earlier comment about the inadequacy of categories derived from literary translation to account for translation in and as performance. It also connects with a subsequent remark regarding the English language translator of texts of and from the Global South. Here, Graham-Jones reiterates Spivak’s caution: first, to “operate with great caution and humility” so as not to reinforce neocolonial relations of power; and second, to be mindful of the fact that texts in translation from the Global South often end up as teaching texts in classrooms of the Global North.18 From Benjamin’s notion of a “task of the translator,” we have arrived at Spivak’s imperative of a “responsibility” (humility?) of the translator. But in keeping with our specific concern regarding the interconnection of theatre/performance/translation, Graham-Jones astutely points out that “[t]ranslation in performance, precisely because of its complexity of engagement, carries the potential for countering, or at the very least complicating, such a limited, unidirectional destiny [of ending up as teaching texts].”19 What appears to be an effect of theatrical performance circulating as more than writing—as gesture, sound, voice, space, and movement—actually masks something more constitutive: an attribute of the embodied-visual mode as such where we are more likely to encounter translation as a “thinking of trace” (that which may have been there) rather than in the literary-verbal mode of “achieved translation” of signs (that which promises meaning).
The invitation to engage with this dynamic, even philosophical, tension between embodied and literary modes of translation that underlies Graham-Jones’s editorial, however, does not appear to have been substantively picked up by most of the contributions to the special issue on “Theatre and Translation.” While many of the contributions remained concerned with practical applications, they often refrained from pursuing at length the attendant theoretical questions (acknowledging along the way another persistent binary of theory/practice) regarding translation, specifically when it exceeds writing, i.e., in theatre as performance. For instance, how do we understand the act of translation when it traverses bodies and spaces, objects and archives, sounds and ciphers? Could translation in the theatre—as an event that is not simply untranslatable but invites incessant translation—have the potential to destabilize and displace the ephemeral/material binary that characterizes the mode of performance?
While these discussions continue to remain siloed within disciplinary comfort zones, Kélina Gotman and I, in our recently published Performance and Translation in a Global Age, have attempted to stage what we believe is a long overdue transdisciplinary conversation between translation, theatre, and performance across the fields of theatre and performance, comparative literature, and translation.20 Our coedited volume builds on dominant theorizations about translation as a literary act, even as it moves toward thinking translation performatively within a theatrical setting and beyond, as a medium, a mode, and a method. Continuing the conversation staged in the “Theatre and Translation” special issue, we further explore the possibility that boundaries between theatre and performance studies might be rendered productively unstable when thinking in and with translation. “Translation is performative, and performance is translational,” we argue,21 but thinking translation in and as performance cannot simply be framed as a problem of extending the terms of its literary provenance to new modes of cultural production. Echoing Catherine Cole’s observation on the preoccupations of performance studies cited in a footnote to Edmondson’s seventy-fifth anniversary issue editorial, we propose a rearticulation of translation in terms that honor what is specific to performance, not just as ontology, but also as a way of knowing and doing.22
Footnotes
1. Laura Edmondson, “Editorial Comment: Informal Archives, Remediations, and Disciplinary Desires,” Theatre Journal 75, no. 4 (2023): xxii.
2. Jean Graham-Jones, “Editorial Comment: The Stakes of Translation,” Theatre Journal 59, no. 3 (2007): ix–xiii. One version of this argument appears in Avishek Ganguly and Kélina Gotman, “Introduction: Translation in Motion,” in Performance and Translation in a Global Age, ed. Avishek Ganguly and Kélina Gotman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), 1–27.
3. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “The Politics of Translation,” in Destabilizing Theory: Contemporary Feminist Debates, ed. Michèle Barrett and Anne Phillips (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), 177–200; Tejaswini Niranjana, Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism and the Colonial Context (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility (London: Routledge, 1995); Naoki Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity: On Japan and Cultural Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); Susan Bassnett, Translation Studies (London: Routledge, 2002); Emily Apter, The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006); Sandra Bermann and Michael Wood, eds., Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).
4. Jacques Derrida, “Des Tours de Babel,” in Difference in Translation, ed. Joseph F. Graham (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 165–207.
5. As it happens, that same year Journal of Visual Culture published a similar special issue, in which coeditors Mieke Bal and Joanne Morra argued for an engagement with translation in another somewhat nonliterary field, “the visual,” and proposed the interesting idea of “intermedial translation.” Mieke Bal and Joanne Morra, “Editorial: Acts of Translation,” Journal of Visual Culture 6, no. 1 (2007): 5–11.
6. For a brilliant example of an editorial intervention that more or less eschews both these options and explores an entirely singular direction, see José Esteban Muñoz, “Ephemera as Evidence: Introductory Notes to Queer Acts,” Women & Performance 8, no. 2 (1996): 5–16.
7. Graham-Jones, “Editorial Comment,” ix.
8. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Translating into English,” in Bermann and Wood, Nation, 100. Perhaps this seeming anxiety to translate the untranslatable, to appear as truly creative (“generative”?) rather than merely aggregative, also haunts every AI application’s (and their creators’) desire to produce poetry as somehow the final proof of their autonomous subjecthood? See, for instance, Keith Holyoak, “Can AI Write Authentic Poetry?” The MIT Press Reader, December 7, 2022, https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/can-ai-write-authentic-poetry.
9. Graham-Jones, “Editorial Comment,” ix.
10. Ibid., x.
11. Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (1990; Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997).
12. Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity.
13. Emily Apter, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (New York: Verso, 2013).
14. Venuti, Translator’s Invisibility.
15. Graham-Jones, “Editorial Comment,” x.
16. Ibid., xi.
17. Spivak, quoted in Graham-Jones, “Editorial Comment,” xi.
18. Spivak, quoted in Graham-Jones, “Editorial Comment,” x. The latter situation has begun to change over the last decade or so, especially with the proliferation of translation-focused publishing initiatives (like Deep Vellum Books, Tilted Axis Press, and Seagull Books) and prestigious new awards for works of translation for popular readership (like the International Booker Prize). There is a long way to go, however, and especially so when it comes to plays in translation.
19. Graham-Jones, “Editorial Comment,” xi.
20. Ganguly and Gotman, Performance and Translation in a Global Age.
21. Ganguly and Gotman, “Introduction,” 15.
22. Edmondson, “Editorial Comment,” xviin36.