Theatre Translation and the Suspension of Disbelief

All theatre requires us to suspend our disbelief. If we didn’t, we would be forever asking questions like: “How is it tomorrow already?” and “Why did these people come here to have their argument, in front of loads of spectators?” We accept these dramatic conventions; they do not trouble us when we watch a play.

Translated drama – or any drama that is set in a country with a different language from the language of the play – requires an additional suspension of disbelief, if we are not to ask:

“Why are all these Frenchmen speaking English?”

Our unquestioning acceptance of this situation is partly to do with ‘transparent’ language. When people speak the same way we do, we don’t tend to analyse their forms of speech. When they speak differently, we notice. When characters in a Shakespeare play speak in Elizabethan English, we accept it because it conforms to what we know about when the play was written and when it is set. If characters in a David Hare play started throwing I-do-beseech-thees into conversation, we’d be puzzled (and if they talked about ‘maidenhead’, we’d assume the play was set in Berkshire).

This leaves the translator with two potential problems: time and place. If s/he is translating a 17^th-century play, what kind of language should s/he use? Shakespeare’s? Difficult to master, and would sound like pastiche. Today’s? Probably easier for the audience to accept, but they might get upset if there are knights and ladies going round saying “OK” and “awesome”. Most theatre translators end up opting for as neutral an idiom as they can manage (modern-ish but avoiding any expressions that too obviously come from the last twenty years or so), which makes the play more acceptable to the audience’s ears, but does run the risk of losing some of the colour of the original.

Translators of contemporary drama are not saved from these dilemmas. If I am translating a play set in northern France, and it is an important fact about the play that one of the characters comes from Marseille, how do I translate her/his accent? I can’t just arbitrarily make her/him a Scot. The introduction of dialect is the point at which an English audience might well start thinking, not “Why is this Frenchman speaking English?” but

“Why is this Frenchman speaking with a Scottish accent?”

Bill Findlay (2006) has written, referring to his experiences translating a Goldoni play into Scots dialect, that the translator runs the risk of using a kind of invented “Costume Scots”. Since Scots as a full language was dying out by the 18^th century, when Goldoni was writing (in Venetian), a ‘matching’ contemporary idiom is hard to find. For Findlay, this was made easier by choosing a play with a “narrow social and linguistic focus” (2006: 53) – a broader range of social classes would have been harder to render in Scots.

Findlay’s translation retained the original setting, whereas other modern Scots translations have tended to translocate the play to Scotland. (Findlay 2006: 54) Translocation makes the language consistent with the setting, but creates a whole new set of problems: can one milieu really be equivalent to another? Is the play’s message the same if it is set in Northern Ireland rather than the Spanish Civil War? And is this still a translation?

The question of translocation arises during almost any drama translation process, since there will invariably be elements that suggest a certain location. Should names be translated? English names will be easier to say on stage. But if my characters are now called Peter and Millie rather than Pierre and Amélie, what are they doing in Paris? Wholesale translocation requires a great deal of thought, about the setting but also the events of the play and the characters – are they all compatible with the new location? Partial translocation, where, for example, names are translated and cultural markers such as food removed or changed, without explicitly moving the action elsewhere, requires a further extension of the audience’s suspension of disbelief.

Part of the difficulty comes from the tendency to ‘domesticate’ in English translation – that is, to force the text to fit into the English language and context, rather than extending the English language to meet the demands of the text. We have grown used to a very English Chekhov, for instance, and tend to think of him almost as one of our own. Translocation is therefore tempting, as a way of making the play seem more relevant and immediately acceptable to an English audience; but it is only by maintaining the ‘foreignness’ of a play that translation can really extend and enrich the English drama.

References

Findlay, B. (2006) ‘Motivation in a Surrogate Translation of Goldoni’, in Bassnett, S. and Bush, P., The Translator as Writer. London: Continuum, 46-57.

This post was originally published on the UEA Literary Translation blog.

Jacques Chessex, Sosie d’un saint

This unsettling collection of short stories, published in 2000, explores dark desires in the tranquil setting of the Swiss mountains. Although the stories are all separate, the reader frequently has the impression that the narrator – most often an isolated man obsessed by sex and/or death, who roams the landscape in search of some sort of epiphany – is the same across several stories, transposed into a slightly different setting or profession.

The word that best encapsulates these stories is perhaps “rôder”, to roam, to wander, to hang around. The narrators prowl the streets or the lakeside paths and watch the other characters, who are generally strangers to them. One fantasises about killing his wife. Another finds himself in a canine cemetery in the middle of the night. Still another follows a disturbed woman into an abandoned casino.

Many of the stories feature some kind of spiritual revelation, or a character who addresses God, as in ‘Le rabais’, in which a former priest has given up religion because he fears he is not good enough for God. The title story, which is among the strongest in the collection, is narrated by a writer who discovers he has a lookalike who is getting him into trouble by accosting women on the metro and leaving restaurants without paying. Rather than being angry or afraid, the writer undergoes a quasi-mystical experience and believes his double is giving him a message about the true essence of being.

Sexuality, religion and death are everywhere in these stories, in many forms, often uncomfortably intertwined. In ‘L’application’, a young clergyman in a guesthouse is fascinated by a mysterious woman. He finds his way to her room, where she insists on showing him the hairshirt she has been wearing as penance since her mother’s death. In the bizarre ‘L’agneau’, the narrator performs oral sex on a series of women in the mountains, before pushing them down a steep drop to their deaths. The spare, tightly controlled prose adds to the unnerving nature of these stories. What sat uneasily with me, though, wasn’t the peculiar or perverted forms of sexuality encountered in the stories, but the fact that whenever the narrator of a story determines to have sex with a female character, he succeeds. These narrators seem mostly to be voyeuristic, isolated middle-aged men. Why the procession of young women that passes facelessly through the collection should uniformly desire them is a bit of a mystery.

My overall feeling on reading Sosie d’un saint, which as far as I know has not been translated into English (several of Chessex’s novels have been, including The Vampire of Ropraz and  A Jew Must Die), was that I was in the presence of technical skill, but that it had not really resulted in anything I wanted to read. Some of the stories were enjoyable, but several were so shrouded in mystery that I felt unable to engage with them. The shadowy nature of the settings (abandoned buildings, institutions about to close down) and of most of the characters works well up to a point, but when the two are combined, it too often results in a story where the reader simply has nothing to latch on to. Chessex is clearly a skilled writer, but I am inclined to conclude that he is not for me.