The Translator as Performer
Tiang's lecture was revelatory to me, a theatre geek who had not given enough thought to who's been translating works like Chekhov's into English. Monetary and marketing challenges determine so much about the American theatre scene, so it does not surprise me that translators have been relegated to the background in order to put forward sleek/uncomplicated posters, programs, and marketing material. Tiang's argument is highly relevant and necessary; I, like him, want the current norm to shift so that the visible presence of translators does not feel like a deterrent to theatre audiences, and so that international works are embraced openly rather than brought to the American stage by subterfuge.
Selling Chekhov Whole/Frayn's Translation Note
I really appreciate the many specific, deeply researched and understood examples that Senelick talks about in his lecture. Paradoxically, the more attention he pays to details, the more exposed the limits of translation become; his research can only be fully appreciated in the context of a lecture or a footnoted text.
Frayn's principles while translating Chekhov admit those limits and attend more directly to the needs of live performance. As he writes, "every line must be as immediately comprehensible as it was in the original; there are no footnotes in the theatre, and no turning back to a previous page." The same kind of research was involved in Frayn's search for the source of Konstantin's possibly Talmudic reference, but Frayn ultimately "had to lightly expanded the reference, to make it comprehensible while leaving it oblique."
On Faithfulness
In describing the catalytic effect of "reactivating" things from the past by visions of the present, Pavis has also described the ultimate futility of his essay:
"This conviction remains at the heart of the creative act, an act that tends to escape any control and any theoretical pretension. This conclusion might sound very worrying. But it must be admitted that it is not the task of the theoretician to clarify the intimate and unconscious choices of artists."
Those intimate and unconscious choices are interesting regardless of what "couples" are conceived of to describe/locate them, and arguing for one couple or another (or one half of a couple over the other) seems to me less generative than it is descriptive of developments that are already latent in theatre.
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