24/02 Reading Response - Sanjana Thakur

 Frayn, "A Note on the Translation"

• Puts forth the idea that a good translator must know the language he is translating from, but also the form - so knowing playwriting and theatre to translate a play; knowing poetry to translate a poem?
• I thought "There are no footnotes in theatre" was a really striking statement, given that we've seen how useful footnotes are in prose and poetry translations (Jeffrey Angles talked about them, for example). So perhaps this is an additional challenge in translating plays. 
• Meredith, Kevin, and I just watched MIT's production of Natasha and Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812, which is an adaptation of Tolstoy's War and Peace, and the entire opening number is just a repetition of each characters various names and nicknames, so as to introduce the audience to all the various names the characters go by, because of how confusing it is. I was thinking about that reading Frayn's section on how names and naming can be a problem when translating from Russian. 
• "This changes the feel of some relationships, particularly between servants and their masters" - the role of language in shifting power and class dynamics. 
• I loved: "Rigidity can in any case produce nonsense." 
• I really enjoyed reading about his challenges with translation on page 359, with tears and knocking - it reminded me of the question, in the tanka, of if the ringing was a doorbell or a phone. You don't know what you don't know. 
•  The section of translating allusion was fascinating - even in creative writing, you frequently receive the advice to not 'date' your work with pop culture references, and I suppose the challenges of translating allusions is in support of that argument, though I am on the side that each work comes from a specific context and should reference things from that context. Perhaps the trick is that the allusion should function like an inside joke - there, for people who recognise it, and not obtrusive for people who don't. 

Pavis, "On Faithfulness"

• The idea of theatre itself as an act of translation! I loved all the questions and found them very well articulated. Particularly: Is the text "received as a source of meaning to be meditated upon by a spectator or listener, or is it to be treated as musical material, more audible than understandable?" 
• I learnt a new word today! "Univocal". 
• I did feel like I got lost in the weeds as we kept reading. In theory, I didn't disagree with any of the points being made, but would have appreciated them being linked to some concrete examples. 

Tiang, "Translator as Performer"

• I really really enjoyed this lecture. Tiang provided so many examples of the opening lines of The Seagull, and it really helped make his point. 
• Again the old idea that translators should be invisible, like a ninja - it sounds like this is even more embedded in theatre than in prose and poetry. It feels, again, almost deceptive to me to laud the playwright and pretend like his work could exist at all without the literal translation that's being hidden. 

Senelick, "Selling Chekhov Whole"

• I'm not sure I totally followed his meaning of "putting the text in a state of crisis". 
• I did appreciate his focus on translation being a translation not only of the language, but of the language as wielded by that particular author.