3/4 Readings Yide

This week’s readings about the relationship between author and translator reminds me of my experience in theater. I see many parallels between this relationship and the dynamics between directors and actors, or between playwrights and directors. In all of these cases, the challenge is to balance creative agency with control.

For instance, in directing and acting, one of the worst things a director can do is to demonstrate the scene by acting it out themselves. Once that happens, the actor’s task is reduced to imitation. Instead of discovering the role internally, they are simply copying the director’s performance like a robot. Good directors avoid this, even if they are tempted to show what they mean. The goal is to preserve the actor’s sense of ownership over the performance.

I think something similar applies to playwriting. When I write a play, I try to keep stage directions and descriptions to a minimum. I want directors and actors to feel that they are discovering the work themselves rather than executing instructions. In general, people do better work when they feel that the responsibility truly belongs to them. Too much control from the author can actually weaken the creative process.

Because of this, I appreciate the idea that each translation should be treated as its own text. A translator can certainly ask the author questions and seek clarification, but that relationship should not become overly dependent. If the translator simply obeys everything the author says, then the translation loses its creative life. There are even cases where the author, many years later, may no longer be the best interpreter of their own work. Writers change, and sometimes the earlier version of their writing was stronger than what they might now revise.

I was particularly fascinated by Nabokov’s working process. Because he was fluent in both Russian and English, he could write in Russian, have someone translate the text into English, and then revise the English version himself. In a way, this gave him a kind of built-in workshop for his writing. The translation process became a form of revision and rethinking. As a bilingual writer, the idea is very tempting to me to use translation as a tool for refining one’s own work.

At the same time, much of this discussion about collaboration assumes that the author can actually read the translation. If the author does not know the target language, the power relationship shifts significantly. In my own experience translating American plays into Chinese, most of the playwrights I worked with do not speak Chinese at all. As a result, they largely trust me to do whatever I think works best.