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Translating Performance

发布时间: 2024-07-01 09:51:48   作者:etogether.net   来源: 网络   浏览次数:
摘要: The translator is centrally concerned at each moment and stage of the process to ensure that the intracultural functio...


A translator for the stage is, in that sense at least, a writer for performance. Viewed from this perspective, the translator is centrally concerned at each moment and stage of the process to ensure that the intracultural function of the play is translated, or negotiated, into the receiving culture. Lorca has a cultural predilection for a theatre of ritual and spectacle rather than one of rationally expounded argument. He is closer to Yeats than Ibsen in that sense and, in a very Yeatsian way, his performance translators must find a stage language that speaks both of the passion with which he represents the assumptions and movements of his society, and of the precision that grafts the speech of his characters into the living wood of their culture. This is the through routing, referred to earlier, along which the translator leads individual character strategies to the points where they intersect most powerfully with broader cultural realities. It is only at that moment – when stage language becomes real, when it can be processed by the spectator as naturally-occurring language – that the spectator is provided with a linguistic framework for fully identifying and understanding the deepening and quickening moments of the drama when language moves from the plane of the naturally occurring to that of the stylistically re-arranged. To put it in the most direct way, the template of communicative competence that all native speakers possess must form the basis for whatever dramaturgical remoulding of language takes place in the translation. This is the linguistic underpinning for whatever foreignising, stylistic or idiolectic elements the translator may wish to inject, maintain or re-create. It is a necessary pre-condition which, if not met, may jeopardise the reception of the new text’s otherness. This –its cultural voice – now runs the risk of being misunderstood and/or dismissed as mere confusion or, in the specific case of Lorca, as excessively melodramatic. All of the various actions – cultural and linguistic – that vivify Lorca’s drama have a singular coherence in the original plays, all contribute to the overall thrust of what the plays are about in performance, all are part of a complicity that is both an aesthetic pre-requisite of performance and a cultural project.

We have already referred to Lorca’s systemic patterns of imagery, with their characteristically powerful interplay between animate and inanimate elements drawn, in very large part, from the everyday world of rural Spain. All of this can be treated with the same tactics that translators normally use for culture-specific items, allowing for whatever balance between originating and receiving cultures that is deemed appropriate for the production. But it is important that the translator does not allow Lorca’s encyclopaedia of reference to push the process towards a merely linguistic exercise. The aim of Lorca’s theatre – arguably, perhaps, of performance in general – is not to foster the growth of knowledge, but to re-frame experience. This means that translation of the culture-specific items of Lorca's original is at least as equally governed by rhetorical and stylistic strategies as by any external referencing.

One much-discussed example, taken from the most frequently performed and translated of Lorca plays, Bodas de sangre (Blood Wedding), will illustrate this. In the opening scene of the play, the Mother curses ‘la navaja, la navaja ... [...] y las escopetas y las pistolas y el cuchillo más pequeño, y hasta las azadas y los bieldos de la era’ as items that all represent danger in the world of men (1980: 566). This is translated almost literally in the first Penguin translation of the play: 'Knives, knives [...]And guns and pistols and the smallest little knife – and even hoes and pitchforks' (Graham-Luján & O’Connell, 1961: 33). Ted Hughes (1996: 1) has: 'The knife, the knife! [...] And guns and pistols, even the tiniest little knife, even pitchforks and mattocks'. Brendan Kennelly (1996: 11) widens the curse to 'The knife, the knife. [...] And the curse of God on guns, machine guns, rifles, pistols ... and knives, even the smallest knife... and scythes and pitchforks'. In his 1980 Spanish-language edition of the play, the distinguished Hispanist Herbert Ramsden notes that the farm implements Lorca mentions 'take both their basic meaning and their emotive resonances from a cultural complex different from our own' and puts forward a number of possible translations – 'drag-hoe', 'pick-axe', 'winnowing-fork', 'pitch-fork'– all of which, he argues, will permit English readers (of his published edition) to process the text from within a familiar context (quoted and discussed by Hickey, 1998: 50). Leo Hickey takes an opposing view:


... a translator can attempt either to bring the ST to the reader, with all its locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary import, wherever the reader may be, or else take the reader, complete with any baggage of cultural or linguistic background that may be attached to such a person, into the world – the linguistic world – of the ST. And I am suggesting that perhaps in the case of these three plays [Blood Wedding, Yerma, The House of Bernarda Alba] the tactic of taking the reader into the ST world should be considered. (Hickey, 1998: 50)


But what is going on here in terms of performance? Given the fact that the Mother's invective comes as the first moment of heightened tension in the play (previously we have had only 11 short speeches of deliberate domestic banality) these are clearly key lines, and really have to be viewed from the overarching perspective of the play – its energy, its dominant motifs, and its meanings – as a whole. Moreover, the translator of drama for performance does well to bear in mind that, whatever we might consider to be the indivisible unit of dramatic construction (the individual speech or the individual exchange), it is stamped with purpose. It is a cellular unit that carries within it the shape and force of the play in its entirety. If that cellular structure of dramatic writing is ignored, there is a real risk that the play will lose coherence, on the page and on stage alike, and will be experienced in a piecemeal and de-energised way. So the emotional action of Blood Weddingbegins, as it will end, with an image of the knife, creating a sense of violence that overhangs the play like a damoclean sword.


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