Theatre and Translation, Again

Avishek Ganguly

Theatre Journal, Volume 76, Number 2, June 2024, pp. E-11-E-15 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tj.2024.a932162

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/932162

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Theatre and Translation, Again

Avishek Ganguly

In 2007, Jean Graham-Jones coordinated a special issue of Theatre Journal dedicated

to the topic of translation vis-à-vis theatre and performance. To my knowledge, it still
remains the only occasion when a substantial discussion of that topic has taken place
in the pages of the journal, including the recently published seventy-fifth anniversary
issue. This brief essay is an effort to revisit that earlier, groundbreaking issue in the
spirit of how Laura Edmondson ends her extensive editorial comment for the recent
anniversary issue: as a coarticulation of “critique with desire,” a wish list for what
might appear in the journal over the next seventy-five years.1
Graham-Jones has long been interested in theatre and translation, but the explicit
point of departure in her editorial vision for that special issue of Theatre Journal was
the contemporaneous developments in the fields of translation theory and practice.
In what follows, I attempt to offer not just a review but also a reading, necessarily
telegraphic, of what Graham-Jones variously calls “the complexity” intrinsic to “the-
atrical translation practices,” or “translation in performance,” to suggest that in any
attempt to think “theatrical translation in performance,” the underlying, not always
productive, disciplinary tension between the fields of theatre studies and performance
studies might necessarily come undone.2
The translational turn in comparative literature and cultural studies and the cultural
turn in translation studies in Anglo-US academia in the 1990s were marked by an extra-
ordinary flourishing of theoretically inflected writing on the practice of translation
that continued well into the next decade. Consider the following examples: Gayatri
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Chakravorty Spivak’s now classic essay “The Politics of Translation” was published
in 1992, as was Tejaswini Niranjana’s field-shaping book Siting Translation: History,
Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial Context; Lawrence Venuti’s The Translator’s Invisibility
was published soon after, in 1995, followed by Naoki Sakai’s influential Translation and
Subjectivity in 1997. Among the most prominent books on the topic to appear in the fol-
lowing decade were Susan Bassnett’s widely read introduction to the field, Translation
Studies (2002), Emily Apter’s The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (2006),
and Sandra Bermann and Michael Wood’s coedited volume Nation, Language, and the
Ethics of Translation (2006).3 These attempts at theorizing translation would often but

1
Laura Edmondson, “Editorial Comment: Informal Archives, Remediations, and Disciplinary De-
sires,” Theatre Journal 75, no. 4 (2023): xxii.
2
Jean Graham-Jones, “Editorial Comment: The Stakes of Translation,” Theatre Journal 59, no. 3 (2007):
ix-xiii. One version of this argument appears in Avishek Ganguly and Kélina Gotman, “Introduction:
Translation in Motion,” in Performance and Translation in a Global Age, ed. Avishek Ganguly and Kélina
Gotman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), 1-27.
3
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “The Politics of Translation,” in Destabilizing Theory: Contemporary
Feminist Debates, ed. Michèle Barrett and Anne Phillips (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992),
177-200; Tejaswini Niranjana, Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism and the Colonial Context

Theatre Journal 76 (2024) E-11–E-15 © 2024 by Johns Hopkins University Press

E-12 / Avishek Ganguly
not always appear under the sign of poststructuralism and deconstruction, a pattern
that can perhaps be traced a few years earlier to the publication of the English trans-
lation of what remains of Jacques Derrida’s most significant essay on the topic, “Des
Tours de Babel” (1985).4
Even as this transdisciplinary conversation around translation was flourishing, the
field of theatre and performance studies remained curiously hesitant to engage with
it in a direct and substantial manner. Most discussion about theatre and translation
would focus either on the literal act of transmitting a playtext from one language into
another for publication or on the proverbial transfer from “page to stage,” a metaphor
for the act of performing a written playscript. One exception to this trend, however,
was an ongoing conversation about theatrical adaptation and its possible relation-
ship with translation, which occasionally veered toward exploring some of the more
philosophical assumptions behind those practices. Conversely, scholars primarily
based in comparative literature or translation studies, such as those cited above, were
mostly focused on prose fiction as the paradigmatic cultural form for thinking about
the dynamics of translation. They analyzed primarily the novel—and occasionally
the short story or, less occasionally, nonfiction or scholarly treatises—and directed
insufficient attention to other literary forms like drama or poetry. It was in this state
of affairs that the “Theatre and Translation” special issue of Theatre Journal offered an
intervention in 2007.5
In laying the foundation for collaborative collections, whether a book or a special
issue of a journal, the editorial introduction typically can play at least two roles: it
can either scan the constituent essays for trends in the field and summarize them
as a way of highlighting, post facto, the contribution of said collection, or it can de-
marcate a scholarly domain and set an intellectual agenda in advance such that the
contributions that follow function as responses to and extrapolations of that charge.6
Graham-Jones’s approach in her introduction to the “Theatre and Translation” special
issue skews more toward the latter. This too, I would argue, is a result of the specific
burden of her editorial project: to stage conversations that had at best been uneven,
if not entirely absent, between the practice and theory of translation on the one hand
and between theatre and performance on the other. Her editorial comment, titled
“The Stakes of Theatrical Translation,” begins with three epigraphs on translation by
Apter, Spivak, and Jacques Lezra, in that order. Graham-Jones then observes that such
exemplary emergent scholarship in related disciplines was beginning to highlight how

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility (London:
Routledge, 1995); Naoki Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity: On Japan and Cultural Nationalism (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1997); Susan Bassnett, Translation Studies (London: Routledge, 2002);
Emily Apter, The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2006); Sandra Bermann and Michael Wood, eds., Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).
4
Jacques Derrida, “Des Tours de Babel,” in Difference in Translation, ed. Joseph F. Graham (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 165-207.
5
As it happens, that same year Journal of Visual Culture published a similar special issue, in which
coeditors Mieke Bal and Joanne Morra argued for an engagement with translation in another somewhat
nonliterary field, “the visual,” and proposed the interesting idea of “intermedial translation.” Mieke
Bal and Joanne Morra, “Editorial: Acts of Translation,” Journal of Visual Culture 6, no. 1 (2007): 5-11.
6
For a brilliant example of an editorial intervention that more or less eschews both these options and
explores an entirely singular direction, see José Esteban Muñoz, “Ephemera as Evidence: Introductory
Notes to Queer Acts,” Women & Performance 8, no. 2 (1996): 5-16.
 THEATRE AND TRANSLATION, AGAIN / E-13
accelerated globalization had complicated any simplistic notions of translation as either
innocent intercultural exchange or derivative literary practice that is forever tripping
up on questions of originality and fidelity. This is followed by a few brief theoretical
conjectures. The first of these states how questions of translation get amplified and
complicated when one leaves the domain of the exclusively literary and ventures into
theatre and performance, where writing becomes only one among multiple artistic
mediums. Or, as Graham-Jones puts it: “Nor do the standard categories of translation,
adaptation, and version accurately account for the complexity inherent in theatrical
translation practices, given that the written text is only one possible functional com-
ponent in the total performance process.”7 This seemingly obvious remark, I would
argue, contains the germ of a significant rethinking of translation in a manner that is
expansive, transmedial, and even beyond writing, which is a shift I will continue to
track throughout this essay.
For now, let’s stay with the report on the state of the field a little longer. Literary
studies scholars (in contrast to, say, enthusiasts of machine translation working with
standardized languages) have been arguing two important points for some time: First,
linguistic translation can never be just a communication of meaning or transfer of
content owing to the unique nature of language as its operating medium. The limits
as well as possibilities of working with verbal language are figured in Spivak’s astute
reminder that “the idiom does not go over” in translation.8 Second, translation does
not necessarily exist in a hierarchical relationship with the so-called original, and it in
fact could be thought of as retrospectively producing the notion of the original in the
first place. Graham-Jones builds on these insights and draws on a range of translation
thinkers—as early as Walter Benjamin and as recent as Jonathan E. Abel—to suggest
that “[t]heatrical translation in performance, in which we so often sense the presence
of two or more texts,” too becomes an instance of “relationality.”9 Graham-Jones does
not cite Édouard Glissant here, but we can hear resonances of the latter’s influential
work around relationality and opacity in her concerns with accessibility—for instance,
when she wonders, “Do we [theatrical] translators make the play accessible to the au-
dience, or do we make the audience accessible to the play?”10 Working from and with
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the (postcolonial) Caribbean, Glissant would argue for a “right to opacity” in transla-
tion, a refusal even to make oneself and one’s work “accessible” to the demands of a
dominant viewership.11 Naoki Sakai, again, working outside dominant Euro-US cultural
assumptions—in his case, modern Japan—would argue for translation as a means of
figuring difference rather than commensurability.12 Emily Apter has also written about
“the untranslatable” operating as both the horizon and limit of translation.13 Graham-

7
Graham-Jones, “Editorial Comment,” ix.
8
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Translating into English,” in Bermann and Wood, Nation, 100. Perhaps
this seeming anxiety to translate the untranslatable, to appear as truly creative (“generative”?) rather
than merely aggregative, also haunts every AI application’s (and their creators’) desire to produce
poetry as somehow the final proof of their autonomous subjecthood? See, for instance, Keith Holyoak,
“Can AI Write Authentic Poetry?” The MIT Press Reader, December 7, 2022, https://thereader.mitpress.
mit.edu/can-ai-write-authentic-poetry.
9
Graham-Jones, “Editorial Comment,” ix.
10
Ibid., x.
11
Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (1990; Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1997).
12
Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity.
13
Emily Apter, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (New York: Verso, 2013).
E-14 / Avishek Ganguly
Jones chooses to address this conundrum in the case of playtexts for performance and
publication by turning to Lawrence Venuti’s argument about “domesticating” (i.e.,
making the translated text “smooth” and thereby accessible for its new audience) ver-
sus “foreignizing” (i.e., retaining the “unevenness” of the translated text and thereby
making it uneasy for the audience) translations—underlining how translation choices
have consequences far beyond notions of lexical equivalence upheld by dictionaries.14
Valorizations of equivalence over incommensurability, sameness instead of differ-
ence, have long been the troubling touchstones of acts of translation. Such claims are
perhaps haunted in no small measure by the myth of the Tower of Babel, in which the
act of communicating across languages gets framed as an attempt to grapple with an
originary lack, a retribution for transgressing a monolingual condition where once we all
supposedly understood each other. These very attributes, however, have also conversely
served to anchor an ethics and politics of translation, especially in the work of some
of the theorists and practitioners discussed herein. Within the Euro-US academy, the
politics of translation is still entangled with lingering questions of disciplinarity—for
instance, which departmental syllabi are translated texts destined for?—and, in turn,
with that of notions of canon formation. In a typical college classroom, literary texts
(including theatrical ones) from the rest of the world continue to get treated as anthro-
pological “evidence” of difference instead of being “read” as works of fiction mediated
by imagination. Theatre and performance studies scholars continue to grapple with
versions of unexamined culturalism in their own attempts to uneasily globalize their
disciplinary concerns. There is also the additional problem of what Graham-Jones in
her editorial aptly calls “commercialized internationalism”15—the repeated circulation
of a handful of texts, playwrights, directors, and ensembles (and “stars”?) in translation
and/or with sub- and supertitles, again with a pronounced bias toward the Anglo-
Atlantic, that keeps the theatre festival circuit alive and sustains an impression of a
thriving global practice of theatrical translation.
Let us examine in some depth one such prominent situation: that of translating into
Englishes in general, and the not unrelated practice of translating texts specifically
from and of the no less monolithic notion of the Global South. Graham-Jones rightly
seeks to complicate the notion of a Global English as an emergent example of dominant
translatese, but she also highlights the potential of what she calls a “decolonizing intra-
linguistic bilingualism” in its usage that goes beyond conventional code-switching (for
instance, in Spanglish).16 And then, to emphasize how something like this might take
place in theatrical translation, she cites Spivak on the “thinking of trace rather than of
achieved translation.”17 Spivak has often brought up the question of trace when talking
about nonliterary modes—“the visual,” for instance—so this move by Graham-Jones, I
would argue, links up with her own earlier comment about the inadequacy of categories
derived from literary translation to account for translation in and as performance. It
also connects with a subsequent remark regarding the English language translator of
texts of and from the Global South. Here, Graham-Jones reiterates Spivak’s caution:
first, to “operate with great caution and humility” so as not to reinforce neocolonial
relations of power; and second, to be mindful of the fact that texts in translation from
the Global South often end up as teaching texts in classrooms of the Global North.18

14
Venuti, Translator’s Invisibility.
15
Graham-Jones, “Editorial Comment,” x.
16
Ibid., xi.
17
Spivak, quoted in Graham-Jones, “Editorial Comment,” xi.
18
Spivak, quoted in Graham-Jones, “Editorial Comment,” x. The latter situation has begun to change
over the last decade or so, especially with the proliferation of translation-focused publishing initiatives
 THEATRE AND TRANSLATION, AGAIN / E-15
From Benjamin’s notion of a “task of the translator,” we have arrived at Spivak’s
imperative of a “responsibility” (humility?) of the translator. But in keeping with our
specific concern regarding the interconnection of theatre/performance/ translation,
Graham-Jones astutely points out that “[t]ranslation in performance, precisely because
of its complexity of engagement, carries the potential for countering, or at the very
least complicating, such a limited, unidirectional destiny [of ending up as teaching
texts].”19 What appears to be an effect of theatrical performance circulating as more
than writing—as gesture, sound, voice, space, and movement—actually masks some-
thing more constitutive: an attribute of the embodied-visual mode as such where we
are more likely to encounter translation as a “thinking of trace” (that which may have
been there) rather than in the literary-verbal mode of “achieved translation” of signs
(that which promises meaning).
The invitation to engage with this dynamic, even philosophical, tension between
embodied and literary modes of translation that underlies Graham-Jones’s editorial,
however, does not appear to have been substantively picked up by most of the contribu-
tions to the special issue on “Theatre and Translation.” While many of the contributions
remained concerned with practical applications, they often refrained from pursuing
at length the attendant theoretical questions (acknowledging along the way another
persistent binary of theory/practice) regarding translation, specifically when it exceeds
writing, i.e., in theatre as performance. For instance, how do we understand the act
of translation when it traverses bodies and spaces, objects and archives, sounds and
ciphers? Could translation in the theatre—as an event that is not simply untranslatable
but invites incessant translation—have the potential to destabilize and displace the
ephemeral/material binary that characterizes the mode of performance?
While these discussions continue to remain siloed within disciplinary comfort zones,
Kélina Gotman and I, in our recently published Performance and Translation in a Global
Age, have attempted to stage what we believe is a long overdue transdisciplinary
conversation between translation, theatre, and performance across the fields of theatre
and performance, comparative literature, and translation.20 Our coedited volume builds
on dominant theorizations about translation as a literary act, even as it moves toward
thinking translation performatively within a theatrical setting and beyond, as a me-
dium, a mode, and a method. Continuing the conversation staged in the “Theatre and
Translation” special issue, we further explore the possibility that boundaries between
theatre and performance studies might be rendered productively unstable when think-
ing in and with translation. “Translation is performative, and performance is transla-
tional,” we argue,21 but thinking translation in and as performance cannot simply be
framed as a problem of extending the terms of its literary provenance to new modes
of cultural production. Echoing Catherine Cole’s observation on the preoccupations
of performance studies cited in a footnote to Edmondson’s seventy-fifth anniversary
issue editorial, we propose a rearticulation of translation in terms that honor what is
specific to performance, not just as ontology, but also as a way of knowing and doing.22

(like Deep Vellum Books, Tilted Axis Press, and Seagull Books) and prestigious new awards for works
of translation for popular readership (like the International Booker Prize). There is a long way to go,
however, and especially so when it comes to plays in translation.
19
Graham-Jones, “Editorial Comment,” xi.
20
Ganguly and Gotman, Performance and Translation in a Global Age.
21
Ganguly and Gotman, “Introduction,” 15.
22
Edmondson, “Editorial Comment,” xviin36.