Watching Shakespeare in Translation

On the occasion of Shakespeare’s 400^th anniversary and perhaps under the auspices of the cultural events leading up to the London Olympics, the Globe Theatre in London had organised the Globe to Globe theatre festival as a part of the World Shakespeare Festival. The premise was that 37 plays of Shakespeare will be performed in 37 different languages consecutively; with each play being performed two or three times. The programme and other official literature highlighted this multilingual aspect of the festival which aimed to cater to ‘audiences from every corner of our polyglot community’.  The festival organisers perhaps did this to make a distinction between ‘nation’ and ‘language’ – an argument used to justify their controversial inclusion of a Hebrew The Merchant of Venice by the Habima National Theatre from Tel Aviv. For me, as an Indian, this distinction between ‘nation’ and ‘language’ is something I take for granted as India is a nation of many languages.

The festival did have two plays from India, or rather from Mumbai – Twelfth Night in Hindi by Company Theatre and All’s Well That Ends Well in Gujarati by Arpana. Also being performed were The Tempest in Bangla by the Dhaka Theatre Company and The Taming of the Shrew in Urdu by Theatre Wallay from Lahore which would have been understood or would appeal to some Indians.  I managed to see Twelfth Night and Taming of the Shrew, as well as Cymbeline in Juba Arabic (From South Sudan), Richard II in Classical Arabic (from Palestine). As a theatre-loving student of literary translation my interest at the start of the festival was to see and enjoy theatre in translation, and I did manage to do this. However, reading the festival brochures, talking to some of the organisers and seeing the particular plays that I eventually did, led me to think about the ways in which nationalisms and national identities are performed.

Interestingly, the only one which did not have a national element, probably due to the reasons mentioned above, was the Hindi Twelfth Night. This production made effective use of the globe stage, with the live music and the performers interacting with the standing crowd. The weather (since it is an open-air theatre) – dreaded British rain – contributed quite nicely especially in the final song which was about the rain.  It was also a production which acknowledged and was quite self-conscious about the fact that it was a translation, a fact I found quite heartening as a student of translation. It used a fair amount of English, contravening the rules set out by the Globe which, according to an insider at the festival, expressly told the various groups not to use English. However unlike some other performances (like the Cymbeline) English was not used merely to reach out to non-Hindi speakers, rather a lot of humour depended on it and on an audience that was multilingual – fluent in both Hindi and English. The way this was achieved was clever and commendable and greatly increased my appreciation of the play. I watched the play with an Indian friend of mine and we both agreed that it was the most fun we’d had in a long time, but we did wonder whether non-Hindi speakers would have enjoyed it. A couple of days later, when I went to see another play, I spoke to a woman who had taken it upon herself to see all the plays in the festival. She said that this production and the Bangladeshi Tempest were her favourites because they ‘stuck most closely to Shakespeare’ and so she could enjoy it without knowing the language.

This play was the first one I saw at the festival, and I have since seen a couple more as mentioned above. However, if someone were to ask me which play I enjoyed the most I would still say Twelfth Night in Hindi, followed very closely by Richard II. In thinking about my responses to the various plays, and degrees of enjoyment (which itself is a dubious and not necessarily fruitful comparison, because of my varying degree of familiarity with the plays, the problems of comparing comedies to tragedies and histories etc.), I have been thinking about the role my national identity plays in the creation of this response. Is the fact that I’m an Indian, and in that I’m more culturally aware of things ‘Indian’ than things ‘South Sudanese’ for instance the reason why I enjoyed Twelfth Night the most? I’d like to think that this wasn’t the case. But, perhaps it had to with the fact that even though I enjoyed the other plays there was a barrier between me and the performers and some members of the audience that I wasn’t able to cross because I wasn’t part of a national community – real or ‘imagined’. The play from South Sudan was, even in the way it was promoted, with people holding south Sudanese flags the primary image, a declaration of a new-nationhood on an international platform, the Urdu play began with an instrumental rendition of the Pakistani national anthem, and the play from Palestine while resonating heavily of the Arab Spring, meant something different and perhaps more powerful and specific to the Arabs in the audience around me, despite the fact that I was in Morocco when the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia began and witnessed first-hand the protests in Rabat.

In the end it made me see that perhaps the distinction made by the organisers of distinguishing between nationhood and language was more about being cautious and politically correct rather than anything else. One of the aims of the festival is to reach out to the various diaspora communities in London. Given this, the choice of Gujarati seems justifiable, but why not Punjabi or Tamil or Malyalam (which has a history of performing Shakespeare in translation), why Hindi? This is not to take anything away from the troupe themselves, who were brilliant, but perhaps this choice was made in order to appeal to ‘Indians’ in general, ‘Indians’ like me, who don’t know Gujarati. If you add to this the fact that the festival ended with a play like Henry V, with its nationalistic undercurrent, in English being performed just after the Queen’s Jubilee, one begins to really wonder what it means for Shakespeare to go globe to globe, to be translated and most of all, for these translations to be watched in London. 

 Anandi Rao translates from Hindi and Arabic to English. She is doing her MA in Literary Translation and is interested in theatre and women’s writing. She can be reached at anandirao88@gmail.com.

The post-colonial banyan tree

One of the most interesting things I’ve found while doing the various readings for our Theory course this term is the range of metaphors that are used to describe the process of translation and the final text produced. One such, derived from an Indian context, is that of the banyan tree. Trivedi and Bassnett in their introduction to Post-colonial translation write that the process of translation as undertaken by Sanskrit/Hindi scholars like Tulsi Das can be compared to the “process by which an ancient banyan tree sends down branches which then in turn take root all around it and comprise an intertwined family of trees” (Bassnett & Trivedi 1999:10). When I saw this the first thing I wondered was to what extent this metaphor was India-specific. A quick google search later, I found that while the banyan tree is found in other countries too, it seems to be most prevalent, or most renowned at any rate in India. I even found out – or perhaps rediscovered is a better verb – that it is the national tree of India, something that I was probably taught at some point in a history class at school. I also clicked on a link to a Government of India website which told me that “the roots ... give rise to more trunks and branches. Because of this characteristic and its longevity, this tree is considered immortal and is an integral part of the myths and legends of India. Even today, the banyan tree is the focal point of village life and the village council meets under the shade of this tree.”

One of the interesting aspects of this image is the use of the word “ancient” in the first quote and “longevity” and “immortal” in the second. In a post-colonial context I suppose these are important because they refer to a long and resilient pre-colonial past. But, in the context of translation they seem to suggest that works that are (or perhaps should?) translated are classical and canonical texts. Given the context of the specific example, in which Trivedi makes this remark, the metaphor works.

In general terms it seems to be used as a foil to the metaphor of translation as a form of cannibalism that emerges from Latin America. But, this metaphor, of a Banyan tree, becomes problematic when used as a general metaphor for translation. Should only classical texts be translated? What is the role of the translator, if it is the source text (the main tree) that produces the roots (the translations)? And despite notions of immortality, the tree does die, so how does death factor in? In the end thinking about this metaphor left me with as many questions as it did answers, and I think that is what makes it an interesting metaphor of translation.

Anandi Rao translates from Hindi and Arabic to English. She is doing her MA in Literary Translation and is interested in theatre and women’s writing. She can be reached at anandirao88@gmail.com.

Translation/Adaptation: Is there a difference?

I’ve been reading a lot about drama and theatrical translation recently for our case studies class and for one of my essays. One of the things I’ve been thinking about is where ‘translation’ ends and ‘adaptation’ begins, and whether distinguishing between these two terms is useful or not. Before I started actively engaging with issues of/in translation I always associated ‘translation’ with the act of transferring a source ’text’ from one language to another or perhaps even recreating it in another language. While ‘adaptation’ I saw as being transference or recreation across media or genres (stage to screen, novel to play etc.). However, I began to find that this distinction is too narrow and several questions began to plague me, as they do: Doesn’t cinema have its own language? In which case couldn’t we argue that say that Jane Eyre, the 2011 film is a translation of Jane Eyre, the novel? And what about Omkara, Vishal Bhardwaj’s 2006 excellent rendering of Othello? To call it merely an adaptation of Shakespeare seemed limiting to me because it seemed to ignore the act(s) of linguistic translation that would have been an integral part of the process of writing the screenplay for that movie.

While I was pondering these questions I came across some definitions in one of the readings for our case studies class which I felt would be a good place from which to start thinking about some of these issues in greater detail. In relation to theatre, ‘translation’ is defined as a ‘faithful, literary rendering into another language’, ‘version’ is ‘translation that takes performance requirements into account’ and ‘adaptation’ as a term that has been ‘used to disguise all manner of unacceptable textual and staging manipulations’ (Santoyo quoted in Zatlin, 2005:79). I find these definitions interesting for several reasons. First, they use words I find problematic: faithful, literary, unacceptable, disguise, manipulation. The first three are words that are open to interpretation based on personal preferences. As for ‘disguise’ and ‘manipulation’ they are used her in a prohibitive manner and I can’t help but find the lexical choice odd given that we are talking about theatre, which at its core is based on a recognition of its own ‘artifice’. Of course, at this point I have to say that I am reading and analysing Zatlin’s translation of Santoyo’s definitions, so perhaps there is something ‘lost in translation’ (another film reference, I know!).

The second thing that I find interesting about this set of definitions is that the author posits a dichotomy with ‘translation’ (the good method) at one end and ‘adaptation’ (the bad method) at the other. ‘Version’, then, in this schema becomes a sort of practical compromise. This suggests, to me, that for the author the written ‘text’ is more important than its performance. I suppose then, that how person answers the question ‘What is drama?’ has an impact on what they view as translation and what as adaptation.

For me, drama is both the text and its performance, whether on stage or in the ‘theatre of the mind’ (to borrow a phrase used by Herbert Grabes). Even when I read a play I visualise some form of a stage and actors in their costumes entering and exiting the stage as required. So when I set about translating a play I am translating a performance, whether it is one I’ve seen or one I’ve imagined. And I have seen, on more than one occasion, a Brecht play being performed in Hindi, having been ‘translated’ to know that ‘literary faithfulness’ is not enough, for the performance to be successful. I know I need to tread carefully here, after all what is ‘successful’, but that would take me on a tangent. My tentative conclusion then is that when it comes to theatre/cinema/dramatic works of art being rendered from language to another the degree to which translation and adaptation are one and the same thing depends on the translator’s perception of drama and the degree of difference between the source and target cultures. After all that is the main difference between Jane Eyre and Omkara, one is a translation in the same culture across media, whereas the other is a ‘transadapation’ between cultures. I do also feel that ‘translation’ is at the heart of ‘adaptation’ – all forms of it. This, at any rate, is my rationale for doing the course ‘Adaptation and Interpretation’ next term, and who knows maybe I will end up changing my mind.

Anandi Rao translates from Hindi and Arabic to English. She is doing her MA in Literary Translation and is interested in theatre and women’s writing. She can be reached at anandirao88@gmail.com.