Translating the Classical Play
J. Michael Walton, University of Hull, UK

There is no dearth of definitive rules for translators of the classical play. They come screaming like steam from the navel of Dylan Thomas's Mrs Pugh. But, as in the case of the poisonable Mrs Pugh, the actuality is all in the mind of Mr Pugh. Each translator (and I confess to being as guilty as the next) seems to formulate a personal philosophy, writ less in the script of the originator or the target than in the wishful thinking of the intermediary. Notwithstanding these personal approaches, there are, and have been since Dryden and Goethe, plenty of thoughtful and provocative statements on the nature of translation, a few of which may be repeated here:

'If ever there were a phase of translation in which the principle of the moderniser was uncontestably to be preferred, it is in the rendering of the Greek play', Theodore Savory in 1957.

'It is useless, then, to read Greek in translations. Translators can but offer us a vague equivalent; their language is necessarily full of echoes and associations', Virginia Woolf in 1925.

'A translator's best hope, I think, and still the hardest to achieve, is Dryden's hope that his author will speak the living language of the day', Robert Fagles in 1966.

'The theorists... contradict each other at every turn; and what is worse they show the most lamentable discrepancies between theory and practice.... Translation is not, at any level, an ideal art; it is a crutch for human infirmity', Peter Green in 1960

'While a poet's words endure in his own language, even the greatest translation is destined to become part of the growth of its own language and eventually to be absorbed by its renewal', Walter Benjamin in 1970.

'We need an eye which can see the past in its place with its definite differences from the present, and yet so lively that it shall be present to us at the present', T.S. Eliot in 1932.

'Translation is a quite specific job, to make a version which is true to the original and doesn't bore the tits off everyone', Pam Gems in 1990.

Drama in translation is more prone than are poetry and prose fiction to inspiring the personal agenda. The contributions of director and actor, as Pavis has pointed out, demand to be consulted. A play is an artefact. If it happens also to be a poem, or a piece of fine prose, well and good: but it was Arthur Miller who suggested that there was no need for a great playwright to be a great writer. The Greek canon may consist of pieces ofgreat literature, but it is the dramatic qualities which today's translator needs to address if the plays are not to take their place on the shelf rather than on the stage.

Greek drama is complex. It deals with issues which are from a past so deep that any contact with the present - and drama without contact has no point - can only be through bridges. These bridges have to be created in the present. A contrary danger to the over-literary translation is that we find a context so contemporary, or even so universal, that the 'strangeness' of the original is submerged and diluted. That way we lose baby andbathwater.

The issue is as great, though in rather different ways, in the translation of tragedy as it is in the translation of comedy. Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides had writing styles, or, to be more accurate, styles handed down to us through a written text, which are so different that Plato might have been tempted to suggest that the same translator could not translate more than one of them. As for comedy, is there not a licence here to abandon Aristophanes altogether in favour of the pun, the gag, the contemporary satire? And to treat Menander as though he were writing a pilot for a television sitcom?

There are two distinct issues for debate here. The first relates to specific questions inherent in relocating a dramatic or theatrical situation in a context which is not wholly, in some cases not at all, dependent on the spoken word: the issue, if you like, of Referential and Emotive meaning. That is the nub of why The Performance Translation Centre was created.

The second is a direct question for all translation but a key feature of any discussion on the classics, namely the difference between what John McFarlane in an essay on Modes of Translation called 'Accuracy' and 'Grace'.

In the name of brevity I shall try to link these around the whole process of translation for performance. 'The cultural context of the play', wrote Klaudyna Rozhin discussing her translation of a play from the Polish about a group of émigré Poles living in New York, 'is a framework built of objects, processes, institutions, customs and ideas peculiar to one group of people amongst whom the play is set'. Greek drama - tragedy, or satyr, comedy old or new - was created for a specific place, a special occasion, for performance in masks, and so on. The characters have no more than a stage reality, even those who, as in Aristophanes, were caricatures of contemporaries in all probability sitting somewhere in the house. Nobody believed that what they saw and heard was real life.

What audiences did accept was the presentation of stories, conflicts and debates in the form of dramatic parable. And so powerfully were these issues presented, we are led to believe, that audiences were moved to tears of joy or sadness, and all manner of associated emotions for which 'pity' and 'fear' become the exemplars. Through a sense of total artifice the playwrights developed a sophisticated stage language, of music and dance, of the visual and the aural, of dramatic rhythm and theatrical device. The artificiality was enhanced by the dramatic structure, the verse formations, the choice of individual words and metaphors, all in different ways according to the manner in which each playwright 'played' audience expectations in the name of anagnoriseis and peripeteiai.

Virginia Woolf was right, of course. It is useless 'to read Greek in translations'. But it is not a reason not to translate Greek plays and present them for a modern audience. Dramatic translation, either in isolation for the reader, or for a particular production, involves a reconstruction of the imagination, rooted in the original but allowing for those contributions by actor and director.

There are moments in the tragedies, and certainly not exclusively in Euripides, that offer a subtext which may be rendered, and hence played, on the line or against the line. The reuniting of brother and sister in Euripides' Electra or the welcome afforded to Aegeus in his Medea are simple examples; there are sequences where the stage picture offers to the

audience a contradiction to the reactions of the characters - Clytemnestra's welcome to Agamemnon, and most of Sophocles' Electra; there are understatements, overreactions, ironies, echoes, images, allusions. It is the task of the translator to open these out, not close them down. The translator will also have to get to grips with the 'foreignness' of a

Greek play and, if you follow Benjamin, eschew 'domesticity'; if you prefer Savory, embrace it. But these are decisions which can, and, I believe, should, be made according to dramatic rather than literary priorities.

As my function here is to fuel the debate, rather than to lead it, I am happy to leave examples to others and conclude with a series of questions which, as a translator, I wrestle with from time to time and to which respondents may wish to bring their own perspective:

1.  Verse or prose?

Tony Harrison once took issue with me over my translation of Cyclops in which only the choruses are in verse: 'I simply cannot understand anyone translating verse into prose'. Michael Alexander, writing in the Times Higher Education Supplement said he used to agree, but recanted: 'Much have I travelled in the realms of lead since then'.

2.  Enhance or leave alone?

Don Taylor, in his Antigone adds to Antigone's speech about Polyneices

    'Left unburied
  There is no rest for him in the underworld,
  No more than here'

presumably assuming that the audience need this. Sophocles does not stress what will happen to Polyneices in the next world.

Is explanation necessary? How much should cultural specifics be adjusted for comprehension?

3.  How long and how short?

Many translators are elliptical both in the choruses and in the dialogue. Kenneth McLeish and I spent happy hours on the phone arguing over whether stichomythia could be reduced to single word dialogue without loss of the original.

On the other hand, how do you render all of Agamemnon 418-9

'ommaton d'en acheniais
 errei pas' Aphrodita'

in seven words?

Or the emotional condensation in Samia

CHR:   Hoti tout' aneilomen?
DEM:   Dia touto kai...

CHR:   Ti "Kai"?
DEM:   Dia touto.

I was proud of doing it in 15 words to Menander's 10.

4.  'At last. Greek for the ordinary punter', headline in The Stage. Language and context - Domestic or Foreign?

5.  Character and interpretation?

Is it possible, necessary, inevitable to interpret a text while translating it?

6.  Does comedy mean licence?

None of this tackles the questions of adaptation, of director's as opposed to translator's vision, the dreaded 'literal' or a number of other issues of translating any play. Perhaps, though, these, adaptation in particular, could be left to another occasion.

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RESPONSES

Lorna Hardwick, Open University, UK

I'm responding to Michael's ideas somewhat from the margins, since I'm neither a translator nor a director. However, my research on the reception of Greek drama and poetry in the late 20th century involves mapping the relationships between modern translations of various kinds and the source texts. In the case of drama this means not just looking at verbal relationships but also at stage 'language', theatrical crafts and other aspects of the new interactive cultural context which is created.

In reviewing and documenting productions, both in the original and in English translation, I'm struck by the increasing awareness of the (sometimes dominant) role of the non-verbal aspects of translation and by underlying directorial assumptions about this. For example, the recent student production of Euripides' Iphigenia in Aulis in Oxford (January 1999) was in Greek and in the Programme Notes the director (Helen Eastman) spelt out very clearly her belief in 'the power to communicate through the body and voice, transcending language barriers...the language of mime and the body creating character or emotion or telling a story can be universal'.

However, it seems to me that the situation is a bit more complicated than that -

(i) yes, there has to be a partnership between verbal and non-verbal elements. The non-verbal may also have a crucial role in 'interpretation' and communication, especially when many of the audience are not fluent in the language of performance (cf. the role of mime in the 1998 Purcarete/Craiova Theatre Company's Oresteia staged in Romanian translation). Would this also apply, I wonder, when the audience is not familiar with the Greek myth and/or is unaware that the Greek dramatists were adapting and versioning traditional stories, i.e. lacks the 'language' in which to contextualise what is happening?

BUT

(ii) it is a mistake to imagine that non-verbal aspects of staging necessarily represent a translation into a universal 'language'. Plucking one's beard, for instance, and gestures of supplication in general are culturally rooted. Equally, laughter and its impact to a high degree involve learned responses. Furthermore, there may be clashes between source culture and performing and audience cultures. A good example of this is recorded in Hansgunther Heyme's account of the production of the Antigone in Calcutta (Theater vol 11 no 3, summer 1980), in which an apparently westernised visual language was grafted on to a Bengali translation of the Greek. According to Heyme, a restructuring of the text needed to take place to 'reduce the group's religious and caste fears of touching one another and to develop a visual language which would make it possible to understand the action, although we [sc. the directorate?] are not fluent in Bengali.'

So it follows that

(iii) the non-verbal aspects of the staging also involve assumptions about both the generating culture and that of the receiving audience and may conserve and communicate the strangeness and distance of the source culture or domesticate it within (assumed) contemporary understanding or, crucially do both. The process is complicated by the conflicts and dynamics within the Greek play itself and by increasing awareness of sub-cultures which make it hard to generalise about audiences.

I wonder whether the popularity of the McLeish translations is because the comparative spareness both preserves the verbal framework and allows directors and players room to set up a translation partnership with the text. Coupling verbal and non-verbal aspects of translation and being more acutely aware of their relation is also useful in getting us away from the notion that reading or spectating Greek in translation is somehow inferior. Surely, its just different. Every translation is a new work and every performance a new play?

Marianne McDonald, University of California, San Diego, USA

Just some notes in response to Professor Walton's interesting and provocative topic for the February seminar.

Professor Walton makes astute observations which are carried out in his own fine translations. He recognizes how these plays have to be acted in front of an audience, and understood by both actors and audience. Retaining the strangeness of the original is also a challenge which should be respected while not obscuring the major issues which still are valid in the present: quite a tightrope act.

I think it is true that certain translators do better with certain playwrights. Irene Papas asked me to do a translation of Seven Against Thebes. I realized the poetry was simply beyond me and I would be doing the original a great disservice if I tried to translate it. I still think it is untranslatable and have never found a good translation of it. I have just

finished a translation of Sophocles' Antigone. I hope that what I have produced is something actable, accessible, and conveys at least some of the major issues, retaining both the strange particularities and the universal qualities.

I think I believe more in placing ancient tragedy in specific modern contexts. Athol Fugard, who will direct it this summer in Cork, Ireland, wants instead the "universal." I am arguing this particular issue presently with my co-director (Marie-Louise O'Donnell) with whom I shall work this fall in Dublin when I am teaching at UCD (my seminar is called "Cool Classics and Irish Fire: Irish Adaptations of Greek Tragedy"): she, like

Fugard, wants us to go for the "universal." I would prefer to go the Tom Paulin route (The Riot Act, based on Antigone), and would like to put Creon and Antigone in the Northern Irish context by the use of the actors' accents and other signs. I don't think the particular setting defeats the universals: for instance, the conflict between family and state (see the film Some Mother's Son). Since this play will be performed in Ireland, I would like it to speak to the people seeing it. This battle/dialogue is not over.

Accuracy vs. grace is another tightrope act. I prefer staying as close as possible to the original text, while also aiming for grace.

Quick suggestions for the questions: 1. Verse or prose? I like an actable verse for the choruses, but prose for the dialogues. This is probably just a personal preference. I often find the drama more gripping this way. But some of Tony Harrison's translations are very powerful and dramatically effective.

2. Enhance or leave alone? Leave alone for the most part. I can't stand Don Taylor's translations.

3. How long or how short? Just right...as Leopold II said to Mozart, "Too many notes...too many notes..." Mozart answered, "Just the right amount." Here the artist must decide. I like a Greek tragedy not to go over two hours and to be performed without intermission, just as we think the originals were done.

Peter Meineck , Center for Ancient Studies, New York University, USA and Aquila Theatre Company

As I think these international e-mail seminars are a great idea, I though that I had better put my money where my mouth is, and send in some comments. Michael's opening remarks are characteristically lucid and thought provoking and I would just like to add a few observations based on my own work on translations of Aeschylus and Aristophanes.

I think that there is no such thing as a definitive translation, the beauty of what we do is that each translator can contribute to our understanding and appreciation of any given work. A great example of this is the current translations available of Homer. I have my students read corresponding books of Fitzgerald, Fagles and Lombardo which has always led to spirited discussions about style and moreover, often shocks students about how diverse translations can be. In this respect translators are facing an uphill battle with gaining widespread recognition for what amounts to a separate and definable craft. For example just visit Amazon.com or Barnesandnoble.com and call up a particular translation of any Greek play in print. If you use the translators name to search, every version of that particular play comes up along with the reviews for several other translators. The site infers that all translations must be the same. Clearly we have a way to go in educating our readers (and listeners) that a translation is far more than just a mechanical rendering from one language into another. As Michael rightly points out it involves creative decisions at every level and I think that we can all agree that a translation is a brand new work in its own right.

To this end there is room for many types of translation. The crib, the poem, the stage version, the adaptation, the weird and wonderful. Furthermore each generation needs to retranslate ancient works in the light of the mores and fashions of its own times and to incorporate some of the newer research that is being done into these plays. I recently had the pleasure of working closely with Alexander Pope's (and others) superb 1726 Odyssey, clearly a masterpiece, but as it was said at that time, "It's a pretty poem Mr. Pope, but is it Homer." Michael shows that these debates are as old as the art of translation itself but I do believe that there are some pointers to help the hapless translator.

First of all, I think translating a play for the stage is a matter of objective. In the same way an actor may seek the objective, or truth of his or her scene to unlock a performance that goes beyond the simple delivery of text (hopefully)! So the translator is beholden to the purpose of the translation itself. Is it for publication in a particular series with a specific style? Is it to be used in a classroom and taught by Classics teachers? Is it to exist as a text on stage and only heard, just experienced in the moment the line is uttered? This last thought is important and in my own work I have developed translations created solely for performance and then altered then on the advice of editors for a particular edition. This leads to an interesting debate. Is this poetry, writing, clever prose to be savored in an arm chair, pored over and reflected upon, or dynamic living speech that rolls around the actors tongue and bounces off the walls of the theatre? I have found that sometimes the two aims do not always concur.

Pope's Odyssey is a great example. It reads wonderfully on the page, beautiful iambic pentameters, rich imagery, and thoughtful phrases, but when given to my actors to read, some of them truly excellent verse speakers, they described it as "wading through treacle" and the relentless pentameters created on stage rhythm that became quite soporific (for those of you who will immediately cite Shakespeare, his texts are often remarkable for just when this meter is broken. Actors love to look for those kinds of clues in any text). But it is clear that the market for most translations is predominantly academic and so the objectives can get steered towards translation of a play as literature rather than drama and yes, I do think these two have become different creatures. Sometimes when a starling new translation emerges on the scene it can too hastily be rejected by the academy as being too way out without an examination of the actual function or purpose of that work. This is often a shame.

For a translator to start of with a clear purpose, a targeted audience and an idea of who or what the finished product is for, is essential to producing a work with any kind of feeling or passion. Obviously either the translators own views of how this play should be performed or the production values of the show it may be intended for, have a great bearing on the finished product, but this is no bad thing. I am constantly getting into good-natured arguments with colleagues over the original objective of a given playwright. My point is any of us who have worked in the theatre at any level know well that the overriding objective of a play is a success on the first (and in the case of the Greeks, only) night. It is only a play that succeeds on stage in the moment that will then possibly develop into something that resembles a written "classic." In this sense the contribution and interpretations of the dramatist have as much relevance to our understanding of these texts as those of the philologist, historian, archaeologist et al. Perhaps then, we can be prompted by the example of the theatre, an enterprise that can only evolve and be productive with team work and the coming together of various disparate elements to create a live show. The playwright can't work in total isolation, he or she must have a sense of the theatre, and objective and understanding of the basic mechanics that make a show, otherwise the work will fail. The playwright must give the work to a director who must then give it to the actors who in turn give to their audience. As Director Robert Richmond so pointedly said during one technical rehearsal "hell is other people."

One other example of translation in performance. Michael asked a question about comedy, what do we do with ancient jokes that nobody understands anymore? Let us never forget that theatre is a Greek word and it means "seeing place" and the visual contribution of actors can do a great deal to enhance a text. I remember our production of Wasps, we had this problem with jokes referring to Cleon, and there are many. How could we make these work to a modern audience. This text has to live in the moment, there are no footnotes. The actors came up with a great and very Aristophanic solution: Every time the name Cleon was mentioned the chorus leader forced the entire audience to stand up make a "epic movie" salute and chant back "Cleon" in unison. It worked like a charm. This very theatrical device translated so effectively that no-one had to be told that the Cleon of Wasps was a corrupt and noisily manipulative rabble rouser, they were doing it and it was hilarious for all. Now, my question is how to translate that to a written text, a stage direction? A footnote? This is a small example that translation of a play should mean far more than just words. We don't go to the theatre just to hear words, neither did the Greeks. My point is that we as translators should strive to create a text that conveys the essential energy of a live performance and seek to understand and translate not only words but also action (apologies to Bernard Knox). I mean, why do we call Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes poets? They were dramatists and their work was originally created for the theatre.

Hope my ramblings make some sense. I am delighted to contribute some thoughts and look forward to reading others.

(Just published: Aeschylus' Oresteia and Aristophanes' Clouds, Wasps and Birds, with Hackett and just starting Oedipus The King with Paul Woodruff, plus Aquila on the road with Odyssey and Comedy of Errors)

David Wiles, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK

[This arrived after Michael had sent final response]

I think discussion of these issues becomes blocked if one starts to imagine that there is a right and wrong answer. To assert in any absolute terms a right way to translate is to impose a fixed set of cultural values on a pluralist world. It seems to me that different translations are needed for different purposes. Since my knowledge of Greek leaves much to be desired, I cannot as a researcher manage without my crib, viz a battered and annotated set of Chicagos. But I would not dream of setting these texts before Greekless drama students, or before an audience. Arrowsmith, at least, was performable in his day, but for performance purposes the useable life of a translation is not long. The late Kenneth Mcleish has now established himself as the standard translator for performance - in Britain, and I suspect most other anglophone countries but am open to correction on this - because his stripped down texts have such a sure sense of rhythm. They seem to work for psychological and ritualist versions alike because they succeed to a large extent in effacing the voice of the translator, and the sense of cultural otherness. Actors feel comfortable. One of the peculiarities of our theatrical culture is that we accept the director as an intervening creative force between the Greek dramatist and us but are reluctant to accept the presence of the modern writer. Texts by poets like Pound or Harrison can (in my experience) produce much excitement and creativity in the drama student, and a strong sense of engagement with a cultural other, but directors are reluctant to take these texts on because they want it to be seen that they are directing Sophocles or Aeschylus, not Pound or Harrison. Perhaps things look different across the water in Ireland, where a strong tradition of poet-translators stems from the inspiration of Yeats. On this side of the water, words are mistrusted, and the minimalism of Mcleish appeals to our theatrical taste.

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Final Response from Topic Leader Michael Walton

A very brief response to Marianne McDonald, Peter Meineck and Lorna Hardwick for their interesting and illuminating comments. I hope they will forgive a single reply.

I do make a very clear distinction in my own mind between responsibilities as a translator and as a director. I will be giving a paper, I hope, about the difference between translating in a vacuum (say for publication); translating for a specific production and/or performer; and translating for a production where the translator is acting as dramaturg.

Marianne raises this issue cogently as well as pointing to the fact that a good translation should have that 'hospitable vagueness' of the greatest plays, i.e. there is room for the performance dimension. Both productions of her Antigone sound feasible, as well as others, perhaps.

Peter's Cleon example raises a different issue to the one I had in mind about comedy but is clearly a direction issue. You should not, in my opinion, write 'business' into a published translation, any more than stage directions which are all too often in published versions either prescriptive or misleading or both. How much of a boon is it to English speakers that we have a single Shakespeare whereas the French/Russians/Germans have several?

Lorna's lucidly expressed point about what is 'culturally rooted' is fundamental, but applicable just as much to the verbal as the non-verbal, surely. Complementing the generating and the receiving cultures is, as she says, complicated by 'the conflicts and dynamics within the Greek play'. Sometimes that can be a positive boon especially if the overall aim is translocation, not merely translation. But then, maybe we are back at that watershed between translation and direction.

Thank you all,
Michael