 Thank you. We want to express our gratitude to those in front of us on your screens and wherever you are. We want to thank you for being part of this. I have Fredo Michel with me in Jose I am in Luz de Guzmán and we wanted to be very blunt and honest with you and tell you that we are extremely nervous but that we are also very excited to be here. I'm going to tell you very quickly the origin of this panel. When Alfredo accepted our invitation to be part of this Congress we were very excited and Brenda and myself we wanted to harness his experience in translation which is what is most important at least for me. When Alfredo said yes I immediately thought of having Jose who's a young translator and who should be moderating the panel and who should be asking questions as a form of interview. We found each other you know out of sheer luck and life gave me the opportunity to be here as well and I'm going to make the most of the fact that we don't usually have Alfredo or Jose with us and we want this to be a very casual and organic form of conversation that taps into our curiosity regarding what translation is specifically for the case of theater. I have zero experience in that I have only done just a single translation of a play that has yet to be reviewed but I do want to learn from my peers and colleagues here if I want to initiate myself in this path of ours and what recommendations and whatever I might need as to where I need to go or not to be part of this career. What would you tell a true beginner of this in this in this path? If that is the first question then there are things that are practical and others that are more conceptual in nature and I would start the conversation going into the concept. First off you need not to trust the dictionary. The dictionary is the worst enemy of a translator in practice now not really but it has become one of the instruments that are the most negative for understanding translation the practice of translation and its effects in the society in which I am in which in which translation actually happens and that is for a very simple reason and that is an inequity in the hegemonic languages and non hegemonic languages if you were to review the playbill in an English speaking country let's say I had the opportunity to live both in New York and in London in very important periods of time and the number of translated plays that you see is actually quite limited and you see that the translations are tend to be original productions of English speaking countries and every now and then you will find a play that is based on any type of translation in our medium we find however a different balance there is a quite a large number of plays that begin in our own language but there's also a large birth of languages that are come from other countries and are translated and we see them as a seeding grounds for our experience and for our theater making process and this is an important aspect of an entire history an environment that is cross cutting especially when it has to do with our position in a world in a political axis so I don't want to go too deep into this but you I think know exactly what I'm talking about we have a history of dependence and codependence of other cultures that at the same time however is not defined by that fact in and of itself but it is also defined as an element of that history and through that we've learned to become more people of the world if you will and we have certain vocations of connection towards the outside that in some cases didn't exist before actually yesterday I defined what I what I call deficiencies of certain cultures and the discourse asked us to look at things in a different way you can see that as maybe loopholes or maybe objectives that you need to fulfill as a society I believe that in the end the domination is not as important the nature of the discourse will be there to provide that definition but I believe that we need more access to information and we also have a society specifically in certain stratum and in certain strata and certain educational levels that are not as free to access other languages in multiple ways while in the other societies in which I have lived turn out to be more monolingual in nature compared to our maybe even some reticent to the incorporation of other languages which provide different cultural energies against their own cultural energies that is truly hegemonic in nature so there's this inequality form of unbalance or asymmetry that in a way percolates into other aspects of our life that we usually don't notice but actually have a true effect I don't know how many of you have noted that one of the most beautiful characteristics of the Spanish language has disappeared from common tongue in Mexico and that is the use of the pronominal forms and personal forms for verbs and even the substitution of certain expressions for borrowings from other languages that had no no bearing in our society in our culture and way of thinking and the people of Mexico are loving pretty much everything and I love this and I love that and I love the apple here I love New York right the big apple and yes I do love the big apple but because you can love in New York but I don't know if I do love in New York you know you can love New York but you don't know if you love New York because the notion of loving as I understand it from my own experience as a consumer a full type of literature in the language in which I was born which is Spanish refers to another type of relationship with the objects and this relationship with x y and z is something that we express as something that I love I really like and I am tantalized even and what is common with all these expressions in Spanish is the pronoun me me encanta me gusta I love it I I I make I go I fall me more the ganas I am dying to for something and this is so truly Mexican and and this is something that I had in my experience when I was teaching languages and you realize that this is one of the most difficult elements to understand outside of the Spanish language the reflexive pronouns where you add for instance these specific forms of grammar for instance the the aspects of you can you could have you know all these varieties because we are so creative in that but sometimes you you hear the use of a verb that would be accompanied by a pronoun like this and it no longer works like that and maybe I see this because I'm older but then I asked myself well this is not the experience I had with Spanish because Spanish has this very personal warmth and this is why I'm talking about dictionaries languages have their own personalities they express themselves through their own means through their own ways and if I have been working in 40 years with the use of the English language in Spanish language it's not that I don't like the English language I love it actually but for this very same situation I want to make it different from my own language they have to be separated in a way if we absorb and absorb it turns out that like it's happening with many people that I hear on the streets especially on television they speak English with a Spanish vocabulary they use a syntax that is usually very particular to English which actually results in very weird stuff like the laws of the abandonment of intransitive and transitive elements of grammar for instance now buildings collapse collapse are now buildings say collapse and they collapse this is a personal aspect of the grammar in Spanish say collapse and instead of collapse are a building collapses it's it's not transitive in Spanish he's explaining the fact that it is not transitive in Spanish and why why does this happen usually because people tend to just look for things in the quickest way you know especially when they go to google translate that has nothing of actually translating because it's just a tool it's a machine it's a form of automatic dictionary that could be useful you know for something that you need to look at really quickly but it has nothing to do with the creativity of actually thinking of what the forms of speaking of other countries are in order to translate that into my own work and to understand by virtue of the same thing to search for this and say well it means this or that or the other no hang on a second it's not as simple as that the other day I was asked for a translation for a ruling on a translation a decision and I read it looked at it and I saw in Spanish they're talking about breaking a letter you can break a piece of paper but in English you cannot break a piece of paper you can tear it rip it possibly oddly enough in English you can break wind but you can't say that in Spanish that's an idiomatic phrase which means flatulence so I'm saying this with all due intent so that you can notice how serious this issue actually is to think that break has the same value for the same things in any circumstances is foolhardy and we apply that every single day in common practice in Spanish on TV radio press regrettably even people who practice translation when what they are doing is transliteration or trans creation transcription of signs that they want to transfer from equivalencies which have nothing to do with meaning this is a grave problem I believe because it has an effect on our own experience in our own language which at the same time is the guiding thread of our culture and life experience in closing let me add one more thing whosoever thinks that translation is not that big of a deal is quite mistaken culture itself could not do without translation as a concept because in translation in the broader sense we see the origin of the circulation of thoughts and expression from the very beginning of time and if we don't understand the essence and importance of it in itself then we're not going to understand what it is all about not just its essence but its being thank you Alfredo I think you have laid the ground here for admitting why we're so nervous because precisely as we have said in many of the previous panels this is not just about launching questions out there into the air how are we doing this how do we prepare our questions a closed and an open question are two different things structuring it in truth preparing the question and in this regard that any of us can open up these tools like google translate or use a dictionary in effect you might think anybody can do this but I think that what we were so nervous about and felt intimidated by Jose and myself before coming here is that it's not just about trying to do something and not just that you need experience but I think that we feel intimidated by the fact that translation is going to require a much more complex train of thought and before giving the floor to you we were talking just before coming out on stage about the close relationship between thought and language and how both can influence one another and this is no minor thing the fact of using a given word instead of another given word can be life changing even though this may sound exaggerated and I'm convinced that that is the case that's why we are so keen on shouldering the responsibility of this being so utterly important when you began participating in talking Alfredo it struck fear in my heart because I use a tool I translate from Portuguese into Spanish and there is a tool it's a Brazilian website called informal dictionary in Portuguese and it's not something that is regulated by laws but it stems from the experience of people and their everyday way of speaking so as you spoke it occurred to me that that is exactly what it is and I was thinking about the initial question there this would be one recommendation to become involved in both cultures to become involved in both languages so when we translate and specifically I translate theater and nothing else but when we translate there is a recognition of my person my experience sound images that a given culture is offering me so that I can understand my reality and my circumstances and based on this I can turn it around and in my translation process I do go round and round and think and rethink until I come up with something that I can say without having it lose its original essence and meaning let me share with you and I had already talked about this when we saw one another earlier I was debating with a dramaturge for a long time and she is a phrase that she said the literal transformation is to give your ass and I questioned what she was trying to do where she was going with this phrase and she said it means having anal sex and I said okay so that's not giving your ass because giving your ass here means that you are sucking up to someone so I I looked for another phrase to give it that intent and she wasn't convinced so I think that this has to do with the lack of involvement that the translation process demands and that is involvement investigation of the cultural culture and the source language into the origin into the target language from source to target okay this is abstinence in dramaturges the typical oh worried about this or that or the other as though they weren't always writing too much which is typical of dramaturges but they also thought that dramaturge is about writing books and the historical process and blah blah but my main love is Shakespeare and Shakespeare and his era and they're dead now of course but it wasn't really about thinking about that kind of writing would be making books came afterwards but what I'm heading toward is that obsession that dramaturges like to employ and you're talking about something that is conceptually very important and that is not understanding that the value of translation does not lie inequality between two things but rather in the differentiation that exists in other words understanding the value of the difference is to understand translation and not just understand it but exercise it as it is required and that is as a release element one that liberates not one that is going to be a restraint nor be something that reduces you translation way long ago was something embarrassing and there were lots of misconceptions about translation whether it was taken as bible truth or not rather now we are seeking manners and you said I think it over and over in my head but you are trans thinking it and amongst friends and colleagues and so many people over the years with whom we deal regarding translation you find trans thinking trans creating everything trans in translation and in effect that is it but it is to translate to transfer it means to take something from one place to another place then that is precisely what you're doing you're taking it to another realm and the first thing they say is you changed the meaning hang on a second you look at the original text nothing's been changed it says the same thing identical I swear if you do a translation and then you do a back translation then it didn't change at all there was no magical act here that made the original change just because I wrote this translation of that text and that is the value of translation that it can foster that otherness that is in effect just that otherness of course it is going toward and how is it doing that and when we talked about this I mentioned this example if one thinks about a dramatic act or action in terms of what it reads right there then you're done for any practitioner of performing arts will know that what is there a series of signs that are invitations to act to execute we are executor we are executors we are executing something more than any other field of translation it is reflected in the performing arts we execute language if we think about you poor devils use you minor substitutes of a great author you're not going to end up anywhere if Shakespeare tells a joke measure for measure a man who worked in the brothel is being interrogated by a judge and the judge asks for his name and Pompey is the name Pompey is the name of this man otherwise in Spanish it would be a Pompeyo and in English Pompey referring to the ancient hero Pompeo the great now Pompey the great this Pompey is just a client at a brothel so there is already an implicit joke there if the judge goes on and says okay Pompey what else what is your surname bum that means Pompey bum and this gentleman Pompey does have a large bum obviously the text text is going to suggest something to show a large bum and to feature this person now this works for me I have to be anchored and enslaved to the fact that good old Shakespeare in the 17th century measure by measure 17th century brings a joke to the audience that is based on reminding the audience of the existence of a hero in ancient times Pompey very important to them and then the name of Pompey comes in this room and thanks to my translation it was performed in this very room we're in and then that Mexican audience in 2016 became familiar with Pompey bum because what's Shakespeare doing here he's simply writing Pompey bum Pompey rear end and I'm sure people will laugh at that I'm sure Shakespeare thought of this thought of that this joke still works well in English but what is the dramaturge the playwright doing here using a name with epic legendary subtle meaning together with a large rear end in a lowly man and that's what the playwright is doing Pompey bum this is what he's doing so this is like having the dictionary here but this is what is really happening in reality in on the stage so in addition that doesn't satisfy me Pompey bum Pompey rear end Pompey but and in Mexico somebody might say well in in Mexico we use the word pompas for a rear end and that is true says the interpreter it is a word that means precisely that in Mexico and there was another hero called herculean herculean and also it was the actor there and the actor also had that bum but then and what's your last name here comes the crux of the joke magno so this was herculean magno and this draws some draws laughter here but imagine back then the theater roof fell fell down with laughing laughter herculean magno not one of the 16 performances that I watched here failed to bring out huge laughter because the joke worked the joke was made based on a name with epic legendary back meaning in addition to the presence of a very large bum and there you have the joke that's the entire joke in itself and as you have so clearly said we need to organically enter into the life of both languages and know how to separate them and understand the processes of dramatic speech that is being proposed in the work that is go back to your notes understand which keys you're going to press and what is so fabulous here as you don't have to use a metric reading for this what if you jazz it up a bit and that's what I did with that name I had to jazz it up a bit and it came out really well you can do this in so many ways obviously in this regard I think that is the creative work of the translator there is no translation without creativity at all so I think that the dramatic text the play is a proposal of senses and meaning and we are the ones responsible for putting it into place so that it makes sense for the person who's going to read it in this case theater it would be the director the actors and then it will resonate in a scenic space or elsewhere so that the dramaturg can be happy with the result too right someone in the position of an artistic director or at least the director of the script or the literary manager per se is the person who has to read all these texts and that's where the germ and the seed is planted and it's going to it's going to echo in the ears of that first reader otherwise it's just dead print very often in Mexican scenes what we read and what we hear in Mexican stage is something that we are seeing here and sometimes it's like putting your shoe into a foot that is three sizes too small and perhaps then you're floating around there with what you are doing and then you are using a very broad concept of translation some things work and others do not so let's not be frightened away if we are executing our craft how many different ways are there of playing a bit one of Beethoven's sonatas well there are as many ways to play it as there are pianists who will play it that is the type of exchange between the reader between the composer and the performer that is not constrained to a certain line of restrictions to jazz it up maybe and sometimes you can jazz things up until they're no longer recognizable or satisfactory you know what the advantage of translating is that you can also do this very same text two three four times you can work on them in many different ways their nature is ephemeral and so what do we have to have here great responsibility I am not going to put someone into a scene on stage if I don't know what I'm doing and just say oh I just thought of doing this there is a process there is work serious hard work and it's informed work that has to be done and you have to know how to defend it and you have to make sure that anyone wishing to challenge you you can put in their place and explain why you're doing things and maintain it if they're not going to buy it then that's a whole other matter that's a very comforting thought to hear you talk like this because that was my first approach to try to fragment and go by small stages and think about this word by word and now I understand that there's no way possible that this is going to work yeah when I was beginning that was like having the dictionary right next to me having the script and having your little notebook and word by word make sure everything was just right and it was like this is endless I'm never going to finish and then I reread and I say this makes no sense at all you can't do this word by word no it doesn't fit together thank you so much Alfredo for what you're sharing because it is precisely this other possibility that you're talking about here don't just go word per word but try to make sure that you can see the whole picture don't be afraid that it's going to be overwhelming or too much what I understand here is that we have to have the entire experience the experience of you can't translate a play if you haven't finished reading it to start with the effect of it I think is what we're seeking here how is it going to all fit together as a whole and not fragmented because then precisely what I'm seeing here is that we are cutting it off we're destroying it okay once again going back to what's practical I have always maintained this I'm going to die saying this the translator is a performer we are performers we're not substitute writers or something like that we are performers we execute these texts we produce them so what does a performer do repeats and repeats and repeats and with every rehearsal every exercise every search they find answers they find hints clues they close doors and open up other ones and this is pretty much the same thing you have to have very good reading of it not one or two or three or four or five but going back to the musical interpreter how many times are you going to do this you are going to evaluate if that pianissimo is going to be a half note lesser a half note more or if a given color is going to take you to a place should that note be longer should we prolong it or should we prolong the other one or should we cut it short these are readings you test them you test them over and over again that is why is a never-ending story quite frankly if there were no premiere date if you couldn't if you weren't going to just sit down and you have all your notes ready and you say to the director I'm sending this to you now where you talked it over with the actors which is fantastic to be part of a team in the production itself and as I said yesterday that you might have the door open and have the keys to go into through that door and be a part of those spaces and say I feel comfortable or perhaps you don't another example in my experience several years ago and it was the first theater play by Palacios directed by Palacios by the South Africa and Hubert the Isle and the other one was Venezuelan and my translation wasn't working the first and second readings that I had with this that and the other and I would say I have I am familiar enough with this but I am familiar and this is how I talk to my mother who is from El Salvador and in the rhythm of speech of that person that character and they began feeling more he began feeling more comfortable that's part of your work to make sure that the actor is comfortable with the speech that you have prepared so there is no small merit in carrying out a micro analysis and finding some idea to isolate and fragment what was being said and then we would have to talk about specific cases to see what works what doesn't work however what I can tell you that stands clear is that no practice that leads to a satisfactory result should be left out the underlying idea is that you can integrate them at the end of the day so that the product will be satisfactory and once you have delivered it it should satisfy the users you executed it the first time but they are going to be the definitive executors of it with the orchestra director and perhaps you will discover something and say oops wait a minute I think I can improve this part of it this verse this stands at 100 percent and I also saw this in translation for stage because that is part of collaboration and for me that's why it's so satisfactory I began doing things in marketing and children's psychology at 17 18 years of age I was already translating but now I'm just doing theater rehearsing rehearsing you know applying the changes both in translation and theater these are living processes that need to continue and need to be modified and continue to advance when I insist you can do that and redo that the Romeo and Juliet that was uh went to the stage by Roberto Lozano is not the same text now that now he set up for the Milano theater the Lucerna theater it was the same text of Romeo and Juliet but chopped in different versions and I myself redid that redo and which was for staff in verse and I did that in prose especially when I was asked of my translation that was included in one of the podcast and bilingual but if you want to do a bilingual version of this I wouldn't be able to provide you the text that has a prose and although it is a rhythmic prose I cannot give you that as I had thought of it at the moment why because they were going to work with it in verse and I need there to be some form of parity between the verse and the prose so this is maybe the fourth version of my translation because I now wanted to be part of a website in which many of my translations are right now for the public but I am changing my translation again well not not entirely but a large amount of the things I have translated because due to the podcast in which it was going to be included I drew a few other conclusions especially when I analyzed the whole panorama Indian so this is a never-ending process and this is something that also is usually not understood in the common places of our trade because people usually don't see what goes behind doing it actually writer Borges said that it was translation was a trap of writing especially when you consider one blueprint of writing more valuable than this one or the other no you should usually go well this is the final version and it stays like that and that is a trap in and of itself because that is not necessary mean that it is superior to maybe other version that you would have had and you especially when we talk about literature in ways in which they sort of compete between one version and the other and it can take us to spaces that are not entirely fruitful of or any type of profit you can say tell yourself well the translation is going okay but if you do not go further than that then your work will be poor and if you strive that means that you put stock into your value and did you actually have an added value actually when we were choosing the questions because we did a rather giant brainstorming session and one of the questions that I believe is one of the most genuine that I have is what would you say if I were to look for a certain for specific certainty once you have the possibilities of improving on the stage especially when you're doing a translation at the same time and you can see how it'll work in the bodies in the spaces I believe that there are a few advantages but you have to give it from the get go of possibility and imagination of your text and then how could I start to feel well that I'm doing okay that where can I say that I can be more comfortable in order to advance so that our questions would not be too overwhelming and although we wouldn't have a definitive version maybe we can have an approximation of it to that of which will be used that question is something I really can't answer except from the own experience however why because like any other process you're going to fall and nothing will happen from the get go you're going to trip and fall I mean you can look back into things that you did in the past and then you acquire this really blinded version of yourself and you know some of my translations are even buried in some computer and I would rather leave them there because I am ashamed of that line of work and through your tripping and your falling you realize the mistakes you made and of course working with the voices and the bodies is one of the greatest advantages that the translator for the stage can have it is life itself the life of your achievement and if you don't have that however you have to deliver in the end and this is what I was referring to in this relationship on whether you are the executor and the executing you know this is what you do you execute but you are also the execution at the same time and and what I have found in my at least for me that helped was that I worked in three different schools of acting and although I would I did act a few times I don't think of myself as an actor because being an actor is a different thing but I did realize what an actual actor is supposed to be and seeing things from the perspective of an actor and develop that as a specific tool of the translation work and also I had an extraordinary teacher that had the capability of being an excellent actor who was a male Ivalis and he taught us how to listen like very few could actually teach you and if you would actually pay attention and you listen to the all the tonalities to the coloratura to all these rhythms and to everything that is being given to you by the dramatic text you have over 40 maybe dramatic voices and even though there might not be the main cast they are part of this quorum of the scores and you have to provide the richness to all these voices and you have to think of how you do it is a sort of a necessary schizophrenia that you have to engage into I think we're in overtime unfortunately I would like to close by saying that Jose and myself are so eager to start in giving and engaging in a larger stride in taking larger steps and this is why I why we want to ask for the audience's help and that of yours as well and we are here to engage in any type of conversation thank you so much