 Hi everyone. Thank you so much for coming to our panel, especially given that it's the after lunch slot on Saturday, on Halloween, on this beautiful day, and so on and so forth. So this is theater that translated. We have a panel on translating drama, obviously, and I'm Jennifer Zobel. And what gave rise to this panel was thinking about the fact, the sort of obvious fact that discussions of theater translation are often quite segregated from discussions of other kinds of literary translation. They tend to happen more within the theater community than within the literary translation community. And we've got a panel here of people who actually translate across genre. One of our panelists does primarily now focus on translating drama, but the others are a combination of work and a combination of genres. So one of the things that we really wanted to emphasize in this panel is the distinct considerations that these translators have taken into account in their process of translating drama relative to their work in prose, poetry, and so on and so forth. We're going to have them present one at a time on projects, on dramatic projects that they've worked on that they consider particularly notable and instructive. And then we're going to open to questions from me, from one another, and from you as well. So we're going to start with Sean Bai, and I'll read his short bio from the program to introduce him. Sean Bai is a translator, actor, and theater director and humanities programmer for the Polish Cultural Institute in New York. His translations of Polish fiction, drama, and reportage have been published in Words Without Borders, Contaments, and in other words, he is an artistic director of the London-based English book theater. Thank you, Jen. My computer has decided that this is an excellent time to install a bunch of updates, so I'm going to vamp for a little bit while my notes come up here. I lived in London for a long time, and I was involved for two years with a company called the Invisible Theater Company. We were an online radio drama or audio drama company that specialized in all kinds of writing from around the world, because I was one of the co-founders of it. I, from the very beginning, wanted the company to have a bit of an emphasis on literature and translation. At the time, I was one of the British Center for Literary Translation mentees for Polish, and I was working with Antonio Lloyd-Jones, a very well-known Polish translator, and so the translations that I did for the Invisible Theater Company were sort of part of my initial education as a literary translator, which was really exciting. A few words about radio drama. This is a form that hasn't really persisted in the United States. If you remember back from, I don't know, the 50s, the 60s, you had shows like The Shadow and this kind of thing on American radio. They've kind of died out here, but in Europe and particularly in countries that have a strong tradition of public broadcasting service, they have been maintained up to the present day, and in countries including in Poland prominent authors will write radio dramas as part of their output. So part of my interest wasn't sort of tapping into this unmind area of Polish literature. We did three translations of plays in the course of the two years of sort of activity with Invisible Theater. Two plays by Czekow, one of which was an old translation and one of which was my adaptation of an old translation. And we did one original translation of a Polish play called The Death of the Mother Superior by a Polish writer and playwright called Adam Kaminski, who is based in Gdansk. The play was chosen basically because it was really fun. It's a kind of contemporary Gothic horror story that takes place in a convent outside of Rome. The Mother Superior is dying. Everyone believes that she is imminently going to be made into a saint. And she reveals to her second in command that she was inspired to found this order of nuns by a visit from the devil. And that this is a secret that she has kept her entire life and is now admitting on her deathbed. Meanwhile, the Pope's envoy is rushing to the convent to hear her confession before she dies. And the two seconds in command at the convent decide that they must do anything they can to prevent this from happening. So they decide to murder the Mother Superior before she can meet the papal emissary. Who at the end of the play we discover is the very demon who visited her in the first place and very carefully organized for all of this to take place. It's a wonderful play. It's written in a very serious, very straight style, although the subject matter I think especially for people from the Catholic background is very funny. It was very controversial in Poland. Adam submitted it to the Polish national broadcaster where it was rejected. Poland is a very Catholic country and it was considered too sensitive material. And so it was finally broadcast on Radio Gdansk, which is where Adam is based. So for him when I reached out to him about the play, this was sort of his opportunity for the play to have the kind of wider audience that he didn't think it was ever going to have in Poland. I didn't tell him that as a small audio theater company, we didn't have that wider audience either. But it was a real pleasure to do. There were a couple of sort of specific challenges related to producing the play and related to translating the play that I just kind of want to talk through briefly here and then we'll have some more discussion afterwards I guess. In terms of collaboration with the author Adam was involved. We did have access to the original Polish production, the recording of the Polish production. I thought it was worth mentioning rights. With Radio Theater it's very uncommon for these plays to be broadcast more than once. And so the production companies don't really have any interest in holding on to the rights in any way. And so we were very lucky that we were able to just make an agreement with Adam and we were able to produce the play. I think that's different for stage productions and I'm sure that's something that will come up in discussion. Also on sort of more the production end of things than the translation things, we felt that the aesthetic of the Polish production needed adaptation. The script was very clear on sound effects and on transitions and kind of the soundscape that it wanted for the play and we stuck very faithfully to that. But the tone of it in Polish was very melodramatic. And for instance the character of the demon slash papal chaplain was sort of like this cackling like evil man. And in general we felt that for a British audience that needed to be toned down pretty considerably and we needed to do it much straighter. We also had a particular translation issue with certain Catholic technical terms. There's a lot of discussion of the rules under which the convent operates, things like the seal of confession which is a term that I had to look up. There's a dramatic moment at the end of the play after the mother superior has died where the chaplain recites a prayer which is very well known in Poland and which comes from the Middle Ages. And me being, I just sort of assumed, oh well the Catholic Church is everywhere, there must be an English version of this prayer. Well there wasn't. And so we had to, I had to dig around in sort of like online texts of medieval books of ours to find something that would have been said under similar circumstances and had the same kind of poetry and the same kind of drama to it as this very well known piece in Polish. And I guess the only other thing that I'll say is that, I think this sort of, this almost goes without saying with adapting or excuse me with translating drama but there was a need to, you know the translation had to be very very grounded in the speech and the dialect and the performance of the individual actors that we were working with. And this is a script that was done, you know, tied to a particular production. We did continually adapt the script as we rehearsed it. I was an American writing for British actors and we had to be sensitive to giving them a kind of language that they were able to work with. We were lucky to have very capable actors. We also had a thing going on where we had actors playing multiple parts and the device that we used to distinguish them, one of the devices we used was by giving them different accents. And so there was a certain degree to which I needed to use regionalisms with these different accents. Again, all in the spirit of sort of making the actors comfortable in the text. So, you know, overall it didn't feel universes apart from the kind of work that I had been doing with translation of prose. I mostly translate fiction and literary nonfiction. But sort of the emphases were in different places. It's also worth saying that I re-listened to this play this morning for the first time in quite a while and I don't actually like the translation very much. And so I think that maybe I was not sensitive enough to those needs of speech and of performance. So that was sort of a funny revelation that I had this morning. So anyway, I just wanted to present that as sort of a little case study of a slightly unusual type of dramatic translation. I guess I'll hand it over to Anne from there. Are you going to hand it over? Oh, thank you. So next up we have Anne Poston. And Anne has a quite short bio too. How do I? Very fast. Anne Poston translates contemporary German literature and teaches writing at Queen's College, Haiti. Yeah, that's all true. Not a lie in there. My experience translating drama is actually I think I'm the least experienced person on this panel. But also it's limited in comparison to my translating of poetry and prose. Not only that, but the history of my work in dramatic translation to me feels in some ways like a history of failures. But I think those failures themselves bring up some interesting questions about the conversation around translating drama as opposed to the conversation around translating other types of genres. And also I have started wondering what is failure? I mean I ultimately think that I'm quite satisfied with my translation. So the idea that I was failing in some way I think brings up its own questions. I'm also going to talk about a specific project. It's actually the only play I've translated in its entirety and it's a fairly young German playwright named Oliver Kluck. And I found Oliver when I was looking for a project specifically to propose for a Fulbright grant. I had been interested in translating drama for a long time because I've always been interested in theater in my non-professional life. I'd found it hard to find an entry point. I'd found it hard to find a project to tackle. And in fact my previous another project had ended in failure when I was about to propose a translation for my MFA thesis. And the night before I found out that it had just been translated and was about to be produced in Chicago. And while in retrospect that's, I should have known, it was a really well-known German playwright. It also, it was easy for me to overlook as someone inexperienced in translating drama in a way that I think is sort of indicative of the way the conversation happens. And the fact that that conversation is so segregated from much of the conversation about translating literature because dramatic translation is so often done specifically for production with publication happening maybe as an afterthought, if at all, this translation left a much less easily Google-able trail. It didn't really pop up until it was about to go up on stage. So I didn't, I had no idea that it was already in the works. And so sort of by the same token I discovered Oliver clicked this playwright through a mutual friend rather than through more traditional research channels which is how I usually find novels or poets that I'm going to translate. And that, that's because as I said, it's been sort of difficult for me to find these projects to work on. It's difficult enough to find novelists to work on when I have to order them from Germany. But with a play, if I go to say a great production at one of the major Berlin houses, chances are that person is already in translation or his agent is looking to find a translator. In other words, it's sort of out of my range. It's not in the same ballpark as the things that I'm working on that are destined for publication. So I got in touch with Cook directly. He sent me a number of scripts. I found them interesting. He expressed his support for having me work on them, though he didn't seem interested in collaboration very much. He said, that's you do it. Talk to me if you have any questions. I'm happy to meet you. But he did go so far as to write me a letter of support for the project and then I got to Berlin and he never responded to my emails again. So the actual process of translation took place basically in a vacuum. I did not have any input from him, nor did I have any access to other productions or to anyone who had seen another production. So I think that's somewhat, my sense is that that's somewhat unusual in the translation of contemporary plays, though maybe less unusual for other types of translation. I mean, I have, for any other contemporary authors I've worked on, I have talked to the author, but only at the end of the process. It's not been what I would call a collaboration in the traditional sense. So initially this inability to talk to the playwright or collaborate with him seemed to me to present a significant problem. Though Cook's work has been fairly widely performed and has gotten some critical playing, as I said, I was unable to find a production anywhere in the German-speaking world in the year that I was there. And the problem was that, or one of the problems was that Cook's plays, and specifically this play, is pretty formally untraditional. For example, the first page of the play is a letter. It's just a traditional letter and there's no indication given of whether this is supposed to be read, how it's supposed to be read, by whom it's supposed to be read, is it supposed to be projected on a screen. No idea. It's just a letter and that's the beginning of the play. And indeed there are no stage directions in the play whatsoever. There are no notes about the characters, no talk about scenery, nothing like that. And another, perhaps most oddly, the script isn't written in what we think of as traditional script format. So usually you expect to see something like Dr. Cullen, we should take your mother to the private clinic. Most of this is we should take your mother to the private clinic, says the doctor. So how do you perform that? I have no idea. And my inclination at first was to wonder about that and to think about how that would function in production and sort of tailor my translation to that. But I didn't have access to any more information and so I stopped thinking about it and I translated it exactly the same way that I translated a novel. I translated it. By the same token the dialogue is somewhat unusual, not crazy, but somewhat unusual. I mean I think one of the theories behind the fact that so much of dramatic translation takes place by people who work in theater and who do not do other types of translation is the emphasis on performability and then it should sound like really natural spoken dialogue. But this play didn't sound like natural spoken dialogue in the first place. It had a lot of sort of poetic devices like repetition, strange punctuation. So again, I didn't try to make it sound natural. I translated it like I would translate poetry or prose. Next challenge was the play's cultural context, which I would have loved to at least speak to the play right about. It's pretty rooted in the cultural context. In temporary play I assume, since there are no directions I don't know, but I assume the characters are about in their mid-thirties. And so the play is very rooted in ideas about the world that these people grew up in. So that would have been a divide in Germany. And the repercussions that world has for today. So how that world turned to this one, the problems that grew out of that world. And so there are a lot of references to that, to that context, particularly the title itself, which is in German die Froschporzenlederfabrik in English. Cover your ears if you need to. In English that's the frog-cunt-leather factory, which is not exactly as bad as it sounds. It's actually a specific reference to East German slang. Froschporzenleder was a sort of pejorative term for cheaply made East German synthetic leather. But that term is not widely known. It's very specific. And my understanding is that much of the play's audience wouldn't know the reference. I spoke to a lot of Germans and they huddled these other ideas. And I said, no, no, I've done the research. I think it refers to this. So in that instance, as in others, I felt licensed to translate it literally. If the audience wouldn't have understood necessarily the context. It is clear in context, but if they wouldn't have known the term already, I didn't see any reason to pursue that route any further. And at the end of the day, I did think that this was a play that was worthy of being translated. Though it's rooted in this cultural context, the concerns are very, very translatable, very important to us, especially in the U.S. today. And translating it in a way that softened or broadened those cultural references I think would have been boring and unnecessary and dishonest. So I didn't do that. So back to the failures. Though I was disappointed about this inability to contact the author, at the end of the day, it led me to wonder about what I've come to understand as the traditional process for translating drama and wonder about how this failure led to some successes. I ultimately feel very satisfied with the product that I produced. I haven't really looked into forums for productions of it yet. But it made me sort of wonder if the collaborative model where a translator works with a team for production, though obviously really productive for that production, can be limiting in some ways, limiting not only in terms of the production choices, but also in the lifespan of the text. If production choices are written into the translation, that makes it less interesting for future productions, I think. And though, of course, all translation contains a degree of interpretation, when I'm translating a non-dramatic text, it's my goal to leave interpretive possibilities as open as possible. And I think that's perhaps an important thing to try in drama as well. A director in the original language hasn't had those interpretations already inserted. Whether he's, whether the original language director is working with the player or not, that's a different collaboration. And I think leaving those things open in translation can be ultimately really productive. I don't really have a conclusion in conclusion. This is a thing that I tried and it worked out pretty well. Maybe we can all think about different opportunities for drama translation. I introduced the second half of our panel. I just want to note that due to an entirely happy coincidence, we ended up having on our panel two people who worked on the same author and actually worked together in a way which you'll hear about. So in addition to hearing each of them talk about their work individually, we'll also talk a little bit about this sort of shared context that I have. So first we have Marguerite Feiluiz. And Marguerite Feiluiz's most recent book translation is Salvador Novo's Pillar of Salt in autobiography with 19 erotic sonnets. Recent publications include stories by Luisa Valenzuela, Claudia Hernandez, and Colm's Aleniana Plan in Rupina's In Translation and the Sonora Review. Thank you, Jim. It's a pleasure to be here. And I don't hear any failure at all with you in what you recounted. We have a lot to talk about, I'm sure, with everybody in the room. I'm going to talk... Fatima and I do have this really amazing kind of serendipity which we'll get to in a little while. I want to talk about two plays because they are both literally theatre of the translated. The very first play I translated and had published was this play, Lilianette Lanc's Monsieur Fugui, which was published by Sey. And it came to me the way every good thing in my life seems to come to me which is by accident through the good graces of somebody who came to me. Monsieur Fugui was a play that is about Janusz Korczak, who was a Polish educator and involved in radio drama, as a matter of fact, in radio education, radio art, who also had an orphanage for Jewish children during the time of the Nazi occupation. He accompanied a group of Jewish children. We believed Auschwitz, though there is a last sighting of him with this group of children they were never seen again. Lilianette was a French Holocaust writer, spent the war years in hiding and was very deeply involved in, after the war, she was part of this Jewish academy that Derrida and all of the sort of Jewish intellectuals of that time participated in. This is a play that takes place in the truck that is taking them to what is called in the play Rotberg. What happens in this play, it opens, the children come up out of a sewer, they are bestial looking, they are starving, they are filthy, they are cruel, and for all that has been going on around them and is being done to them. The Nazi officer Christoph, who has set foot to the ghetto and is lying in wait, playing dead, captures them. Mr. Sieg, who is based on Janusz Korczak, tries to come to their rescue, they are all put into the truck, and the whole play takes place in the truck, and it is literally a theater of the translated. What happens in this play is that the children grow up, literally, they grow up and they grow old, and so by the end of the play they are truly, truly old, and I'll just read you. So the challenge in this play was that these are children, the play should be done with children, and we did it once with children, and we can talk about that. But they are children who have been sort of de-civilized, if you will, at the beginning of the play through having been brutalized. They retain fragments with which they sort of torment each other, there's a certain amount of play acting, a lot of it they have a doll, who is Tamar, who is a child who didn't survive, but they keep her with them, this doll, and they go through all of the lives that they might have led, including two of them who might, who would marry, have a fairly miserable but long-enduring marriage, Abracha, a diminutive for Abraham, who was to be an opera composer, but a tormented one, never knowing if he would finish his opera, Yonah, who was to be a rabbi, Yossala, who was to be something else. And so they all go, they go through all of this, and so the challenge was that these are French children whose French is very inflected by Yiddish, and a lot of the really nasty sort of language and references that they've learned in the ghetto and in the camps, in the ghetto actually, and then the vestiges of what we can see were a bourgeois education and gentile life, and so it all comes, it's all kind of mixed, as they grow old, and by the end of the play, they are truly old. And I'll just read a couple of things very, very briefly to give you a sense of some of the translation issues. They also had gone to Hebrew school, so it was clear that they had been steeped as Lilian was, not just in general sort of basic Hebrew school teaching, but also in Talmud and the sacred tales. And so, for example, one of the songs they sing at the very beginning is a baracha. They say, what if we rested? Not already. There they'll be wheat, taller than we are. We'll get there and be safe. Sing a something, Ra'isa, and beat. I don't want to. Ra'isa, we're in the forest. Sing a something, beat. Ra'isa sings in her broken voice, sometimes very sweetly, then again hoarsely. Don't ask why ill-loved and mortal mother, we the golem with dreams gone dry, our hands are made to be broken. Not so loud. And so they sort of go back and forth between these different registers. Whose fault, if you sleep on an earth that despises you, we the golem with dreams gone dry, our hands are made to be broken. And so they sort of, one of the things that they do is they break apart the stanzas of this song and then sing them singly and together. And that's when they're still kids. And by the end of the play, when Christopher is giving them their last chance to do the jump rope game, to see if they can survive it, which they won't, they will be killed and they know it. Yosela says to Christoph as though he were doctor, don't lie like that doctor, I'm not going to last much longer. You jump, I let you leave. The forest doesn't fall far. You walk free. Yosela is still to his imaginary doctor. Don't give me all these drugs. I don't want to go to sleep. I want to see everything right up to the end like at a vet. Christopher, you're young. You'll make it to the sea. You'll be saved. Raisa, visiting the hospital. The nurses say it isn't visiting hour, but me, I don't let myself be pushed around. You feel better, Yosela? Yosela, I'm going away, Raisa. Raisa, that's not true. You just have to eat. Yosela, go get a baracha. I'm going to throw out a party. Raisa, what party? Yosela, I don't know. Go quickly. I can't breathe anymore. Oh, I'm sorry. You couldn't hear any of that? Whoopsie. I don't know. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. We don't... Yeah. Did anybody hear any of that? No. Sort of, kind of? Okay. All right. Maybe you could move in. Yeah. That would be better. And so the point is... So a baracha finally says, I brought you my opera. I finished it for you. And they sing a final... like a kaddish, right? They sing this to their dying friend. Nothing... And one of the things that they're singing is a lesson from a geography class they had in elementary school. When they were told by their teacher, nothing lasts, save erosion. And they sing this like a kaddish. Nothing lasts, save erosion. This is the code. You will smile, you will smile, even if living hurts you. To smile, you will smile, even if living hurts you. And the grass, the birds, the stones will remember you. And the grass, the birds, the stones will remember you. And then a baracha says, there's nothing to say. Howl. That's all. Cry. But cry. Did you go to the cemetery, Raisa? Did you say the prayers? Raisa, haggard, like an amputee? Yes. And a baracha already, more than a year ago, you've got to live still and all. So they're consoling her as though she were a widow. And the play is going to end. And the last line of the play is, they are helped down from this truck where they're going to be shot. And Raisa says, I still would not have wanted to see all this dirt. And a baracha says, oh, you know, in a bed or in a valley, which is something he had said earlier, it doesn't matter where you die in a bed or a valley. And so the challenge in this play was to try to capture all these different registers, but to let it know that somehow the children, they had become old, but the speech was, there was a certain amount of role playing in the speech, which was both authentic, but it was children doing it as they were about to die. So that was a kind of an amazing thing to do. I was very lucky to work with Dilyan during that time. And we did a lot of reading out loud in French, and in French, actually. So I just thought that was the kind of, in a novel, for example, or in a fiction, I've often had to switch from one register to another, but you somehow get narrative time. And in a play, it just has to happen. And it's got to be speakable and it's got to be all those ellipses and all those things that characters remember that other characters have said. You've just got to slip in there hoping against hope that your audience also remembers the way your characters remember. So I just thought I would throw that out which we can talk about. I also, it was getting to Fatima. So continuing the serendipity, I was introduced to the work of by mutual friends in Paris. And Griselda is generally considered to be the most important 20th century Latin American playwright. She's Argentine. Her work was banned by the last dictatorship. She was forced into exile where she wrote no plays. She said, without my audience, I can't write plays. So she wrote a novel during the three years they were in exile. Before she left for exile, she wrote the title piece here, Information for Foreigners, Informacion para Extranjeros in 7071, which was before the dictatorship that began on March 24th, 1976. And it's truly a prophetic play. It foretells the coming era of state terrorism and the disappeared and torture. Torture was, I should say, is an old story in Argentina, but never on the scale it had been as in the last dictatorship. So this play, which is, again, literally theater that translated, it takes place in a non-traditional space. A warehouse is what it's called for. It could be a house, a big house. And you walk in and the audience is separated into groups. Each group gets its guide and the audience is together and then they separate, going through the house and the scenes, which take place in different rooms in a different order to converge on the final scene. And this is a play that is extremely, it has only one, two scenes, sweet, that are straightforward, limpid, and dramaturgical, in a dramaturgical sense. Every other scene is extremely stylized and what we would later call intertextual. There are lines from Juan Helman, the great Argentine poet that the great Lisa Rose Bradford translates, and in fact he gets the final words in the play as a tribute. They were close friends. There is also a scene from Shakespeare. The Grupo 69 theater group was arrested while it was rehearsing Othello and she put the scene that they were rehearsing at the time of their arrest and we read this scene, the rehearsal, the arrest, and then which goes right into an extraordinarily rapid vaudeville in the judges' chambers. So there was also Grand Guignol, a lot of very unforgiving, rapid-fire rhyme, and a lot of frankly and deliberately on her part bad writing and calling for bad acting, so as not to eroticize violence, eroticize torture, eroticize fear. And so it had there been a collaboration with future producers or actors who might likely say, I won't look that ugly, I won't do that. I don't understand this style. It could have been really disastrous. She always intended it, as she said, to be an impossible play and it's had a very odd trajectory. It was hidden in her nightgown drawer and it went undiscovered during police searches at the house because the police couldn't bring themselves into her unmentionable drawer. And when she was in exile, a couple of scenes were published in Italy in a theater journal. There was an apartment production in the former Yugoslavia, but it was not published. It actually was published in English before it was published in Argentina and it's never been produced in Argentina but it has had productions in the States and in Zimbabwe. It was done by former students of mine from Harvard who actually had a professional theater company in Zimbabwe and it was done just last year at Connecticut College. So when a playwright says something's impossible, it's obviously kind of a magnet for a certain kind of director. What else did I want to... So I guess I would say the other thing that she incorporated were newspaper clippings from the time there was a whole question of who was a foreigner is very much in the air. She meant it to be her compatriots but also she received as she was sort of finishing the play when she returned from exile from a former political prisoner she received in the mail a poem which is in the play and created a scene. And I'll just read it quickly. It's a girl. It's in one of the repeating scenes. The scene is she's stretched out on a cot and she's breathing in a very labored way and she has a sheet folded over her feet and the guide advances on tiptoe and says, don't make any noise, she's sleeping to his group and he looks at her and he says, how are you doing? This girl has been tortured. We know that. And she sits up and very simply and colloquially says, I would like to die as softly as possible so that my friends will think she is sleeping in the earth become a worm digging in the earth so that in spring the flowers blossom. After my death I want my children to sit at the table and say, at her age, mama ran off with some guy. What a shame. Poor old dad staring at the tablecloth his cup of coffee searching for her. This is how I want to die as simply as though I had never lived. What a lovely thought to leave like that not causing any pain. The cup of coffee that no one drinks, absent. Then silently a character mixed in with the audience steps forward and strangles her and she offers no resistance and just dies. So this is sort of typical of this play where you're having a moment of what we could call poesía humilde. This is not maybe professional poetry but it's very moving and very straightforward and it's a moment of kind of forthright feeling and then she's killed by maybe the person who's standing next to you and you don't know, right? Is this part of the play? Is it not part of the play? And so maintaining that, and this is the last thing I want to say before we go on to Fatima maintaining that kind of tension in a play that's moving around a lot and where things are up in the air. There's a certain amount of, I think frustration with not knowing that one is always cherry about overburdening. So I would say that for me, one of the plays I've translated they've had everything that I've ever had to deal with in fiction, nonfiction and poetry plus they're also plays. So I would just leave it there. We talked about the balls. We talked about the balls. Can I use your jacket? Yeah, sure, sure. We're having a little crisis of temperature here. I am from desert. So last time we had Fatima Madami and Fatima Madami is a PhD candidate who is a leader in performance of the America's at Arizona State. She holds a BA in English Literature and in the Andromeda Studies from the University of Tehran. She translated two plays by Griselda Galvaro, The Walls and Antigua Veriosa into Persian. Hello. So I just remember that I translated another play in 2005 that I forgot. That was by Tom Stopper, the real inspector. So it was in the publication company for one year and then somebody else, I don't know, translated and published it before me. So it was burned. So I did that because I wanted to go to the drama department and they said, OK, you don't have any experience in drama or writing so you are English student so translate something, they need translation. So I did that to pass the interview. So for my master thesis, one of my friends from London sent me two books. One of them was this information for foreigners that Margaret already translated that from Argentinian to English. So I read this just to get a sense of how theater works in Argentina. Then the topic for my dissertation was revolutionary theater in Latin America. So then when I read The Walls, it really touched me and it was really revolutionary and very ideological for me. So because I was an activist in Iran at that time, I said, OK, so I thought I am very smart so I said, OK, instead of just talking about politics in Iran or dictatorship in Iran, maybe I can talk about dictatorship in Argentina and introduce some techniques that people were using at that time and translate a play sample and say, OK, that's about Argentina. I'm not doing anything in Iran. But they were smarter than me because I contacted... We don't have copyright in Iran but I wanted to just know Margaret that I am doing that. So she kind of accepted and gave me the permission. She sent me a letter to put in my book as an introduction, something. So you contacted Margaret? Yes, and she was delighted as well. Yeah, because she couldn't understand English and I couldn't understand Spanish so she was also handing up on me. I'm kidding. So then it was published before the election 2009. We thought that there was a fraud in the election and they changed the result and Ahmadinejad became the president again. So we were protesting and all this stuff and many people were killed or disappeared exactly like what happened in Argentina 34 years ago or 50 years ago. Yeah, so I'm going to talk about some challenges that I had and then talk about the production which was banned in Iran. So by display as I said it was the author's ideology or I don't know how you say goal was something like close to me, to mine. And also it was a part of my dissertation so my thesis. That is why I chose display and I focused, I didn't know anything about the translation theories like performability or readability or I didn't know Susan Bassnet or Pavi or people like that but because my background was literature so I was focusing on the text and literally I mean how is it readability rather than performability because I didn't know any production team I was in playwriting program. So some stuff that, another thing was censorship I knew that we cannot talk about sex in the place so there was a dialogue that they are talking about do you have venereal, why don't you have appetite maybe you have venereal disease, STD. So I had to cancel that because we don't have venereal disease in Iran we cannot have sex. Another one was Margarita's letter so she mentioned the name of an Iranian would you like to talk about that Mansur Farhan? One of my dear colleagues at Bennington was Mansur Farhan who was one of the architects of the revolution that went bad and he was the Iranian ambassador to the UN at the time of the hostage crisis and he resigned his post because of the non-release of the hostages and he has never been able to go back to Iran since and so when Fatima wrote to me I told Mansur quite excitedly about this serendipity and he too was delighted so your project had delight from all sorts of corners but so when I quoted Mansur in the letter which he was pleased to do the publisher said that we cannot mention his name it's forbidden so I talked to Margarita and I said we have to cancel his name so we cancelled that line too so another thing was that so there are some expressions I don't know if they are Argentinian or English like you cannot expect a pearl tree to give you apple or something like that so there's stuff like that when I wanted to find an Iranian equivalent and put that in the dialogue people read that and said that what do you mean by this like poyo neshebes it's not working it's just throwing us off of the text because it's Argentinian the setting is in Argentinian everything is Argentinian dialogues are foreign so you better translate those things into Farsi instead of finding Farsi things Farsi proverb or idioms for them so they wanted the text to be foreign because I don't know that it's prestigious or because they want to know more about their foreign countries or foreigners so when sometimes some translator they use Farsi expressions people are like it's not Iran so we know that it's not Iran it's not working it's the opposite of what happened here people want everything to be Americanized so this is the challenge that I have with my new play that I am working on so this will be my witness in Farsi with something else so I had to translate them you know and politeness so sometimes when they are talking about she just said ass so I had to put something more polite so for those lines that are Italian and French I had to put footnotes because I assumed that people might not know Italian I mean intellectuals or scholars may know French in Iran because we have a lot of French words but so I put some footnotes for the readers that is another reason that it's not performable but that's for the readers yeah okay okay after the election in three occasions the publisher called me and she said that Dr. Khaki is going to stage the play and she he wants your permission and I said I need to I think I called yeah I'm sure you did I said I need to talk to Margarita and Griselda so they said okay so they rehearse the play for one month and when they send the play to the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance the same ministry gave the permission to the book to be published but it was before the election after the election they said oh no you cannot stage this play it's very political it's about a guy who was kidnapped in Argentina it was happening in Iran a lot at that time so he couldn't do that so his student wanted to do that for his thesis on campus so he said maybe on campus he didn't care because there is no police to come to the show and watch but he after a while he said he couldn't do that either after I don't know and there was another group in my city that they were trying to do that but his understanding, the director's understanding was different he thought that that is psychological play and all these people are voices inside his head the young man's head oh no that is political play so for some reason this one didn't happen to but when I came to the US in 2012 I with the help of my friend a friend I staged that and I added some green movement we were called green movement after the election those people we had green signs like green t-shirt, green because green is the sign of hope in Iran so that candidate that we voted and wasn't elected for some reason I don't know they changed the result he had, how you say that he was the leader of the green movement so I used some of these green movement elements like green t-shirt or at the end we projected some photos from Argentina on green movement so the new play that I'm working so I said the culture is different here so people want to see the Americanized stuff and I took some translation courses and I read about performability and stuff like that although Susan Bassnet then changed her notions about performability and she said no just readability so but I talked to my supervisor and she said that we can we can do participant observation so after I'm done with the translation we can do play reading or stage the play for the American audience and see their reactions if they are okay with the farce stuff Iranian stuff or we can keep we have to American us or change them but I still believe in the foreignness because I think the Americans are becoming more open to foreigners and foreign cultures I think so I don't know so there are a lot of metaphors in the play and more interestingly this play was a stage after the election although it was political but because it was comedy and the playwright used a lot of metaphors so they couldn't get that and they it was a stage so I'm going to explain the theme of the play so it's exactly what was happening during Ahmadinejah so there is a group of people that sign a contract they need the money really bad and they are in debt 30 million so they sign a contract with a guy we don't know a contractor to dig 2000 graves for the enemy that may attack Iran in the future we don't know who is the enemy we don't know the name of the country I didn't I did a mistake so may attack the country that they are living in and then they are living on the border so they are digging and after one year two years they are done and then they go to get the money from the contractor and he said oh I'm sorry the enemy hasn't attacked us yet so we cannot pay you you have to wait for the enemy so they are waiting for the enemy and they are trying to do some stuff to provoke the enemy to attack Iran and then they start the war and kill them and then they steal the graves but you know some of the stuff that they are thinking to do is that to show to go to the border and curse the enemy or to go to the border and give them the finger but in Farsi we don't say finger in Farsi this is curse okay but in here another finger is curse so I had to change this okay and after that give them the thumb give them this finger so this is another challenge that I have to choose if that is America that is the setting is Iran so another challenge is these these idioms or metaphors that they are using so I'm going to read a short dialogue it's rough I just finished it two weeks ago I need someone to proofread it and I need to talk about that in the workshop so I'm going to read a line from by Oscar White that my supervisor told me last week if you want to tell people the truth make them laugh or otherwise they will kill you so I think that is the reason why this play was a stage and not not your play so Griselda's play so in this scene this guy is trying is trying to talk to them to start how to initiate the war so the war that we use in Farsi to we say send the rat send the rat means when you send the rat to somebody's party or house everybody freaks out and you know and then you annoy the person so they are using the expression send the rat and I I haven't found the equivalence for that in English but my professor suggested that I use I put send the rat but when you when the audience maybe I can't put footnotes but for the readers but not for the audience how am I supposed to tell them what is send the rat so memar war war not in a bad way we just need to initiate the war not in a bad way God forbid we are not traitors or anti-revolutionary or anything like that we are sure 100% that we can't beat the enemy we only need to send the rat and when they shoot us our soldiers will attack and destroy them everybody silent or we first make sure our soldiers are equipped enough and then send it how does it sound like everybody silent or we will first get the permission from whoever on top and then send the rat what do you think everybody silent can you check on the potatoes so this is that was the send the rat part I don't know how I don't know it was rough I mean it was not fluent it's good you suggest me please for send the rat so I'm done thank you we actually don't have much time left so I have a couple questions but I'd really like to open it to you first anyone out there have any questions and then I can chime in at the end with any additional one at this time I'd like to offer a little bit of amplification on my own experience most of what I'm hearing here is engagement with literary texts rather than the old process since theater is for presentation on stage I'm in a situation where I operate a website devoted to theater in central Texas so I have a lot of contacts in that theater area which is quite extensive what of the mass media well can you suggest to play on American and I thought great opportunity to do a translation so I went looking I found an Argentine playwright on the Mexican playwright I was able to get any contact with the publisher or with the playwright in Argentina I was able to get a reply back from a Mexican publisher who said oh well we don't have the rights he's died his heir has the rights and so I worked and worked and tried to get permission to translate because I didn't want to invest myself in it first of all rights and then second of all that would be the question of rights before I didn't want to jump into into the void a separate example I read about a play that was published in Stockholm I translated from Swedish and was very interested in it as described wound up googling around found the playwright in fact on Facebook succeeded in sending him a direct message saying I'm interested in having the script so I can translate it perhaps he writes back he says oh that's great I'd love to have you do that I'm attaching a copy of the script I'm also attaching a copy of a translation into English which had been done by some colleague of his I looked at this and I thought I'm not going to look at his text I'm going to start and do my own translation it's a project that's still in course but I've done about a third of it and at that point I stopped I looked at the other English version already prepared was obviously done by somewhat with a lot of UK experience so the two were very different I have the right to go ahead and translate but in all of these cases I'm looking for a text that I can render into English actually to put on stage and I think that's maybe an interesting part and it's part of this opaque that as you have described there is a production process out there that's involving theatre companies and we as literary translators are often not at all privy to Is that a question? Or a comment? I would just say in terms of you know generally theatres have dramaturgical departments and so you want to get in touch oh I'm sorry yes I'm sorry theatres all have dramaturgical departments or literary management departments the terminology varies and they're the people you want to get in touch with unless you have director or actor friends who may wish to run with the play starting with a staged reading perhaps but you need that's the part you need to get because I think you were also saying production rights are separate and each production needs its own transaction so you need to be careful about that I've noticed lately with Polish plays that have been performed in the United States it's quite common it seems for new translations to be commissioned for new productions and I can think of two instances off the top of my head and these were British productions that then came to the United States and a whole new script was commissioned into American English rather than adapting the old translation so even for authors that have been translated in the past it strikes me that there might be potential reaching out to literary departments in theatres and to dramaturgs and so on to be able to shop around a new translation do you know about the theatre communications group? yes they would be a good first stop for you I have to get the rights for the pieces before I can start to walk good luck I mean that really good luck when translating into English for an English production there's always a question of where is that going to be performed I'm based on the East Coast I'm translating into like my region the question when something is in the vernacular or slimy I don't want to be limiting I want it to be specific but I don't want it to be so specific that somebody says I can't say that I'm not from there I just am curious how you would deal with maybe a director's translation or something you know what I mean like you can't put footnotes for the audience there's a way of packaging a translation of a play from a place that nobody knows about you know to say like this is the situation you know it would not be published anywhere but to say like here's the context do people do that or to sort of respond to that in a slightly different way I mean with the piece that I was working on as I said I was an American translator working with British actors and I was actually really surprised how little of a problem it was partly because I was living in the UK and was familiar with sort of UK ways of speaking but also because good actors can make anything work and I was trying to remember if I could come up with a concrete instance of something that we had to change because it just didn't work for the actors and I couldn't which says to me it was something fairly minor and again going back and listening to my translation which was one of my very early translation projects there's some real clunkers in there and the actors really make it work you know and that's what professional actors will do so I think it's probably you know I've seen play actually this is another really good example I saw a production of a play by a young Polish playwright called Dorota Masłowska and Masłowska writes about working class Poles in Warsaw in very very rich working class Polish this play was translated into very very rich working class British English and then I attended a reading of that play in New York with American actors the script had been adapted not at all and they were performing this very very British dialogue in American accents and I knew that they were saying things that they did not understand but they were making it work so you know I think if you have the right actors and if you have the right production team I think it's you know I think for the text itself I wouldn't worry about it necessarily too much yeah and I think yeah I mean that's yeah some publishers, translators authors are going to insist that you perform it word by word yeah I'm not so sure that those are costs hold very much weight or at least the status of the author is such that it would demand I mean I think that's one of the things that really distinguishes the translation of drama as a genre is that it's the translation is never understood to be the final version if in fact it's going to be produced it's understood that it's going to be handed over essentially as a blueprint to the actors and directors of drama Turks and senior designers and such to be cut and changed I was going to ask any of you who have seen your your work produced to what extent like how you felt essentially about that knowing that or did you actually see the results of things that had been excised and was that a sort of more fortress process another pretty self-displaced La Mala Sangre or Bad Blood was the translation was commissioned by the Gate Theatre in London and and I the translation they took the script as the script what amazed me was the stylistic choices but it was again it wasn't a question of language or or phrasing it was just that the director had a pace for this and a pitch for this script that I had seen the script building very very kind of gradually and having it sort of crescendos and quiet places and she just started at a pitch and it just kept going and I was just amazed by it it had never occurred to me it would be done that way and it was so I think it's I think there are two things one is what can be done to change your words and what can be done without at all changing your words but in ways that are really really surprising and I'm not saying this was at all bad it was just something that had never occurred to me so yeah theater is just an endless surprise we're just about out of time are there any more questions or comments so I'd just like to give everyone on the panel though an opportunity to speak about anything that they're currently working on or would like if there are any particular plays or dramatic works that they would like to do in the future or sort of dream project in this genre we've heard from you about what you're doing yeah I'm doing this yeah okay do you have anything else you want to say no it's a part of my dissertation again yeah thank you and Marguerite did you have any plays coming up? well I've been translating mostly poetry and fiction but Jen has this wonderful and Jen and Anne have this wonderful and I'm sorry and Ben wonderful radio play project that you should talk about it's really exciting well we're the three of us along with two other producers are starting a podcast that's going to feature international radio dramas both in English and in English translation it's going to be called play for voices and so if anyone in here who hasn't already identified themselves as such is a translator of drama and is interested in translating radio plays please come up and let us know and give us your content information and we'd love to keep you a little bit and potentially collaborate with you on that same note we are I think mostly for the moment interested on things that are intended as radio plays and there is in fact a radio version of this play that I was just talking about so I will be excited to actually see how that radio version differs from the version that I translated and see if it's interesting to us there's also actually my first published translation was a novella by a very very well known now very very old German playwright so it was unusual for him to be doing a novella and I'm really interested in revisiting some of his earlier work some of which were also adapted for radio my two dream projects are the Polish poet speaking of Herbert wrote a number of plays all of which to my knowledge were originally radio plays that then went on to be staged in the 1960s they're all really wonderful a lot of them deal with the ancient Greeks which Herbert was really into the Greeks and Romans and then some of them also take place in 20th century Poland as well they're funny they're incredibly intelligent they're beautifully beautifully written they've never been translated into English and they happen in various places and he has various other translators so I don't have high hopes but my other dream project is a Polish playwright called Tadeusz Swobożanek who wrote a play called Our Class which was produced in London several years ago about a pogrom that happened in Poland in the 1940s he wrote a trilogy of plays called The Death of the Prophet which is based on a true historical incident where in the northeast of Poland there was a man who founded a messianic cult where he claimed to be the reincarnation of Jesus Christ and there was another man who claimed to be the escaped Tsar Alexander II who had hidden out in the northeast of Poland and was gathering an army to return to Russia and the two men were in the same part of Poland at the same time but never met and the plays are about what would have happened if they had and they're fantastic and the three of them together are just about novel length and I have dreams of getting a literary publisher to publish them as a novel that's wonderful thank you to all of the panel