 Um, and it's a pleasure to meet have you guys come and sit and you can move your chairs down Alright. Come and sit. More clothes. Let's make this a little bit, a little bit cozier and more informal and more interesting. Thank you. Um, encouraging you to tweet on Twitter while you're doing this. We are filming this for New Play TV and it will be archived. Um, so, uh, it's an important conversation. And one that, um, you know, will be, will last beyond today. Um, so I'm just going to introduce to you, uh, the leader of this panel, uh, Judith Miller. Judith Miller is one of the foremost Francophile translators in the country. Perhaps in the world, other than the wrong. And, um, and she, and sitting next to her is the other foremost translator in the world. So we have heavy hitters here today. Um, and they'll tell you a little bit more about what they do. Division of the, of the, um, NYU New York University in Abu Dhabi. Oh boy. And, uh, so it's a testament to how deeply she feels about, uh, particularly about French playwriting that she's here with us today. Thank you, Amy. I don't, everything I'll get to is provision in Arabic as I am in French, so they won't be able to do this for Arabic language playwrights, but I certainly hope that in the period of time that I'm going to unite in Arabic Emirates, I've learned a lot about what kind of theater is being done in that region. So, um, first I'd like to say that I'm thrilled to be here with such an innovative and artsy people doing this particular festival and also meeting all of these playwrights that I have met before and being with my friend Lohan Bouvez to talk about translating theater, which is something that he has been spearheading and transmitting for a really long time and I've been translating French plays since the early 80s, so it's been something that's been very important to me to be able to do. And I've always felt that I was able to do it partially because I also do theater and it's the active joint theater that's made it easier for me, I think, to translate theater. But I think it'd be good to introduce everybody who's here, so this is starting with our translators, Eric Butler and Kim Lee Jennerone, who have translated Marion Aubert's play, right, that has two different titles, what we'll call it, Pride and Headlessness at this point, okay? And Michele Hayner and Emily Jane Cohen who translated Nathalie Fillon's play, right there, and Nathalie's play is called Out There, Aloueste, and then Rob, Mel Robles, excuse me, who's the director who runs a theater here in San Francisco that you probably all know, and the Cutting Ball Theater, right? And Rob has translated Samuel Alcade's play, Communicate Number 10. We've all been talking about different aspects about translating the plays that we were thinking about, but I have a whole series of questions and I think I'm going to just throw them out and then whoever wants to jump in and kind of start to answer this, I think that's great. So I think we should start with an easy question, an easy in the sense that everybody's going to have an answer for this one. And that is the question of hurdles. What was kind of, what were sort of the major hurdles that you encountered in thinking about the particular play that you were translating? These plays are quite different, okay? They're really very different. I don't know how many of you have seen the plays or read the plays. I know that you were here for both sessions, right, yesterday, but you know that the play that you'll be seeing tonight, Out There, is a very quick, you can call it a dysfunctional family drama after enter the financial crisis in 2008, whereas Communique No. 10 is a play about alienation of the urban underclass of projects. I'm sorry for this short, but they've kind of helped explain what they are. And Pride and Headlessness is this crazy, surrealistic kind of dark lark that takes us through the mind of an author engaging with an act of making theater at the same time as engaging with the act of kind of exercising family demons. So that quickly sort of does the synopsis of these plays. And so again, major hurdles in the translating, how you had to figure out what to do, do you have problems with register, do you have problems with tone, if there were special words that caused problems. If you had to do some research in it, to be able to think through the transition of the space. Who wants to start? Well, I was really excited to translate some of this play for two reasons. One, I loved it, and two, because the language I thought when I first read it was kind of straight forward, and as I got tangled into it, I realized it was actually quite difficult for me. For two reasons. One, I translated probably ten plays before this, but I was always translating plays that had already been translated, so I was basically hopefully writing a better, fresher translation. This was the first time I had ever translated a play that has never been translated before, so that was its own challenge. The second challenge is that I say slang, and I realize I misled people. Everybody thought I meant that there's a lot of swearing in the play, and there's not a lot of swearing in the play, but there's a lot of language used in interesting ways, a lot of dropped words, a lot of syntax that's interesting and creative, and a lot of words used in different ways. I would find myself late at night on French language forums with other translators reading about how words can be used in certain contexts, which when I'm translating Enesco or Saatch or something like that, I don't have to do that. It's more clear. But then the other thing is getting a sense of Samuel's voice, which is the language in French is not completely simple, but the sentences, Judith asked if we did research, and I have to say probably the thing that helped me most is having read a lot of fault books, having a sense of how to sustain those sentences, because that's something that Samuel does very well. Someone will have a monologue, and a sentence will be many, many lines long, and so those are my big hurdles, but they were fun to work on, and I'm grateful that I had Yvonne and Samuel to help me out when I got stuck. I think one of the things that was really handled beautifully in the translation was, in fact, the complexity of shift in registers which happens a lot in contemporary theatre between the kind of spark dialogue parts and then these long, monological things in other parts, and everybody has kind of experienced that in the translation that they're doing. Sure, I can say something about, I mean, that is something that's common of the plays that we worked on. Natalie's play in particular, there's a lot that's lost, I will just confess that we lost so much because it's full of rhymes and assessments and puns that cannot be translated into English or words where you just have to choose and sometimes you'll have three characters going one, two, three, one after another and they'll be all using a word that rhymes in each other. We were still talking about the problem of translating the word bomb with certain scenes where you've got to pick one or the other. That's going to work. I think that the thing that I was personally most worried about in translating this play is that people take it as some sort of view onto reality that it's not reality. To me, I mean, it's not a real, it helped me, I mean, first of all, you asked the research question. This is maybe what the French called they fall messed up with this, you know, I do research no matter what about everything, I'm just a nerd and in fact the research for this play was looking at certain resonances with this, there are things in common but it's really important to get that this play has all kinds of genres mixed into it that it's not at all realistic, naturalistic and the original language because of all that word play you don't need to provide that many cues I mean, it's just there built in and I think we were always worried about maybe you want to say more about that but we tried to... I was like you, take the microphone out of my hand, please The main question about what you just said though, does this mean that you kind of... in addition to being a translator you also have to be a poet or a writer to do that, does it help? Is that what you become? I would never say that I'm a poet or a writer, but... Yes, you have to be a writer to be a writer Yes, okay Then I don't know whether we did... There is actual... I should say that there are poems also in this I mean not only poems that are poems that people know, like the Odyssey or... but there's also... Natalie herself wrote a poem for this play which you don't always know when you're reading as a... there are also expressions that are invented, I mean there's this one thing where somebody laughs, it's like a we transit laughter as a mountaineer like a man at least but if you're reading that as a foreigner you have something in your head I know as a translator, oh maybe that's an expression maybe everybody in France knows what that means and I better start doing research to find out and in fact know it's invented for the for the play I just want to respond to your question of do we have to be writers and poets and I'm going to say yes I think that you have to find in yourself to translate your own... you have to sort of have and trust that you have a writer or a poetic sensibility I think it also depends very much on the writer I don't think I don't think that I would be a good translator for everybody's work I also think that I read this particular work and felt that I sensed the something about Natalie's writing or poetry that spoke to me and that I felt that I could be an honest translator of and that would not that's certainly not true for every piece and that might not be true for other translators either but it's my case and certainly as much as Emily Jane might say you know she's a you know having sort of been you know worked closely with her there were many moments when I would read the original and I would read what Emily Jane had written as a first pass and I would say yes this is really the essence of it but I do want to say that I think as a translator this is something this doesn't go too much with the next domain but I'll just say that I think that there are times when people who really build themselves first and foremost as a writer and poet do wonderful translations of other people's work and neither Emily Jane or I actually bill ourselves first and foremost as a writer-poet who writes their own material although Emily Jane writes professionally and I've written a lot of things and we both love language and literature and in this particular task I think that that can nonetheless make as good translators because in fact our egos as writers or poets are not necessarily in play in any sense and even as much as we have our own sensibility the stamp of our own you know voice is perhaps more fluid therefore may be able to bend towards trying to the whole thing is a hurdle because this is what I like about the play is everything that the various characters say they say in defiance of everybody else so the main task for me at least I don't know about Kimberly's reception but what I tried to do was sort of see what energy and presence was there in the language when I read it in French and then try to create the same of this plastic quality this sort of statue like material aspect so that was so it wasn't you know word by well so of course we had to proceed word by word but at least I was thinking about the words as sort of forming large blocks big masses each of which had its own articulation and impact so that's where I would locate the hurdle so it was a series of hurdles because you're jumping through a landscape so to speak that is made of of language because each character kind of takes this material and sculpts it into something different and you bend, weave, duck and sort of leap over as you encounter it and then try to subject the audience to the same thing creating a similar obstacle for us it's hard for me to think of hurdles right now because I just think of it as a joy it was really a joy to translate this work and especially with Eric who is sort of maybe the fastest translator I've ever met we sort of got the script and I turned around and he had a draft she's not just saying that because he's her boyfriend by the way and he doesn't waste any time thinking about what the he's not pedantic he doesn't think about the literal he doesn't worry about the literal because he immediately gets to what the heart of the meaning is which is a real gift after a few days of fasting and prayer after a few days of fasting and prayer so really for me then what I had was a joy I had he said the engine I think about the the doors and the wipers and you know maybe rethink the structure a little bit but I mean for me then I was faced with the challenge I would say of the cultural translation having known Maryam's work one other piece already I knew that she wrote for a very specific context and she had a lot of in-jokes and in-jokes are part of her work and for this play when we realized that some of the references were French and they weren't landing we decided to go ahead and start scooting the play closer to our audiences to the central valley even and that was a fun challenge but in the process of play development of course there are people who feel oh the play is French and it's in France and there's this wonderful details for here today right so there's a sense that French things are beautiful but in a way it makes it safer too and this is not a safe play this is a violent rough edged, very immediate play and to say that it's set in France where maybe they think those things kept it at a distance so for me one of the wonderful challenges was finding ways to make it to make it read in all of its complexity and its internal jokes and its references here in this culture what was that central valley? was it the Loire Valley in France? we actually had a reference to Fresno but it got cut during the reading just because they cut that part of the scene but what was it in France? before you changed it the Gav exactly not South of France it's a lost place it's a beautiful dry and lost place South South of France so military not incredibly not a cultural capital very hot, very dry and a little rustic so we were thinking what's the equivalent for San Francisco audiences none of these equivalents are perfect but you try to scooch as close as you can to help things out I should mention that we thought it was very important in our translation that in fact it be very situated in Paris I'm stopping Michelle just a minute because this actually leads us right into the second question that I wanted to ask which is actually the question I think that underlies a lot of what we were thinking about the translation and it's something that's important to La Homme to think about and he wants to say a few things about and that's the whole question about translation versus adaptation when you move plain text into a cultural space in which it emerged how you go about thinking about that what is in play when you're thinking about that why it's important to do it why it's not important to do it what gets lost, what gets saved all those kinds of questions so that's what you're going to be talking about I'll say a few words about it then maybe Emily Jane can say some more about it we felt that it was very important that this particular play so feel there's a big difference between adaptation and translation and I do think it has something to do with ego I feel like when I'm translating I I embrace the experience of giving myself over to someone else's vision and as a director actually I had a wonderful experience I've directed a lot of back then I'm used to directing Shakespeare where I set it in a rock in 2003 and so I'm used to having my directorial voice present and with Beckett of course I had to there are actually rules if you mess with his ideas and so I was directing at the Guthrie Happy Days and I realized I can't stick around with this stuff but I found tremendous freedom in just saying I'm just going to do the best version of the play that Beckett wrote and I found that actually my voice was there in a way and that I found a lot of freedom in those constraints and just like with translating I think what's fun about translating is really trying to do the best in English possible and not trying to not have it be my voice at all but really trying to have the challenge be his voice for my little adaptation challenge I feel like I didn't have as big a hurdle as because jokes are I think are hard and you think about Commedia dell'artic troupes that when they would go to different towns they would change the jokes they would fit the town so I have great sympathy it makes sense to me why you made those changes for me the challenge was where we put rich and poor people in our country is different from where they do in Europe so here the rich people live in the suburbs and the working people live in the inner city and in France it's the exact opposite the wealthy people live in the city and the working class people live outside the city but if I use the term suburbs for where the projects are that just would conjure the completely wrong picture that's where I had to look for words like outskirts and periphery and things like that to get a different word out there there's no way around it the work has to go through you the translator so you're in a way kind of the sieve through which we receive the work I mean everyone's you can't be invisible as a translator you can't I think that's a really important question because I want to say that I don't believe there's such a thing as a literal translation I mean there's this kind of fairy land where words would just have equivalents that you would just plug in like that doesn't even exist every time you choose a word you're making a choice absolutely of course and it's interesting to me that we still have a sense of the sanctity of the text here even though we've been fighting in the states for 40 or 50 years because we're so free with our choices as directors for example sometimes I will have students who are afraid to change a word of the text but they'll cast a lead role that used to be a man with a woman you know or they'll set it in some in some world and I'm like you know that's a much bigger interpretive choice that you're making than that word that you didn't want to change you know like you didn't want to change pal to buddy you know whatever but it would change the gender of the lead person so to me it's really interesting how how much we still believe that there is a kind of core that is true and absolute and firm that maybe there is something exact and we don't feel that way in other aspects of our creative work so for me what the translator can do is first of all give us a sense of what the words were and what order they were in and the shape of it and the structure and the internal dynamics of the pieces but we can also have access to and this is sort of an extraordinary thing that has been made possibly but what did you mean? what about Le Ga? was the reason why you chose it and why this word in this place why Thummi Devoe so I got to ask for all those things so for me that made it beautifully easy to say okay the in-joke about Thummi Devoe okay Marcus Gardling can you imagine that scene when you didn't know that it was an in-joke about the play you had to change that absolutely but I feel like if a script like this is published with somebody who's interested in metatheter who's very interested in watching the process of creation and the place where it's being performed landing, what I can do is give people options so if it's where to be printed I mentioned this briefly to Matthew already we might choose one way one set of references and then put a note and say here are the choices we made during our reading in San Francisco we changed X to Y you might do something similar but to let the potential producers know that these jokes are meant to land and that there are different options for them because directors make these kinds of choices all the way where they're casting and they're design and they're even the style and the pace of it why not give them the option to translate things if the playwright herself feels that this is the play that can move through cultures and doesn't have to be French but you can do this because of the specificity of the play that you were working on if you were working with this different kind of a text where the energy in the text came entirely with the rhythm and you decided to switch the rhythm entirely I think at that point you've done something that's incorrect that you have not translated the text and so I think that this question at the blanket statement that you made at the beginning about there's no sanctity of the text I think we have to be careful when we say this that as well because I am of the deconstruction generation so it's not that... I just wanted to say that it's not that the text I didn't by specifying there's a difference between adaptation and translation the point was not that the text is sacred I think what worries me particularly in the American context because we talk a lot about multiculturalism in this country and yet we don't really have it or it's very symbolic it's window dressing a lot of times and it's very easy for Americans to think particularly with things that come from western Europe that it's the same and that's why I have that emphasis on you know no it's not the United States and don't fool yourself for a minute and thinking that that's very important to me and if we had made it more that way for instance by changing the names of places not using Brittany not using Paris I think that that would have been really a tragic rendering in some way I mean it would be a great loss so that's why I mean American culture is absolutely everywhere and we're a little bit disconnected from what real difference is even though as I say it's a big topic here I'm sure that no one wants to talk about this but one of the things that I've heard him say frequently is one of the things that happens when we go see theater pieces from other countries that have been translated and that leave something of the otherness of the country there is that we experience that otherness in a different kind of a way so that instead of going to the theater we're seeing ourselves we're going to the theater and we're seeing something other than ourselves that then can become us so that's a kind of interesting thing to contemplate things from now on I hardly have anything to say more about the real the high quality of your reflection about what is translating but yeah in a general way I think Antoine Vitez because we have Maison Antoine Vitez and Antoine Vitez used to say all the plays of humanity are one and a single text written in an infinity of different languages and everything belongs to us we have to translate everything and this is the motto of Maison Antoine Vitez and it's the Babel theory it's about the same thing written in different languages which have created or are linked to different cultures ways to see the world but there is a thing there is a common language and it's because there is a common language that translation is possible and so most of the time the question for me when I think about translation is how much are we ready or willing or willing already it depends it's not the same thing to post to incorporate from the others in order to find ourselves it's like in a love relation you have to know the differences to know what's in common and this thing in common is the act of translating so when I heard about the debate between translation and adaptation I'm not sure it's an artistic it has to do with something artistic adaptation most of the time had to deal with ethnocentrism that means that 100 or 200 years ago when translations were made these things change with German and French romanticism when really people were looking outside their country to see how it is but before this each country used to consider as the center of the world so everything that came had to fit to the standards of your own country and because they have been travelers because they have been people that went far away and discovered other stuff you slowly and slowly became aware about the differences and the evolution of translation because I don't believe at all that there is a theory of translation translation is always about experience and all what you have said reflects this but a translation is an experience as writing is an experience when we translate we don't translate a language we translate what an author does to his own language we translate a translation and after us the director is another translator he translates what we translate from the translation of a playwright and that's why in this progression every single step is absolutely important and that's why translators are not less important than directors or less important than authors and maybe that's the sense of you have to be a writer when you translate you also have to be a dramaturg you also have to be you have to be connected to be to the whole thing and yeah okay general stuff I just wanted to put it this way it's very beautiful I think I actually wanted to get back to thinking about Ram type and bird direct and back it you know the back it translated his own place and if you put his play waiting for Godot next to the way he wrote in French a text that you would call an adaptation so that one might call an adaptation it's certainly not anything like a literal translation so he's thinking very much about how the jokes will fall how the rhythm works because he's thinking about the audience he's going to receive an English rather than French so that it's and he wasn't he didn't want anybody else to translate his theater text nor did he really want anybody else to have a direct so control so what Mahon just said about do we have to be writers if we're going to be translators I didn't mean to be creative writers necessarily we'll play rights ourselves but I don't think that you could be a good translator if you're not on some level a good writer you just can't have a sense of actually the sense of openness I think in the room to having the expression and kind of landing as possible was important to us I'm sorry I'll try to make this brief although this is a question that speaks to my heart because this collaboration is where a handful of actors were there and got to hear a draft and based on that one Skype meeting we went home and changed hundreds of we found that the periods were real stoppers for our actors and we knew that Mahon's text had to go go go go so there was there changing into commas making more contractions you think when you're translating and then since we've been in rehearsal this week you know you keep hearing actors stumbling over something that didn't it seemed in a literary fashion fine but obviously it's not yet flowing theatrically then you find I actually heard all this week strange leftover galasisms that seemed okay on people right but then and actually I wonder if you felt this Rob but I had a I had a revelation yesterday when hearing Rob's piece because I heard there were caca and we had caca in ours we were cleaning up caca literally we were cleaning up caca in the last minute because I heard it and I went oh my god caca in our play is a galasism it should be boopy we had this moment and it wasn't until I heard it and Rob's play I was like oh yes that's the way French people caca is a word but no poofy is really the better for us can I ask this question does anybody use because Amy said caca which she was growing up in her family so I'm wondering if any other Americans use caca in Latino culture we all call it caca this is about Latino culture that uses caca no no caca you know the thing is my ancient work but I don't it worked okay it worked fine then we got a lot of things like we got we cleaned that soupy and we got a lot of the poofy and let me just say actually I'll awkwardly push the microphone after this we talked to Sharon we talked to Sharon Lockwood one of our maybe doodoo and we sat there for 20 minutes and I said well what did you say with your kids and her husband said we said shit I said okay well that's what the mom says when she's frustrated at the end of the speech she goes demand but she's trying to talk in that tone link and there was a book apparently that a lot of parents of this generation are reading like somebody goes poopy because I think the mother in that speech was reading a lot of how to parenting gods and how do you talk to your child and what to do that's appropriate and I think one translation for a different generation caca might be better for a different part of the country do you know what I mean this is the joy of translating hey can I jump in here I'm just really glad we're talking about poop it's all it was so high this French translation that I'll never talk about poop but for for me my relationship to poop is that in the play I kept it caca because the line is the caca on your the caca in your mouth is worse than the caca on your shoe and we where I would probably if I was only talking about stepping a dog poo I might say dog poo but we don't often say oh he's full of who he's full of caca he's just saying caca so that's why it was important to have the the figurative idea of your words being caca which made it make sense and another thing I want to jump up on I don't know why it is but every play I've translated at a certain point especially with the actors are speaking it I ask myself why did I always translate it cannot do not we start meeting and the actors are very observant and they're very respectful and they say do not go there I cannot do that and I keep going oh that sounds so terrible and I don't know why I don't know why it is but I always in rehearsal realize I've got to change those all the cants and I don't know why it is but it's only when it's the last thing that happens with the tags that anyway I think it's interesting that you have that experience too talking about caca and poo and mail and mail and everything I think probably I'm always dreaming about an international translation workshop dedicated to humor and to slang because humor and slang are the probably the most relevant things about what the culture is if you take for instance our slang in France and I'm speaking about two French speaking countries now in France we have a relationship to the bad words which is a relate on shit and on sex we say bordel we say maire we say nique ta mère, fuck your mother etc etc when we go to Calcon, Conas it's sex genitals and and fecal and when we go to Montréal for instance it's about religion and I'm translated from German and when I translate a play from south of Germany or Bavaria or Austria where the Catholic religion is very important all the bad words are related to Jesus or to the the religion etc when we go to the north it's completely different and the other way the other workshop that would be really interesting is about humor because humor is the distance a population people have with themselves and this distance reveals lots of things about what a population is humor is the distance you keep with your own reality in order to to to reflect, to see it and from one culture to another it's really difficult to translate humor and to put it in the right way that is the thing that was so fascinating in the reading yesterday about Marions because it has such a kind of specific French humor and to see it it was not an adaptation it was a translation and it worked but it it worked with other with others rules with other so that makes me think about what was the French for slot yeah that was the purpose in this particular one to get back to this question of adaptation and translation so let's say you're translating a play from Canada from French-Canadian because this is something live running too and you have this awful word, the most awful word that a French-Canadian can say which translates as church or or temple and obviously that means absolutely nothing in English so what do you translate it as I usually I translate it as fuck except that the awful thing is now French-Canadians are also usually fuck so you can have and then you get fuck fuck and the next thing you know you have lines of fucks because you can't you get the connotation you get the strength of that connotation that you can't go anywhere else in English so then you have to start inventing things anyway, nothing you wanted to say something does the summer not mean the same thing to patients? no does it mean that it doesn't have the same dirty connotation? so patients don't say tabernacle unless they live in Molyard and there are a lot of international fluctuations and what did because I love this discussion it's because it's so about writing or the journey and you know I realised that where we worked together I really appreciated a lot the time we had to talk and my parents that I speak really English so I can I can be very anxious about the translation because I feel English language and what really reassured me a lot was that you asked so many questions and that you were so anxious about knowing what I meant because I know how difficult it is to translate my writing I choose words who have many several meanings so it's impossible to translate this part of my work and I know that so I'm always very anxious because I know there will be many choices to make and the participation just to be I was so sure that you wanted to know what I meant and what I mean is not necessarily what is written it's also translation sometimes when you write what you mean you know then you try to put it in some word in a sentence and it's very organic it's a way to deposition somehow and I felt it's like in a love relationship and sometimes just trust people and I really trusted you guys the way you work so you just go hand in hand on a way and there's kind of a no well end when the text appears which is there's something magic about that really but it has to do with possessing and I love the way I pick up on something that Kimberley had said about how distance when you step back from something that you see vestiges of Galax syntax and things like that and I think on the one hand you always have that in translations there is that structure that somehow you don't want it to be there and it creeps back in on the other hand I have to say that in some ways I'm less worried about it I see it all the time also because we do these books and then a year later I pick them up and I'm like oh my god you see what language that was originally in particularly in English we're living in this world where so many people speak English and now we have this Glowish where my husband works in an office where maybe two people are native speakers of English and they're 50 people there and yet they're all speaking to each other in English and so they're using so that these other syntaxes are creeping into English at vice versa anyway and that's part of the fact that the language is not a fixed thing and so maybe it's not I'm not saying that we shouldn't try to get rid of that but it's there and it's not necessarily bad either that that's part of the translation process so oh, it's definitely about that yeah I think something I like when I'm either translating either either French or from German is to try as much as possible to keep especially because of Shakespeare we're used to having all kinds of crazy syntaxes and what I often try to do is I try to mirror the French syntax and see if it could work in English and if it absolutely can't work then I'll change it but I like to try to try to have the word order match as close as possible and try to have because we have so many borrowed words I like to try to have the sounds of words be similar I once read a translation of a play where the playwright translated any mo as beasts and I just felt like why in the world would you you've got a perfectly good you could translate it as animals animals it's so close why would you translate it as as beasts I don't understand that because I feel like you're changing both the sound and the idea so I like to try to keep it as close as possible it's a good example the reason why you sometimes have to translate animals with beasts is because you can sometimes say when a woman says from a man it's an animal so she doesn't say it's an animal she says he's a beast that's it's everything is a question of of context so yeah and I forgot what I wanted to say but you could come back we can say about a man he's an animal what I wanted to say is to to respond to I wanted to add something about the legal point part of it as Mesopotamia is also an institution an association dedicated to defend the status of the translator there is one thing we we want to defend in France is that the translation the translator is the author of his translation the words he uses are his words and he's responsible for the text he has written and that's in I suppose here it's the same thing but in French in the French in the French law system the translator and the author in our author society because we don't have agencies represented by the SRCD for those who are here which is the society responsible on a national level for collecting the money of the productions and gives the parts to everyone who is involved in the process so the authors and the translators they have the same status and when we have a foreign play being produced in France the SRCD asks the authors and the translator how they want to divide their their the right the right so you have the same and this is very simple and that's why it's important when a producer production is done that you have the name of the playwright and you have the name of the translator just because because it's not the translation of someone else and each translation is different from another so it's important to know who has translated the play it does not work like this in the United States and very frequently one never sees the name of the theatrical translators ever ever ever a play by Yasmina Reza is a play by Yasmina Reza if it's in French it's the same play but that's a whole other issue about what kind of theater is she right so I think it changes with every production and different cast and different directors and different times and places when it's done I think that's a gift to plays to continue to have different lives every time that they're produced and just as texts will have different lives based on different translations I'm in the middle of the verse epic it's wonderful for me to have those to choose from some in rhymed couplets some in prose some in verse places in a lot in others some stuck in elevated poetic some completely contemporary it's wonderful considering that plays are pretexts for performances or that they're one part of performance and that the rest has to happen around it it's wonderful that we have options to choose from and if I could bring it back to shit I was thinking we're an august company here because we've been talking this week some of us and at the center of his play the beginning of his play throughout his play it's called Merseille which is shit with an extra R in French and this word and the translation so shit right doesn't and when you put the extra R say Merseille properly oh no I don't know some of us are watching that we're even discussing anyway it has a wonderful sound to it in French and shit kind of falls flat so some people have said shitter to shit yes there is Merdre and the alliteration with Perth lose so it can be hours of investigation and he took instead of translating it to the same what's that and your choice behind it it's fascinating well one of the most famous lines in literature is and so and Merdre you know I feel like it's almost a verb form of Merdre and so I and you know of course Jerry is playing on the Scottish play all these Shakespeare plays and so the first time he says it I have him say to shit to Perth and then and then later on it gets shorter to shit so it becomes to shit but it's this kind of verb form and it gets the idea of Hamlet that we're going to be messing with Hamlet and the play I might ask one last question because I don't think we have that much more time but this is a great question to Rob and Amy because I think the final act of translation is a cultural translation in the institution of theatre to the mouths and the bodies of actors who are not from these other countries so my question because Kerry is not here but you too have directed these plays how have the actors experienced these texts have they been changed by encountering these texts have they felt that they were encountering something other than a text by an American author by American authors I think I can speak for myself and having observed pride I'm just going to take it down to one word I think I can speak a little bit about that for our actors the idea that something seemingly naturalistic was in fact stylistic and that the language is resonant and poetic and that the style of the piece shifts and changes and employs different kinds of stylistic strategies to get its to tell its story was really you know eye-opening challenging and fun and I don't we didn't really struggle we have one actor that we wanted to really work the sound of the language interpreting but overlaying it with an idea you know saying I'm now an actor and I'm going to act this character was for now always squashing it was shitting on it that it was squashing it and that to find a lighter a lighter expression for the play was hard because you know you want to perform and in fact the performance really is within the context of the words that the structure of the language itself was and Harry is that particular play and I think hearing the text spoken by the playwrights together and we did we designed each other the opportunity about how they were reading and we couldn't tell when it was shifted from character to character we couldn't tell where the it was just driving and Marcus Liz and myself just should just know how to perform thinking about that so we hear the text and I have one or two this is how we're seeing it but then the day that we are going to read them we're reading this oh this is what she wrote and it looks like on the page it looks like like a conversation it looks like a realistic battle but we remember what she did with the performance of it we were finding nuances we said we have to respect and she said that was good did we do it right yeah that was good sometimes it was a few notes but generally they said no that was great that was it so we took our cues from their own performances it really helps to hear the playwright read their own text because you kind of understand the sort of the shape of the work we did that by Deborah's pool I got to hear her say well read the entire play in French and that was really helpful we have a terrible practice in American acting that comes from TV and film the director will often say you don't have to say you don't have to say the word just say something get the feel of it and since actors go from film and TV to theater powerful actors will sound natural words that are hard and make your mind have to think a different way and they're used to exercising that muscle again because you're actually not saying what's on weirder and they say could you a direction I like to give some time read it again but read it like you're being in a situation and action and it's more about listening to the sound of the words and being in tune with that I have my Kindle let me read you this listen to it it isn't natural but if you just give yourself over to that and notice how I'm not trying to make it sound real I think that's what the sound and the rhythm of the piece it was an adjustment but I think it's an important adjustment to give people I think we have to end now so I would just say that I think probably the greatest challenge of translating French contemporary text into the American contemporary scene is precisely the differences in who are going to be thinking in these kinds of terms we think how Americans approach acting that is really so Amy says we can continue this conversation in the hall I'll break up some wine I know what y'all want to have a little glass and we can be on the water thank you Drew and Althar thank you new play TV audience we'll see you again we'll see you again thank you thank you thank you goodbye