Barbara Bibik

Translators, as it is argued by translation scholars, often become the first directors of plays. This happens because taking into account the dramatic potential of the translated text results in the translator’s own projections about the possible staging that are inserted in the translated text. In ancient tragedies there were no written stage directions. But it does not mean that there were no stage instructions. Oliver Taplin, who sees the texts of ancient tragedies as a kind of theatre scripts, observes that the majority of information needed to perform any ancient tragedy is implicite included in the text itself. The fact that we do not have any written records of any performances that took place in 5th century BC makes it possible for the translator to imagine a prospective staging. Undoubtedly, the 5th century BC tragedies were the theatre productions influenced by the Athenian theatre of the day – its natural location, architecture, theatre equipment and stage design. So a translation that aims to be both literary and theatrically significant has to include the theatre dimension. Inserting stage directions into the translation is one of the means to do this (and we find them in almost all modern translations of ancient plays). In my paper I discuss three main Polish translations of Aeschylus’s Choeforoe (the second part of the only extant ancient trilogy titled Oresteia), taking into consideration the stage directions inserted by the translators. The versions by Zygmunt Węclewski (published in 1873), Jan Kasprowicz (in 1908) and Stefan Srebrny (in 1952) are examined in view of the question what kind of staging the translators suggested and why.

Between Fidelity and Freedom

Ancient playwrights created their plays to be performed on the Athenian stage in the 5th century BC. Within the ensuing centuries, though, their plays were regarded mainly as literary works. Such was the prevailing attitude in the 19th century, when first Polish translations of Greek tragedies were published; it was also very common in the 20th century. However, some translators were aware of the fact that what they translated was not only poetry, but also a material for the stage. Since the Polish theatrical stage differed from the ancient one, a translator of any drama found themselves not only between languages and cultures, but also between stage conventions. That is why their work was always interdisciplinary, it also required inventiveness. But their licence was usually constrained by contemporary literary and theatrical tendencies, and also by the current body of research on antiquity, which was constantly changing. We will never have access to the original idea of those works, but we may try to follow the translator’s work, and try to understand their decisions, their interpretation of a play and the staging potential designed in the final translation, which influences the imagination of readers or spectators. Making use of the necessarily interdisciplinary standpoints as well as selected examples of Polish translations, this paper considers the role of translators in rendering a play from a distant past into the modern world.