Ewa Bal

What If the Past Returns? Translating Older Theatre Texts and Performing Remains

The article is an attempt to transfer into the field of translation studies selected theories of performance and of performative strategies of establishing relations with the past. The author seeks to define the act of translating old theatrical texts – a fragmentary trace of the Italian dell’arte, a theatrical practice which is forgotten yet paradoxically still reproduced based on specific principles – as “performing remains”. The term is borrowed from Rebecca Schneider, an American performance scholar who introduced it into contemporary humanities in her book Performing Remains. Art and War in Time of Theatrical Reenactment (2011) to describe the theatrical reconstructions of historical events and artistic transformations of historical performances. The tensions between the material and non-material traces of the past and the possibilities of their contemporary transformation in performative actions, as described by Schneider, provide a point of departure for reflecting on the act of translating as an epistemological tool for constructing knowledge about the past and, at the same time, for making the past present in a performative way.  

The article deals with issues related to translation of texts for theatre in the light of the performative and cultural turn in the modern Humanities. While Cultural Studies scholars have abandoned the categories of directness in text translation in favor of analyzing cultural differences and contexts, they have neglected issues connected with language performativity, especially with regard to the dual function of the dramatic text – as literature and as theatre. Following the steps taken by William Worthen, the paper shows the historic dimension of the concept of a theatre play as literature (poetry) and as performance and proves that we have to look at the language of translation from the performative angle (contrasting “performativity” with “performability” as understood by Susan Bennett), not only in a broad cultural and social context. What has to be taken into account are the circumstances of the practice of reading and understating a play, its form as well as the cognitive frames of both the performance creators and the spectators. The argumentation is illustrated by a comparative analysis of two modern Polish translations of Comedic Theatre by Carlo Goldoni, accomplished by Jolanta Dygul and by the author of the article herself.