This Week By Jove Artistic Associate (Research & Education) Christine Plastow discusses how a performance affects the study of a text.
Hello, M’dears, Woody here. The blog’s had a brief hiatus while I was off saving villages from rampaging monsters, but now we here at By Jove HQ have a treat for you. Often the things posted up here are rather casual in tone. This is partly because I like to create a laid-back, welcoming feel to the blog, and mainly because being amicable hides the fact I rarely know what I’m wittering about. This week, however, the blog is donning a gown and mortarboard in acknowledgement of the academic rigour of the post. This week’s post was written by PhD student, and long-time By Jove intellectual colossus Christine Plastow. Put on your clever trousers and have a read.
Text and Context: Performance as Translation and Reception
By Christine Plastow
Christine Plastow, Intellectual Colossus
A play-text is a surprisingly different thing from other kinds of texts. It does not exist purely on the page, but in a space of potential performativity. The fact that the performance dimension must be added means that there is always something more to be determined about these texts. This applies not only to modern play-texts where the ‘original’ context for the performativity of the text is present, yet to occur, or recoverable, but also to the ancient play-texts which make up so much of popular ancient literature. As translation is a key part of the reception of these texts into modern cultures, the translation of a play-text must be considered differently from other kinds of texts. With the translation of the play-text, the translator must also translate the possibility of performance, even if it is not being translated for performance, or indeed, if the original performance context is lost. This is because the possibility of performance is what transforms a play-text into a play.
This potential for performance makes an ancient text visible to a modern audience in a different way to other kinds of reception, particularly when the performance text is a straight translation or a close adaptation. Both actions interfere as little as possible with the original text to make it accessible to an audience who might not know the original language and context. A performance exists separately from an original text and has no need to interfere with it. A translation gets as close as possible to an original text, altering it as little as possible to convey its sense. These acts of performance and translation, then, can be seen as paratexts to the original texts, existing at once in their own right and as a part of the original texts without infringing upon them.
Exactly what is meant by play-text and performance paratext? The play-text is simple: it is the purely textual existence of something which has the capacity to be performed. The paratext element is slightly more complicated. Genette writes that ‘in principle, every context serves as a paratext’ (Genette, 1997, 8). If we consider this is relation to a play, the act of performing a play-text, with everything that act entails, is its paratext. Conventionally, the role of a paratext is ‘to present [the text], in the usual sense of this verb but also in the strongest sense: to make make present, to ensure the text’s presence in the world, its ‘reception’ and consumption’ (Genette, 1997, 1). The performance paratext allows and informs our understanding and reception of the text without necessarily interfering with the text itself, in the same way as, to use Genette’s example, the title of Joyce’s Ulysses informs how we read the text without altering what the text actually says. It ensures the presence of the text in a new context for new receptions.
A performance-based example shows us the effect that this can have; there are many performances of ancient Greek dramas presented in the original language. We cannot assume that all members of the audience would be fluent enough in ancient Greek to understand all the dialogue, and some may have no Greek at all. However, the act of performance instills meaning in the spoken text through the use of, for example, gestures or facial expressions showing emotion, props, costume, or set. Thus a lens is created through which the original text can be viewed and understood, without altering the text at all. A similar effect can of course be had when performing a text in translation, and translation itself functions in a similar way to performance, with the context this time being the target language. The translator, or at least a certain type of translator, will do their best to render the original text as closely as possible in the target language, with minimal interference in form and meaning. Once again, we have a lens through which to view the original text.
Of course, these lenses are not as clear as they may first seem, but are coloured by the choices made by the director and/or translator. These paratexts are created by figures other than the author. But as the director and the translator do not play a role in the traditional paratext, what is their role in the creation of reception paratexts? Both will rely heavily on their own understanding and interpretation of the text with which they are working, as this will allow them to bring the text to life and make their own points with it. A translator may use a sense-for-sense translation which is less linguistically accurate than a word-for-word translation, and yet it is still received as a true translation of the text. Similarly, a director may choose to set an ancient play in a different context while leaving the language of the play unaltered. For example, a director may put Trojan or Greek soldiers in modern military costume, to draw parallels between atrocities in ancient wars and modern wars. The paratext of performance or translation, then, is dependent on a reading of the ancient text by an individual (or sometimes a workshop or group) in order to produce a more comprehensible or powerful reception of the ancient text.
Even if a translator uses words which are as close as possible to exact translations of the original, the meaning will differ due to the different context in which they are being presented. The same can be said of performance. Performing a play involving the Trojan War in present day England will likely to conjure up images of modern wars, projecting ideas of mechanised war onto the hand-to hand fighting of the siege of Troy. If we were to create a simple model of our reception of an ancient ‘play’ as a concept, we could show that it is made up of play-text in ancient context, and performance paratext in modern context. For even if a performance paratext attempts a recreation of the original ancient performance context, the performance will still be occurring in the modern moment, and therefore subject to modern ideas of dramatic convention, for example, or the distancing and alienation of other times and cultures. The creator of the paratext, then, will always be utilising modern signs when making the ancient text visible.
Reworking another’s words in one’s own voice or actions will always be a potent act. It is neither completely the original text, nor an entirely new one, but an exchange of information between two texts which are at once separate and the same. The receptions created through translation and performance provide both new ways of seeing old texts, and old ways of seeing new events. To be successful, translations and performances must make explicit something implicit in the original text. The loss of the original performance paratext of these plays gives modern authors more freedom and license in creating and presenting their own readings from within the text to express their feelings and ideas about their own contemporary context. Presenting these readings as an intrinsic part of the original text by showing the two concurrently, rather than, for example, academic readings in an article separate from the text of the play, allows a wider audience or community of readers to access aspects of Greek tragedy which could not necessarily be gained from reading the original text
Bibliography
Genette, Gerard. 1997. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Well, I certainly feel smarter.
One hopes you’re well,
yrs,
ADWoodward
