'Performability of a text is often equated with
the speakability' of a text, that is, the ability to produce fluid
texts, which performers may utter without much difficulty and
the audience, could grasp without much effort. From a theatrical
viewpoint, during the process of translation the need or will
to appeal to audiences usually involves a tension between foreignization
and domestication. The source text (ST) passing through the different
stages of anuvad as translation or interpretation, bhashantaram
as transformation or translation and vivarta as trans-creation
thus enforces decisions which find their way into performance
as textual strategies in the form of a dialect or an idiom or
audio-visual signs by way of body language, design, sound, and
music. The use of Sanskrit terms here shows that a culture that
creates a need or demand for translation has an indigenous framework
of references which help in the interpretation and translation
has an indigenous framework of references which help in the interpretation
and translation of the text in that culture. Performability a
way of arthakriya, from one medium to another, from verbal or
written to performance, is also determined by the theatrical ideology
of the performing unit, and is related to questions of a social
standing of both the performers and the audience.
The translation process is therefore adaptation,
interpretation, paraphrasing, and contemporization and most importantly,
understanding the combine to create meaning in the theatre. The
nature of contemporary theatre has altered from being necessarily
a mere interpretation of experience to being a manifestation of
it. The experimental and experiential quality of theatre today
has led to a definite interaction between the audience and the
performers, often setting aside the role of the author. Thus translation
at these different levels, which gains a multi-dimensional character,
is indeed dual empowerment. James MacDonald, an Honorary Fellow
in Drama at the University of Exter, who has written plays and
assisted performances in Adaptation and the Drama Student,
has this to say
IndianPlay translation is a relatively humble form of
playwriting. Little is ever made of it, in publication or
in production. In production, indeed, it is more commonly
thought of as a literal rendering of the foreign original
or as a transcription of the director's concept of the play.
(MacDonald 1998:137-38)
II
Both the translator and the playwright need to constantly
visualize performance. If a linguistic utterance itself is a translation
of an idea or thought, it is this translation of an idea into
word and then into action that is indeed empowering. Translation
of a dramatic text therefore works at two levels. Language in
theatre is most often the spoken language unlike that of prose
and of poetry. This language of performance is the language that
communicates instantly, in more ways than one, with the spectators,
and hence the need to use a code that could be received and perhaps
even responded to immediately. Preparedness of the spectators
or audience acquires a significant connotation. The rhetoric of
historical and mythological plays presented a heightened and flamboyant
register while contemporary theatre, on the contrary, across the
centuries, redefined language which is close to the spoken word
to present socially relevant elements in plays. A sense of ownership
or rigidity of the written word has little meaning in theatre.
Giving voice to others may literally mean letting the performers
put the text into their own words or tone through devising or
improvisation. Thus language on the stage gains a gesture, a body
language. The language needs to become a coordinate of the action.
This could be termed Brechtian or simply an element of clarity
given to the actor so as to have freedom to concentrate on action.
If the source text can be considered as a work of art from the
universal to the particular, the target text in turn evolves as
art from the particular to the universal.
Referring to one of her Indian adaptations of the
German silen theatre, Request Concert in her unpublished autobiographical
dramatic narrative antaryatra, Usha Ganguli, a well known
playwright actor-director says:
…the play was being performed in a cowshed. About
twenty Santhal women, strong able-bodied women used to hard
work, came to watch the play that night. In the last scene,
I'm not able to sleep, so I pick up the tablets. Immediately
I felt the riveting stare of twenty pairs of eyes on me, as
if forcing life on me. I could not swallow the tablets to
commit suicide in the last scene that night. That changed
the history of the play…
(Mukherjee 2005)
Contemporary performers often argue and also practice
the very notion of a rigid text or a structured script as redundant
since it prioritizes the word over body, text over the visual,
the written over the spoken and the writer/performer over the
audience. There are often cases wherein the writer or the director
changed the text, context and even the form of the play. In theatre
therfore the spoken word and the performance transcend a rigid
script.
In our postmodernist culture, where narrative structures
are fragmented, theatre substitutes for 'the marketplace'
and its various contributors become subsumed in the whole.
In this context, the author is not so much 'dead' (Barthes
1977) as indivisible from the totality, her/his personal strategy
- text - becoming one strand, merely among many
(MacDonald 1998: 128).
In modern/ postcolonial theatre/ literature, English
words and phrases are often used in vernacular language texts.
While translating such a text one needs to use extralinguistic
methods in the form of quotes or italics. If the translator is
aware of the fact that one of the characters doesn't know English
the dialogue attributed to such a character could remain the source
language or a different register could be used. Keeping in mind
not merely the text but also the performance, the act of translating
plays becomes audience -specific. In intercultural translations
of the plays the translator finds himself/ herself further in
a complex dilemma. As G.N.Devy puts it,
An Indian student of Literature finds himself precariously
hanging between a literary metaphysics, which rules out the
very possibility of translation, and a literary ethos where
translation is becoming increasingly important.
(Devy 1998: 46)
A relationship between author, text and translator
can be viewed in terms of the image of a bird in a cage. Flights
of imagination captured within a framework, both linguistic and
stylistic, form the text. The reader or the translator releases
the bird, lets loose his imagination, only to capture it in another
form/another cage or frame for another set of readers to release
the bird again. However, playwriting being more of a social genre
than a literary genre invariably locates the writer in a specific
culture, and therefore in a specific audience group. Translation
therefore brings about a radical relocation and even transubstantiation.
Thus translating a play imposes certain limitations, limitations
of period and locale and the related speech patterns. How good
or authentic the translation is, is a question often asked. As
Matilal in his note on Translation: Bhartrahari on Sabda says,
The goodness or badness of a translation, the distortion,
falsity or correctness of it, would not be determined simply
by the inter-linguistic or intra-linguistic semantic rules,
but by the entire situation of each translation with all its
uniqueness, that is, by the kind of total reactions, effects,
motivations and references it generates on that occasion.
(Matilal 2001:123)
Translation of literary texts unlike the translation
of scientific texts becomes more of an aesthetic concern, a 'creative
transposition' rather than a linguistic transposition wherein
a literal translation may often miss out on the nuances in the
source text. Translation emerges as a window onto something new
and different even while maintaining the source text and culture.
There emerges a possiblility of understanding others, their cultural
history and power relations in the contemporary world. This awareness
and knowledge is an empowering experience. Michaela Wolf in one
of her papers (affirms that translators and translation scholars
are becoming aware of the fact that translation need not be necessarily
viewed as a transfer "between cultures", but also to
be seen from the standpoint where cultures merge and create new
spaces. She further asserts that translation therefore does not
confirm borders and inscribe the dichotomy of centre-periphery,
but rather identifies pluricentres where cultural differences
are negotiated, - mainly in the context of asymmetrical cultures.
Why does a translator choose a particular text for
translation? Is it just because he/she likes it? Or are there
other reasons? Translation is not merely a linguistic activity,
but it is also an economic, artistic, intercultural or intracultural
communication, a power-political activity. When one translates
for pleasure initially it is he or she who is a translator, the
reader, the audience. But when one translates for reasons academic
these parameters change. The choice of the text depends on structural,
thematic, and even social concerns. The composition of the audience
plays a significant role. If the audience is familiar with the
SL culture, translation into TL is different from the case wherein
the audience is unfamiliar with the SL culture. Therefore there
could be various translations of a text depending not merely on
the translator but based on the target audience / reader.
III
The text under discussion is Suno Shefali, a modern
Hindi play by Kusum Kumar published in 1992, and being a modern
play at least one hurdle could be partially overcome viz. that
of language and the social idiom. However, in the process of translating
the text there were moments of difficulty, when the writer used
poetry and music to highlight specific aspects of the play. Theatre
across the cultures has roots in the divine and the religious.
Natyasastra, accorded the place of a fifth Veda, is deemed to
have taken (itihasa) tradition and combined it with instruction.
Various characteristics were taken from the four Vedas; "from
the Rigveda the element of recitation, from the Samaveda song,
from the Yajurveda the mimetic art, and from Atharvaveda
sentiment" (The Sas Dra. P.14). these elements though traced
to the Vedas have in fact made their presence discernible only
in the epics and the literature that followed. If music is used
for mere ornamentation for instance soft music or the beat of
the soldiers or even music evoking seasons there is no problem
of transferring the mood and tone from the SL to the TL as translation
here is non verbal, however the problem arises when the music
is accompanied by poetic verses. It is the intercultural idiom
that makes it difficult to maintain a proper balance between the
performance-oriented text and the reader/audience - oriented text.
Listen Shefali is the story of a young dalit woman
of self- respect and dignity. Even as a child she was always different.
She would refuse to accept 'alms', as she would call it, 'free
books and free food'. She considered them as a way of distancing
from the regular and accepted norms of society. She refuses to
be exploited and desired to 'be like every one else', to be a
part of the mainstream. Her mother works for Miss Sahib. It is
Miss sahib who encourages Shefali to educate herself. She recommends
Shefali to a prospective politician, Satamev Dikshit to teach
her English. English and the presence of Miss Sahib bring in the
subtle presence of the colonial powers that open the windows to
the outer world. It is here that Shefali falls in love with Dikshit's
son, Bakul. However she realizes that Bakul's interest in her
is not for her as a person or as an individual but his interest
is because she is a dalit. Both Satyamev Dikshit and Bakul want
to cash in on the fact that she is a dalit. They want to say that
they show no discrimination against dalits, they want to use this
as an exploit for winning the elections. But Shefali refuses to
be used as a commodity or material for propaganda. Seeing through
their game, she declines to marry Bakul, thus shattering their
dreams:
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