PANEL 8
THEATRE TRANSLATION
Chair: Daozhen Zhang, Guangdong University of Technology
Make it New: Lady Precious Stream as a Modernist Adventure in cross-cultural Theatre Translation
LIsha Xu (Queen’s University Belfast, UK)
Lady Precious Stream (1934), adapted from Hong Zong Lie Ma[红鬃烈马], a Peking Opera widely-staged in China, is the first English Peking Opera translation adapted for the British stage by a Chinese translator and director, S. I. Hsiung (1902-1991). Since its premier at Little Theatre in London in 1934, it became a blockbuster running for over 900 nights in London with glowing reviews in the two years which followed. Its commercial success put the translator’s role at risk. Commercial theatre productions in London lead to ethnical queries on what has been reserved or changed from the source culture and what attempt has been made to introduce or cater for the target culture. The success of the play reveals that the translator (Hsiung), even with his intentions of transmitting Chinese modernity in the first place, nevertheless, ultimately compromises this due to a complicated British theatrical context between World war I and II. From an orientalism perspective, his compromises, however, fall into a political ideology -- modernism fused with commercialism, exoticism, escapism in the 1930s. This paper contextualizes the translator’s choices that led to Lady Precious Stream becoming what it is and how it was performed on the London stage.
This paper will investigate the choices made by the translator in the two following ways: the translator’s intention of transmitting Chinese modernity against the colonized stereotypes that remained from feudal times and which were prevailing then, and the anxieties of being accepted by a conservative western theatre market. Instead of staying as a literary text, Lady Precious Stream, together with its various staging productions, provides an opportunity to examine the translator’s role in cooperation with the rest of the participants in the theatre system.
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Tradapting for the Theatre: Alloula and Adar as a Case in Point
Souâd Hamerlain (University of Mostaganem, Algeria)
The scant interest ascribed to drama translation in Algeria buttressed my commitment in publicising the Algerian theatre and its translatability. For this to take concrete shape, I shall attempt, within the precincts of this paper, (1) to spell out the Oriento-Islamic and Occidental influences that marked the inception of the Algerian theatre; (2) explicate the linguistic unease felt by 20th century Algerian playwrights due to the community’s diglossic situation; and expectantly (3) explain the tortuous pathway I followed in rendering two renowned playwrights’ works, namely Mohammed Adar’s 1972 Lamkhakh (The Two Brains) and Abdelkader Alloula’s 1980 Lagwal (Sayings) into English. Admittedly, when translating for the theatre, performability and immediacy of discourse are perhaps the most arresting factors. With these two notions in mind, specific features listing time and space, sociopolitical, religious, and onomastic traits had been itemized and worked on. I come to conclude that the chasm between the Arabic and English languages/cultures could well be constricted thanks to the technique of tradaptation (Michel Garneau 1978) in which neither a pure literal translation nor a rugged adaptation is adopted. Eventually, I hope that the obtained TL versions will trigger a stimulating debate on the feasibility of making an English-speaking audience interact with a priori ideologically-charged and culturally-sensitive texts.
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Translating the Untranslatable: Foreign Otherness and Cross-Cultural Readability. A Case Study of Wang Rongpei’s Translation of The Peony Pavilion
Kexin Du (University of Macau, China)
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As a classic traditional Chinese chuanqi drama, Tang Xianzu’s The Peony Pavilion (Mudan Ting), written in an unusually dense and poetic style, has been translated into multiple languages. Nevertheless, inadequate research has been done to explore both cultural and linguistic untranslatability embedded in either the content or form of this vernacular masterpiece. Untranslatability, which is ordinarily ascribed to foreign otherness, seems to decrease cross-cultural readability while, on the other hand, foreignness is known to be liable to create diversity and possibility of the target language and culture. In this light, this study intends to examine how the untranslatable elements—cultural references have been perceived and processed by diluting linguistic strangeness and cultural alienation in literary translation, with Wang Rongpei’s translation of The Peony Pavilion as its research subject. Drawing on the theoretical discussions of untranslatability, foreign otherness and readability, as well as the analytic methods of cultural references (CRs) associated with translation, this paper reveals the intricate patterns of interplay between the translator’s stable behavior and his continuous attempts at strengthening or undermining foreign otherness and thus enhancing the cross-cultural readability of The Peony Pavilion without destroying its literariness, so as to enable better understanding of the multidimensional nature of translation operating at different levels.