The Mercurian

The Mercurian : : A Theatrical Translation Review Volume 7, Number 2 (Fall 2018) Editor: Adam Versényi Editorial Assistant: Sarah Booker ISSN: 2160-3316 The Mercurian is named for Mercury who, if he had known it, was/is the patron god of theatrical translators, those intrepid souls possessed of eloquence, feats of skill, messengers not between the gods but between cultures, traders in images, nimble and dexterous linguistic thieves. Like the metal mercury, theatrical translators are capable of absorbing other metals, forming amalgams. As in ancient chemistry, the mercurian is one of the five elementary “principles” of which all material substances are compounded, otherwise known as “spirit”. The theatrical translator is sprightly, lively, potentially volatile, sometimes inconstant, witty, an ideal guide or conductor on the road. The Mercurian publishes translations of plays and performance pieces from any language into English. The Mercurian also welcomes theoretical pieces about theatrical translation, rants, manifestos, and position papers pertaining to translation for the theatre, as well as production histories of theatrical translations. Submissions should be sent to: Adam Versényi at [email protected] or by snail mail: Adam Versényi, Department of Dramatic Art, CB# 3230, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3230. For translations of plays or performance pieces, unless the material is in the public domain, please send proof of permission to translate from the playwright or original creator of the piece. Since one of the primary objects of The Mercurian is to move translated pieces into production, no translations of plays or performance pieces will be published unless the translator can certify that he/she has had an opportunity to hear the translation performed in either a reading or another production-oriented venue. All material published in The Mercurian is protected by international copyright law. Inquiries related to production or reproduction should be directed to the translator of the piece in question. The Mercurian, Vol. 7, No. 2 (Fall 2018) 1 The Mercurian Volume 7, Number 2 (Fall 2018) Table of Contents Editor’s Note 3 The Thief or Three in the Bedroom 5 by Radu Țuculescu Translated by Mihaela Mudure We Are the Ones Our Parents Warned Us About: A play for two characters 40 By Tanja Šljivar Translated by Cory Tamler and Željko Maksimović Why Does Everything 76 By Rafael Spregelburd Translated by Samuel Buggeln and Ariel Gurevich Inching Towards Yeolha 146 By Sam-Shik Pai Translated by Walter Byongsok Chon The Invasion 217 By Arthur Adamov Translated by David Carter Abu Hassan: Musical Farce in One Act 247 Libretto by Franz Carl Hiemer Translated by Mark Herman and Ronnie Apter In Review: Translating for Singing: The Theory, Art and Craft of Translating Lyrics 281 By Ronnie Apter and Mark Herman Reviewed by Rick Davis The Mercurian, Vol. 7, No. 2 (Fall 2018) 2 Editor’s Note Welcome to the Fall 2018 issue of The Mercurian: A Theatrical Translation Review! Five plays, one opera, and one book review present different translation challenges having to do with radically different approaches to theatrical structure, character, and language from Romanian, Serbo-Croatian, Spanish, Korean, French, and German than commonly occurs in conventional U.S. dramaturgy. We open the issue with Mihaela Murdure’s translation of Romanian playwright Radu Tuculescu’s one- act The Thief or Three in the Bedroom. This dark comedy uses the device of the erotic triangle to examine Romanian society after the fall of Ceausescu in December 1989. In the process Tuculescu reveals the hypocrisy and corruption of Romanian politics in the period. Next is Zeljko Maksimovic and Cory Tamler’s translation of the Bosnian playwright Tanja Sljivar’s We Are the Ones Our Parents Warned Us About in which the accidental meeting of a middle-aged woman and a teenaged boy in a public restroom becomes a series of scenes of role-playing as they attempt to make sense of their lives. As the translators note, not only were they faced with conveying the cultural and political complexity of the Balkans to an English-speaking audience, but also with a text heavily imbued with regional Bosnian idiomatic expressions that might be difficult for even a native speaker to untangle, as well as allusions to Bosnian folk songs, Serbian TV shows, and bloody regional conflicts that might elude the understanding of even audiences from the region. We Are the Ones Our Parents Warned Us About is followed by Samuel Buggeln (translator of Marivaux’s School for Mothers in Vol. 4, No. 2 and Molière’s Hater in Vol. 5, No. 1) and Ariel Gurevich’s translation of Argentine playwright Rafael Spregelburd’s Why Does Everything. Spregelburd’s text is divided into three sequences utilizing various doubling schemes for the actors as the play investigates state bureaucracy, art, business, religion, and superstition. As the translators discuss, contemporary Argentine theatre, and Spregelburd’s own company in particular, frequently runs at a fast pace, with lines overlapping each other in a manner that can seem chaotic to Anglo audiences. The fact that Spregelburd directs and performs in his own plays and that such productions often tour or run intermittently for two years or more, frequently means that a published text does not reflect the rhythm and/or textual changes made in performance. By working closely with Spregelburd on their translation Buggeln and Gurevich attempt to recreate that feeling of Argentine performance on the page. Spregelburd’s play is followed by Walter Byongsok Chon’s translation of South Korean playwright Sam-Shik Pai’s play Inching Towards Yeolha. By means of a talking “four-legged beast” who relates tales of the outside world to an isolated village, Pai creates an allegorical satire that explores the tension between tradition and innovation. Drawing upon the travel diary of an eighteenth-century Korean philosopher named Yeon-Ahm, Pai’s play explores Yeon-Ahm’s search for practical ideas based in Chinese Confucianism that could be used to modernize Korean society. As Chon discusses in his introduction, while Korean-American playwrights have recently begun to receive recognition, contemporary Korean theatre in translation has largely been absent from the English-speaking theatre. The Mercurian hopes that the publication of Chon’s translation will spur more work in this area. The Mercurian, Vol. 7, No. 2 (Fall 2018) 3 We continue with David Carter’s translation of the undervalued twentieth-century French playwright Arthur Adamov’s The Invasion. A contemporary and friend of Antonin Artaud, André Gide, and Jean Vilar, Adamov’s play investigates the nature of human existence in Europe in the 1950s, with references that seem all too contemporary as we deal with present day issues of mass migration. Influenced by both August Strindberg and Franz Kafka, Adamov’s work mixes dream-like scenarios with existential angst and political theory. We conclude this issue with Mark Herman and Ronnie Apter’s translation of Carl Maria von Weber and Franz Carl Hiemer’s singspiel Abu Hassan, paired with Rick Davis’ review of Apter and Herman’s book Translating for Singing: The Theory, Art and Craft of Translating Lyrics. Abu Hassan, although using the tale of Abu al-Hasan told by Sahrazad to King Shahyar in Thousand and One Nights, parallels Weber and Hiemer’s own constant condition of debt. Davis’ book review presents Apter and Herman’s “exploration of the perils and promise of translating for sung performance.” A practice that has been largely shunned by Anglophone productions of opera. Back issues of The Mercurian can be found at: https://the-mercurian.com/. As the theatre is nothing without its audience, The Mercurian welcomes your comments, questions, complaints, and critiques. Deadline for submissions for consideration for Volume 7, No. 3 (Spring 2018) will be February 1, 2019. —Adam Versényi Advisory Board Neil Blackadder, Knox College Catherine Coray, hotINK at the LARK/New York University Richard Davis, George Mason University/Theater of the First Amendment Jean Graham-Jones, The Graduate Center, The City University of New York David Johnston, Queen’s University, Belfast, N. Ireland Kirsten Nigro, The University of Texas-El Paso Caridad Svich, Playwright/Translator Paul Walsh, Yale School of Drama The Mercurian, Vol. 7, No. 2 (Fall 2018) 4 The Thief or Three in the Bedroom by Radu Țuculescu Translated from the Romanian by Mihaela Mudure The one-act play The Thief or Three in the Bedroom is a dynamic comedy inspired from the Romanian realities after December 1989, the year when the Communist system dismantled through a violent popular uprising. A burglar breaks into a rich house in a residential neighborhood in the middle of the night. This event will uncover the corruption and the immorality in the Romanian political high life. The wife of a VIP sleeps with her husband’s chief secretary but is also eager to offer her charms to the intruding thief. She has always been attracted to the man who has more power. After all, don’t all these men have something in common? They are all enticed by goods that do not belong to themselves, in other words, they all steal. Consequently, the thief, the most “innocent” of them all because—at least—he practices the craft in the open, will be invited to join the party. His skills might get more refined. As political phariseism is everywhere the same, the play can be associated with the realities from other societies as well. The basic structure of the play is the famous (erotic) triangle. There is first the triangle of the Wife, her Husband (who is only heard on the telephone), and the Hunchback. Then there is the second triangle which is formed during the burglary night: The Wife, the Hunchback, and the Thief.

Load more