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JUNE/JULY 2017 The Linguist 7
FEATURES
H
ow does the translation of a play
influence its performance and its
staging? How do textual and linguistic
strategies adopted by a translator
reverberate through a play's production?
Arne Pohlmeier's staging of Piotr Lachmann's
Gliwice Hamlet attempts to answer these
questions through practice. The performance
was made in collaboration with Dr Margherita
Laera, of the University of Kent, in the context
of her research project 'Translation Adaptation
Otherness' (www.translatingtheatre.com). This
project seeks to increase the attention given
to translation in the British theatre scene by
interrogating what is translated and how, but
also by asking how translation can influence
the work of making theatre.
The research takes its cue from the concept
of 'foreignisation' in literary translation – the
idea of allowing a translated text to produce
an effect that is outside dominant practices
within the receiving culture. The project thus
employs a number of strategies – from the
discursive to the performative – that seek to
minimise the translated text's integration
within the target language's standard dialect,
and instead to communicate its linguistic
and cultural difference. Moving from this
conceptual ground, Laera's work intertwines
the rich debate on language and identity in
translation with the equally complex debates
on such matters in theatre studies,
investigating how 'otherness' tends to be
attended to and represented on stage.
The project commissioned a translation of
Piotr Lachmann's Gliwice Hamlet, which
"It's about the space
between the words –
delivery, voice, gesture
– the colour words
take on when spoken"
Flora Pitrolo talks to the creative team behind Gliwice
Hamlet, a production that asks how a play's translation
can influence its staging – and how 'foreign' it should go
Staging otherness
interweaves elements of Shakespeare's
famous work with the Greek tragedies and
plays by the 20th-century Polish playwrights
Stanislaw Rozewicz and Helmut Kajzar, to
tell the story of Lachmann's childhood in
Poland during World War II. This production
of the translation by Dr Bryce Lease (Royal
Holloway) and Dr Aneta Mancewicz (Kingston
University) was presented at the V&A's
Festival of Performance in April.
I spoke to the creative team – actors
Kudzi Hudson and Tonderai Munyevu,
Director Arne Pohlmeier and Movement
Director Yukiko Masui – to find out more.
Given the intercultural make-up of German,
Japanese and British/Zimbabwean
professionals, and the text's inherent
multilingualism, my first questions concerned
how the text and the team spoke to
each other.
DRAMATIC: Tonderai and Kudzi take centre
stage during the presentation of Gliwice
Hamlet at the V&A's Festival of Performance
©
JAMIE
SMITH
