“A Great Ox Stands Upon My Tongue” : The Refusal of Translation and the Poetics of Amnesty in Yaël Farber’s MOLORA

Abstract

Receptions of MOLORA, Yaël Farber’s dramatic reimagining of the Oresteia myth during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings, have praised the play’s use of its tragic and historical bases for adaptation to transform spectatorial experience into a site of dramatic witnessing, as the conventions of ancient tragedy resonate with recent South African history. Yet, despite its recognizable double referents, MOLORA is marked too by its use of techniques of linguistic sense-making to obfuscate recognition, as Farber uses translation and intertextual citation as devices for denying full comprehension of the referential play at work in both its mytho-tragic and historical-juridical domains. Through an examination of the play as an adaptation and translation of both myth and recent history, this paper interrogates the aesthetic conditions of possibility for achieving justice through narrative testimony that the TRC set forth in its exceptional structure. Indeed, through techniques of non- and partial translation that produce a paradoxical experience of “dramatic amnesia” within its familiar formal and narrative frames, MOLORA fosters a particular anti-memorial relation to its adapted content, one whose performance nonetheless demonstrates the possibility of unprecedented socio-political imaginaries within and despite the ambivalent amnesty of the TRC.