Dramaturgical translation in the post-dramatic era: Between fidelity to the source text and the target ‘dramaturg-as-text’

Abstract

The core of this article engages with the field of dramaturgical translation. It is based, apart from the theoretical and practical substructure, on an extensive field research of contemporaneous German dramaturgy over the last decade. The article investigates major current approaches to inter-lingual and inter- and intra-cultural, as well as inter-theatrical translation designated for the performance of 'texts', from conventional dramatic plays to extra-dramatic script-materials, in an age of collisions, convergence and synergies between text-based and post-dramatic dramaturgies. The approaches range between the poles of adhering to a reductionist fidelity to the work's interpretive options, and devising orientations based on the dramaturg's own environment, biography and ideology and, not least, on the dramaturg's direct involvement in the rehearsal/conception process as 'spect-actor' and co-director. The central argument is thus that the closed traditional approaches of textual dramaturgy are challenged by the open-ended and autogenic dramaturgy of the self, or the dramaturg-as-text. These contentions are, inter alia, demonstrated through Feridun Zaimoglu's 'translation' (in fact, rewriting) of Shakespeare's Othello into a blatant German-Turkish argot for Luk Perceval's production, which manifested the 'otherness' of migrating populations as experienced by the dramaturg himself; and Castorf and Hegemann's imagistic, hybrid and theatrical-event-conscious adaptation of Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire as Endstation Amerika at the East-Berlin Volksbühne, turning the piece from a psychological character drama into a nostalgic satire on the creators, actors and implied spectators, all of whom are subliminally defined by the production as non adjusting 'exiled' East-German ex-communists.