Performing Translation in Contemporary Anglo-American Drama

Abstract

Performing Translation in Contemporary Anglo-American Drama Jenny Spencer (bio) There can be no operative notion of universality that does not assume the risks of translation. —Judith Butler1 MILTON: English is my only language, alas. —Tony Kushner2 Both translation studies and performance studies have prospered as significant interdisciplinary fields by providing powerful, conceptual lenses with which to construct new knowledge in the humanities and social sciences. In addition to the question, "What happens if we look at these phenomena as a performance?" contemporary critics have begun to ask, "What happens if we consider these phenomena a translation?"3 Both disciplines claim genealogies going back to the Greeks, have suffered secondary status in relation to the sources they provide with an "afterlife,"4 and depend upon practitioners who may or may not do theory. But the fields' current configurations can be traced to the impact of poststructuralist theories of language, identity, and power [End Page 389] associated with cultural studies more generally since the 1970s. As one might expect when scholars working on widely different material are reading the same theorists, conceptual metaphors resonate differently depending on their provenance as well as their use. For example, Judith Butler's concept of "gender performativity" was taken up by feminist theatre scholars in ways that led to Butler's own disclaimers about just how much agency was implied in this term.5 A similar issue has arisen around the widespread appropriation of the term "translation" in work having little to do with the actual translation of written or spoken words from one language to another. Postcolonial critic Homi Bhabha, for example, uses translation in its most figurative sense to describe and analyze the effects of Third World migrancy in primarily Western multicultural locations.6 Indeed, the very productivity associated with performance and translation as metaphors, and the speed with which they are taken up in both popular and critical discourse, tends to undermine their specific theoretical utility. Such an argument is familiar: if any behavior can be viewed as performance and any communicative act can be viewed as translation, then knowledge produced within particular disciplinary frameworks may seem imperiled, especially to those most committed to the fields being raided, whether translators or theatre practitioners. Is it possible to deploy translation as a trope without diminishing the value of the concept as it derives from specific linguistic practices? And is it useful to do so? Certainly 9/11 and the misguided foreign-policy initiatives that have ensued highlight the problem and urgency of adequate cultural translation along with the need for actual translators. War is not simply the continuation of policy by other means but, as Emily Apter has so appropriately noted, "the continuation of extreme mistranslation or disagreement by other means."7 Current geopolitical conflicts have thrust us, willingly or not, into what Apter calls "the translation zone" (undoubtedly alluding to Mary Louise Pratt's "contact zone"), a highly hazardous arena where mistranslation has deadly consequences. While this is not a new dilemma, theorists like Butler have recently taken up the relationship among cultural understanding, translation, and ethical action with renewed interest. Even before 9/11, Butler was turning to a concept of "cultural translation" as the most generative approach to political ethics, noting in Conversations on the Left with Slavoj Žižek and Ernesto Laclau that "the very concept of universality compels an understanding of culture as a relation of exchange and a task of translation."8 In answer to whether the critiques of ideology, strategic essentialism, or false universals can themselves produce an effective progressive politics—a question also asked by post-Brechtian political playwrights—Butler advances a "counter-imperialistic concept of translation," one that does not presume linguistic or cognitive commonness nor an [End Page 390] ultimate fusion of perspectives.9 Apter suggests that for Butler, "the form of universality is translation itself—albeit performative, alive to the syntactic stagings of linguistic difference."10 In her most recent work, Butler's use of cultural translation seems especially indebted to Bhabha's The Location of Culture, in particular, "How Newness Enters the World: Postmodern Space, Postcolonial Times and the Trials of Cultural Translation," a chapter that develops Walter...