Theatre and Translation

Abstract

Among the contexts in which this issue is produced is the memory one of us has of growing up francophone in Ottawa, feeling the frustration of always having to translate in order to get on with the business of everyday life: the feeling, spoken in the epigraph above, of both speaking and being heard “in translation,” as a distant echo of “what’s inside.” But, in a sense, all human communication – the encoding and decoding of meanings – consists of acts of translation, of refracted echoes. And since such acts are performative, the topic of theatre and translation is potentially a very broad one, taking all human communication as its subject-including, as Ellen MacKay and Jeanne Klein demonstrate in this issue, various kinds of border crossing and code-switching both within and across linguistic divides, and various performances of identity. To a greater or lesser degree, moreover, all translation, between languages, peoples, cultures, species and codes – and even between individual people in intimate relationships who speak the same languages but remain proverbially “misunderstood” – is mistranslation. This, of course, is at the root of many conflicts in the home, the workplace and the world, ranging from divorces to disasters: brutal wars and intercultural conflicts that are all too familiar as the world sidles anxiously into the third millennium with no sign that the human capacity for brutality is on the decline. But, as Jacob Wren points out in this issue, translation as an inexact science is also at the root of all invention and creativity: mistranslation itself constitutes the frisson, friction and Assuring from which pleasure derives and from which emerges the possibility for social change. When translation happens within generous and congenial contexts such as those Don Druick describes in this issue at the Tadoussac residency, moreover, the possibility emerges of enlightened and mutually enriching exchange – and, through exchange, change.