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This paper deals with the problem of translation for the stage, of transla-
tion/adaptation and its subsequent production. It evidences the complexity of
this type of practice, given the complex interplay of signs involved not only in
translating the text for the stage, but also at the level of performance. The
implications for translation theory and practice are discussed through discussion
of the translation and performance of a text that is politically engaged, Adel
Hakim’s Exécuteur 14 . This paper also problematizes the relation among
different languages within the same text, the role of foreign terms, of syntax,
and rhythm in the construction of discourse, and implications for translation. In
particular the focus is on the problem of the relation between intertextuality,
translation, performance, communication, and value systems.
A man, alone, the last survivor of an unnamed war, Lebanon, Yugoslavia, Algeria,
Africa?*/ a monologue. He spits out his venom at the world as he recounts
unspeakable horrors, cruelty and suffering. War, atrocities committed in his
name. In the name of what, in whose name in fact? Why does humankind descend
into this destructive logic that operates like a never-ending downward spiral
A TEXT ON TRIAL 231
consuming the tiniest scrap of humanity? More than blindness and conditioning, it
is human cowardice, the cowardice of humankind. It starts with refusals. The
refusal to react to the warning signs of impending destruction. Road blocks are
built on the exit roads from an imaginary city. Up until then, everything was fine,
everyone got along with everyone else. Who was the first to attack? It’s
impossible to unravel the threads of history, as though history, having lost its
way, no longer means anything. You don’t react the first time, or the second
time, when bombs fall at random during the night. He ends up getting used to the
worst of it, the bombs, the screams. However, a day comes when he reacts but it
is too late to put a stop to the spiral. So, from having been a passive victim, he
becomes an executioner, just the same as those on the other side. A murderer,
like the others, and all of humanity is in the hands of murderers. Human tragedy
makes way for barbarism.1
There are two distinct types of translation of play texts and it is important to
distinguish between literary drama translation (translations designed to be read)
and practical theatre translation for the stage (translations designed to be
performed and seen*/performance texts). As Zatlin (2005, vii) says: ‘‘If a play
translation is nothing but ink on a page, it is not theatre (performance text). If it
is published and read, it may be considered drama (literary text)’’. Although,
clearly, these distinctions can be quite blurred, in that drama translation done
for the page can and does serve as the basis for stage production, with cuts or as
an adaptation/rewriting, or even as an academic text that is used for a
production because there is no alternative. Furthermore, translations of play
texts can be used for readings rather than full performances and even exist as
text accompanying a performance in the form of surtitling or sign language.
Nonetheless, in this case, it is the process of translating a play text that is
designed to be performed and seen with which we are concerned here. Johnston
(1996a, 7) sees a similar distinction even between those who translate for the
stage when he indicates that there are, of course, no hard and fast rules in
practice. He comments that there is a literary view that is concerned with the
1. ‘‘Un homme, seul, dernier survivant d’une guerre sans nom, sans lieu*/Liban, Yougoslavie, Algérie,
Afrique?*/monologue, crache son venin à la face du monde, témoigne d’une indicible horreur, de la
cruauté, de la souffrance. La guerre, des atrocités commises en son nom. Au nom de quoi d’ailleurs,
au nom de qui? Pourquoi les hommes sombrent-ils dans la logique destructrice telle une spirale sans
fin qui bouffe la moindre parcelle d’humanité ? Avant de relever de l’aveuglement et du
conditionnement, il y va de la lâcheté de l’homme, des hommes. Cela commence par le refus.
Refus de réagir aux signes annonciateurs de la destruction. Des barrages sont dressés au sortir d’une
ville imaginaire. Jusqu’alors, tout baignait, les uns et les autres cohabitaient. Qui a déclenché le
premier les hostilités ? On ne sait plus démêler les fils de l’histoire, comme si l’histoire, déboussolée,
ne signifiait plus rien. On ne réagit pas la première fois. Ni la deuxième, quand les bombes tombent au
hasard dans la nuit. L’homme finit par s’habituer au pire, aux bombes, aux cris. Vient pourtant un jour
où l’homme réagit. Mais il est trop tard pour mettre un terme à l’engrenage. Alors de victime passive,
il devient bourreau, au même titre que celui d’en face. Assassin, comme l’autre, et l’humanité toute
entière est entre les mains d’assassins. La tragédie humaine fait place à la barbarie’’ (Lin 1996).
232 R. BAINES AND F. DALMASSO
translation at the level of semantics and detail while there is also a theatrical
view that is concerned with the play in terms of its dramatic impact while not
abandoning a word-based analysis. Our translation tried to steer a course
between these two approaches and it is important to emphasise that it was also
very much an adaptation because the translation was refined and adjusted during
the rehearsal process as the particularities of our production developed and we
decided to apply a particular reading to the play. Translation had a leading role in
the rehearsal process but also, as we will see, during the performances. In the
United Kingdom in particular, adaptation usually involves a translator providing a
translation of a play that is then worked on by a writer-adaptor who may well not
have any access to the source language or culture (for example, see Hale and
Upton 2000, 10). Johnston (1996b, 256) notes that:
This describes the processes we undertook where the specific devices used in the
adaptation were suggested by an interpretation of the source text that was
carried over into the translation and the adaptation. What is significant, and
relatively unusual in our experience, is that the translation and the adaptation
were not undertaken by different people, and both translators had access to both
languages and cultures; we will return to this in more detail shortly.
There are two consistent general observations about drama translation in
existing research in the field. Firstly that, compared with the amount of research
devoted to literary translation, whether to prose or poetry, there is significantly
less research into drama translation. Zatlin (2005, vii/viii), for example,
comments on the small proportion of space given over to drama translation in
major works on literary translation and the little major work that is devoted
solely to drama translation, while Bassnett (2000, 96) comments that ‘‘although
it has flourished as an art, it remains probably the least explored field in
Translation Studies and there are very few serious examinations of the complex-
ities of transferring a play across cultures’’. The second consistent general
observation is that the majority of writing focuses on translation for the page and
not for the stage. Bassnett regularly makes this point, for example (2000, 96):
Hale and Upton (2000, 12) suggest that this is because there is little collaboration
or even awareness of each other’s fields between translation theorists and
practising theatre translators, while Bassnett advances two explanations; firstly
that there is no clear definition of what constitutes a play text, but secondly that
A TEXT ON TRIAL 233
However, this comment does not refer specifically to how the incorporation of
these signifiers into the translation is then built on in order to transfer the new
performance text onto the stage, and this is a crucial consideration. Bassnett
(2000, 97) reports Kowzan’s five semiotic systems that underpin all performance:
spoken text; bodily expression; the actor’s physical appearance (height,
gestures, features, etc.); the playing space; and non-spoken sound, including
music. There are then 13 distinct subsections: words; intonation; mime; gesture;
movement; make-up; hairstyle; costume; props; décor; lighting; music; and
sound effects, which he classifies as either auditive or visual signs (Kowzan
1975). Bassnett suggests that this structuralist breakdown is a useful tool for
understanding the complex interrelationship between sign systems in theatre and
that the final performance is the result of interaction between different sign
systems and different individuals. These multiple considerations mean that it is
usually the case that theatre translators are not fully equipped for the task. In
most cases, translation for the stage cannot incorporate all these signifiers
because they are worked out in rehearsal by the director and the actors who
revise the translation, and this problem is deemed insurmountable by Bassnett
(1998, 92), particularly when considering what drama semiotic theory calls the
gestic, or inner, text that is read intuitively by actors:
[. . .] if we accept the idea of a gestic text that exists within a written text and
needs excavating by actors, then we are faced with an absurd problem for
translators [. . .]. For the translator is effectively being asked to do the
impossible. If the written text is merely a blueprint, a unit in a complex of
sign systems including paralinguistic and kinesic signs, and if it contains some
secret gestic code that needs to be realised in performance, then how can the
translator be expected not only to decode those secret signs in the source
language, but also to re-encode them in the target language?
234 R. BAINES AND F. DALMASSO
2. Feliu Formosa, actor, director and translator, from German to Catalan, is one exception. See
Formosa (2002).
A TEXT ON TRIAL 235
Figure 1 Fred Dalmasso, Executioner No. 14 , Meeting House Square, Dublin, October
2002.
co-translated, co-directed and performed the play (see Figure 1), and Roger
Baines (translator, lecturer in a modern languages department, and amateur
actor*/both in French and English) co-translated and was involved in the rehearsal
process.3 This placed us in an unusually privileged position to write about these
processes but also, because the text is a solo piece, a monologue that was staged
with a minimal set and uncomplicated lighting and music, this reduced the number
of collaborators/interpreters of the text and, as such, decreased the interference
with our text and adaptation and gave us an unusual degree of control over the
network of signs operating within the production.
No, I was not cruel when I was Non, je n’étais pas cruel quand
young. j’étais petit.
I never used to cut . . . chop frog’s legs Les grenouilles, je ne leur coupais pas
with stones, les pattes arrières avec des cailloux,
I didn’t force lit cigarettes inside the je n’enfoncais pas une cigarette
mouths of green lizards, allumée dans la gueule des lézards
verts,
3. The following were also involved with the production: Jeremiah Cullinane, co-director; Sabine
Dargent, set-designer; Conleth White, lighting designer, and Roy Carroll, sound artist. It is important
to reiterate the specificity of this production, which was to give the translation process priority over
other elements. For example, the set designer was instructed to work on the idea of a war crimes
trial, and especially the relationship between the interpreter and the defendant. This was striking for
the outdoor Dublin performances where the interpreter was placed on a tower overlooking the stage
and the auditorium at the centre of Meeting House Square in Temple Bar. The sound artist also worked
from the rhythm being produced by the text: for the Dublin performances, he played live and subtly
accompanied the actor’s voice with electronic jazz whose beat was dictated by the rhythm of the
text.
236 R. BAINES AND F. DALMASSO
I did not open their stomachs to look leur ventre, je ne l’ouvrais pas pour
inside, voir ce qu’il y a dedans,
and I never ripped . . . tore the wings et jamais je n’ai arraché les ailes des
off flies, though it doesn’t hurt them. mouches, même si ça ne leur fait pas
mal.
I was in fact very afraid of cats. J’avais même très peur des chats.
They are cruel, I used to think. Ils sont cruels, je pensais.
With their long whiskers, their sad Avec les longues moustaches, leur
and watchful heads, sharp eyes and tête triste et attentive, et les yeux
their terrible claws . . . awful claws. perçants, et les griffes terribles.
And how quiet they are, and Et comment ils sont tranquilles, et
suddenly they move to kill. They tout à coup ils se mettent en marche
cannot be stopped . . . there’s no pour tuer. Alors, rien ne les arrête
stopping them then. plus.
(Baines/Dalmasso, unpublished (Opening lines of Ex écuteur 14 ,
translation for Harum-Scarum’s 2002 Hakim 1996, 6)
production of Executioner No. 14 )
At the UEA Drama Studio in October 2002,4 the lights rose on a sparse set; a
man, dressed in a suit and tie, sat stage left, behind a Perspex screen,
handcuffed to a table on which a microphone was placed. First he muttered
incomprehensibly and then, as he began to speak in fluent French, the
disembodied voice of an unusually dispassionate interpreter rendered his initially
reflective but increasingly passionate speech into English. He started by
reminiscing about his childhood (see text above) and these memories quickly
carried him, via reference to the bravado of adolescents playing with guns, to the
current reality of the civil war he had been engaged in. All along, he listened
carefully and suspiciously to the interpreter’s translation and the interpreter
spoke occasionally haltingly until the protagonist referred to ‘‘l’Être Conforme’’.
The interpreter hesitated, attempted to speak once, twice, three times,
repeating the definite article until finally offering ‘‘the Conformable Being’’.
During this hesitation, the protagonist listened carefully and then, after a pause,
corrected ‘‘Conformable Being’’ to ‘‘Communal Being’’ and then continued
speaking in excellent English, of the kind that only betrays itself as being a
foreign language for the speaker through its occasional and very discreet over-
sophistication and the odd, hardly discernible, unnatural idiom. He also revealed
his cosmopolitan identity by speaking a text that was shot through with a series
of recognisable foreign language terms in a range of languages. Having slipped
out of first the handcuffs and then out of his suit and shoes to reveal non-descript
clothing and bare feet, he proceeded to tell the tale of the civil war between the
Adamites and the Zelites. Clearly dying, for the rest of the play, he spoke in
English and, as best he could, recounted his journey from being a victim of civil
war to becoming an executioner.
Barthes sees the place of the literary work as that of making the reader not so
much the consumer of a text but also as a producer of the text, while Kristeva
sees the reader as realising the expansion of the work’s process of semiosis. The
reader, then, translates or decodes the text according to a different set of
systems and the idea of one ‘‘correct’’ reading is dissolved. At the same time,
Kristeva’s notion of intertextuality that sees all texts linked to all texts, because
no text can ever be completely free of those texts which precede and surround it,
is also profoundly significant for the student of translation. As Paz suggests all
texts are translations of translations of translations and the lines cannot be
drawn to separate Reader from Translator.
If this is true for translation in general, then it is only part of the story in
translation for the stage. In the process we are concerned with, which involves
the realisation of a performance from a translation and has a distinct adaptive
element to it, intertextuality in performance needs considering as well. Balme
(1998, 262), for example, comments that:
Elam (1980, 93) elaborates on intertextuality within the theatrical frame thus:
Appropriate decodification of a given text derives above all from the spectator’s
familiarity with other texts (and thus with learned textual rules). By the same
token, the genesis of the performance itself is necessarily intertextual: it cannot
but bear the traces of other performances at every level, whether that of the
written text (bearing generic, structural and linguistic relations with other plays),
the scenery (which will ‘‘quote’’ its pictorial or proxemic influences), the actor
(whose performance refers back, for the cognoscenti, to other displays),
directorial style and so on. [. . .] An ‘‘ideal’’ spectator [. . .] is one endowed with
a sufficiently detailed, and judiciously employed, textual background to enable
him to identify all relevant relocations and use them as a grid for a correspondingly
rich decodification.
238 R. BAINES AND F. DALMASSO
So, the nature of the theatre genre opens up a space for a multiplicity of
readings/viewings because of the more complex interplay between sign systems
available for interpretation, and the translated theatre text potentially increases
the range of texts that are invited into the reading/viewing experience. Before
we move on to analysing the mechanisms of intertextuality, those of which we
were aware, operating in our translation/adaptation of Exécuteur 14 , it is worth
discussing the way in which specific and non-specific references and markers
appear to operate in Hakim’s source text.
The original text is notably lacking in explicit references, it contains no
temporal, geographical, or historical markers while its cultural location comes
simply from what is conveyed by the fact of it being written in French, although
this is not as straightforward as it might seem because there is a distinctive
language mix. The original contains a considerable number of slang terms,
‘‘sapées à la énième mode’’, ‘‘déglinguée’’, ‘‘nous reluquons’’, ‘‘la castagne’’,
‘‘putain’’, ‘‘zarbis’’, some of which are derived from foreign languages,
‘‘fiasco’’, ‘‘pésète’’. Neologisms are numerous, either to describe the long-
gone childhood world, ‘‘La Super-Cité’’, ‘‘les feuilles-diamant’’; the mysterious
female sphere, ‘‘machine à écrire démantibulaire’’, a mix of ‘‘démantibulée’’
(dismantled) and ‘‘patibulaire’’ (sinister-looking); or the new context of war,
especially the weapons, ‘‘lance-feu’’, ‘‘clachinques lourdes, grenades petites et
grandes, canons chenillés, schlagas de toutes sortes. [. . .] Des métals-vampires
affamés de chair humaine.’’ The use of slang is psychological and is used to
summon up the past or to try to cope with a tense situation, such as the
roadblock scene. Similarly, neologisms occur when the situation eludes the
character or in order to recreate a world that has disappeared. In this regard,
neither the slang nor the neologisms anchor the text temporally or geographi-
cally. Moreover, their use is rather limited in comparison with the use of foreign
language lexis, which does not seem to be linked to the emotional state of the
storyteller but to be imposed on him; in the same way that he is confined to a
restricted zone, with distance actually measured in yards. Foreign words clash
with the character’s attempt to keep a grip on his words, his world. If at the
beginning of the play, the text presents a few English words, which have been
assimilated in French, in expressions such as ‘‘Et c’était okay aussi’’ or ‘‘On allait
comme ça, cool, promenade du soir’’, gradually and increasingly English terms
are used instead of French terms like stumbling blocks: ‘‘Et puis on revenait,
back sur le trottoir’’, ‘‘Une dispute maybe?’’, ‘‘Les meubles, quoi?, renversés,
fouillés, saccagés, killed, meurtris, le ventre dehors’’, ‘‘Toutes les directions
sont perdues, lost pour toujours’’. At times, parts of sentences are completely in
English: ‘‘alors tout était okay, easy, relax’’, ‘‘Puis le danger revenait, alors vite,
nous retournions dans nos sweet homes. Sweet, sweet home, sweet, sweet
home, mild and cosey’’. In other places, English expressions encapsulate the text
and summarise the situation: ‘‘no comment’’, ‘‘no problem’’, ‘‘no help’’, ‘‘no
hope’’. English seems to have the last word, ‘‘Un jour, nous irons dans un camp,
l’ultime, the last’’, ‘‘Jusqu’à la fin, the end’’. Via a particular mix of French and
other foreign languages, with English by far, and significantly so for a French
A TEXT ON TRIAL 239
text, the most dominant, as well as via the use of neologisms for weapons in
particular, Hakim, in a text about civil war, seems to be commenting on the
political weight of English in the context of war. We will examine how we dealt
with the effect of these anglicisms in translation later on.
On the other hand, numerous English terms are gallicised, some which are
already used in French*/‘‘zoomer’’, ‘‘shooter’’, others that are neologisms, ‘‘Par
le trou de la serrure, je lookerai; je verrai des exécutions’’, ‘‘Tu lookes, et tu
comprends rien à ce qui est arrivé’’. As a result, the syntax has a jolting quality
and conveys a sense of indeterminacy. English terms seem also to accelerate the
pace of the text. From narration, the text becomes action and recreates the war,
‘‘Eh oui, la guerre était là, steady, prête à nous avaler’’. We will see in a
subsequent section how we have attempted to translate the rhythm of the text
and to transpose in translation what is being done to the syntax in the original.
The original text’s mix of languages and use of neologisms combined with
uncomfortable syntax thus make it difficult to pin the text down to any particular
linguistic context, and this diversity is also discernible in the implicit markers in
the text. Together these two elements introduce linguistic and cultural
inferences from diverse sources and it is their very diversity that enables the
text, in terms of its potential intertexts, to go beyond what a narrower, more
culturally specific piece would evoke. Hakim’s use of a civil war context, for
example, invites reference to a wide range of specific civil wars across the globe
as can be seen from the review quoted at the beginning of this essay where
Lebanon, ex-Yugoslavia, Algeria, and Africa are suggested.
The neologisms and the use of English are both implicit rather than explicit
references but there are two references in the original text, one of which is
explicit and another range of references that are much less explicit, which, in
different ways, both serve to enhance the text’s lack of determinacy.
The first example is also a good illustration of how the collaboration between
the two translators operated because, although the reference was clear, the
complexity of the intertexts it evoked were not as available to a non-native
speaker of French as they were to a native speaker. The play’s only explicit cultural
reference occurs in the phrase ‘‘l’Ange Super Bonux [. . .] Le héros, comme sur la
pub’’ (literally ‘‘The Super Bonux Angel [. . .], the hero, like in the ads’’) when the
protagonist imagines that the Adamites’ deity will send a heroic angel to save him
during a dangerous bombing raid. For the French audience, the mention of the
advertisements for Bonux, a washing powder, is likely to conjure up an image of a
child waiting for his mother to buy a packet of washing powder, in the expectation
of getting the gift inside, ‘‘le cadeau Bonux’’. This particular advertising campaign
lasted decades and Bonux was possibly the first brand to introduce this type of
marketing strategy in France. ‘‘Le cadeau Bonux’’ became integrated into French
linguistic culture, and in particular became the basis for many cynical jokes by
stand-up comedians. Thus the intertextual reference to this advert in the middle
of a bombing scene could either be read as a cliché that denotes the insufficiency
of language itself to articulate the situation, as the character’s tendency to seek
refuge in childhood or, alternatively, as a mark of cynicism on his part. The reading
240 R. BAINES AND F. DALMASSO
of the scene is up to the director and the translation has, in this case, followed the
original’s emphasis on a fantastical relation to a purifying god. We retained the
name Super Bonux Angel and embodied the advertisement context in the
description of this figure’s heroic qualities by using a phrase that, for the English
language audience, has strong advertisement discourse connotations: ‘‘The hero,
washing whiter’’ but that nonetheless also retains a flavour of cynicism about the
veracity of advertising in general. Retaining the Super Bonux name enabled us to
preserve the notion of a delusional world that is particular to the character while
retaining the advertising discourse preserved the degree of cliché. This reference
contributes to the original text’s indeterminacy simply because it is the only
explicit reference in the whole play and so it draws considerable attention to, and
simultaneously highlights the absence of, any other specific cultural markers.
Super Bonux is also one of very few proper names used in the play. The protagonist
is accorded no name, beyond the implied ‘‘Exécuteur 14’’ of the title, his mother is
referred to only as ‘‘Maman’’ and his girlfriend as ‘‘petite amie’’, indeterminate
names are given for places (‘‘La Cité Horizon’’, ‘‘le quartier Gimba’’) and for rulers
or deities (‘‘Le Chef Suprême’’ and ‘‘Le Grand Conciliateur’’), and his classmates
are given the unfamiliar exotic names Kline and Coma. All this adds to the piece’s
abstract atmosphere, despite the concrete violence of the civil war that is
described in the play, and the proper names have all been retained in the
translation.
The second range of references that contribute to the original’s lack of
determinacy are also proper names. The list of proper names above includes
virtually all those in the play,5 with the exception of the names of the clans, the
Adamites, the Zélites and the Yamites. These names, although they do not have
the explicitness of ‘‘Super Bonux’’, along with the ‘‘tours Asmonée’’ (literally
‘‘the Asmonean Towers’’), do not appear to have been chosen arbitrarily.
Adamite and Zélite are the names of the principal opposing factions and could
evoke religious struggles, while the ‘‘tours Asmonée’’ evoke the Asmonean
palace, Herod’s stately home.6 The plurality of possible interpretations in the
text is perhaps enshrined in this use of proper names that could evoke references
to the Bible. What could be more all-encompassing than to make virtually the
sole semi-explicit reference a reference to the Bible, the Book of Books, the
most universal text, for a western audience at least? However, while this use of
biblical names may give a sense of western universality, it may also add a layer of
intertext that refers to the Middle East and the third faction referred to in the
text are the Yamites, a name that evokes an ancient sub-Saharan African tribe,
and thus adds to what is a mythological flavour brought in by the biblical
5. There are variations on the name for the deity, for example ‘‘Le Très Haut’’, and military zones are
given proper names such as ‘‘Zone de Guerre-D’’ as are some nouns that would not normally be
expressed in this way, such as ‘‘La Cause’’, ‘‘Le Crime’’ and ‘‘La Faute’’.
6. The Adamites were a group of heretics in the second century, and the Zealots were Jewish patriots
who advocated violence against the Romans. The Asmonean tower overlooking Mount Golgotha is also
mentioned in the Bible as the symbol of the Roman occupation.
A TEXT ON TRIAL 241
The occasional use of accent was important because we wanted to create a text
for a multilingual European character whose command of English is excellent and
sophisticated but who, periodically, in accent but also in lexis, betrays the fact
that English is not his native language. We conveyed the former characteristic by
occasionally having him use slightly more sophisticated, Latinate words than a
native speaker might. For example, in translating the phrase ‘‘c’était à peine
sensible’’, we used ‘‘perceptible’’ where ‘‘there’’ (‘‘it was scarcely perceptible’’
versus ‘‘it was scarcely there’’) would have sufficed as a translation for
‘‘sensible’’ with the connotations of indefiniteness being contained sufficiently
in ‘‘à peine’’/‘‘scarcely’’; and for the word ‘‘résumé’’ in the phrase ‘‘comme un
résumé de tout ce qui précède’’ we used ‘‘encapsulating’’ rather than ‘‘summing
up’’. More complex Latinate terms served both the purpose of underlining the
character’s desire to be as accurate in his accounts as possible but also of
expressing himself with a higher degree of conceptualisation or sophistication.
242 R. BAINES AND F. DALMASSO
text with drama. In this play, more than conjuring up images, to speak is to act.
The verbal physicality creates action. Thus, the singularity of the text is not the
presence of foreign words but, as we have described, what the incursion of foreign
words does to the French language, how it disturbs the syntax and creates a
particular rhythm. Hence we have tried to do the same to the syntax in English. This
is where our collaboration was the most fruitful as we could not only read the text
aloud but perform the text in both languages to practise and reproduce its rhythm.
With regard to our analysis of idioms in the original and with what has already
been said about our translation strategy, the translations should be self-
explanatory; certain expressions did produce a particular way of acting; for
example, ‘‘everyone rubbed along together’’ allowed for a moment of complicity
with the audience as it enabled the character to point out that he masters the
language of his ‘‘captive captors’’. Generally, the rhythm oscillates between
‘‘narration’’ and ‘‘action’’ and the actor could use the same movement and, for
example, show both moments of interiorisation and moments of exteriorisation.
In the original French the foreign lexis of English represents what is foreign and
what is dominating him, what is exteriorised, the world of war. In the translation,
for what is a French character, the French lexis is his own world, his own story
and so what is interiorised. In the original the foreign words came from outside
while in the translation they come from inside, from the identity of the
character. The foreign lexis is there to the same degree in the translation but
244 R. BAINES AND F. DALMASSO
in terms of the performance was used to convey the diametrically opposite side
of the character compared with the original.
We have already mentioned that domesticating this text was not an option
because of the relative indeterminacy of the original. However, there was
another reason for not domesticating the text and this was connected to the way
in which we adapted the text because the particular character we created
needed to have a diversity of European identities visible.
In theatrical terms, the considerations that informed this adaptation stemmed
from the type of character that we wanted to suggest and involved both the
choice of the performer and the particular nature of the English that he would
speak. Firstly, as far as the choice of performer was concerned, having the play
performed by an English actor would have shut off many of the potential
identities that we wanted the character to allow the audience to infer. Had this
actor also been the English-language translator of the play, this might have gone
some way to countering the argument that a particular gestic text cannot be
conveyed by a translator; however, it is debatable whether the intuitive reading
of a text that would inform this gestic text would be as available to a non-native
speaker as to a native speaker of French, however immersed in the language and
culture the former was. The choice of the French language translator/actor to
perform the piece enabled access to the original gestic text. In a domesticated
performance text this French gestic text would not be appropriate but, because
we wanted to create a non-native English identity for our protagonist, such a
choice was absolutely appropriate. In addition, this choice enabled us to
occasionally make the actor’s natural French accent audible in order to
communicate his Frenchness, or non-Englishness, and so reinforce his identity.
A further feature of the original text that serves to blur its references, and which
played a role in the construction of the protagonist’s idiolect, is the deliberate use
of an unusually high number of non-French terms, as we have already mentioned.7
The vast majority of these are English, a language that is generally perceived as
globally dominant but that is also the language of the USA, the dominant military
force in the world and whose prominence in a French context also evokes a
particular battle with linguistic imperialism where English is a weapon.
7. The full list of non-French words and expressions in the original text is as follows, excluding
repetitions: buildings, back, okay, cool, devotchka, shoot, crash, ID, stop, steady, sweet-home, killed,
maybe, no way, home, this one, no help, no hope, no, bombing, clap, no man’s land, black-out, scoop,
all of it, phone, out, shitland, ketchup, no comment, boom, easy, relax, dead, songs, comics, yes sir,
no problem, living, basket, fixed, sweet home, mild and cosey, boots, help, nothing, zoom, bastard,
all of it, kid, et tutti quanti, cut, feeling, ultima, nada, todo, one, slow, the last, nobody, the end,
look, because, lost, making.
A TEXT ON TRIAL 245
Rollason (2001, 21) points out in his essay entitled ‘‘The Use of Anglicisms in
Contemporary French’’ that:
For the analysis of the function of the English terms in Hakim’s text, it is worth
adding, as indeed does Rollason (2001, 31), that this dominance includes a military
dimension: ‘‘the relationship between French and US English is not an equal one: it
is predicated on the economic, military and mass-cultural power of the USA’’.8
The fact that most of the non-French terms in the original are English may be an
attempt by the author to address the influence of America on the western world.
Given the author’s background, we might have expected, for example, Middle-
Eastern languages to come into play but the inability of the character to articulate
the world, his world, in words other than those of the dominant military culture
works on two levels. Firstly, for a French audience, English-language terms in a war
context evoke fictional accounts; images of the Hollywood GI as seen on television
via any number of Stallone or Schwarzenegger films, for example. Or they evoke
images of war in news reports or media interviews with soldiers from Chechnya to
Angola; as Baudrillard commented on the first Gulf war, the West’s experience of
war is that it is created via the news. In either case, this is the most direct
experience of war the majority of the play’s audience would have. American
English warfare vocabulary has no boundaries and is often mixed in with whatever
the foreign language is to create military or pseudo-military lexis, even in places
where US military forces are not present*/at least not openly. What we have in
mind here are interviews with representatives of rebel forces in civil war contexts
across the world where, to an English speaker, what leaps out from the native
language are the English-language military terms. Simple examples from Hakim’s
text would be the words ‘‘boom’’, ‘‘crash’’, ‘‘dead’’, ‘‘No man’s land’’, ‘‘shooter’’,
‘‘killed’’ and ‘‘black-out’’.
Secondly, the use of these English military terms pinpoint what is at stake in
the play: how can an individual convey his experience of civil war unless he
moulds his story to suit his audience and resorts to collective imagery, running
the risk here of relying upon clichés to recount his intimate experience? The
inventiveness at work in Hakim’s play thus consists of neologisms that stretch
understanding to its limits. In the original, the language of war is reinvented and
8. Jean-Marc Chadelat’s (2003) article ‘‘Le vocabulaire militaire français en anglais’’, among other
things, points out that the French military vocabulary that is used in military English is either archaic
or used where no word has developed in English. This reinforces the point that English and French are
no longer languages that cross-fertilise each other, unlike English and Hindi in India are, for example
(see Rollason 2001, 33), but that they are languages whose relationship is exclusively one where
English dominates and invades French, and this is especially true in the domain of military language.
246 R. BAINES AND F. DALMASSO
given a more universal flavour with foreign words and neologisms based on
onomatopoeia. A striking example is the word ‘‘clachinque’’, formed from the
distinctive sound of a weapon being loaded and perhaps the French slang for gun
‘‘flingue’’. When pronounced, this word sounds in French like a condensed form
of Kalashnikov. It became ‘‘kalash’’, short for Kalashnikov, in the target language
based on the same contracted sound. The author succeeds in doing this with
other names of weapons that, as with ‘‘kalash’’, combine a familiar sound with
the evocation of familiar words just sufficiently to convey the meaning or an
image/representation of the given concept; other examples are ‘‘schlaga’’,
‘‘métal-vampires’’ and ‘‘une casserole-blindée’’, as mentioned above.
Espasa (2000, 55) points out that ‘‘translation does not have to be a vehicle for
the illusion of theatre, but one more instrument, among the scenic signs, which
exposes the artificiality of theatre’’; the way in which we translated the deliberate
interplay between languages and across languages was important both in order to
retain the text’s lack of explicit connection to any particular culture and also in
order to help us construct the character for this particular production. The
transformation of the French source text into the English target text obviously sees
a form of intertextuality in operation where the English text refers to the French
text; Bassnett notes that ‘‘[t]he language in which the play text is written serves as
a sign in the network of what Kowzan calls auditive and visual signs’’ (2002, 130),
and Hakim’s decision to pepper the original French with such a high number of
English-language words potentially has a very specific two-fold effect on the
reader/audience; on the one hand, it refers to US cultural, military and linguistic
imperialism as discussed above but, because the protagonist’s idiolect is so clearly
not restricted to French, it also helps to move the original text beyond a context in
which only intertexts of civil wars in francophone societies might be evoked.
There are approximately 65 occurrences of non-French words (see note 8) in the
original text, of which 60 are English*/the remaining five are either Italian, Spanish
or Russian. The majority of these words do not occur just once, they are spread
throughout the text with increasing frequency and there are at least three and often
more on most pages of what is sparsely presented text of 32 pages. However, if one
assumes that one of the effects of the use of English in the original is to broaden the
range of the text and to increase its potential intertexts due to the status of English
as a lingua franca, a language that enables its users to cross borders and to be
understood across those borders, or to be understood by audience members who
have access to a broader range of languages then, in translation, a simple reversal
will clearly not have the same benefits. In addition, converting the effect of the
political weight of the English in the source text was a considerable challenge.
During the rehearsal process, we considered trying to reproduce the effect of
a language that has military associations making itself visible in the English of the
protagonist by using Russian words, much in the way that Burgess’ Clockwork
Orange does;9 however, the political context of the Cold War and the military
9. For example, ‘‘But that devotchka was smecking away ha ha ha now with her droogs at the bar, her
red wot working and her zoobies ashine . . .’’ (Burgess 1962, 24/5).
A TEXT ON TRIAL 247
power of the Eastern bloc is no longer a relevant one, films and plays that have
the Cold War as their subject are no longer as common as they once were, and so
this idea was rejected, despite the appeal of the link to the Kalashnikov via
‘‘clachinque/kalash’’ and the wide influence of this Russian weapon in the world
of military/terrorist violence. An audience member did suggest that we could
have made use of Serbo-Croat, a language that achieved considerable promi-
nence via a terrible civil war. Its use for a character struggling to find his words
might have proved effective since Serbo-Croat no longer exists formally, but we
did not pursue this either as it is debatable how recognisable it would be for an
audience. In the end, we felt that we achieved a similar effect more subtly.
We decided to retain the effect of the presence of a foreign language in the
protagonist’s idiolect but to widen its scope beyond French. Although in a high
number of cases we have used a French term in place of the English one, in the
original there were also occasions where a sufficiently recognisable French term
was not available or where the rhythm of a phrase would have been
compromised, and we have tended to compensate for this by placing a French
term at a different juncture in the text or simply by reducing the number of
French terms used; there are approximately 66 French terms in the translation.10
However, in order to recreate the sense of a character via whom audience
members may recognise or infer reference to civil war in a wider range of
cultures, we have also introduced a higher incidence of terms that are neither
French nor English than there are in the original (22 as opposed to five) and that
cover a slightly wider range of European languages (German, Russian, Spanish
and Italian). This enabled us to have a protagonist who is more obviously
multilingual, a skill that does not necessarily have the same effect as the obvious
demonstration of the original character’s access to the lingua franca of English,
but that does, nonetheless, convey the character’s ability to cross linguistic
borders and thus reinforces the range of potential intertexts. It enables him to
potentially exist in a range of cultures, to not have an identity rooted in one
culture in a way that resembles his own account of the danger of losing his
identity card in a civil war context. He describes this as creating a situation in
which he would no longer be a friend of the Adamites or an enemy of the Zelites,
but a potential enemy for both sides: ‘‘Alors on devient suspect pour tous. U-ni-
ver-sel!’’11 Indeed, as noted above, the decision to use the range of languages in
this way in the target text was crucial in our development of the protagonist’s
character, a development that was dictated by the requirements of our
adaptation.
10. The non-English words and expressions in the translation are, without the repetitions, listed
below. The translation also includes English-language terms that may have been assimilated into
French but whose Englishness is still marked for the non-French speaker; for example, ‘‘boots’’,
‘‘cool’’, and ‘‘zoomer’’: Maman, Petite Chérie, Mon Dieu, bene, molto bene, devotchkas, bon allez,
tierra muerta, pesetas, rancoeur, niente, mia casa, un seul corps, et tutti quanti, la casa nostra, au
secours, schnell, schnell, tracé obligatoire, les chansons, adieu, voilà, oui monsieur!, nada, bon
courage, no problemo, celui-là, Zone interdite, il cielo intero, mia casa, dernière, ultima, todo, le
show était super, personne, c’est le seul kid qui reste, c’est le dernier des enfants.
11. ‘‘Then you become a suspect for everyone. A U-ni-ver-sal suspect!’’
248 R. BAINES AND F. DALMASSO
The context of civil war and its potential intertexts that the author brings to the
piece as a writer who grew up in Beirut are obvious.12 Pavis (1992) notes that no
reading, no translation can avoid interpreting a text and that the very intention
of trying to maintain the indeterminacy, the mystery of a text, implies a
positioning towards it, and will condition a specific reading, mise en scène , and
reception of the text. As we have already commented, the lack of determinacy in
Hakim’s original text created by the range of conflicting and imprecise
references, as well as by the awkward syntax and unusual idioms, does not
invite domestication as a translation strategy. We did not domesticate but nor did
we try and maintain an indeterminacy because we imposed a particular reading
and interpretation on the text in the way that we translated the first page and a
half, and in the way that we adapted the text for the stage. We will argue that
this approach enabled us to evoke a range of contexts in a different multi-
referential way and so retain a sense of diverse applicability. We have provided a
specific reading for a specific production, but it is nonetheless a specific reading
with different layers.
We have already described our production as starting with the protagonist as a
defendant at a war crimes trial with the initial sequence of the text delivered in
the original French and mediated through an interpreter. Elam (1980, 93), as
quoted above, comments that ‘‘appropriate decodification of a given text
derives above all from the spectator’s familiarity with other texts’’. If we agree
that, at the time and as we intended, the initial sequence of our production most
clearly provided the observer with the possibility of interpreting images or
accounts of Slobodan Milosevic on trial before the International Court of Justice
in The Hague charged with war crimes in former Yugoslavia as an intertext, then
this intertext could be broadened to invite in reference to all war criminals
before such a court, where perhaps the most obvious reference point is the
12. Although there are no such explicit intertexts that the translators bring to the text, it must be
remembered that, when translation is involved, the translators too need to be included in Still and
Worton’s description of intertextuality, of ‘‘texts entering via authors (who are, first, readers) and
texts entering via readers (co-producers)’’ (1990, 2).
A TEXT ON TRIAL 249
Nuremberg war trials.13 More broadly, the use of the Milosevic intertext connects
simultaneously with civil war in former Yugoslavia but also with the play as a
whole, which itself has the potential to provide the intertext of ‘‘tracings’’ of
other accounts of civil war, whether these be written,14 or oral (e.g. television
news reports or first-hand accounts in television documentaries), real or
fictional. Once the intertexts are established, the anchoring of the production
in a western context does not preclude the evocation of images of, or accounts
of, civil war in other parts of the world, as is demonstrated by the responses of
the reviewer reproduced at the beginning of this essay. That our transla-
tion/adaptation retained the references to civil wars is confirmed by a similar
response that was provided in a review of our production in Dublin: ‘‘Images of
Srebrenica and Rwanda resonated’’ (Kilroy 2002, 14).
It is revealing to pursue this and to examine different responses generated by
our production, the different contexts, other texts and ‘‘tracings’’ brought to the
performance by particular audience members. Elam (1980, 93) notes that ‘‘An
‘ideal’ spectator [. . .] is one endowed with a sufficiently detailed, and judiciously
employed, textual background to enable him to identify all relevant relocations
and use them as a grid for a correspondingly rich decodification’’ but, however
much our translation of the text and its adaptation for a production with specific
characteristics was designed to evoke certain other texts, there is, of course, no
guarantee that these intertexts will be those which each individual member of
the audience will ‘‘read’’. As Nord (1997, 31) indicates ‘‘A text is made
meaningful by its receiver and for its receiver. Different receivers (or even the
same receivers at different times) find different meanings in the same linguistic
material offered by the text. We might even say that a ‘text’ is as many texts as
there are receivers’’. We do, unusually, have a record of the response of an
individual from what is now Bosnia-Herzegovina who came to see the play in
Norwich and e-mailed us the following day. Her passionate response, unsurpris-
ingly, reveals the deep connection she made with the experience of civil war in
her own country:
I am sure you have heard much of what I have written already, but perhaps not
everybody commenting would have had the same personal experience that I have
and where this play struck. I happen to be from former Yugoslavia*/this is what it
was while I lived there until 1988. The part I am from is now Bosnia and
Herzegovina. My family on both sides have lived in Sarajevo for many generations. I
had left the country (to study) before the war, but my whole family remained there
during the war, and in the aftermath some are dead and some live around the
world, some are still in Sarajevo. I am from a mixed Muslim-Catholic marriage. My
feelings about the war are based on a ten year long study of how not to hate and
with some assurance I can say that the war in Bosnia and in former Yugoslavia was
one between Adamites and Zelites. Any of us could have been there and unless we
13. The Perspex box we used is deliberately reminiscent of Eichmannn’s war crimes trial in Jerusalem
in 1961.
14. For example, Feargal Keane’s (1995) Season of Blood: A Rwandan Journey or Ed Vulliamy’s (1994)
Seasons in Hell: Understanding Bosnia’s war.
250 R. BAINES AND F. DALMASSO
were very careful and learned not to hate, many of us could have become
executioners. I was lucky enough not to have been there. I had many reasons to
hate but I never did, and I consider this to be my greatest personal achievement.
15. The section that is interpreted is relatively short and contains little complex syntax where a
professional interpreter might have been obliged to simplify and to reformulate for ease of
expression. As Jones (1998, 42) notes: ‘‘a literal word-for-word translation is not only undesirable, it
is often impossible’’ whether this be for mechanical (lexis and grammar) reasons or for changes in
language culture. We particularly wanted to produce an obviously interpreted sequence, a visible/
audible sequence in order to highlight this context.
A TEXT ON TRIAL 251
Figure 2 Fred Dalmasso, Executioner No. 14 , Meeting House Square, Dublin, October
2002.
16. A more considered translation might produce something like ‘‘I love gun salutes, flashes of fire
ripping through the sky’’, for example.
17. ‘‘Au début, il marmonne des choses incompréhensibles, pendant un long moment, il ne parlera
que pour lui-même, comme s’il était déchiré à l’intérieur. [. . .] Puis, peu à peu, de ses borborygmes,
on commence à distinguer le texte’’ (Hakim 1996, 5) [‘‘To begin with he mutters incomprehensibly, for
a long time he talks only to himself, as though torn apart inside. Then, little by little, out of his
rumblings, the text begins to emerge’’].
A TEXT ON TRIAL 253
Interpreting is not mere rote-work. ‘‘When you go on mic, you have to assume as
much as possible the persona of the person speaking’’ says the English interpreter
Kenneth Cleary. ‘‘If you are translating M. Le Pen, you have to translate his
views’’*/even if you dislike them. A British interpreter was translating Silvio
Berlusconi last year when the Italian president compared a German MEP to a
concentration-camp guard. ‘‘She said she could not believe her ears, but the
adrenalin was flowing. She just had to say something. The interpreter must, in a
nanosecond, use what could be called nous: Is this man really saying this? Am I
going to ruin my career and cause a political incident?’’
herself and what, in the context of a war crimes trial, was bound to be a
particularly stressful and sensitive set of exchanges, and we had this
uncomfortable relationship between war criminal and interpreter in mind in
the translation/adaptation of this sequence. The interpreter’s translation and
delivery were acted in such a way as to reflect a suspicious attitude to the
protagonist’s words as, little by little, she uncovered their double meaning, but
also to show the limits of interpreting practice in the sense that, as the
interpreter could not anticipate what the speaker was going to say, she had to
be careful to neither fail in her job to render the text accurately, nor to betray
her conscience. As we have already seen, the staging at this point was not
intended to be a realistic staging of an interpreting scene; on the contrary, it
was intended to push the logic of such an activity within the framework of a
trial as far as it could go in order to place the language of the play, and indeed
the process of speaking, in a delicate position: the account of a survivor that
does not use ‘‘suspension of disbelief’’ or simple theatrical conventions, an
account that would not flow easily by itself but would need to be interrogated
by the audience and constantly re-evaluated.
The interpreted text lasts one and a half pages before it is interrupted; the
much hesitated-over translation of ‘‘L’Être Conforme’’ as ‘‘The Conformable
Being’’ is seen as a distortion by the protagonist, calmly corrected and then he
subsequently dismisses the interpreter and continues in English, a language that
is clearly not his own. Bahktin’s (as Volosinov) concept of the counter word here
is useful. He writes that ‘‘[u]nderstanding is to utterance as one line of a dialogue
is to the next. Understanding strives to match the speaker’s word with a counter
word . Only in understanding a word in a foreign tongue is the attempt made to
match it with the ‘same’ word in one’s own language’’ (Volosinov 1986, 102).
Here, for the protagonist, the counter-word is not appropriately represented in
translation by the interpreter’s choice and it is this which pushes him to reject
the interpreter. Wadensjö (1998, 39/40), writing on Bahktin and dialogism in the
specific context of interpreting, comments:
When one person explicitly quotes another’s talk, this is a particularly obvious
example of how language is continuously re-used to serve partly new functions.
Consequently, if we consider that interpreting is a kind of quoting, interpreter
mediated conversations would provide excellent occasions to explore how the
dialogical opposition between the voices involved creates new meanings.
text by the speaker of the source text at the point where the tension between
the two texts breaks and they collide?18
Conclusion
18. The translation of ‘‘l’Etre Conforme’’, appropriately, did prove to be particularly problematic. It
is a term that leaps off the page in the original because of its strangeness, it is the term with the most
potential interpretations and which needs most explanation. The term has a range of meanings that
encompass a sense of belonging to a society, a society with a shared central ethos, combined with the
sense of conforming, of being appropriate for, or even authenticated. In French, spoken in
performance, the term can sound like ‘‘l’Etre Conforme’’, literally ‘‘the conformed being’’,
potentially conformed to the pure, original being of Adam before the Fall and therefore an Adamite,
or ‘‘l’être qu’on forme’’, literally ‘‘the being which we form’’, or even ‘‘lettre conforme’’, which
brings in the notion of an officially authenticated photocopy and the idea of incessant duplication of
victims and executioners. This play on words reinforces the notion of the term expressing an ideal
that is being sought, an ideal which one wants to create, or recreate. For the production, we settled
on ‘‘Conformable Being’’/’’Communal Being’’; however, after the production we finally came up with
a translation that we felt bridged better the difficulty of such a philosophical term being less
comfortable in English but one that nonetheless remained a repository for the range of meanings
outlined above, and retained the character of strangeness that the original term has: ‘‘Model Being’’.
256 R. BAINES AND F. DALMASSO
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