Look at the credits for any Anglophone production of the musical juggernaut Les Misérables, and you may notice something curious: while Alain Boublil is credited for the “original French lyrics,” it is the late Herbert Kretzmer who is listed as the English-language “lyricist.” How might these lyrics have been transported from one language to another? One might assume this was through a process of translation and that Kretzmer must surely be the highest-earning theatre translator of all time. Yet in a 2013 New Yorker interview, he indignantly refused that title. “If I wanted a literal translation, I would go to the dictionary,” he said. “Translation—the very word I rebut and resent, because it minimizes the genuine creativity that I bring to the task.”
Why is the work of the translator so easily minimized?
Indeed, translation seems to be generally looked down on in the English-speaking theatre, to the point that well-known playwrights are frequently called upon to produce new “versions” of plays written in languages they do not speak, drawing from “literal translations” produced by, well, actual translators who very much do not get their names on show posters. One often has to delve deep into the inner pages of the playbill to uncover who actually did the work of moving the text from one language to another. In response to Michael Frayn and Gregory Motton’s suggestion that plays ought to be translated by people who can read them in the original language, Simon Stephens—who has defended his right to “write Chekhov into English” despite not knowing Russian—disingenuously claimed their arguments were “based on the odd assumption that it is in some way possible to make a pure translation.” I do not imagine experienced translators such as Frayn and Motton think a “pure” translation is possible, but rather they are pointing out that no adaptor who does not speak the language they are “translating” from can provide the view of both sides, the understanding of bridging context that the translator brings to the role.
Has translation always been this unpopular? A look at the handful of translated plays that have won the Tony Award for Best Play reveals a regression. In 1961, the citation reads “Becket by Jean Anouilh, translated by Lucienne Hill.” 1966’s Marat/ Sade by Peter Weiss has “English version by Geoffrey Skelton,” already losing the word “translation.” The citations for Yasmina Reza’s Art and God of Carnage do not even mention translator Christopher Hampton (a Tony winner in his own right). Most egregiously, in 2022, translation was so absent from Ben Power and Stefano Massimi’s acceptance speeches for The Lehman Trilogy that many viewers might not even have realized that the play was originally written in Italian. Mirella Cheeseman, who did the work of translating the script into English, posted an Instagram reel of herself celebrating while watching the Tonys on TV, but no one on the podium so much as mentioned her name.
Why is the work of the translator so easily minimized? Could it be that people who don’t do it—indeed, who don’t speak any other languages—imagine it is merely a mechanical process: unimaginative, dry, sterile? This stereotype is not helped by the Dramatists Guild, which insists on “a distinction between a literal translator and an adaptor. A ‘literal translator’ is a person translating a play from one language into another, with the intention to render it in as close a proximation to the original text as possible…It is specifically excluded as a form of dramatic authorship under the Guild’s Broadway contract.” The Guild does seem to be softening its position and is in the process of creating a “adaptor/translator agreement” that will acknowledge the creative work of the translator in adapting a script for performance, though of course it would be preferable to simply drop the idea of “literal translators” altogether and accept that all translation involves a high degree of artistic choice.
An even more depressing possibility is that theatres believe audiences think of translated plays as forbidding or inaccessible and therefore obfuscate the translator’s name in the hope of passing the piece off as an original work. And yet, do we not have an ethical obligation to transparency? As Margherita Laera points out, “Only those translations that remark themselves as translations can do the work of uprooting and regrounding that is necessary to resist cultural narcissism.” The resistance of the US theatre to translated works comes partly from complacency, a belief that the English-speaking world contains all that is necessary to it. In the words of Sarah Cameron Sunde, who translates the plays of Nobel laureate Jon Fosse, “As Americans, we can go anywhere and people can understand us. English is so privileged as a language around the world, so it means we don’t have to work as hard to understand other people… It’s the capitalist country we live in that doesn’t prioritize culture; and then within that culture, there’s not a prioritization of learning and listening from other cultures. It’s very insular.” Making translation prominent when it occurs helps destabilize this limited point of view.
I translate books as well as plays, which means I spend a lot of my time in the world of literary publishing, an ecosystem that is vastly more receptive to translation. For a start, I’m able to make a living from translating novels, which would simply not be possible with plays. Enough books get translated from Chinese to English each year that the nonprofit organization Paper Republic is able to publish an annual round-up of titles; the equivalent list of translated Chinese plays would, most years, be a blank page.
Their mandates for diversity, I quickly discover, generally stop short at the borders of the English-speaking world.
Thanks in part to the prominence of literary translation awards such as the International Booker Prize and the National Book Award, translated literature has gained a certain amount of buzz, with a recent study showing that in the United Kingdom, readers under thirty-five account for almost half of translated fiction sales, while only buying 31 percent of overall fiction. Imagine how much more vibrant the United States theatre scene could be if it had the same buzzy receptivity to exciting, challenging work from outside the familiar English-speaking world.
One of the key elements in the growing appetite for translated literature has been the rise of the literary translator as a cultural figure, with debates over the appropriate means of crediting translators (on the front cover, or merely on the title page?) and awards for translated books being presented equally to the author and translator, with both going up on stage together at the ceremony. No Tony-style erasure here.
I have noticed this difference in my own interactions with the industry—not just in the act of translation, but also in the place I can find for myself in the ecosystem. When I get in touch with publishers, editors are often eager to meet with me so I can tell them about the books I’ve been reading from the Sinophone world. Many of the translation commissions I receive come from me directly pitching them in this way—indeed, this is the only way these translations could have come about, as most of the authors I work with are unagented. By contrast, when I manage to wrangle a meeting with a literary manager or artistic director, I usually find myself talking not about the exciting Chinese or Taiwanese plays I have been looking at, but instead trying to convince them that they should program translated plays at all, because very often they have never done this and have no idea how to commission or develop a play in translation. Their mandates for diversity, I quickly discover, generally stop short at the borders of the English-speaking world.
Even when a translated play does get commissioned, the translator isn’t necessarily allowed to be a part of the process of getting it to the stage. The Russian translator Helen Rappaport notes the perception many theatremakers have that “the translator’s role ends as soon as the text is delivered,” ignoring “the crucial role that the translator can play as the all-essential conduit between the original-language text and the actors who perform it.” I experienced this myself a few years ago, when a North American theatre company commissioned me to translate a Chinese play. They flew the playwright over from China to be in the workshop, while I was not invited, despite living several thousand miles closer; when I asked how then I would be able to make changes to my translation, it turned out that they expected me to hand over my text for them to alter as they wished. When I protested, I was told that “having to get permission from you first, before we would add any new text…is not an efficient, or conducive way to create theatre.” I did eventually manage to explain the rights of the translator sufficiently to the director that he acknowledged that I owned the copyright to my translation and it shouldn’t be changed without my consent, but that took up much time and energy that I could have spent on the translation itself.