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Abstract
Internationally regarded Argentine playwright Rafael Spregelburd has never seen a satisfying English-language production of any of his textually complex plays. Spregelburd's negative experiences highlight not only some serious obstacles to successfully staging his theatre in translation, but also several key pitfalls awaiting anyone translating Argentine theatre for Anglophone readers and audiences. Through an examination of recent productions, particularly the multiple North American stagings of La estupidez in English translation and my own ongoing collaboration with Spregelburd in translating El pánico for a 2006 New York theatre festival and his latest work, Spam, for international production, I consider how the theatrical translator might respond productively to a playwright's anticipation of the failure of his plays in translation and in the process complicate translation's often-assumed unidirectionality.
Notes
1Rafael Spregelburd, message to the author, 11 Aug. 2010.
2Spregelburd's some fifty national and international awards include Spain's Tirso de Molina for La estupidez (2003), Cuba's prestigious Casa de las Américas Prize for La paranoia (2007), and Argentina's Premio Nacional for La terquedad (2011).
3“Buenos Aires in Translation,” Performance Space 122, New York, November 4–19, 2006. All four festival plays have been published in English translation (Graham-Jones, BAiT).
4Global English is often used interchangeably with “Globish,” but whereas the latter portmanteau term has its roots in international economics and is limited to a 1,500-word lexicon intended to streamline business communication (as set forth by Jean-Paul Nerrière, who trademarked the name), Global English extends far beyond business and is much more fluid (McCrum).
5Although Spregelburd composed about half of La estupidez while in residence at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus, it took him three years to complete the entire text. The play premiered in 2003 in Buenos Aires's independent theatre Portón de Sánchez, where it ran for three more years.
6In another essay, Spregelburd explicitly states that the production spoke of “the Argentinean monetary system's 2001 dissolution into chaos” (“Life” 377).
7La estupidez was the fourth installment in Spregelburd's Heptalogy, seven plays created during fourteen years and, in keeping with their inspiration (the late-medieval Bosch's Seven Deadly Sins tabletop), constituting local responses to contemporary global sins. In La estupidez's particular case, the sin is what Spregelburd calls the “stupid times” accompanying the demise of our modern order. Spregelburd initiated the Heptalogy in 1996. The seven plays are: La inapetencia, La modestia, La extravagancia, La estupidez, El pánico, La paranoia, and La terquedad. See Bulman for an overview of the Heptalogy project.
8When Spregelburd wrote the play, he had never visited the United States. He still has not been to Las Vegas.
9La estupidez, selected for London's National Theatre Studio's Channels series, received a public reading at Hoxton Hall in London on October 7, 2004. The reading was directed by Crispin Whittell. Whittell calls his translation an “adaptation” of a “literal translation” by Simon Taylor, who worked closely with Spregelburd. Whittell's text has been published as Stupidity.
10Most crucially, scene 16 was eliminated in its entirety, together with the character of Finnegan and his connection to the Gamblers.
11Compare, for example, the synopsis advertising the Canadian production with El Patrón Vázquez's description for the original production:
Five actors play 24 characters in this fast-paced comedy set in The Desert Flamingo motel on the fringes of Vegas. A group of white trash works a casino scam…the secret of the universe is about to become tabloid fodder…a fading painting has to be unloaded fast…the mafia launches its own version of Kylie Minogue…three cops live an intense story of love, treason and sign language. Imagine gags that George F. Walker and Quentin Tarantino might write for Reno 911. (http://conspiracy.ca/tc_production/stupidity-la-estupidez [no longer available])
Un grupo de gente intenta hacerse rica en Las Vegas. Un método matemático para ganar a la ruleta guarda relación con la temible ecuación matemática que encripta el Apocalipsis. Dos criminales deben vender un cuadro robado antes de que termine de borrarse por completo. La mafia siciliana fabrica una nueva estrella pop. Y unos policías motorizados viven una intensa historia de traiciones. Pero todo esto ocurre, lamentablemente, al mismo tiempo. Y en Las Vegas. …Suerte de road-movie, pero en incómodo formato teatral…(Alternative Teatral).
12The term grotesco criollo refers to an early twentieth-century theatre form, popular in Argentina and neighboring countries. Developing out of the earlier sainete criollo and influenced by European tragicomedy, the grotesco criollo is far more critical and grim. Most grotescos center on the problems encountered by New World immigrants: poverty, alienation, identity loss, and disillusionment. Anguish is the prevailing emotion, and verbal and physical violence is frequent. The form is associated with such playwrights as Armando Discépolo and Francisco Defilippis Novoa; and actors like Luis Arata developed a unique acting style for their plays.
13The Repertorio production suffered from an additional problem that has become pervasive in New York's Spanish-language performances: a disregard for dialectic coherence. The result was that in a play requiring careful attention to a very specific and invented dialect, the audience heard a mélange of Mexican, Caribbean, faux-porteño, and peninsular idiolects. When I expressed my frustration as a spectator, the production's director, Julián Mesri, replied that he consciously exploited this mix to highlight the New York Latino theatrical panorama.
14A counterexample to the perceived antipathy of US audiences toward what is currently known as “durational theatre,” New York-based Nature Theatre of Oklahoma's latest and very favorably received piece, Life and Times, 1–4, currently clocks in at almost eight hours.
15The other plays were Lola Arias's A Kingdom, a Country or a Wasteland, in the Snow (La escuálida familia), Federico León's Ex-Antwone (ExAntuán), and Daniel Veronese's Women Dreamt Horses (Mujeres soñaron caballos). All four translations have been published in BAiT (Graham-Jones).
16Spregelburd often writes of fractals, entropy, labyrinths, and multiplied dimensions coexisting in the world and therefore in his plays; this he contrasts with contemporary art's tendency toward the Euclidean, linear, and one-dimensional. See, for example, “Prólogo.”
17For example, for the published text of Panic (prepared after the play had premiered in New York), I decided to remove specifically local geographical references from the script but retained (and explained) them in the accompanying endnotes. Spregelburd and I also decided to make one name change. All were done to open up the range of possibilities of the text in performance as well as to reinforce to readers and potential theatrical producers that El pánico's crisis is not exclusive to Argentina, but rather, as with all the plays in the Heptalogy, part of a larger breakdown of what the playwright calls our modern order.
18We might also note, as Bellos does, that GT elides the human labor that produced the very texts it scans for precedents.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Jean Graham-Jones
Jean Graham-Jones is Professor of Theatre and Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literatures and Languages at the City University of New York's Graduate Center, where she currently serves as Head of the Ph.D. Program in Theatre. She is the author of Exorcising History: Argentine Theater Under Dictatorship and the forthcoming Evita, Inevitably: Performing Argentina's Female Icons Before and After Eva Perón. She is also the editor and translator of three volumes of plays by Argentine theatre artists.