Culture in text and performance: The translation and dramaturgy of Osvaldo Dragún's Tres historias para ser contadas

Abstract

This essay examines the challenges that theatre translators and dramaturgs face while rendering the culture of the source text onto the stage of the target culture, and identifies in their collaboration a productive solution to the long-standing split between text and mise en scène. Using the author's experience as translator and dramaturg of Osvaldo Dragún's play Tres historias para ser contadas, the paper highlights how both professions come to terms with the specificities and limitations of the theatrical medium and apply strategies to optimize translatability and comprehensibility. The analysis of the narrative frames and foreignizing techniques in Dragún's text, and of its staging, suggests we may consider translation and performance as cultures unto themselves, spaces of in-betweenness where cultural traits are negotiated, dislocated and mediated to amplify the global appeal of the story. This intercultural and interdisciplinary approach is used to suggest new critical translational and dramaturgical paradigms.

Keywords:

• translating culture
• dramaturgy
• narrative frame
• translation and performance
• theatre translation
• Osvaldo Dragún

Notes

1. For clarity and consistency, I will use from now on the title Tres historias para ser contadas to refer both to the original play written by Osvaldo Dragún and the production A Toothache, A Plague, and A Dog staged by the University of Pittsburgh and based on the collective adaptation of my own translation of the original play. All translations of excerpts from Tres historias para ser contadas in the following are taken from this version.

2. Melanie Dreyer is currently an assistant professor of theatre in the Department of Theatre, Film and Dance at Cornell University.

3. “My face is not a watermelon anymore, it is a globe […]. Is Buenos Aires at night this way?” “Those three lines of the subway serve some purpose only if they are my blood and run in my veins. […] Listen to me, understand that I must work and I don't have any time, and that now this obelisk is the monument to a dead pharaoh”.

4. “I see him [the character] move in different directions: the past, the present, the future […]. A historical whole that is in constant flux”.

5. “You see, the Italian comedy was a completely different story. We wish we lived in that wonderfully rosy time but we don't. Nowadays the flowers lose their leaves to the wind and the roses’ thorns tear our skin […]. Harlequin's broken mandolin is today's deafening streetcar, and Cantarina's trusty smile is the timid hope of a new heroine who is a mother, a woman, and a sister and who marks off our tomorrow with a question mark” (Dragún 1982, 12–13).

6. “It's also a juicy vehicle for improvisational ensemble theater. Under the direction of Melanie Dreyer and starting with a fresh, quasi-idiomatic translation by Stefano Muneroni, the cast and creative team have evolved their own adaptation of Dragún's 1957 text. […] I say quasi-idiomatic for the text, because it attempts to preserve traces of its Argentinean origins even while it talks about Pittsburgh places and events (Fox news, etc.). The result is occasionally stilted, but perhaps that's just flavor of international clown theater talking back to our theatrical conventionality” (Rawson 2006).

7. “If it is indeed this way, if there is someone among you who has been asked to become a dog, like it happened to our friend, well … well, this is … This is another story”.