Introduction

Special and specialist areas of translation cover so much ground that their practitioners inevitably have clashing priorities. The poetry translator operates within a different constituency from the UN interpreter, the scientific journalist or the sur-titler for opera. The biblical scholar, the cultural historian, the gender critic, all have their agendas, agendas different because of their individual priorities and constituencies. Manchester University’s Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies has a programme which incorporates lectures on, amongst other topics, translation and conflict, video games, the language of young children, philosophy, journalism in Iraq, Italian fascism and computer technology. TRIO (Translation Research in Oxford) once devoted a full day to translating nonsense. All such translators enthusiastically rehearse and debate the issues of their discipline, sometimes fruitfully, sometimes in so arcane a fashion as to defy penetration. All have in common, though it does not always seem so, that their discourse revolves around a source and a target language and the transference from the former to the latter.

Translating drama is different. The source may be there but the target is not: at least not as a finished article but only as an intermediate stage. Where most translation involves a bond between source as mother and target as child, theatre translation serves as midwife between the playwright’s pregnancy and a living, breathing performance baby. If this seems no more of a distinction than is the polysystemic approach to literary or poetical translation and the open-ended possibilities of a target which allows for a variety of ‘true’ (in the sense of ‘equally suitable’) translations, it is not so. A stage play on the page - any play of any shape or form from the long-dead Sophocles to the contemporary Botho Strauss - is still in transit, a potential only, its breath of life to be determined by directors, designers and players in as many different ways as there may be productions.

My aim here will be threefold: in the first instance, to provide some sort of introduction to the individual nature of translating of drama, and especially ancient Greek tragedy, as opposed to other forms of literary translation; second, to identify the parameters that may be set between a respect for the original text and the imperatives of a modern production, together with the function of the translator within the process; third, to consider specific examples from each of the Greek tragedians which highlight the transition in ancient Athens from the formal tragedy of Aeschylus to the more human and humane plays of Sophocles and Euripides. Overall, the intention is more to provoke discussion than to provide solutions to the problems: for the nature of translation and the nature of the theatre both show there are no absolute rules and no easy answers.