Lombardo - Translating Shakespeare for the Theatre

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TRANSLATING SHAKESPEAREFOR THE THEATRE

Agostino Lombardo

Let me start by saying that the following observations are in no way intendedto constitute a theory of translation. They are to be taken for what they are:observations on my own work as a translator, in this context a translator ofShakespeare. Although I have translated considerably, and have inevitablydrawn a number of conclusions from my work, I feel unable to formulate anddictate rules (as is too often done, paradoxically enough, by those who havenever translated). This is not simply because I am not a theorist—I am acritic and a craftsman—but also, and particularly, because each translation isits own world, with problems peculiar to itself. For example, I have justfinished translating King Lear into Italian and noticed that, while followingthe general lines already traced in my previous work, I was also facingproblems and seeking solutions which were very different from those, say, ofMacbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Timon of Athens, The Winter’s Tale or The Tempest.The fact is that, though belonging to the sphere not of art but simply ofcraftsmanship, each translation is unique, just as the work of art it tries toevoke is unique. It cannot, therefore, accept rules, impositions or suggestionsfrom quarters other than the work of art itself. Let me, then, merely offerobservations, in the hope that they may stimulate discussion, questions anddoubts, doubt (not dogma) being the real driving force, as Hamlet knew, ofall cultural and human research.

Since translation means, to me, a series of acts of loyalty, the first of myobservations concerns loyalty to the theatre. Owing to both our background asliterary cr itics and the extraordinary poetic and literary qualities ofShakespeare’s art, we are accustomed to reading his work qua literature, themore so since Elizabethan dramatists use verse. We now realize, however,given the development of Shakespear ian cr iticism and the language ofmodern theatre, that this is a mistake. These plays are plays. Their words havea bodily quality: they need a voice, a body, a stage, an audience. They arecomplete—they are a complete expression and are completely real—only on

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the stage for which they were intended. Even if their poetry is supreme, itgoes beyond literature. It is dramatic poetry: theatre. These words were notmeant to be read in a library or at home but to be spoken on the stage, byactors during a dramatic action before an audience. These passages (even the‘purple’ ones, even ‘To be or not to be’ or ‘The barge she sat in’) are alwayspart of an action and a dialogue—even monologues are to be listened to, ifnot (as often happens) by other characters at least by the audience. Indeed, aplaywright, particularly a ‘total’ playwright like Shakespeare, is always aplaywright, even if he is a great poet, the greatest of the modern age. Evenhis most complex passages were written for human beings impersonatinghuman beings in front of other human beings. The theatre is not a solitaryart; it is the art of men (and, after the Elizabethan per iod, women)communicating with other men and women. Herein, as well as in its constantchange and renewal, night after night, lies its fascination as a mirror of life.

This is the necessary starting point for the translator of Shakespeare (orany other dramatic text), but there are other acts of loyalty to observe. Thereis loyalty to the text. All translations should, I believe, be faithful. You mustnever prevaricate (unless you are ‘reducing’ or ‘reworking’, like CharlesMarowitz, for instance, or in Italy Carmelo Bene, but this is another matter).Translators are interpreters, mediators, not authors, however much they maybe tempted to think so. To ‘be’ Shakespeare is, needless to say, particularlydifficult, since, hubris apart, in his essentially ‘poor’ theatre the word ischarged with all possible meanings and functions. You must thus work on themost reliable editions; you must be conscious of the philological problems(even the insoluble ones) present in the text precisely because Shakespeareconsidered himself a playwright, not a literary artist. You must respect, asmuch as possible, the meaning of the words—you cannot really changeanything in Shakespeare, particularly given the charged, dramatic use of hisimagery, unless you are willing to risk damaging or even destroying anextremely delicate and complex mechanism. To give an example from mypersonal experience, while discussing my translation of The Tempest, in 1978,Strehler and I would constantly realize, after various trials and experiments,that the Italian word nearest to Shakespeare was invariably the right one, fromall points of view, conceptual as well as poetic and theatrical. Repetitions,words like ‘strange’ or ‘brave’, had a profound meaning and impact and hadtherefore to be kept in spite of sounding heavier in Italian than in English.The only legitimate changes are those, I think, which attempt to find anequivalent for puns, the translator’s ultimate nightmare: you can sometimesfind the exact correspondence (‘dolour-dollar’ (The Tempest) can easily betranslated ‘dolore-dollaro’), but the gods are seldom so kind, and moregenerally, since the stage has footlights but not footnotes, you must try to befaithful not to the letter but to the spirit, the sense, even if it means creatinga totally different pun through which you can at least signpost the presenceof the original one.

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But apart from puns, loyalty to the single word or image is easier tomaintain (with the inevitable limits of pregnancy and suggestiveness,although some shades of meaning can be evoked by theatrical means) thanloyalty to Shakespeare’s language as a whole: its texture, rhythm and music.Here lie the real torments. As I have already pointed out, a translation is atranslation; it is not, and should not be, a new work of art. To be a goodtranslation, however, it must have a unity of its own, both linguistic andrhythmic. In the very moment in which it proves its fidelity it must alsodemonstrate its autonomy—a sort of autonomous reflection, echo, image,memory, perhaps, of an artefact: the more so since, while the original textis atemporal, immortal, an unmodifiable form (cf. Keats’ Grecian urn), thetranslation is always temporal, and its language must always becontemporary (in this sense, no translation can really last, other than as adocument, for more than two or three decades). It must speak in time, inhistory, to a given audience at a given moment—and this is especially truein the case of a theatre audience, who must immediately perceive themeaning of the play. By this I most emphatically do not mean thatShakespeare should in any way be trivially contemporized, modernized ordegraded. I am strongly opposed to any such manipulation of Shakespeare(who is not ‘our contemporary’). What I mean is that as well as loyalty toShakespeare and his language the translator must observe loyalty to theaudience, and therefore the present time, language and tradition—one mustthink, in a sense, of a ‘double’ translation, which is of course an almostimpossible task; but we know that translating is in itself an impossible taskwhich must, however, be accomplished; it will inevitably be a failure—butwe can at least try to make it an honourable one.

What I have been trying to do, then, in the last few years (and it is notfor me to judge the results, although Shakespeare is so complete, sopowerful, that he can capture an audience through any medium, theatre,cinema, television, even in a bad translation or through a bad performance)has been to create a language combining absolute loyalty to the text (Icannot overemphasize this) with an Italian and contemporary quality andpattern of its own. I have been trying to achieve a translation which is afaithful version of the English text but has a textual autonomy for an Italianaudience, and which also has some connection—necessary, if unobtrusive,allusive, even secret—with the Italian literary tradition (‘you must alwayshave your tradition in your bones’, to paraphrase T.S.Eliot) and with thetradition established both by previous translations and by othermanifestations of Shakespeare’s influence in Italy (opera libretti, forinstance).

The best example I can give is the type of verse I use. I must confess Istarted by using prose: rhythmic prose, but prose nonetheless. Gradually,however, I noticed that on the one hand prose tended almost inevitably tochange into poetry; on the other, that it was indeed impossible, when

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Shakespeare was using verse, to use a different medium. There is always areason behind Shakespeare’s choice and that, too, required fidelity. But I havenever, even when I first began translating Shakespeare, tried to find an Italianequivalent of blank verse. There is no corresponding syllabic verse in Italian,not even the basic hendecasyllable, which has the same energy, flexibility anddramatic quality, quite apart from the fact that the hendecasyllable wouldhave given the translation too strong an Italian quality. I therefore graduallycame to use, or to invent, a sort of free, varied verse based not on the numberof syllables but (following the Latin tradition here) on stresses: usually four,less often three or five according to the dramatic situation. Just one example,from the translation of King Lear (published 1991): KENT. I know you. Where’s the king?

GENTLEMAN. Contending with the fretful elements;Bids the wind blow the earth into the sea,Or swell the curled waters ’bove the main,That things might change or cease; tears his white hair,Which the impetuous blasts, with eyeless rage,Catch in their fury, and make nothing of;Strives in his little world of man to out-stormThe to-and-fro conflicting wind and rain.This night, wherein the cub-drawn bear would couch,The lion and the belly-pinched wolfKeep their fur dry, unbonneted he runs,And bids what will take all…

(III, 1, 3–15)

KENT. Vi conosco. Dov’è il Re?

GENTILUOMO. In lotta con gli elementi scatenati: ordinaal vento di soffiare la terra nel mareo di gonfiare le acque arricciolate al di sopradella terra, sì che le cose possanotrasformarsi o cessare; si strappa i capellibianchi, che le raffiche impetuose con rabbiacieca afferrano nella loro furiacome fossero niente; si sforza nel suo piccolomondo di uomo di sovrastare il ventoe la pioggia in violento conflitto. In una nottecome questa, in cui l’orsa spossata dai figlivorrebbe accucciarsi, e il leone e il lupodal ventre famelico mantengono asciutto

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il pelo, lui a capo scopertocorre, e grida che chi vuole prenda tutto.

A fairly free rhythm, then, but a ‘track’ of sorts (particularly useful for actorsbelonging to a different linguistic tradition) and, most of all, a piece ofwriting with a continuity, key and tone of its own. It is this one should aimat: a stylistic unity, a rhythm and tone which can claim an autonomy while atleast evoking the tone of the original; it is always, inevitably, a question ofapproximations, but this, I believe, is the moment in which translation comesnearest to the artistic process.

Within this structure there are, of course, countless other problems tosolve. There is the search for a unitary tone, but at the same time the needto differentiate characters through language. A play is a play, and thecharacters live, and are defined, only by their language and their actions—and nowhere more supremely so than in Shakespeare, if you read the workdramatically.

There is the problem of echoing (not reproducing) not only the generalpattern but particular rhythmic situations. This is particularly important inThe Tempest, where sounds, as Caliban knew, are everywhere. Think of Ariel’ssong:

Full fathom five thy father lies;Of his bones are coral made…

(I, 2, 399–405)

A cinque tese sott’acquaTuo padre giace.Già coralloSono le sue ossaEd i suoi occhiPerle.Tutto ciò che di luiDeve perireSubisce una metamorfosi marinaIn qualche cosaDi ricco e di strano.A ogni oraLe ninfe del mareUna campanaFanno rintoccare.

And finally think of the first dialogue in The Tempest, between Prospero andCaliban, in which moral violence is expressed through sounds and

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alliterations, and in which, moreover, there is an extraordinary change oftone, from harshness to sweetness, then back to harshness:

As wicked dew as e’er my mother brush’dWith raven’s feather from unwholesome fenDrop on you both…

(I, 2, 323–46)

Addosso a tutti e due cadano gocceDi brina maligna come quellaChe mia madre da una palude marciaCon penna di corvo raccoglieva!Che un vento di scirocco possa soffiare su di voiE riempirvi di piaghe.

…

Quest’isola è mia. Mi venneDa Sycorax mia madre. E tu me l’hai presa.Appena arrivato mi accarezzaviE mi tenevi nel cuore,Mi davi acqua con dentro i mirtilliE mi insegnavi a nominareLa luce più grande e quella più piccolaChe bruciano di giorno e di notte—Allora ti amavo, e ti mostravoTutte le qualità dell’isola,Le sorgenti d’acqua dolce,I fossi d’acqua salata,I luoghi sterili e quelli fertili.Maledetto me per averlo fatto!Che tutti gli incantesimi di Sycorax,Rospi, scarafaggi, pipistrelli,Vi cadano addosso! Perchè oraIo sono tutti i sudditi che avete,Io che prima ero il mio proprio Re.E voi mi stipateIn questa dura roccia.Da tutto il resto dell’isolaMi avete escluso.

Loyalty to the director is my next topic. If you translate without having aparticular production in mind you avoid this problem (although translatorsmust always try to rehearse the play on a mental stage, becoming, so to speak,their own directors). But if the translation is meant for a particularproduction, loyalty to the director is essential.

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I have always been lucky with my directors: from Strehler to Squarzina toPeter Stein, I have been able to establish with all of them that relationshipStrehler speaks of in an essay (‘Staging Shakespeare’, 1979, now in InscenareShakespeare, Rome, 1992):

In the case of a foreign text, the first critical operation is that of thetranslation. I go so far as to say that a great part of the ‘critical work’ ofthe direction is in this case closely connected with the problem of thetranslation…. The translator-director relationship is extremely complex,difficult and of pr imary importance, if one of course thinks of a‘critical type’ of interpretation.

As regards The Tempest, since Strehler does not impose a previous meaning onthe text but tries to go as deeply as possible inside it, our oral and writtendiscussions were mainly a joint attempt to penetrate the mystery of that play(and let me add that I only fully understood the real meaning of certainmoments in The Tempest through Strehler’s theatrical reading).

This phase of the work is followed by that in which the directorcelebrates a personal vision of the scenic form the play must take. Thetranslator will inevitably also make a personal contr ibution towardsrealizing this. Hence, in my translation, the use of expressions tending tounderline the meta-theatrical aspect of The Tempest, which Strehler wouldrightly emphasize. Hence the language used for Ariel, faithful to the textand to the nature of the character, but loyal also to the fact that the actorwas in fact an actress, the admirable Giulia Lazzarini: a language, then,which had to have a special, feminine, ambiguous lightness. But I also hadto bear in mind that for most of the time Ariel was flying about in the air,tied to a (not completely) invisible cable, and therefore a good way fromthe audience; for them to hear and understand him, single words andsentences had to be as short and incisive as possible. Loyalty to the directoris thus also, implicitly, loyalty to the audience, who must understand but,first of all, must hear. Of course this is the actor’s problem, but it is also ofconcern for the translator, who must use words which will allow the actorto communicate with the audience.

There is also, then, loyalty to the actor—to what I regard as the real bodyof the play. In the theatre at a given moment everyone disappears—author,director and, for that matter, translator—leaving the actor alone on thestage in front of the audience. That is the moment when the play comes tolife.

Translators must never forget that the words they write are to be spokenby a human voice, by an instrument which has all the human qualities and allthe human limitations. Breathing is of course central, and the translator, inconstructing ‘new sentences’, must not forget this, or that the new linguisticpattern must be such, even when the syntax is at its most complex, as to

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allow the actor to pronounce it with fluency. The translator must realize thatthe words are not static; they are words in movement, in time and space,accompanied by gestures, part of an action and elements of a dialogue. Thusthe relationship between the translator and the actor must be as solid as thatbetween the translator and the director. This can be established with animagined actor on an imagined stage, but it is often established with a realactor whose possibilities and qualities (obviously within the limits imposedby loyalty to the text) the translator must take into consideration, just asShakespeare would take the qualities of his actors—Burbage, for instance, orArmin—into consideration.

I will not insist on loyalty to the audience, my final topic, having alreadydone so throughout. Whatever definition we wish to give of the theatre—rite, entertainment, communication or show—it always needs the audience asan intrinsic element of its language and composition. And Shakespeare, morethan any other dramatist, felt this presence and wrote with the publicconstantly in mind at every level, from the most external and spectacular tothe most secret, subtle and profound. Thus loyalty to the audience isconnected with, and includes and sustains, all the types of loyalty indicated sofar. The audience, after all (in my case an Italian audience to whom totransmit Shakespeare’s words), are the translators’ prime motivation in theirdifficult, tormenting, even frustrating job, one full of loyalties, obligations andlimitations of all sorts, one of approximations and compromises—neverentirely satisfactory, always open to different solutions, and constantly inprogress.

A useful job, however, both for its contribution to the knowledge ofotherwise inaccessible works and for the rewards to the translatorsthemselves. Among the many things they learn (not the least of which isgreater insight into a foreign language—and, perhaps more important, theirown) is the full realization that a play is a play; they learn to ‘read’ thetheatre, this most human, and hence perhaps most fascinating, of the arts, thenearest to the essence and the movement of life, being simultaneously lifeand a metaphor of life (and in this sense the world is a stage). An ephemeraljob, as I have already said, but this very quality brings the work closer to thenature of the theatre and to the nature of life, making it a tiny metaphorwithin the vaster and more frightening one. It is a metaphor, too, for thatnostalgia for an unattainable language which is the motivation and substance,not only of translation, but of art and life; a metaphor of a utopia notdissimilar to that of Enobarbus when, in Antony and Cleopatra, he attempts todescribe Cleopatra and evoke the features of her beauty but succeeds only ingiving a suggestion, a faint memory of it:

Il vascello su cui sedeva, come un trono brunitoBruciava sull’acqua: la poppa era d’oro battuto,Purpuree le vele, e così profumate che i venti

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Morivano d’amore per loro; d’argento i remi,Che battevano al suono dei flauti e costringevanoL’acqua percossa a seguire più veloceCome amorosa dei colpi. In quanto alla sua figura,Immiseriva ogni descrizione: giacevaSotto il suo baldacchino—stoffa intessuta d’oro—Oscurando quella Venere dipinta nella quale vediamoLa fantasia superare la natura….

(II, 2, 196–206)