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An Act of Imagination
Philip Boehm
In truth I am an impostor, a
theater director masquerading as
a translator. (Incidentally the fact
I consider translation my “day
job” says a lot about working
in the theater.) And over the
years I’ve come to the conclusion
that the two trades have a lot
in common. They both involve
taking a written text from one
place to another. And they both
begin with an act of imagination.
Theater always happens
right here and now: the live
event is what moves the audience
to laugh or cry or walk out dazed. The written play is all about
potential, much like a musical score or perhaps a chemical
formula that tells us when A comes into contact with B there will
be a release of energy. The director’s job is to summon the world
of the play onstage and catalyze that release.
Translators do much the same thing: we first distill the
potential of the original, then conjure its world in another
language, another time, another place. And both translators and
directors have to cope with a shifting cultural context. Plays by
Tennessee Williams seem quite concrete in St. Louis but a bit
more abstract in Kyoto. Kafka’s Trial was read differently by
Eastern European dissidents than by American professors. And
when Joseph Brodsky toured as Poet Laureate of the United
States, he would read the same poem in Russian and in English,
shifting from fairly flat delivery for the former to dramatic
declamation more suited to his native tongue.
Every performance requires long periods of training and
rehearsal to ensure that it stays grounded in the reality being
created on stage. Such grounding is also essential work for
translators, so that the re-creation of the original text remains
so securely and deeply rooted that it can achieve a life of its
own. Clearly the first step in this process is to understand the
language of the original—and not merely vocabulary, syntax,
and grammar, but the personality of that language.
For example, working in German, I am constantly amazed
The Art of Empathy: Celebrating Literature in Translation
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