David Johnston is one of the best-known contemporary theatre translators of Spanish plays into English. His translations of Spanish Golden Age theatre, in particular, have been regularly performed across the Anglophone world, including by the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Washington Shakespeare Company. According to American critic Kathleen Jeffs, he is “widely recognized as the writer of the most innovative translations of Spanish Golden Age comedias in the twenty-first century”. Spanish playwright Juan Mayorga noted that “his wonderful Dog in the Manger, which the Royal Shakespeare Company brought to the Teatro Español in Madrid (in 2006), is still talked and written about as a key moment in the history of the theatre of my country”. Johnston is a theorist-practitioner who continually reflects upon what translation is, what it can do in the theatre, and who has written extensively about translation as a special form of writing rather than a sort of original manqué. For that reason it seems logical to begin this interview by asking what factors influence his choice of play to be translated.
YANGYANG LONG: What is it that makes you decide that a particular play is worth translating?
DAVID JOHNSTON: Very often you can’t tell whether a play will work in translation until you’ve actually written the translation or at least a draft of it. Then as the translator you can begin to feel whether or not the new play has the ability to make some sort of impact within the new theatre environment in which it will be performed. All translations involve acts of interpretation, and stage-worthy translations, in particular, very often derive from practices that many purists may well feel uneasy about. These practices or re-writings — purposeful deviations — tend to manipulate the original play towards a new audience, so that any attempt to judge a translation for performance by comparing it against the original becomes virtually meaningless. In that way, what makes a play translatable, especially a play from the Spanish Golden Age, from a repertoire that has been around for a long time but, paradoxically, remains largely undiscovered, is the set of fresh concerns and forms that it instantiates — in other words, how visible it might be within the context of the new moment of performance.
YANGYANG LONG: So a play from the Spain of four hundred years ago has to prove itself as though it were a new play?
DAVID JOHNSTON: To all intents and purposes, yes. No translation is ever definitive, so that every translation is, by extension, a text in transition that needs to be tested in the rehearsal room in terms of its ever-shifting potential for establishing new connections in new ways with new audiences. More than simply a response to text embedded in its own context, translation also requires a response to the implications and connotations that arise from the possibilities of relatedness generated by the text’s new conditions of encounter as it travels through time and space. It’s the translator’s response to these extra-textual dimensions, the markers of the work’s actual and extended lifespan from cradle to afterlife, that secures the translated play’s performability on the stage today. That’s one of the beauties of the translated play, perhaps its most creative paradox, that it continues to be itself even as it moves through time and space, and in this moving it accrues new potential for complicity and engagement. Of course, when it comes to working with classical Spanish theatre, there are some individual plays or certain recognised writers — Calderón’s Life’s A Dream, Tirso’s The Trickster of Seville, Lope’s Fuenteovejuna — that might have a certain resonance with audiences. Then, what Walter Benjamin called the “aura” of the text becomes important — not so much creating a set of additional constraints, but reinforcing the conditions of that environment in which the stage translator generally works.
YANGYANG LONG: What is that environment?
DAVID JOHNSTON: It’s all too easy, when you’re faced with translating a well-known classic, to be excessively reverent. With very few exceptions this is what’s happened with the translation of Don Quijote in English, for example, where most published translations are characterised by an opaque sameness. Aura here becomes a constraint. But the translator of any play for performance, even when that play is an acknowledged masterpiece by a great writer, needs to think of him or herself not as beholden to any one context, but as a reader/writer working along an uneasy border between past and present, there and here, text and reading/writing self. In this conception, the text is not a bounded site, but more of an itinerary between there and here, then and now, an itinerary that takes the form of a series of translations in and across the various temporal and cultural engagements that bring together the text, as it moves through time and space, and the translator who is searching for a stage language to capture the dynamic range of meanings generated by this trajectory. Of course, it’s now become commonplace to name this environment the “third” space. But we rarely examine the implications that this occupation of the so-called third space has for translators (and indeed, for actors), or for the intellectual and cultural spaces that both sets of cultural mediators journey — or zigzag — through. This “third space” offers little more than an essentialised conception of the way in which translation inevitably traffics in difference, of how it prompts hermeneutic reflection between the located self and the text that is teetering on the edge of dislocation. So the environment of translation is characterized by the translator’s refusal of the discursive authority of both source text and target context. Translation achieves this by recognizing that the different spatial and temporal domains inhabited by text and translator alike are provisional because they are always shifting.
YANGYANG LONG: In the context of this provisionality, how meaningful is Benjamin’s concept of “aura”?
DAVID JOHNSTON: Benjamin was talking about what happens when we reproduce a work of art. Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art, he argued, is missing one key element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence within that interstice.
YANGYANG LONG: So, its authenticity?
DAVID JOHNSTON: Yes. But Benjamin was a Marxist thinker, not a theologian, and he also had, to say the least, something of an ambivalent relationship with the idea of authenticity as an inviolable condition sanctioned by specific coordinates of production. Reproduction degrades aura, but the destruction of aura also brings about a sort of emancipation that, in terms of the work’s reception, is political, cultural and artistic. When a work of art loses its aura, it moves from the sacred preserve of the unique to the shifting terrain of the political, its meanings open to being constituted and reconstituted in and through the moving coordinates of time and space.
YANGYANG LONG: Its afterlife, in Benjamin’s term?
DAVID JOHNSTON: Benjamin wrote that any notion we have about the continuing life of works of art should be considered with what he called “completely unmetaphorical objectivity”. It’s hard to know exactly what he means by that, but Benjamin — like many of us today — finds the notion of the afterlife problematic. To believe in any sort of afterlife —secular or non-secular, material or transcendental I think we need to be able to foresee or visualise what these conditions of survival might be, we need to be able to imagine survival within another knowable place of habitation. In The Translator’s Task Benjamin famously argues that the “afterlife” of the text resides in its translation, a characterisation frequently press-ganged into service as abbreviated form in order to assert the centrality of translation to wider processes of cultural transmission. In this understanding of the translation as a location of survival, the original is supplanted by the new, an act of displacement that is simultaneously vaunted by those seeking to stake a claim for the power of translation and disavowed by those for whom the translation can never be more than an imperfect attempt at reproduction. Benjamin, of course, sees the relationship between the life of the text and the afterlife offered by translation as processual and dialectic. He draws a key distinction — but not absolute separation — between what he terms the “moving truth” and the “resting truth” of the text, effectively eschewing any simple sense of the translation as a product of annexation into the present, and suggesting instead that the new text is constituted by fragments of relation; firstly, between the competing “truths” of the source text, historically conditioned and transcendental alike, and secondly between the target text itself and the shifting contexts of reception in which it is newly located. Benjamin’s argument, in that way at least, prefigures Derrida’s articulation of the “survival of a text that is a legacy”. Because Benjamin’s sense of textual afterlife implies something that is ongoing, something that is both culturally present and materially absent — as is implied in the apparent paradox of his paradigmatic “translation passes through continua of transformation, not abstract ideas of identity and similarity”. I’ve always thought of this as one of the most complete ways of thinking about translation, in that it reminds us that translation both continues a text and makes it different and that the act of translation itself is never complete. As a translator I would like to think of myself as a contributor to these ongoing continua of transformation.
YANGYANG LONG: So does translation have a relationship with time that in some way is different from what we think of as the continuum of history?
DAVID JOHNSTON: We imagine time in different ways. If you start from Michel de Certeau’s argument that historiography in the West essentially begins by distinguishing between the present and the past, then yes. So much of the way we think about texts from the past is conditioned by a sense of rupture of breakage. Of course, we inherit this in turn from the resolute presentism of the modernist (think of the opening of Eliot’s Burnt Norton, for instance, where he writes that “What might have been and what has been / Point to one end, which is always present”[l. 9-10]). I was a victim of this sense of radical material difference between past and present as a student of literature — although from the other end of the scale. Nearly all of the teaching I received was genuinely disconnected. My lecturers constantly peddled a clear disengagement from our own pressing historical moment in Belfast in the years of the Troubles. They simply avoided being critics of their own culture, of their own lived moment. They adopted and passed on to us critical positions that were seemingly aloof from the tangled emotions of the present moment and that were couched in terms of a continual denial of position-taking. These were critical positions that actually constituted a reluctance to admit the effects of culture and history upon their own ways of thinking about literary or theatre texts. Perhaps even upon their own lives. The act of contextualizing Calderón’s seventeenth-century audience, for example, seemed to require my lecturers to radically uproot themselves. And with them, their students. It was an enforced disempowerment. Since then, in reaction, I’ve always been touched by W. H. Auden’s oft-quoted insistence that the work of art is one of the very few ways in which the dead remain alive: “Through art, we are able to break bread with the dead, and without communion with the dead a fully human life is impossible”. Surely the human life can only be defined as full when it has some sort of contact beyond its own span. Historical time hems us into the impossibly short term, but individual and cultural memory are based on a synchronicity of past and present that offers a different experience from the relentless presentism of our modern sense of history. Translation is re-creation, the re-creation of past lives within the span of our own.
YANGYANG LONG: Is this what W. G. Sebald meant when he talked about the “acute difference” that exists, “between history as historiography and history as experienced history”?
DAVID JOHNSTON: Sebald was one of the great translators of lives, and of course a great translator in every sense.1 Key works of his, like The Rings of Saturn, are an amalgam of history and fiction, filling in the gaps and blank spaces that surround historical lives, creating a meaning out of those lives in a way that connects with the lives of others. That’s the role of the translator, to make connections across what Slavoj Zizek called “the blind spot of historicism” that is the “unhistorical kernel of the real”, what history tends not to see: the material lives of others. When a translator takes on a play from the past, of course he or she wants to evoke something of what has gone before us, but it’s only possible to extend the sweep of our lives if we experience that past through points of connection with the flow from one human being to another — which is what I think Zizek meant by the “real”. Translators are concerned with the human “real” of any text, so that every good act of translation, like Sebald’s writing, becomes a complex hybrid between the context of the original and the context of the new.
YANGYANG LONG: Like an act of memory?
DAVID JOHNSTON: What this paradoxical amalgam of continuity and change implicit in “continua of transformation” suggests is a sense of time that exists in folds of synchronicity, palimpsests of experience, in which the material and the transcendent, the present and the absent are in dialogue, woven together into fragments of relation that intimately re-connect the human subject of now with who and what have gone before. It’s this experience of time that vivifies human memory and lies at the heart of our processes of memorialisation: what de Certeau refers to as “reabsorption”. His recognition that as human beings we do not abandon easily leads him to draw a distinction between Western history, straddling its perceived rupture between past and present, and what he sees as “tradition”, where such reabsorption takes place. Translation connects with living tradition. Good translation avoids the production of ossified artefacts, like in a museum where exhibits are characterised by their utter alterity, but offers instead a quality of access into the lived experience of lives from different times and places. Only the re-creative practices of translation can provide this.
YANGYANG LONG: What forms this tradition?
DAVID JOHNSTON: A desire for connectedness, to obviate loss — and, I suppose, an ethics of connection. Robert Pogue Harrison’s great book The Dominion of the Dead talks powerfully about our responsibility towards the dead: an allegiance between the past, embodied in the dead, and the future, embodied in the unborn or yet to be born. So this tradition is an allegiance, a transmission, a simultaneity, a series of palimpsests of life and culture — an allegiance of which translation is the ligature. Translation that permits the tight connection, that enables the human flow. Tradition is a flow, Benjamin’s moving truth, as opposed to the sense of loss that inhabits the resting truth of the work of art. Aura is instantiated by loss. Joachim du Bellay’s wonderful poem from the collection Les Antiquités de Rome, written in the mid-sixteenth century, which begins “Nouveau venu qui cherches Rome en Rome / Et rien de Rome en Rome n’aperçois” is a very early capturing of this sense of loss that we inherit from aura,2 that aporia that arises from the perceived rupture of past and present. All that is left of Rome to the eye of the sixteenth-century observer are its ruins; it is reduced to its name, its aura. But looking around the city in ruins, du Bellay is able to perceive a principle of continuity in the onward flow of the Tiber, the one element of constancy that remains. This is how translation works. We’re drawn to classical plays by their aura, by the name of the writer. But the truth is that the classics don’t fully withstand the test of time. The great translator Tony Harrison famously talks about the “rubble” that is often all that is left of the Greek classics. Of course, he’s not saying that nothing survives, but that there are sufficient instances of breakage of connection in the text to mean that the play in contemporary performance requires special attention – breakage that arises from gaps in our knowledge, different templates of assumption, divergent systems of production and reception, for example.
YANGYANG LONG: Does this mean that we have no access to the plays of the past in terms of how they functioned within their own contexts?
DAVID JOHNSTON: I’m not suggesting that it’s impossible to establish correspondences, whether formal, semantic or thematic, between the source text and the translation; all translation begins with the possibility of establishing equivalences, at the very least of a sort, and good translation always derives from careful thought and research. But whatever equivalences we find are filtered through acts of interpretation that are, in turn, both responsive to and shaped by the new performance environment — in other words, by the need to ensure that the new play works in performance. Every single part of the process — including the choice of play to be translated, as your opening question implied — derives from and is coloured by interpretive acts. Because, in practice, the stage translator invariably follows a zigzag itinerary between the competing conceptions of equivalence that notionally underpin both source-text oriented translation and audience-oriented adaptation, reconfiguring what somehow seems to be grounded in the text on one hand, and evoking its potential for relatedness on the other. In this sense, therefore, to translate is primarily to engage on behalf of the new receiving context with the sweep and scope of the play as an object that differs linguistically, culturally, historically, and theatrically from the uses, assumptions, and practices of our own moment. In other words, the translator is concerned with the play as an object that is other to us, but such alterity is not conceived of as a barrier to understanding but rather as the territory in which the challenge to really translate is undertaken, where time and space themselves become tools of the translator’s undertaking. The act of translation doesn’t take place within the set parameters of either an uncomplicated textual strategy — whether of professed fidelity or of wholesale domestication — or indeed the norms of a specific moment or location; but rather as a balancing act that straddles the demands of textual authority and reader (or spectator) response, somehow reconciling apparently objective and subjective readings of the text in question while at the same time crucially refusing to bestow on either position the status of an absolute imperative. But there are of course translators who privilege locatedness — very often academics, for example, defend the location of the original text and who see any departure from that as simply the rehearsed impertinence of the irreverent. How often have we sat through theatre translation conferences listening to academic commentators satirizing the work of writer-translators who have intervened at various levels in order to ensure that the play actually works in contemporary performance? And on the other hand, there is the translator who is concerned only with the receiving context and who produces what are effectively new plays emerging from the original – such as Simon Stone’s recent production of García Lorca’s Yerma in London. For better, because these are plays divested of aura that impact in their own ways on the receiving theatre culture, but also for worse, because they lose something that should be intrinsic to the translated play: the flow. One sort of translation derives from a museological sense of curatorship, while the other embodies breakage.
YANGYANG LONG: In other words, what’s lost is the flow.
DAVID JOHNSTON: We tend to think of time and space as barriers to understanding, expanses that texts need to navigate if they are to continue being thought of as classics. But of course, ever since Einstein’s work on the nature of space and time, we know that they are categories that don’t exist independently or absolutely, that they have more to do with ongoing relatedness rather than absolute loss or separation, and that how we account for an object’s position in time and space depends on the movement of our own position. If you apply that to translation, you can easily see why different translators produce different accounts of the text to be translated. As I’ve just said, time and space, if we think about them creatively, are key tools of the translator’s imagination. Because, although the act of translation can never fully restore the original any more than memory can actually revive the dead, there is nonetheless a potential in translation not only to create relatedness, but also to restore something of the materiality of time and space to the translated text, to evoke something of its journey across time and space. I suppose it’s aura of a sort, not in Benjamin’s sense of the original in its place of origin, but of a text that comes at us from an elsewhere long ago and that still connects vividly with us today. So the purposeful deviations that I spoke of earlier, sitting as they do within more straightforward translational accounts of the original, are not merely to make the play more intelligible within the new performance context, but also to enhance the sense of the play’s existence across time and space, to restore something of the materiality of distance to it. So in the case of a new version written out of the original, aloof from it, no matter what the merits of that new version are, no matter what the spectator recognises in performance, it will be stripped of the materiality of movement, devoid of the pleasure of recognition that comes from the long gaze back through time and space to something that we can acknowledge as still substantially connecting with who we are today.
YANGYANG LONG: Is there not a danger that this movement might confuse an audience?
DAVID JOHNSTON: We need to be careful not to think of audiences as univocal. In terms of my own experience of watching audiences and talking to them afterwards, I can say that I’ve seen many spectators who’ve responded positively to this sort of movement. After all, theatre happens through acts of re-creative imagining — we’re told we’re on a desert island and we imagine we are. So just as the translator zigzags between and across the notional boundaries of original text and new contexts, the spectator is no less capable of following this zigzagging itinerary. Cognitively we live in complex worlds that are characterised by simultaneity and sharing and movement, and, if the writing is good, theatre spectators can blend in and out of different apprehensions of reality on stage — I’m thinking here of the work of Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, for example, who examine the centrality of cognitive blending to spectatorship.
YANGYANG LONG: Can you give an example?
DAVID JOHNSTON: El pintor de su deshonra / The Painter of Dishonour is a good example of a play that presents the most significant features of Golden Age world vision. Dating from around 1648, it’s one of Calderón’s most mature reflections on a decadent and brutalising society in which truths and untruths lie confused under the shielding aesthetic of courtesy. Don Juan de Roca – a name resonant with contradiction and tension — is the eponymous gentleman painter, whose honour has been irredeemably stained by the kidnapping of his much younger wife. He wanders through Italy, now a man of no name, in search of his stolen wife and lost honour, but like Shakespeare’s “man of no mark” or Agamben’s homo sacer, he is now cast adrift from society, stripped of rights, bereft of protection. Calling at the house of Prince Ursino in order to fulfil a commission, he asks the Prince’s servant when his master will return and receives the answer “No lo sé” (literally “I don’t know”). In the context of the elaborately formulaic expressions of courtesy with which the play has opened, and the series of framing devices used throughout by Calderón to evoke a society in which any direct or open approach is an affront to a deeply ingrained sense of personal inviolability, this reply is abusive in its directness. No servant would have dared address a gentleman in such naked terms. It confirms Don Juan’s brutal loss of status, and serves as a linguistically sharp and socially crude catalyst for one of the most memorable speeches in the whole of Spanish Golden Age theatre – Don Juan’s raging complaint that begins: “By such and such is honour broken” and climaxes with the bitter questioning: “What madness dreamt up laws like these / these shameful rites the world accepts / where another’s shameless intent / visits such punishment on me?” The “shameless intent” Don Juan refers to is the kidnapping of his wife, so that the elaborate forty-seven line speech becomes a powerful indictment of any power, moral, legal or cultural, that reduces the vulnerable subject to bare life. It is the fulcrum upon which the translator seeks to balance the moral universe in the original against the one evoked from that in the translation. By now the Spanish Golden Age was moving towards its close, its crowning moment of moral and intellectual sophistication enshrined in Calderón’s baroque love of ambiguity. Don Juan Roca queries, in the most modern way, how public morality is allowed to impact so brutally on the private realm. How might the translator deal with this brief exchange so as to allow spectators to engage with the socially and morally oppressive reality in which these characters live, to appreciate the personal pain of Don Juan’s loss of social standing? Certainly its literal meaning did not satisfy actors John Carlisle and Zubin Varla (Don Juan and the servant in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 1995 première of the play); it lacked the edge that was to push simple discourtesy into the realm of sheer tragedy for one and schadenfreude-driven brutality for the other. A.K.G. Paterson’s published translation, describing itself as “agreeable to read and to perform”, has the servant retort “No idea”, the curtness of which goes some way towards communicating the marginalisation enforced upon the former gentleman now become man-of-no name. But this is an instance where the translator has to think more of impact than of equivalence. In my translation, accordingly, I chose a reply “the colour of shock”, to borrow a formula from surrealism. “How the holy fuck should I know?” restores impact to a moment of intense and far-reaching humiliation. Moreover, by occupying the full-length of the four-beat line in which the translation is encased, it is an utterance that automatically instigates its own resonant silence, made even more resonant in the context of a fully-costumed Stratford production. This particular translation is an act of writing forward in order to project the impact of a core moment into the emotional landscape of the new audience, potentially generating thereby a sort of temporal interface, a crossing point between core experiences lost and re-created.
YANGYANG LONG: This is also an example of what you called “breakage” or “rupture”.
DAVID JOHNSTON: Yes, it requires attention. Sometimes, however, it’s less a case of attending to breakage, and being more concerned to write something forward into the experience of the new audience. That something might be a fleeting emotional transition, the momentary use of a telling metaphor, a turn of phrase that might have impacted much more forcefully on the original audience. Paul Klee wrote that “a line is a dot taken for a walk”.3 These are all dots that may be briefly extended to anchor a voice from the past in the experience of the spectator today. In Lope’s comedy La dama boba, which after much soul-searching I eventually translated as The Lady Boba. A Woman of Little Sense, there are two sisters, both of whom have developed specific personas to cope with the demands placed on them by a society ruled by men and money: Finea is extravagantly stupid, while Nise cultivates a studied and conventional bookishness. Upon learning that Finea’s father is bestowing a rich dowry on her in the hope that he can get rid of her through marrying her off, Nise’s suitor takes advantage of her month-long illness to switch affections. Confronting him on her return, Nise resorts to the metaphor of settling an account in order to emphasise his pecuniary greed. In William I. Oliver’s academic translation – published as The Lady Nitwit – she rebukes him: “You untrustworthy liar! You mad, inconstant mutable man, who in but a single month of absence have altered your affection. And men say women are untrustworthy? You settled the accounts of my love with ever so tender sentiment before proceeding to transfer your own affection to Finea.” It seemed to me there were a couple of things that might benefit from being written forward here, two dots that could be taken for a walk. The first concerned Nise’s pretentious love of literary style, the second her use of accounts as a trope for a love debased. So, accordingly:
Facile fickle feigning fraudster,
you immoral mendacious man.
Men dare to call women fickle.
We shift and change like weathervanes,
you say, you call us mutable.
So what are you? You cashed me in,
like you’d redeem a bond or sell a share,
you closed my account, you switched banks.
In a single month of absence!
Yes, with all due propriety,
but you have transferred your account
to Finea. To my sister!
Of course, banks didn’t exist at the time of the play. It’s very much an example of a purposeful deviation, a deliberate anachronism that’s less concerned with underlining historical accuracy that it is with drawing a line of communication between two very different moments in time, without obliterating either.