2 - The Over-translated, the Under-translated, the Untranslatable, and the Limits of Performance Translation

Summary

Chapter 2 considers the limits of performance translation, drawing from the author’s experiences working with three internationally acclaimed Argentinian theatre artists. The chapter first examines the potential “over-translatedness” of Claudio Tolcachir’s global sensation, La omisión de la familia Coleman (The Coleman Family’s Omission), in which audience identification seemingly transcends cultural difference and risks “over-translatability.” Considerations of the “local” underscore the translational limitations of “American realism” and challenges in staging plays bearing a culturally bound performance style for which there is no obvious US or UK equivalent. A case in point is the grotesco criollo, a tragicomic genre and acting style developed in 1920s Buenos Aires and still informing local theatre making. To illustrate, the chapter discusses the author’s and Rafael Spregelburd’s collaborative search for countering anticipated “under-translatedness” when bringing his plays to US stages. At the same time, the “untranslatable” can function as a productive performance strategy, thus the chapter concludes with an examination of Lola Arias’s Campo minado/Minefield, in which three Argentinian and three British ex-combatants reenact their 1982 Malvinas/Falklands War experiences. While translation is built into the multilingual production through projected supertitles, the untranslatable asserts itself at nearly the play’s end in a provocative moment of untranslatability.