[In honour of the recent English premiere of From Alaska – and because this week I am teaching a workshop on translation for the first time, at Playwrights Workshop Montreal – I am reposting this 2012 article, originally shared on the CROSSING BORDERS blog of the Theatre Communications Group. My thinking about translation has evolved since then, as has the translation I’m referring to: my questions remain pretty much constant.]
PART 1: WHY DID THE CHICKEN CROSS THE ROAD?
“Mais les mots SONT l’action.” That’s the passionate and cultured voice of Sébastien Harrisson, a young playwright from Montréal. We’re deep in discussion, in a room, in the Rockies, in Alberta, in Canada, in over our heads.
Yet here – in the rugged heartland of a country on which it’s my impression that francophone Québécois artists have largely though imperceptibly turned their backs – I have just leaped over a border that I’ve been staring at wistfully for years.
It's 2006, and Sébastien and I are at the prestigious Banff Centre for the Arts so that I can translate his luminous two-hander, D’Alaska. It is the initial project of the Banff-CEAD Translation Exchange… and it is not going well. My dramaturg is Maureen Labonté, co-chair of the Playwrights Colony and a leading translator of Québec drama into English: she is completely unimpressed with me, which she tells me in no uncertain terms. (In the first few days of the residency, having been swamped beforehand, I do a quick and dirty first draft just as a starting point for discussion: but in my joyous relief at getting SOMETHING on paper, I apparently come across as arrogant and sloppy. Maureen refuses to read anything until I do a second draft.)
Though not yet widely known as a translator, I’m a mid-career playwright with a number of published, regularly produced, and even academically studied plays, yet no one at the Colony knows my work: either because they’re from a different region of our enormous country, or because most of my plays have premiered outside Toronto (the rural/urban divide is a whole other border). Sébastien, meanwhile, has been nominated for a Governor-General’s Award, is hugely respected in Québec, and is building a reputation in Europe… but he’s unknown in English as of yet. So I hole up in my little room, revising, and both of us sort of flit through the halls like ghosts. The most accessible of Sébastien’s plays, D’Alaska recounts a blossoming friendship between a mercurial teenaged skatepunk and a seventy-something retired librarian. It turns out that they have both been abandoned by the one they love. In the case of the librarian, Maggie – her partner of forty years – has just left her to go on a cruise to Alaska. For deep-sea diving; underwater photography; and a much younger woman.
My eyes are old, Maggie
I try to decipher the little games of love
Being played beneath the arctic blanket
But my eyesight isn’t sharp enough now
All hearts are like enormous tomes in a foreign language
Do we become unfit for love as we age?
Do we become glaciers?
We ought to dive in the deep sea
Stop dipping our toes in it
Be without fear
Hold the breath and go down to see
See if what we perceive on the surface
Is really anchored to the depths
See if it’s not all just a snare, a mirage
Or if it’s solidly attached to the depths of us
And made to last
Beyond ourselves
And our petty opinions about things
The lamplight wavers, then goes out. Momentary blackout.
Maggie
Forgive me
For never having been able to understand
Except through words
That’s my first attempt at a key moment in the play, when the secretly dying “Miss” – as we and the skatepunk must call her, since she never reveals any other name – monologues to her absent, jilting lover. It’s an accurate translation, technically speaking; the words are quite close to Sébastien’s words; but as a moment of theatre, it just sort of lies there. In the original French, it shimmers. It soars.
Over the next week or so, progress is made. Maureen finally reads my text and is impressed that (for the honorific by which the older character chooses to be addressed) I have chosen “Miss” as the idiomatic equivalent to the French “Madame”: a tiny victory. Then the wonderful actors have a first go, and some moments are encouraging: that key speech, however, proves as inert in the mouth as it is on the page. Dead birds don’t soar.
I stop trying to fit in with the rest of the Playwrights Colony and discover that Sébastien and I can be our own colony of two. We walk scenic mountain trails and go to dazzling concerts put on by the jazz programme. My new companion is wickedly smart, erudite, and kind: the more I dig into his writing, the more I dig it, partly because it’s so different from my own. He buys me a scotch at the pub on my birthday, and we talk: about our work; about theatre: about how more and more young Québec artists – disenchanted with the sovereigntist movement after two very-close-but-no-cigar referendums on Québec independence – are discovering that they don’t need political separation to have all the autonomy they want. Buffered from the ROC (“Rest of Canada”) by a different language, a collectivist culture, and a flourishing and well-supported arts scene, they turn their attention to interacting – as Québécois – with Europe, with Mexico, with the United States, and beyond. Montréal’s Festival Trans-Amériques invariably lists productions as being from “Québec” or from “Canada”. Toronto – with the biggest theatre scene in Canada, and one of the largest in the English-speaking world – is four hours down the highway or an $18 ride on the Megabus, but most of the artists I have met in Montréal have never seen a play there, even though their English is more than equal to the task. (Meanwhile, most English-speaking artists I know would not be able to follow a Québécois show unless it was by the Cirque du Soleil.) When I mention Margaret Atwood to a literate stage manager friend in Montréal, she looks at me in blank incomprehension.
PART 2: TO GET TO THE OTHER SIDE.
My route to this particular border was twisting and strange. I grew up in a tiny homogeneous Ontario village and I’ve never lived in a Francophone environment in my life. But when it came time for me to go to high school, my poor widowed mother was in despair. I’d used every scholastic resource available in two counties, and I was bored bored bored. Moreover, any form of intellectual curiosity was a social death sentence. Enter the Toronto French School, a private school (with a generous scholarship programme) which at the time was a refuge for geeks and oddballs from around the globe. Mom made the gamble that I’d prefer to be miserable on account of being alone, far from home, at the bottom of the class, and not understanding a word that was said to me, than miserable because learning was impossible and the desire for it made you an outcast. Turns out she was right. That place kind of saved me. The fact that I fell in love with the French language and culture was a spectacular bonus.
TFS’s curriculum was very Eurocentric, and it took many more years for me to get connected to the hugely different language and vibrant theatre culture of Québec. As an actor and playwright in Toronto, I supplemented my income for many years by doing French-to-English translations for everyone from a dog food company to an educational channel. At last, with the great dramaturg Paula Danckert as pander and midwife, I was commissioned to translate my first play: Philippe Soldevila’s Conte de la lune. A few zigs, a few zags, and here I am at the Banff Playwrights Colony. Sometimes the chicken chooses the road: sometimes the road chooses the chicken.
PART 3: SO, NOW WHAT?
“It’s not about the words.” Séb and I are hanging out in my room. Our second reading is imminent and brass tacks are being got down to. Maureen has turned out to be a hugely giving mentor, and our sessions together are an intensive course in the sort of meticulous word-by-word consideration that she had expected from my first draft. However, to my surprise, when it comes to the dreaded iceberg monologue, she says, “You need to throw it all away and get inside the speech. Understand its function in the play. Use your intuition. Make it work for English-speaking actors and an English-speaking audience. It’s not about the words.”
“Look,” I tell Sébastien, “I’m not impugning your writing. It works BEAUTIFULLY in the French. All the imagery of icebergs and oceans are like this lovely white feather that your language keeps puffing up and up and up. Or a balloon carried off by the wind: we love watching how high it will go. But you guys have such a different aesthetic. And you have that whole rhetorical tradition in classical French drama, where Phèdre or whoever just takes an idea and runs with it. It’s a virtuoso turn, like an aria. It’s also one of the reasons why Racine and Corneille are so little produced in English: because we find those moments totally static. I mean, I’ve always hated the Queen Mab speech in Romeo and Juliet. It’s pretty and poetic and it stops the action dead. How the hell are you supposed to act that?”
He looks at me bewildered. He is trying hard not to take any of this personally, and by now he knows me well enough to succeed. “But,” he says – in French, the language we have been speaking – “The words are the action.”
It’s nothing I haven’t heard before: but somehow, in this specific context, that proverbial light-bulb switches on. Okay, I tell him: you need to walk me through this entire speech, and even through this entire play. I am going to ask you really stupid questions. I’m going to ask you to be explicit about stuff you have implied, or left ambiguous. And you’re going to agree not to get insulted or exasperated, because I need to understand this speech – its genesis, implications, and inner workings – even better than if I were going to act it.
I need to understand it as if I had written it.
So off we go. Sébastien is completely unpretentious and enormously patient. We talk about the Strasberg-tinged training of most English-Canadian actors, how we are activated by verbs, that it’s all about doing something to somebody (he is fascinated by this). We talk about how this not-overtly-political play begins on Canada Day, which has long been ignored in Francophone Montréal except as the day when renters’ leases are up and they move to a cheaper apartment. We talk about the specifics of same-sex couples, and the implications of a lifelong relationship that seems to dissolve without a trace. I suddenly remember being in Newfoundland, watching a “growler” – a tiny splinter calved from the big ‘bergs floating southward – melt away. An ancient shard of a giant and seemingly indestructible formation, slipping into nothing.
It’s one of the most memorable afternoons of my artistic life.
A few days later. The reading is electric. The room is abuzz. The firecracker Val Pearson reads the iceberg speech – re-imagined Anglo version – and it lights her up. Banff is a well-known launching pad, and a bright future for Sébastien Harrisson’s From Alaska seems assured.
Six years have gone by since then, and I am as yet unable to find a producer for this award-winning, funny, and very moving play: possibly because, in my culture, it crosses a line between theatre for adolescents and theatre for the general public; because it is too gay for some companies and not gay enough for others; because I am still not a part of the Canadian theatre establishment, and it is hard to get them to really hear me?
Borders…
I continue to work to get From Alaska produced and published, and I hope to work with Sébastien again one day. But nothing can take away from me the unspeakable rush of the divide that I came as close as possible to crossing, one afternoon, for a moment or two, after years of preparation and toil. The border between two cultures, but more than that. The border that actors, writers, and translators are always trying to sneak across. The border between two minds.
Time marches on, Maggie
And my eyesight isn’t what it used to be
The heart seems to me, now, like a weighty book
In a foreign language
Have I become too old for love?
Too blind, too slow, too cold, like a glacier?
Is our love an iceberg solid as an island
Ready to stand the test of time
Or a mere fragment, melting in the sun
Rolling over and over
Until it is only a stain on the water
An oily ghost
I need to know
But I’m too weak to make the descent
Dive, Maggie, dive
Don’t dip your toe in the water
Let go of fear
Take a deep breath and go down and see
If what was there on the surface
Is all that there is
See if it’s just a trap, a mirage
Or solidly anchored to the ocean floor
Vast and firm beyond our imaginings
And made to last
Beyond
Ourselves
And our petty pronouncements
Our tempests in a teapot
Our
The lamplight wavers, then goes out. Momentary blackout.
Maggie
Forgive me
I could never understand
Except through words
