June 19, 2012
Edward Albee: How to piss off a translator
by Ellie Robins
Edward Albee’s Catalan translator Joan Sellent has published a revealing open letter to the playwright. You can read it here (scroll down for the English).
On Sellent’s completion of the translation of A Delicate Balance, it seems that Albee’s agent sent the translator a five-column grid, which was to be filled in with “any deviation from the exact English words and the explanation why this couldn’t be directly translated into Spanish, and why the words that were chosen were used.” Never mind that Sellent was in fact translating into Catalan, and not Spanish: this is a mind-bogglingly pointless and weird request. How can Albee, a man who has made his living from words, have failed to understand that languages do not translate directly? The clumsiness of the language used — ‘any deviation from the exact English words’ — reveals a basic misunderstanding of the task of translation, as Sellent points out:
As for the first part of the above statement —”any deviation from the exact English words”— I can assure you that, with the exception of the characters’ names and the odd place name or cultural reference, the rest of my translation is an absolute deviation from the exact English words, simply because it is written in another language.
Sellent ultimately complied with the request, out of friendship with the producers of the play: had he not done so, they would not have been allowed to stage the translation. But he’s rightly insulted both by the demand and by the manner in which it was made. One of the weirdest things here is that Albee’s demand characterises translators not as competent or incompetent — a judgment that would have been made before the offer of work was extended — but as manipulative, eager to skew the meanings of texts to suit their own ends. As Sellent again points out:
The grids you compel your translators to fill in do not guarantee in the least the quality of a translation. Do you honestly think it possible that anyone who has done a bad translation will be able to detect his own translation mistakes and be as reckless as to enumerate them explicitly?
Bad translations exist, but this is decidedly not the way to detect one — nor to treat a professional who’s done nothing but their job.
Ellie Robins is an editor at Melville House. Previously, she was managing editor of Hesperus Press.
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11 Comments
Fascinating. I agree
…with Sellent’s comments. I think in more cases than not the translator probably gains or improves the original. Translating is an art, but more performance than creative, a concert pianist may have mastered the craft better than the composer, because the performing artist is less consumed with expending creative energy and can focus on the final product. A translator is very astute, sensitive, and aware of literary nuance. Marquez said the English translation of 100 Years of Solitude was superior to his Spanish, would that Albee could have been so gracious.
Good
“Gracious” is not a word typically associated with Edward Albee. I once asked him in an online forum if he’d every discovered or been surprised by anything in one of his plays staged by a guest director (for a time, Albee pretty much insisted upon directing every major production of his works). He answered in one word: “no.” It is notoriously difficult to secure the rights to his works, as he retains approval on casting & directors. It’s really too bad since he’s a masterful playwright.
I call total B.S.! And…maybe partial responsibility for this.
I was in grad school at Southern Methodist University in 2003 when Edward Albee had come to our campus to accept an award from The Meadows School for the Arts. The school had planned several days of workshops and talks with Albee in order to give the students a chance to have time to learn something from America’s greatest living playwrights. During one such meeting Albee said to an assembly of all of the students from the theatre department, “I make sure ALL of the major premieres of ALL of my plays are done EXACTLY as I wrote them to the word, to the letter, and to the punctuation. There has never been a premiere done of one of my plays for which I didn’t do this.” Shortly after that statement he opened up the assembly to questions.
I was the first one to raise my hand and asked, “Do you speak German?”
Albee looked confused and said, “What…?”
I repeated the question and added, “I’m just curious. Do you speak German?”
He said, “No. What does that have to do with anything?”
“You don’t?” I said.
Albee repeated, “No. I just said that.”
Then I said, “Well, then I’m confused.”
“About what?” Albee said, looking somewhat annoyed with me.
“Well,” I said, “didn’t your first play, THE ZOO STORY, originally premiere in Berlin, Germany?”
There was a long silence. Albee stared at me (or what felt like THROUGH me) and said, “Yes. Yes it did.”
I asked, “Was it performed in an English language theatre?”
Albee answered, “No. No it wasn’t.”
So then I asked, “Did you go through it line-by-line with someone?”
“No. No I didn’t.” Albee replied.
Finally I asked, “So what did you do?”
There was a long pause during which it seemed like Albee considered his answer and said, “I just trusted my translator and director.”
Albee answered questions for the rest of that first assembly that weekend, but he kept on glancing (actually…GLARING) back at me. I think I angered him with my cheeky line of questioning. There was then a lunch arranged for the whole student body of the theatre department in honor of Mr. Albee.
Friends of mine in the department came up to me and said things like, “You have got some nerve! Where did you come up with that question?!”
I answered to one, who later became a close friend, “Well, I once dated a translator. She was really adamant about what her work meant to her, what went into it, etc. and felt that playwrights sometimes ignored her work and didn’t honor it. I felt like he wasn’t doing that.”
I was clearly gloating…maybe a little too loudly.
It was a buffet style lunch when one of my teachers (I’ll call that person R.B. here) said, “Maybe you want to sit over here, Mark?” This professor escorted me to a table that felt like it was one the other side of the room away from everyone else, and, most of all, away from Albee.
“Great,” I thought, “I’ve been exiled! I should have kept my mouth shut, I guess…”
Shortly after that, R.B. escorted Albee to the same circular table where I was seated and sat him directly across from me. R.B looked at me, lightly smiled, and then walked away. Albee and I caught eyes for a second, looked away from each other and proceeded to eat our lunch. Other students quickly swarmed in to sit at the same table and started launching questions at him about career, how he liked Dallas, his writing process, etc.
One of my colleagues from my grad class, in the middle of one of her questions, for some reason, stopped and said, “How rude of me. I keep talking and asking questions.” She looked at me and said, “Mark, do you have any additional questions for Mr. Albee?”
There was a long silence during which all those seated at this circular table turned to me and waited for what I would say. I also remember Albee carefully putting down his silverware in a very determined fashion and staring at me as I said, “Yeah…uh…can you pass the rolls?” He reached over to the rolls, which were in a basket on his side of the table, passed them to someone to his right, who then passed them to me. I said, “Thank you.” Albee continued staring at me, pressed his lips together and just nodded a few times in silence. I said nothing else and the other students started firing questions at him again.
My friend who turned the questioning over to me came up to me immediately after lunch and said, “‘Can you pass the rolls?!’ That’s all you could think to ask?!”
I said, “What? They were on his side of the table. How else was I supposed to get them? I’m also fairly sure he wanted to kill me for my other question.”
If I didn’t drive Albee to this policy of totally disrespecting a translator, then I am certain I was fairly instrumental in cementing it in his mind as a good policy to shut-up young, impertinent scamps like myself.
This nut Albee doesn’t deserve to be read abroad.
I hope he remains the obscure nobody that he currently is.
Obscure nobody? You apparently know NOTHING about theatre.
It’s interesting that everyone skips over the fact that the article clearly states that the silly request came not from Albee, but from his agent. There’s every possibility that Albee himself knew nothing about it.
Perhaps Albee’s agent ought to forgo translators altogether and go with Google Translate or Babelfish. Those translations are absolutely faithful to the meaning of the words, so there would be no need for the grid explaining any deviation.
Any writer who has an agent who would do such a thing without telling them has the agent they deserve.
He was being sarcastic.