Troubling the Categories of “Adaptation” and “Translation” in Performance

Jean: Do you take roughly the same approach you’ve just described for each novel you’ve adapted for the stage?

Caridad: Yes. House of Lagoon by Rosario Ferré was the most recent. I read it. Then, I responded in my own language. For Love in the Time of Cholera, In the Time of the Butterflies, and La isla de los hombres solos, I’ve used the same approach.

Jean: With Euripides, did you consult multiple translations? How do you engage with all the theatrical baggage, shall we say, of the Greeks?

Caridad: My versions with the Greeks are very radical. They’re very much their own hybrid, mutant plays that use some of these source texts as a point of intervention, and sometimes as a point of liberation. I’m usually looking at the structures.

When I worked on Iphigenia Crash Land Falls on the Neon Shell That Was Once Her Heart, I looked at a lot of different translated versions of Iphigenia in Aulis, but I wanted to find my own way in. I was working on another project, and the two projects came together. I created something that was a response to Euripides, but also a response to the idea of sacrificial women in the neoliberal state and the way power is wielded in the class wars in society.

I differentiate that from my work with Federico García Lorca, for example. My job there is not to smash and cut them up. My job is to make them sing in American English. I’m usually writing for American actors to do them, trying to find a new way in. I really love Lorca. I feel like I’m an advocate for Lorca when I’m translating a new Lorca.

Jean: Almost all the work I’ve translated has been the first translation into English, and that’s a completely different artistic responsibility. I feel really strongly that I’m still adapting. I think everything’s adaptation, honestly. I don’t understand distinguishing, but there are gradations in terms of the freedoms you might grant yourself. I just finished writing a book about all this, on what I call translationality and the relational in performance translation, not just theatre.

All translations stand in relation to other iterations: the so-called original, other productions, other translations, actors’ training and bodies, etc. For example, I couldn’t imagine translating or working with plays from Argentina if I didn’t understand the grotesco criollo or actor training programs there. That gets wiped away if we talk about “new versions.” With first-time translations, which many of us recognize as new plays (not just translations), I feel we have a responsibility to engage with that context, because the play might not survive.

Caridad: It might not get translated again.

Jean: Or staged.

Caridad: Staged—don’t even get me started. With first-time translation, that may be the only chance it’ll ever be read or seen. I think the responsibility is ten times greater.

You’re seeing it in a new language with a new context around it. The translation is for a brand-new audience that may not have the cultural context for this work, may not have even the context of other writings this writer has done. You’re not just translating that play; you’re also going, “This is a window into what this writer does. What you’re witnessing is just one part of their larger artistic body of work.”

Now, some translators are even getting co-credit as authors. I try to imagine that for the US theatre, and we’re not there.

Jean: I’ve translated ten plays by one playwright, Ricardo Monti. I started that project because I thought he was an amazing playwright. It’s often how we get going. We’re missionaries in a way. I worked with him for over a decade on this project. The plays were published. Some have had readings and full productions, but I had hoped it would ignite this huge interest in someone I think is fantastic and dedicated ten years of my career to working with.

Monti created versions of his own plays as well as adaptations, and so I got an insider’s view of how a playwright engages with adaptation. He adapted Rayuela (Hopscotch), Julio Cortázar’s novel, for the stage. He also was known to take one of his own plays and rewrite it, like he did with the full-length Una pasión sudamericana (A South American Passion Play), reimagining it as the one-act Finlandia (Finland) and reducing the twelve characters to four. I translated both versions and even started working on my own, where, with Monti’s permission, I’m moving Finland to the United States in the nineteenth-century.

I loved seeing Monti play and be really un-precious about the material. He’d say, “Just do it. Have fun.” And then he’d listen to it. Every summer when I returned to Buenos Aires, we’d go through the translations and work, and he learned English through that process.

To return to where we began this conversation, I think it creates an interesting quandary when we force everything into categories that leave out or background the translator. Translators of narrative are way down the road from us now. They fought to get their names on the covers of their books. Now, some translators are even getting co-credit as authors. I try to imagine that for the US theatre, and we’re not there.

Caridad: People in different countries think about theatre in different ways, including how theatre is situated within the larger context of the cultural scenes in their countries. Countries that have culture secretaries, for example.

Jean: Or national theatres. Or audiences who feel that as a citizen of country X, it is their responsibility to go to the theatre. Seeing that cultural commitment in Germany blew my mind.

Caridad: I think they take great pride in it too.

Jean: Do you think attitudes towards translation and adaptation have changed over the course of your career?

Caridad: I don’t want to be the doomer girl, but I do feel like I’ve been having the same conversations for twenty years. How do we get translations onto the stage? How do we read them? Should we look to universities? I mean, we keep fighting the same battles. Maybe one day some wins will happen.

There are many artists who have respected my work, and I don’t continue working with the ones that don’t. It comes back to recognition of artistry and labor for me.

Jean: What was the most difficult translation/adaptation project you’ve ever tackled over the course of your career? What made it so challenging?

Caridad: I haven’t talked about it much, but taking José León Sánchez’s book to stage, La isla de los hombres solos. That was a peculiar situation because it was a commission by Teatro Espressivo in Costa Rica. I didn’t know until I got into the project that they wanted me to adapt the book to the stage, but they also wanted the public persona and stories around the author somehow woven into the adaptation.

He’s a very controversial figure. He was a fabulist, so he told many versions of his life story that were common knowledge in Costa Rica, and therefore there was an expectation that the adaptation would engage with that. And then there was a book. The book is incredibly violent. It’s about prison culture, and a lot of it is about torture and the brutalization of prisoners. And I thought, I have to show this somehow because it’s central to the story. I was trying to figure out a way to navigate, knowing there would be young adults in the audience who would come see it on a school trip. It also had to be viable theatre. I was also the woman adapting this hyper-male book about toxic masculinity, and I can’t pretend I don’t have my own take on that. I had to contend with all of those things.

Jean: That’s interesting, with the consecrated author problem in Costa Rica. If you were creating that for a United States audience, it would be a completely different experience.

I think the biggest challenge for me was also an incredibly pleasant experience, and that was translating Rafael Spregelburd’s play Spam. Rafa and I had worked together before on another play translation. He always said, “There’s no way English-speaking audiences are going to get my theatre,” and I wanted to prove him wrong.

His British agent commissioned me to translate Spam because they thought it was a play that could travel.

One of the challenges is that Spregelburd often writes three- to four-hour plays.  English-language theatre directors want to do his plays but then say, “They’re too long. The audiences won’t sit for that long, so we’re going to cut them up.” And then they destroy the machine. So he wrote a modular play, which is thirty-one days of spam email. You can move the days around, throw them out. In the Buenos Aires production, which he directed, I think he omitted nine or ten days. We worked closely together on the English translation, talking about issues that have come up in the past, trying to be preemptive through the translation, and had a blast.

Spregelburd’s also a translator, so he gets what translators do. The translation was pretty much completed when Sam Buggeln contacted us to stage it, which he did in New York a few years back. The production worked, and I think the translation works. It’s really nice when the playwright is also a translator and understands the process.

I’ve had those situations, too, where the playwright and production crew do not understand what translators do, and they think they can do whatever they want with your translation. There are many artists who have respected my work, and I don’t continue working with the ones that don’t. It comes back to recognition of artistry and labor for me.