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

What do we mean when we say “original”? A playtext has many points of “origin.” Translation lives in this slippery area–between texts, people, cultures, languages, and sources. What happens when the word “adaptation” enters the arena of play? How do the words “translation” and “adaptation” dance around each other? During an extended Zoom chat in early August 2024, Caridad Svich and Jean Graham-Jones engaged with these points (and many others).  Graham-Jones, a theatre artist and scholar, has translated into English some two dozen plays by Argentinian artists and published widely on Latin American theatre and performance.  Her new book, Contemporary Performance Translation: Challenges and Opportunities for the Global Stage, is currently in press.  Svich, a playwright and translator, has reconfigured, adapted, responded to and translated numerous plays from the classics to contemporary drama. Her new book Transmedia Theatre Plays will be published by Methuen Drama in 2025.

Caridad Svich: How do you relate to the terms translation and adaptation?

Jean Graham-Jones: I really dislike these categories. I think pitting translation against adaptation doesn't do any of us any good. Sometimes we become so obsessed with the difference between a translation, an adaptation, a version, or a reimagining, that we're not looking at the nuances of the work, the process, structures, and methodologies.

I would like to throw all those terms out the window and think about the individual projects. Who's involved? How did it develop? Who was in the room when it was being created? I understand a new translation, or the “English language premiere,” is a way to market a play, but it sometimes gets in the way of actual engagement with the work.

Calling something an adaptation starts foregrounding a certain artistry that's associated with a playwright like Amy Herzog while backgrounding the work of translation. Yet again the translator’s labor and artistry go unrecognized, and the translator doesn't get a percentage of the box office profits because they provided what is called a “literal translation.”

This idea is you hire someone to do a so-called “literal translation.”  In most cases, that person gets paid a lump sum, and they're done. The translator doesn't get to be part of the collaborative process; they aren't always in the rehearsal room. They don't get any of the future rewards in terms of acknowledgement and payment. Then producers go with the big name for the adaptor. You see it over and over again.

I looked at the Drama Desk nominations this year for adaptation, and there were some where I couldn't even figure out who had done the translation. How did it end up in English? How did the adaptation of The Hunt, a Danish film, turn into a UK stage project? Where did the language come from?

It's not always clearly stated who was involved in that creative process. I don't think I should have to look that hard to figure out how this transformation occurred.

My job there is not to smash and cut them up. My job is to make them sing in American English.

Caridad: It makes me think of The Lehman Trilogy, because it often gets treated like Ben Power just came up with it one night. It magically appeared into the universe.

Jean: Descended from heaven.

Caridad: Mirella Cheeseman did the translation. I want her name everywhere where that play is done. Without her, you wouldn't have Ben Power's version.

Jean: It’s part of the “let's erase opacity” mindset. Let's make it transparent so people say, "It's a really great play. I couldn't even tell it was translated."

I really question terms like “adaptation.” If we're talking about moving from one medium to another medium, like a film that's adapted for the stage, I can see that as adaptation. I would say it’s an adaptation in your case. The first one of yours I saw was House of the Spirits. Everybody knows Isabel Allende wrote the novel House of the Spirits, but you claim your artistic work and labor. I commend that.

Caridad: The official credit is, "A play by Caridad Svich based on Isabel Allende's novel."

My decision had to do with the fact that, first, I am translating something from one medium to another.

The other part of it, and this is a tricky thing, is that I didn't lift any text from the novel. I read the novel, thought about which characters and situations I would focus on, and tried to tell that story in an interesting, theatrical way; but I was determined to tell it in my own voice. It is me responding to Allende with her characters and situations.

With the novels I've moved from the print medium to the theatrical medium, my intention remains to take this story and refashion it for the stage. My job is to bring it to an audience that may or may not know the material, so I'm taking ownership around my labor in that process

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.

Caridad: I remember working on a project for the Lark, one of the earlier ones I did as part of United States-Mexico, and I went through five different versions of the play because the writer kept rewriting. Suddenly, I was translating every single version of every single rewrite.

Jean: Were your translations inspiring the changes?

Caridad: Yes, but still. At a certain point I was like, "No more. Please stop."

Jean: Because that's not the contractual agreement.

Caridad: The play was in process, and I didn't know that. The play needs to be set. My job as a translator is not to fix your play. You mentioned labor, and I think of the number of hours I spent… And the next day, she would be like, "Oh no, I'm cutting that scene." And I was like, "I just spent three days working on that scene.”

Jean: Maybe we're not as clear on our parameters, legal and otherwise, as we need to be as translators and adaptors. That's a lesson I'm still learning. I've had situations where I pulled my translation because I saw it was being treated as a literal translation. And I said, "That's not what I do.” That was something that happened to me in the United Kingdom. There's something there in terms of collaboration, artistic ownership, labor.

Do we have anything else we want to say about all this?

Caridad: Keep translating, people. It's important to keep the faith, especially in theatre, and to believe that these acts of finding new audiences for work has merit.

Jean: I get so much pleasure out of translation. I'm very happy to be a part of the process of creating a new iteration of that work, being in the rehearsal room, and helping create a new play. I don't think we should forget our pleasure.

Caridad: We cannot forget about pleasure. I want to lift up one thing that I thought was rather positive and unusual. The O'Neill this summer had a play in translation as one of their plays, Chris Campbell’s new version of The Blacks by Genet. I've never seen them offer one of their slots to a work in translation before. Maybe that's a harbinger of the future.

Jean: There are some interesting initiatives, and hopefully they grow and we're involved in them!