ANCIENT BODY & CULTURAL TRANSLATION

STAGING ANCIENT G REEK DRAMA IN HELLAS AND BRAZIL

Andreia Garavello*
Tereza Virgnia Ribeiro Barbosa**

Diverse and worldwide changes about global movements, culture moving processes and
the transformation of gender studies brought on a subtler understanding of priority,
identity and culture.1 The new conception of disciplinary established areas and their borders
prepares us to hybrid research. This has led us into studying ancient theatre under Giorgio
Agamben insights in What is an apparatus? (2009, p.39-55): we understand as properly
contemporary what does not coincide perfectly to our own time neither is adequate to our
pretensions; what is out of the present, but, precisely for that, for such anachronism and
displacement, is able more than anything else to make notice and to present our own
time to ourselves.
Naturally, this noncoincidence, this "dys-chrony," does not mean that the
contemporary is a person who lives in another time, a nostalgic who feels more at
home in the Athens of Pericles or in the Paris of Robespierre and the Marquis de
Sade than in the city and the time in which he lives. An intelligent man can
despise his time while knowing that he nevertheless irrevocably belongs to it, that
he cannot escape his own time.
Contemporariness is, then, a singular relationship with one's own time, which
adheres to it and, at the same time, keeps a distance from it. More precisely, it is
that relationship with time that adheres to it through a disjunction and an
anachronism. Those who coincide too well with the epoch, those who are perfectly
tied to it in every respect, are not contemporaries, precisely because they do not
manage to see it; they are not able to firmly hold their gaze on it. (AGAMBEM,
2009, p. 41)2

This is the direction into which our propose joins the strengths that merge areas such as
theatre (dramaturgy, performance, body art and staging), classical studies (Greek literature
and rhetoric) and translation studies.
We aim a new understanding of what happens to be ancient theatre translation, and we do
it throughout transforming and merging those mentioned arts. Then, the experience we are
* Truersa: artistic director ** Truersa: translation director.
1
Here, we are thinking of the potential culture has to generate economic development and social inclusion; we are
thinking also of integration among academicism, cultural and economical circuits and political reality. Cf. YDICE, G.
A convenincia da cultura usos da cultura na era global. Belo Horizonte: UFMG Editora, 2004.
2
What is an apparatus? Translated by David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella. Stanford/California: Stanford University
Press, 2009.

going to report comes to systematize and consolidate a new and urgent methodological
approach created face to the perception of an unfortunate abandon, in Brazil, of Greek
theatre, which was kept restrict into universities and rare huge productions.
We fight for a theatre which could be popular and elitist for everyone3. Under such
perspective, we defend an inclusive approach to classical studies, taking in account
principles of equality and cultural negotiations and joining the traditional linguistic and
philological sophistication to the supplementary background of our own cultural
environment, so that we can manage the translation of the other (the ancient Greeks) not
through language only (SPIVAK, 2003, p.8), but searching a kind of language which may
reveal the irreducible hybridity of every language (SPIVAK, 2003, p.9). Extreme care
towards language face to the opposite action of getting free from the language. From such
opposition comes out an imagination ready to work with alterity, no matter how imperfect it
can be. That will give us better conditions to deal with the unknowledgement (and
strangeness, in the studies of the ancient world) and to transcode the message of that Other
lost in the time (SPIVAK, 2003, p.11-12).4
Our first crossing happened with the translation troupe Truersa in 20095 and finished in
2011 with the complete translation of Euripidess Medeia, from Greek to Brazilian
Portuguese. Anyone who happens to know our aim to consolidate a new methodological
approach to ancient theatre translation may ask the reason for such an enterprise, due to the
fact that Brazil is not too bad in translation of ancient theatre. Actually, Brazilian
translations have great academic quality, and some of them undoubtedly reach authentic
poetic effects. Such translations are based on philological studies, ancient commentators and
3

MNOUCHKINE,
Ariane.
Sabatina
Folha
SESC.
In:
SESC
Belenzinho,
21/10/2011,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&NR=1&v=7geJ5BqFgqQ. Acesso em 12/02/2012. Ariane
Mnouchkine works as actress and director of the Thtre du Soleil; at the 39th edition of Venice Biennial, in 2007, she
received the prize "Golden Lion" for her complete works.
4
SPIVAK, Death of a discipline. p. 11-12: "If you sit in on these so-called remedial classes, you perceive the
institutional incapacity to cope with the crossroads of race, gender and class [...].There are Haitians and West Africans
in those CUNY remedial classes whose imaginations are crossing and being crossed by a double aporiathe cusp of
two imperialisms. I have learned something from listening to their talk about and in Creole/French/so-called pidgin and
English-as-a-second-language-crossing-into-firstthe chosen tongue. I have silently compared their imaginative
flexibility, so remarkably and necessarily much stronger, because constantly in use for social survival and mobility, than
that of the Columbia undergraduate, held up by the life-support system of a commercializing anglophone culture that
trivializes the humanities. It is time, in globality, in New York, and no doubt elsewhere in the metropolis, to put the
history of Francophony, Teutophony, Lusophony, Anglophony, Hispanophony alsonot only (please mark the
difference)in a comparative focus."
5
BARBOSA, Tereza Virgnia Ribeiro et alii (Truersa Trupe de traduo). Traduo inclusiva e performativa: dossi
de um processo tradutrio. In: Nuntius Antiquus, n 4, Belo Horizonte, dezembro de 2009.
http://www.letras.ufmg.br/nuntius/data1/arquivos/004.10-Trupepersa119-137.pdf

literary criticism. As these translations present recovered sound, syntactic and etymological
games, they show translators deep knowledge of Hellenic language and culture. Some
emphasize phonemic elements, other value and reproduce the metrics in various ways, some
others use rhyme and, by such means, they get irreproachable to the reality of poetry
translators.
However, those translations are not theatrical, neither accessible to a great public and, to be
put on stage, make necessary violent adaptations, sometimes not very reliable because they
are not done by scholars of ancient theatre, but by directors and actors which often know
only the factory of contemporary scene, and ignore all that could be strange to modern
theatrical world. The reason of this fact, as we believe, is basically a difference of approach.
Translating poetry is not translating theatre. To that difference of approach, we must add the
adequacy of literary procedure strange to theatrical rhetoric modes. That question has been
mapped by Susan Basnett long time ago:
[w]hilst it seems that the bulk of genre-focused translation study involves the
specific problem of translating poetry, it is also quite clear that theatre is one of
the most neglected areas. There is very little material on the special problems of
translating dramatic texts, and the statements of individual theatre translators often
imply that the methodology used in the translation process is the same as that used
to approach prose texts. Yet even the most superficial consideration of the
question must show that the dramatic text cannot be translated in the same way as
the prose text. To begin with, a theatre text is read differently. (BASSNETT, 2002,
p. 123-124).6

Theatre is certainly not read as poetry, although poetics are one of the elements of theatrical
scene. In fact, poetry is present in texts, but it is not the text; there may be poetry in texts no
matter they are written, oral, watched, danced, performed and theatre deals with all these.
We could add:
[a]s work in theatre semiotics has shown, the linguistic system is only one
optional component in a set of interrelated systems that comprise the spectacle.
Anne Ubersfeld, for example, points out how it is impossible to separate text from
performance, since theatre consists of the dialectical relationship between both,
and she also shows how an artificially created distinction between the two has led
to the literary text acquiring a higher status." (BASSNETT, 2002, p. 124).

Artificial distinction between text and spectacle conferred to the written score a higher
status and such supremacy resulted in an excessive literarization of ancient text, which

BASSNETT, Susan. Translation Studies. London and New York: Routledge, 3rd ed., 2002.

certainly contributes to its inaccessibility.7 However, theory shows there is not an only
reading of written theatrical text, there is no right way to perform it and every director or
actor can generate significant and often quite positive (GOETSCH, 1994, p. 75-95;
UBERSFELD, 2005, p. 1-28; BASSNETT, 2002, p.125) changes in the staging of a play. 8
One must remember also that, if a translator does not get the physical marks left by the
author on theatrical score, he lets the actors physical intention completely free, making the
action and the cast confused by erasing necessary signals. If you do not mark any physical
intention, you take the risk of not caring about one of the most important elements of
theatre: the gesture, which, complete on the physical action on scene, cannot ever be
recovered:
[...] pas de reprise du travail ou du desoeuvrement pass, ni de retour sur
l'ebauche. Pas de coupure possible, la diffrence des arts qui peuvent supprimer
un fragment mal venu, l'inverse mme, semble-t-il, de tous les autres arts, o il
est toujours loisible d'anantir une oeuvre [...] (GALARD, 1986, p. 91)9

Aristotle already worried about it when, on the Poetics, he warns the actors: slowing the end
of an episode, a misplaced violence, some object thrown in a exaggerated way, all can spoil
the scene (1461b-1462a). Greek theatrical text presents inner machinery to control exactly
the actors movements, and that must be registered on translations.
However, if we are teachers and such machinery is not visible to us, to solve staging
perception and determine it since translation, it seems urgent to have theatrical people as
allies. In our case, for empathy, Truersa allied itself to the French troupe Thtre Du
Soleil, particularly to the ideas of collaborative theatre developed by it. Generally, we had
the disposition to apply such ideas to translating and staging ancient dramatic texts. In the
resultant translations/stagings, many translating orientations were followed; however, for
didactic effect, we are going to deal in this report only and generally with two of them: the
obsessive attempt to make a collective-collaborative translation and the hiding of the
translators. The main purpose of this last attempt was to rescue the materiality and iconicity
7

BASSNETT, Susan. Translation Studies. p. 124: "As Ubersfeld shows, the danger with such an attitude is
immediately obvious. The pre-eminence of the written text leads on to an assumption that there is a single right way of
reading and hence performing the text, in which case the translator is bound more rigidly to a preconceived model than
is the translator of poetry or prose texts."
8
The possibilities of a word to generate duble sense is registered in Sophocless Oedipus the king; on Jocastas part, v.
938, Oedipuss both mother and wife asks: ; ;
/But what is it? What is this power with duble effect?
9
Galard, Jean. La beaut du geste. Paris: Nouvelles Impressions, 1986.

of the Greek text. We had an aim: the text should be read as something incomplete, rather
than as a fully rounded unit, since it is only in performance that the full potential of the text
is realized." (BASSNETT, 2003, p. 190).
We wished the text was seen only as the graphic part, score which contains the strength of
fixed word, but points to a whole only able to be fulfilled in simultaneous presentation of
text and scene. It would necessarily have, then, diverse and multiple authorship. In the
attempt to make it happen, translated text was discussed and finally established in
accordance to a staging group which suffered, in two different moments a virtual one
(translation process) and a real one (performance) deconstructions, fragmentations,
experiences.
The composition of what we decided to call functional translation was brought out with
effective intervention of actors who followed translation process daily, working on each
translated verse. After completing the first version of the translated text, a pre-staging was
made to test the results something new at Brazil. Such modus operandi certainly reveals a
non-satisfaction to see the text as literature, and an audacious step to read it as a written
unfilled score, directed strictly to theatrical scene.
That practice led us to think that sophisticated translation solutions, as well as metric and
semantic well-succeeded equivalences, are not enough to understand continuous flux of
scenes oral performance. We believe that, with Medeia, we achieved a result which keeps
the characteristic elitization of an ancient text inserted in contemporary world. We did
nothing new: we followed strictly all the steps of the original texts author, we used the
same figures of language and thought, we kept some preciosities strange to our own time
and, we could tell with no fear, we reached transferring Greek culture to Brazilian culture
with efficacy.
The experience of collective translation is important because it opens surprising
possibilities, including that of the staging of the text to be able to contradict the written
register at the moment of presenting. That is, at least, what Salie Goetsch shows in her
analysis of the tetralogy Les Atrides, produced by Thtre du Soleil and directed by Ariane
Mnouchkine. For Goetsch, on that staging, Mnouchkine, for long involved in essentially

feminist purposes, faces a group of virile and masculine plays, and falls under the
chauvinism of their author. Goetsch gets disappointed with that.10
It is particularly interesting the inference the American hellenist makes against the French
director: she shows in her text that Mnouchkine despite all expectations materialized
Aeschilian Erinyes as disturbingly sexless beings.11 The point of interest is that the young
Hellenist seems to be more strongly tied to tradition and repetition than the septuagenarian
French director. Putting the Erinyes sexless, in our point of view and opposite to that from
Antiquity, seems a revolutionary act which brings Greek theatre to the present. Why should
such execrable beings keep ad aeternum femenines? The cultural translation made by
Mnouchkine, contrary to the linguistic scholar from the New World, seemed to us a good
augury. Nonetheless, we are not going to discuss a play we did not watch. The example is
here just to notice that text may come to scene in order to betray the author a happy
betraying, as we understand it through directors hand. Therefore, it is not only impossible
to congeal theatrical text as a consequence of being written for an only hand, as it is also
inadmissible to make it sacred so that you must block scenic imagination by fulfilling the
gaps in sentences free of syntax, gaps waiting to be fulfilled by various future performers.12
That is why, for us, the theatrical text is never, not even when and if it was written by an
only hand, of one only authorship; because, as a principle, there is no theatre without public
and, even if there was so, each intention textualy built by the author can be undermined by
culture, actor and moment of staging.
We started choosing dramatic parts at the beginning of the translation process; we made
pairs of young researchers one representing female gender, one representing male gender
10

GOETSCH, Sallie. Playing against the Text: "Les Atrides" and the History of Reading Aeschylus. TDR (The Drama
Review) Vol. 38, No. 3 (Autumn, 1994), p. 76: "Nor was it an accident that Les Eumenides had everything in it but
Aeschylus. From the very beginning of Les Atrides, Mnouchkine is engaged in reading - and therefore, since she is a
director, in playing - against the text. Why "against"? Because the text itself is assumed to be inadequate for her
purposes; Aeschylus, unmeddled with, cannot possibly have anything true or empowering to say about women. There is
a brand of essentialist feminism which denies to man the physical capacity to speak for women."
11
GOETSCH. Playing against the Text. p. 85: "The Life of Aeschylus says that when the chorus of Eumenides entered
the Theatre of Dionysus, women miscarried and children fainted. Mnouchkine was clearly going for a shock effect. The
audience had seen the choreuts dressing, but they had not seen them dressed. The cages swung open and through their
latticed doors walked-crawled-maned, snouted creatures like lions, or baboons. As a still short, it was eerie and
dramatic. But was too still. It lacked impetus and the thundering drums which had characterized the earlier choral odes.
For all their fearsome silhouettes, these beasts appeared to be taking a stroll, not relentlessly tracking their quarry. And
they were disturbingly sexless, though the text stresses their quintessential femaleness. This elimination of sexual
identity was surprising in a production widely hailed as feminist. Bag Ladies from Hell, the three Erinyes poked and
prodded the chorus into more or less behaving, speaking the lines of the First Parodos with screechy cackles."
12
The performers we refer to shall be understood in lato sensu, i.e.: directors, musicians, actors, illuminators, costumers
and the whole troupe who will make up the scene.

 putting translators in partnership with actors, writers, poets, singers and dancers. We
aimed to guarantee translated text the freshness, liveliness and topicality originated from the
contemporary strength. Each pair took a character to model its verbal identity. Such
procedure eliminated an important problem of the transposition of theatre writing in any
language: the particular diction of each character, forged in the poetic anvil, which reveals
through the words the peculiar self of each character.
After the translations were finished by the pairs and the particularities of each part were
taken into account, the translation director obviously harmonized vocabulary, syntax, tone,
of each character. This director acted as a musical conductor, and so all results were
controlled and all characters were harmonized. When the translation was finished, the text
was submitted to an actress (Andreia Garavello), also a reader of Greek language, for a first
evaluation, and then the whole process started again: translators listened to their texts from
someone elses mouth and, surprised sometimes happy, sometimes furious they made by
themselves, in partnership with the actress, the necessary adjusts for staging. At that
moment, text was put under a concrete test before being adopted in daily preparing of the
professional actors.
When the adjusts were finished, the material was given to the actors for actual memorizing
and staging. This was the most critical moment: the opportunity to verify the scenic quality
of each verse. From the intrinsically collective point of view of the religious, social and
politic ritual dedicated to the god Dyonisus, to take the translator-actors and scene-actors
from our personalistic culture to the collective performance of translation was an exercise of
cruelty, pure omophagy. The director of translation started to act as in the practice of
sacrifice. Stringency was instituted by drastic intervention on translator-actors texts and,
that way, we saw the color of Dionysian ritual. Nothing was completely preserved from the
first result; the translation director, using techniques inspired on literary theories of
deconstruction, alterity, strangeness and hospitality, made the sparagms/ (ritual
tearing), so that it was possible to disintegrate, to tear into pieces the personalities in
collective translation. No voice should overhang or even be identified! The final decision
was up to scene-actors.
In fact, the pursued hiding came from a Platos suggestion, Republic, 392a-394e. According
to the philosopher, the theatrical text is a narrative in which the author usually hides himself
under a mask, a persona who acts and says words for him, a character which surges in

someone elses body. That seemed very interesting to us, and we took it as a reference. We
would be theatrical; we would all keep hidden, actors and translators. The hiding of the
author in Antiquity was respected, and translation was signed by a huge mixed organism,
the Truersa. We should particularly notice that, in Greek tragedy, palming goes further
than masks only. With only three allowed actors (except chorus), the trick of masks made
possible, with no great difficulty, to play various characters in a few bodies, which admitted
the possibility of a man to play tormentor and victim at the same show. In such situation,
voice was the most obvious trace of identity, which was also expected to be masked in
many different ways (DAMEN, 1989, p.317).
Taking that paradigm strictly, the translator would hide himself as much as possible, even
when producing a written text that pretends to be oral text. The ways to show diverse
registers and oral aspects (current vocabulary, agglutinations caused by the continuous flux
of speech, repetitions, specific use of 2nd person pronouns, interrupted syntax), marks that
we think necessary to put a written text under an oral mask, were carefully pursued. About
register, there is a particular paradox in tragic text. Aristotle, in Rhetoric 1404b, says that
tragedy has a haughty diction reached through ornamented language, but that Euripides
might have used everyday language (1404b); the same Stagirite points, seemingly in a
contradiction, that the tragic is for common watchers/
(Potica, 1462a, 3-4). This paradox can be equally seen in the function of the written score
to be made oral; that reference kept our attention.

13

Reproducing this paradox, we dressed

the textual mask to say the sublime either in high either in current ways, keeping the highest
point of tension between oral and written, poetic and prosaic. The result of all this work may
have been watched by some of you, at the show which opened this Congress.
Thank you very much.

13

Iambo is, in fact, the most colloquial of the meters. A proof of this is that we use mostly iambos on conversation with
each other, and rarely only when we want to escape from colloquial tone the hexameters (1499a 23-28). From
translation into Portuguese by Manuel Alexandre Jnior; Paulo Farmhouse Alberto; Abel do Nascimento Pena.