New meanings to be found in translation

Translating a play is about more than just adapting the language – cultural exchanges and traditions strongly influence the understanding of the piece, as director Sarah Jane Scaife discovered when translating an Irish work to Mandarin

BRIAN FRIEL'S seminal play Translationscharts the remapping and renaming of the Irish landscape from a local native Irish dialect to the standard English of the British colonial powers. While Friel famously said "the play is about language and language only", Translationsdemonstrated that every act of translation involves the negotiation of a whole array of cultural codes. The act of translation goes beyond language: it involves a whole set of other cultural exchanges, and this is a reality that was reinforced upon director Sarah Jane Scaife, who has spent the last two years overseeing the first translation of Marina Carr's play By the Bog of Catsinto Mandarin.

Scaife first became interested in the cultural negotiations of translation when she travelled throughout Asia performing and directing the work of Samuel Beckett. Beckett's work, which is deeply rooted in a Western philosophical tradition and the legacy of the second World War, initially appeared to pose a huge gulf in cultural understanding between Western and non-Western audiences. The concept of waiting "as a metaphor for life" in Waiting for Godot, for example, "was completely alien to a Mongolian audience", although in Georgia it perfectly reflected how "everything was crooked since the Revolution, and you had to wait for everything – even electricity, which would only come on once a day. There seemed to be no logic to their existence, beyond these endless queues and waiting, but even that was a different understanding than the one that I had come with based on my own background with the play."

While conducting Beckett workshops with Chinese students in Beijing in the final stages of her project, Scaife was struck by the potential for finding new ways to understand Irish theatre that the process of translation offers.

Irish theatre is usually read in a narrow cultural way. Thanks to the political origins of theatre in Ireland in the 20th century, plays are read firstly in dialogue with social and historical conditions, and secondly in dialogue with each other; how is this writer responding to or deconstructing the limitations of the tradition that has gone before it? What happens, Scaife began to ask, when you take all of those assumptions away? Scaife began to experiment with scenes from Marina Carr's play By the Bog of Catsand found that the students' reactions to certain elements of the text were changing her understanding of the play and giving her a deeper understanding of its theatrical dynamics.

Over the course of two years, Scaife has been working on a translation of the play with Li Yuan, associate professor of Translation, Interpretation, and Comparative Literature at Beijing Foreign University. It was launched alongside staged readings as part of the Irish showcase at the Shanghai Expo Project in October, with the support of Culture Ireland and the Irish Literature Exchange.

By the Bog of Catsis set in late-20th century rural midlands Ireland and examines the relationship between a member of the travelling community, Hester Swayne, and the settled community that she lives among, including the man who fathered her young daughter, Josie. The play presents a complex engagement with a variety of specifically Irish social conditions: prejudice against the travelling community; the post-colonial obsession with land; the declining role of the clergy; and the new materialism of Celtic Tiger Ireland, where religious rituals like communions and weddings have become more significant as performances of social status.

Some of these cultural circumstances a Chinese audience could relate to: the rapid globalisation of Chinese culture has provoked a similar materialism as that of the Celtic Tiger, while land is a highly valued commodity in the over-populated country. However, other elements needed to be adapted for the Chinese context, as Scaife explains, “for example the white dresses that Marina uses in the play symbolise purity in the context of Irish culture but in China, white is a colour for death, so instead we used a red dress, which carries a similar context in Chinese culture”.

On the most immediate level, the language of the play posed one of the greatest problems. for a translation. The play is heavily influenced by the low guttural drawl of midlands Ireland, and Carr reflects this phonetically throughout By the Bog of Catsby dropped t's and flattened vowels and idiomatic cadences and phrases.

As Carr says in an interview that accompanies the Mandarin translation of the play, “[the] language is more about how the thing is said as much as what is said; how language evokes a very particular kind of landscape and way of living and dealing with other people and yourself in the world”. Li Yuan needed to find a local equivalent in Mandarin to echo the literary quality that Carr invested in the local midlands dialect that her characters use.

The coarse texture of the language in By the Bog of Catsreflects the environment of midlands Ireland, and in particular it evokes the landscape of the bog, another uniquely Irish element of the play. The more universal translation of bog into "swamp" doesn't quite capture the shifting, liminal landscape of the bog in Ireland or the dark and violent symbolic significance that it has accrued since tribal times. Scaife and Li Yuan visited a midlands bog as part of their research, allowing Li Yuan to experience the bog's unique atmosphere, "the [way the] springy ground breathes underneath your feet, the way the air is thick and soft"; the distinct colours; the way the light behaves. For Scaife, the visit "highlighted the need to effect 'the purling wind' and the other distinct qualities of the bog in production", as those assumptions could not be translated within the text itself.

However, the greatest gulf in the different responses to the play, Scaife says, was in tone – “humour in particular is cultural”. Where Irish audiences traditionally see Carr’s play as a tragi-comedy, as political as well as personal, Li Yuan and the students Scaife worked with struggled to see how grotesque characters like Mrs Kilbride, who calls her granddaughter a “little wagon of a girl-child”, could ever be seen as funny; from their perspective she was just cruel.

Scaife explains that this difference in tone was significantly enhanced by the response of Li Yuan and the Chinese students to the gender politics of the play, which resonated deeply with Chinese culture’s attitude to women, and the moral, ethical and political issues attendant on the official one child policy that has been held throughout China since 1978 and which can be traced back to Confucian philosophy as well as economic logic. As Scaife recalls, “the [students] told me how the theme of longing for the mother and the rivalry between Hester and Joseph for the love of their mother would be very relevant to a Chinese audience. The notion of the mother giving preference to the boy [they said] would affect the girls in the audience who might have felt traditionally less valued than the boys,” while Hester’s final gesture, the killing of her child, was seen to be a shocking representation of a reality that is still practised in rural China as a consequence of the policies of population control.

Other elements that were particularly pertinent to the Chinese students were the supernatural themes, where ghosts and otherworldly beings inhabit the more realistic elements of the play. “The ghosts were very readily accepted,” Scaife says. “Even though the religious aspects of the play that draw from Catholic tradition were foreign to them, the spirits of the ancestors are seen to be a constant presence in traditional Chinese, so there was no lack of understanding.”

Exchanging languages

The Ireland Literature Exchange (ILE) was established in 1994 and has since funded the translation of almost 1,500 works of Irish fiction, children's literature, poetry, drama and non-fiction into some 50 languages, including the Mandarin translation of By the Bog of Cats.

In 2009, Bulgarian was the language into which most Irish works were translated, while Sebastian Barry, Eoin Colfer, Hugo Hamilton, Claire Keegan, Colum McCann and Joseph O'Neill were the most translated authors.

In the service of promoting Irish literature, ILE attends major international book fairs every year, while offering translation grants, residential translator bursaries and author events on an ongoing basis.

This month, it brings Irish literature in translation into the public library, in an exhibition at Dublin Central Library at the Ilac Centre featuring titles in languages such as Polish, Russian, Brazilian Portuguese and Chinese.

There will also be a series of readings and talks by representative authors, including John Boyne, November 10 (this show is sold out); Hugo Hamilton, November 17; and Tadhg Mac Dhonnagáin, November 24.

To reserve a place, phone 01-873 4333 or email openlearning@dublincity.ie