Reading for Comic Performance Between the Lines, Part II

Reading for Comic Performance Between the Lines

Part II: Virtual Dramaturgy – A Taxonomy for the Translation of Theater

by Jody Enders

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Translating theater is different from translating other literary genres. As I argued in Part I of this essay, the silence of the printed page must come to life anew as the performance that a play once was, that it might have been, or that it could be again. For that reason, the holistic translator rightly leverages what I termed “virtual dramaturgy” and responds to questions such as these: How do we see the unseen? What do the characters—or the actors—look like (costume; physical attributes)? How do they move? What is signified by their movements (or immobility)? When are those movements seen and by whom? And how do we hear the unheard? In addition to grammar or dialect, do the people onstage have accents (which may or may not be transmitted on the page)? How do they sound (pace; volume; intonation)? Lastly, we ask of both the unseen and the unheard: What changes have been wrought over time to the sights and sounds of communication?

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An early Dutch farce in motion. Pieter Balten (ca. 1527-1584). The farce of Wonder Water in the center. (Click for detail.)

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As eight two-part cases illustrate below, theater poses considerable challenges that transcend the translator’s requisite attention to language. That is to say that the audiovisual material must be just as legible and just as meaningful. But how theater makes meaning—how things are seen, heard, said, and done—typically shifts in subtle ways that, in service to the artistry of translation, it is beneficial to spell out.

To set forth a taxonomy for deciphering the visual and auditory meaning of a play text is, to some extent, to return to the discipline of theater semiotics, as pioneered by such towering figures as Erving Goffman in Frame Analysis (Harvard, 1974), Patrice Pavis in Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture (Routledge, 1992), or Umberto Eco in “Semiotics of Theatrical Performance.” Curiously, though, their insights remain largely underutilized in translation studies, even in works that purport to investigate how theories of communication and performance are put into translational practice.^[1] While my taxonomy might not be exhaustive, each case explores, separately and together, the transcultural and transhistorical legibility of two crucial parts of theater’s sensory experience: sight and sound. I submit that, ultimately, the most faithful translation of a play is a text that is appropriately cued in such a way as to allow the reader or future performer to see and hear all the live and living silence.

Interestingly enough, in a terrific two-article spread for The New York Times on the Hamburg premiere of Hamilton, Michael Paulson focused on translating into German some of the key sounds of the smash Broadway hit. “Imagine the challenge,” he urged, “of adapting the story of America’s first treasury secretary for a German-speaking audience—preserving the rhythm, the sound, and the sensibility of the original musical while translating its dense libretto into a language characterized by multisyllabic compound nouns and sentences that often end with verbs, and all in a society that has minimal familiarity with the show’s subject matter.”^[2] And yet this is nothing new, as any translator of Aristophanes might readily assert of the musical, rhythmic inflections of ancient Greek. Paulson’s perspicacity notwithstanding, he neglects to bring up the nonverbal elements, including the one for which Hamilton is best known: the casting of Black actors. Now compare that situation to that of the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century French farce (and the nominal subject of our Part I). The Middle French language is similarly replete with dense octosyllabic verse, long-lost lyrics and melodies, and sight gags. As for the linguistic particularities, the medievalist even encounters the occasional hapax legomenon to boot, as I did in the title cut of Holy Deadlock (Penn, 2017; hereafter, HD). (A hapax is a word that appears only once in any extant source and for which no dictionary definition is available: a word like tablativé which, from context, is probably “downtrodden” [HD, 144].) And that’s not all. Contemporary audiences are even less familiar with the historical material of medieval and Renaissance France than they are with the story of America’s first treasury secretary (if only from having seen a ten-dollar bill). For those audiences, the harmonious and humorous coexistence of the verbal and the nonverbal material demands translation.

Enter the virtual dramaturgy of sight and sound, a translational practice that might, at long last, put to rest one of the more damaging misnomers of traditional theater criticism: “closet drama,” i.e., not meant for the stage. Just because we don’t know how or why or if a play was performed, that does not mean ipso facto that it was not intended for performance, was not performed, or could not have been performed. I am not implying that a play cannot be written for the page alone—the paramountcy of intentionality is central to my Murder by Accident: Medieval Theater, Modern Media, Critical Intentions (Chicago, 2009). But I would venture to say that, regardless of whether a script is produced ad hoc or post hoc, most plays are intended to go live or, at the very least, to invite that possibility. In the interpretive scenarios below, I thus direct eyes and ears toward the immense performance potential of theater’s nonverbal elements, all of which clamor for translation.

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From a Richard V set during World War I to a Dangerous Liaisons set at a prep school, production values are regularly updated as stories are adapted. In premodern drama, the original contexts are harder to recognize. Take the endless list of wayward monks in Blue Confessions (#2 of my Immaculate Deception [Penn, 2022], hereafter ID). God only knows that, for medieval and Renaissance spectators, the Franciscans, Dominicans, Carmelites, and Augustinians mentioned in the play would have been instantly distinguishable from their brotherly attire. But those visual distinctions might well elude the twenty-first-century spectator. So, too, would any humor connected with why a particular monastic order might incline toward a particular sin. A dramaturgy of set design or pantomime can be elucidating. That is why, in Blue Confessions, I arranged for all the costumed brothers to be on stage and to have them rise when the name of their order is spoken, gesturally transmitting any missing information (ID, 65-66).

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Nowadays, it would not be a stretch for an audience to anticipate the arrival of a king after the sounds of trumpet fanfare. Not so for other telltale sounds lost to the ravages of time. Perhaps a certain type of shod foot or pushcart on the cobblestones heralded the approach of a specific tradesman like the Kettle-Maker of Pots and Scams (HD, #3) or of farce’s ubiquitous cobbler or elixir-touting charlatan. Here, a dramaturgy of noise or music can fill in the blanks. The translator might fashion stage directions, for example, that transport readers (or directors) aurally to the necessary context, as I do repeatedly with opening music. Nor am I alone in looking toward music as a phenomenal contextualizing device. In At Cross Purposes (Farce de Trois amoureux de la croix), I suggested “She’s Not There” or “Lover’s Cross,” whereas André Tissier went with Jacques Brel’s “Madeleine.”^[3]

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In this case, what is seen onstage means both what it once did something else entirely at the time of performance. This is the essential conundrum of Extreme Husband Makeover (HD, #11). The Farce des femmes qui font refondre leurs maris tells the tale of two sexually frustrated wives who pay a Bell-Maker to rejuvenate their decrepit, impotent, but unusually solicitous husbands. Turnabout is (un)fair play, so in a stunning theatrical embodiment of a Middle French proverb, what they get for their money is two violent abusers. The two women are “as surprised as a bell-maker” when they “get the nasty surprise of their lives after much labor” (HD, 349–51). But the makeover takes place inside a prop so powerful that it threatens the comedy’s postmedieval survival. When the Bell-Maker ushers two human beings into a baking chamber, the difficulty lies not with the metaphor but with the material reality. It is not the word for “oven” per se (fournaise) that compromises the farcical; it is the inanimate object on stage, which inescapably conjures the horrors of the Holocaust. If the play is to be translated as comedy, the prop must somehow be neutralized. Either that or Extreme Husband Makeover can be played as the tragicomedy that it is. Dramaturgy must address the issues and determine genre. That is not because we are obliged to repair at any cost an original that is now despicable; it is because the meaning of the object has changed. No matter how fiercely contemporary debates about historical presentism may rage, we need not consign early misogynists to the dustbin of history. Instead, as translators do, we may elect to concentrate on how meanings can, do, and ought to change in the new contexts of new moments in time. A historically informed semiotic presentism, as fitting as it is unavoidable, is de rigueur.

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There is plenty of evidence that farcical farts go boom, especially in the opening play of my Farce of the Fart and Other Ribaldries. Of a wife’s emission in La Farce du pet, husband Hubert hollers: “I was so sore afraid at the boom that my butt is still quaking!” (Fist vramy [sic] ung pet / Auprès de moy: dont j’eus si peur/ Que encores le cul me hallette) (FF, 77; below Case 6b). That’s funny. Boom go the cannons that accidentally killed two men in two late fourteenth-century Passion plays (Murder by Accident, chaps. 1 and 2). Not funny. Such sounds, moreover, have evolved over time. In California in the 1960s, sonic booms were meaningful; in New York, not so much. And, presumably, the boom of a nuclear explosion (flash, boom, roar) would now preclude any laughter at all. Nor, by analogy to Case 2a, would any joke about booms be opportune on the day of a deadly explosion. Comedy might well be the sum total of “tragedy plus time,” but it is often unequal to the task of eliciting laughter that is timed with “tragedy plus today.”

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In contrast to our previous cases, where clarity of meaning is historically contingent, sometimes it’s a matter of clarity, period. In the translation of theater, this happens in two principal ways. Either an act is indicated only indirectly, with any clarifying language appearing post hoc (if at all), or an implicit call-out for stage action is present but the accompanying language is so imprecise that the action thus signaled is unclear. It is important to emphasize that I am not referring here to such commonplace situations as these: An extant document is so damaged or mutilated that the text is impossible to decipher; or a play is almost surreal in its seemingly deliberate obscurantism (as in Theologina’s perilous horse ride in Confessions of a Medieval Drama Queen [Farce excellentement bonne de quatre femmes; ID, 99-100]). Nor am I referring to such a frequent utterance in farce as “stop hitting me!” We find the stage direction “hitting her” in The Edict of Noée (Farce des Drois de la Porte Bodès [FF, 95-96]), but no such phrase cues the identical action of Default Judgment Day (Une Femme qui demande les arrérages à son mari) of my Trial by Farce, hereafter TBF (Michigan, 2023; 67). Nevertheless, in the latter farce, the action is easily intuited when one character asks: “What the hell are you hitting me for?” Instead, Case 3a applies to moments like these:

In Immaculate Deception (Soeur Fessue [ID, #12]), we know that Mother Superior emerges from her parlor having experienced ecstasy. She sports a pair of men’s drawers on her head to prove it, but there is no didascalic mention as to how they got there. Nor is it clear at what point the characters see what the audience sees all along. If the play is to be comprehensible, the translator does well to transform virtual dramaturgy into the actual dramaturgical guidance of stage directions. Indeed, the most notoriously impenetrable farce, Confession Follies (ID, #5), needed just that. The plot of Le Badin, la Femme, et la Chambrière is so confounding that Bernard Faivre threw up his hands when trying so much as to summarize it in his Répertoire des farces françaises (Paris, 1993). I translated it anyway, but with ample stage directions to demystify—or remystify. Similarly convoluted is the staging of Wife Swap (Farce joyeuse à V personnages [HD, #10]), where the dialogue indubitably provides multiple call-outs for action; but that dialogue is so truncated that it stymies comprehension of the denouement. After two husbands (Blotto and Jacko) swap their two wives (Margie and Persephone), a violent ballet of push-me, pull-you ensues, establishing once and for all which spouse winds up with which. But on the page, we see only exclamations along the lines of “No way, I say. Mine!”; “Seems so”; “He’s all yours”; “No, mine!”; “Who, him?”; “No, you!” and so on. What’s the upshot? Again, the ambiguities will be resolved only by dramaturgy, an operation that is, in some respects, akin to that of the filmmaker who resolves a textual mystery for the eye. Unlike most filmmakers, however, save Kurosawa, the translator-as-virtual-dramaturge might reflect the spirited ambiguity of the original by crafting, as I did, upwards of ten alternate endings. One of them is a favorite of my students: a queer ending in which it is the two women who wind up together (HD, 309-17).

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In The Farce of the Fart, when Hubert hectors his wife about what on earth he just heard “ring out” (FF, 70), it is simple enough to divine that it was the titular fart. Equally straightforward, if necessitating a choice, are the sounds of The Shit House (Farce nouvelle et fort joyeuse à quatre personnages [HD, #2]). When a wife’s illicit lover is hastily dispatched to hide in the latrine, the comedy derives from a valet’s unsuccessful efforts to camouflage all the attendant noise. Although there are no didascalia as to what that noise might be, we can freely surmise that coughing, choking, or vomiting are involved (HD, 92-93). By analogy to Case 3a, I refer instead to another standard occurrence in farce: A given character clearly hears what is said, but there is no indication whatsoever of how that character came to hear it in the first place. Circumstances dictate that the translator either flag the inconsistency or somehow integrate the character into the scene in question. In Husband Swap (Le Troqueur de maris [HD, #10]), I make sure that Cindy Lou is onstage to hear the sales pitch of a Husband-Trader, inasmuch as she alludes much later to all its details (ID, 327; 333). Likewise, in Who’s Your Daddy (Jenin, Filz de Rien), one Father John is manifestly not present to hear a mother reveal the mystery of her bastard child’s conception (TBF, #5). Here, I take full advantage of farce’s propensity for metacommentary by interpolating this line: “And where the hell’s the script supervisor anyway? I wasn’t even in that scene” (TBF, 12).

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Farce loves nothing more than a good pun, and that’s just fine. But every now and then, a jeu d’esprit is so complicated, so sophisticated, so polysemous that its full semantic depth cannot be apprehended in real theatrical time. Such is the case for The Resurrection of Johnny Slack-Jaw (La Résurrection de Jenin Landore [ID, #9]), a farce whose humor is so labyrinthine that one almost wonders whether it appealed more to the readerly than to the spectatorial eye. The overarching metaphor of Johnny Slack-Jaw is an “April Fool” who practically defies translation (a challenge to which translators of poetry are accustomed). Minimally, the faithfully complex translation must evoke fish, fisherman, the shoes of the papal fisherman, the miracle of the loaves and the fishes, the serendipitous chronology of when Easter falls on April Fools’ Day (as it did in 1453, 1464, 1526, 1537, 1548, etc.), plus, that most sacred of Christological jeux de mots, the acrostic for Jesus Christ as ICHTHUS or ICHTHYS): Iesous Christos Theou Yios Soter (“Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior”) (ID, 241-32). And wait, there’s more! Not only does the play feature what I believe to be the first known use of what the French say on April 1, i.e., poisson d’avril or “April fish!” Johnny Slack-Jaw’s fish is also an Easter mackerel (maquereau), which further denotes a pimp, thereby equating the sacred ichthus with pimping. So much for Christian intercession! Since a singular advantage of the theatrical medium is the power to embody metonymy visually and materially, it proved helpful to set the action at a harbor replete with poissons (real or ersatz), the better to translate one of the more compelling usages I’ve seen of the rhetorical figure of metalepsis or transsumptio. As defined in the excellent “Forest of Rhetoric,” metalepsis is a “reference to something by means of another thing that is remotely related to it… or through an implied intermediate substitution of terms. Often used for comic effect through its preposterous exaggeration. A metonymical substitution of one word for another which is itself figurative.” One of my favorite instances of metalepsis is the “Linda Ronstadt”: a home run at a Southern ballpark because the ball “blew by you,” as in “Blue Bayou,” a song recorded by Ronstadt. What can I say? During the brisk pace of comic timing, the metaphor can blow right by you, which would be detrimental to meaning. In live media, one cannot go back in time to ponder what one might have missed the first time around. Once again, Stephen Sondheim (cited in Part I) had something to say about the oral and aural density and complexity of the musical theater:

Poetry seems to me to exist in terms of its conciseness: how much can be packed in. Lyric writing has to exist in time. The audience—the listener—cannot do what the reader of poetry does. He cannot go at his own speed; he cannot go back over the sentence. Therefore, it must be crystal clear as it goes on. That means you have to underwrite: You have to lay the sentences out so there’s enough air for the ear to take them in.^[4] 

Whether the communication be spoken or sung, the materiality of the theater gives meaning some breathing room. Far from a potential distraction to our understanding of the underwritten Johnny Slack-Jaw, nonverbal onstage life offers a wealth of semantic support.

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Aural perception need not be confined to words that are actually spoken. Words can be heard in one’s own mind, be it at the theater or, in a celebrated passage from Augustine’s fourth-century Confessions, in the silent, mental singing of prayerful meditation (bk. 10). Imagine now that a joke depends on solving a word puzzle like the spoonerism, “you missed my history lecture.” The humor lands when you swap the two initial consonants to yield “you hissed my mystery lecture.” But the punchline can still be funny even if it is never spoken: experienced listeners will hear it anyway. So, too, will any French speaker fond of verlan, a type of backwards-talking linguistic fun in which the phonemes of a single word are heard in reverse order. Verlan thus reversed is l’envers—“the reverse;” and a contrepèterie is a bit like verlan on steroids. A good example of the phenomenon appears in Chick Latin, cited in Part I of this essay and projected for my “Whorticulture” and Other Classroom Farces. The aural comedy revolves around a Latin-language declension lesson for baculum (“stick”). Bacus becomes cul bas (a “low” or “low-hanging asshole”), which no one in the play, in fact, says. It’s an ingenious strategy, by the way, for any early author seeking to pass muster with a censor. But, since the aural fun of hearing unseen or unspoken obscenities in one’s mind is less in the modern spectator’s participatory habits, the translator can call upon clarifying language or gesture to assist with filling in the blanks. In Chick Latin, I tease out what is elided by having the Latin Professor point to the derrière and confirm that his female student’s answer is “correctum.”

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Although stage movement can be accidental—an actor trips over a stray prop, a set comes tumbling down—we are concerned here with intentional gesture or movement as what Adam Kendon terms “deliberate expressiveness” (Gesture: Visible Action as Utterance [15]). What is more: gestures can be “performative” in the sense posited by the ordinary language philosopher J. L. Austin: “the issuing of the utterance is the performing of an action—it is not normally thought of as just saying something” (How to Do Things with Words, 6-7). When the Cobbler of Pots and Scams antes up by placing some small change inside a boot, there is no stage direction to that effect; nor does he say “I bet.” But he most definitely places a bet when announcing that he is “in for two bits” (je gaigne deux patars) (Farce tres bonne et fort joyeuse à troys personnages d’un Chaudronnier [HD, 113]). In other words, within the framework of the fictional storyline, the Cobbler has committed a performative act, whereas the actor playing the Cobbler has committed what I’ve dubbed elsewhere a pseudoperformative act (Murder by Accident, 9-11). In the translation of theater, Austinian performativity must be assessed and rendered as such, particularly when it comes to a host of transactional gestures that are performed—or misperformed—by farcical priests and penitents.

In Confessions of a Medieval Drama Queen, Lady Theologina rightly instructs the women whom she is about to confess to “make the sign of the cross and say mea culpa, for God’s sake! Mea maxima culpa” (ID, 121). But a trademark move in such a farce as Confession Lessons is to stage the ignoramus who has no idea what to say at confession or, still more germane, what to do (Farce de celuy qui se confesse à sa voisine [FF, 130-33]). When the key performative gesture of a rite is required, it is mandatory to make the sign of the cross correctly, lest a failure to do so compromise the sacrament as an Austinian “misfire”: “we do not carry through the procedure—whatever it may be—correctly—and completely, without a flaw and without a hitch. If any of these rules are not observed, we say that the act which we purported to perform is void, without effect” (Philosophical Papers, eds. J. O. Urmson and G. J. Warnock, 2nd ed. [Oxford, 1970], 225). Now consider Highway Robbery (Le Brigant et le curé [ID, #3]), where a less-than-moral man of the cloth seeks to save his life from a Highwayman. The good father’s spur-of-the-moment solution is to offer to confess his would-be assailant. But the Priest is so flustered that he botches the language of that sacrament. Instead of absolve te, he utters the incomprehensible ego asuote, a phrase that anyone who has seen Four Weddings and a Funeral can instantly equate with “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spigot.” Since the lexical/grammatical error is in Latin, however, I went with: “In secula seculor… seculor… ummm….” (ID, 81; 94)—supplemented by the wrong performative gesture. In that way, the translation of the Priest’s “misfire” is visually and visibly accurate; it is not only a geste juste but a performative acte juste.

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Farce is riddled with onomatopoeia, but sometimes the auditory/aural material signifies an act in and of itself. In Confession Follies, the sound of esse, esse, esse, esse! or etesecs! (“achoo!”) tells us that a character is doing something, namely, sneezing (ID, 159-60). In Wife Swap, characters laugh (Ha! Ha! Ha!; Ha! Ha! He! He! Ha!; and Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!); they exchange blows (Hict! Hict! Heust! Heust); and, at one point, I’m reasonably sure that somebody has an orgasm (A!) (HD, 283). While it is logical to look toward the onomatopoetic sounds emitted by objects like cannons that are acted upon, people go boom too, as in The Farce of the Fart (FF, 77; Case 2b). So does Persephone in Wife Swap with the Pouf! Pouf! Pouf! Pouf! Pouf! of a fart (HD, 305). To this, one might add that the most literal translation of Pouf! Pouf! Pouf! Pouf! Pouf! would be for the actor to lay an actual fart, inspiring us to contemplate even the olfactory components of stage action. After all, this is the same aesthetic universe inhabited by the martyred Saint Barnabas of the Acts of the Apostles, whose stinky roasted entrails might have lent realism to his immolation.^[5]

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In all likelihood, a playwright sees how characters communicate, and actors and directors interpret how that communication is to be embodied. Absent the inflections of performance, however, readers and translators are obliged to see it—and interpret it—for themselves. In Who’s Your Daddy?, for instance, does Johnny tip his hat as a sign of respect toward the priest who may or may not be his father? Does he re-don it backwards? Or, as I have him do, does he perform any number of those things (TBF, 111) … and as evidence of what? Stupidity? Kindness? Manipulativeness? All of the above? None of the above? Or what about Jean’s allegedly unfettered sexual desire for her husband in Bitches and Pussycats (Les Deux Maris et leurs Deux Femmes dont l’une a male tête et l’autre est tendre au cul [HD, 289-94])? Is there any nuance to it? Mightn’t she “accidentally” knee him when climbing on top of him (HD, 264)? Does Wife Swap’s Margie endlessly kowtow to her husband with her fingers crossed behind her back? Nowhere, moreover, is the power of inflectional gesture more pivotal than when farce enacts violence. Even when the Middle French text supplies hitting him, as for the Wife in Pots and Scams (HD, 111), or hitting her, as for the Cobbler in The Edict of Noée (FF, 95), there is still much to be revealed. Is it a knockdown drag-out, as in the extensive beating of Bridget in Playing Doctor (Farce d’une Femme à qui son Voisin baille ung clistoire [FF, 217-18])? Is there any conceivable way in which it could track as a playful poke? Can the feminist translator’s own inflectional choices turn the tables on the misogynistic authors? Through virtual-turned-actual dramaturgy, can she assimilate the power of the oppressor? Decisions must be made because, in a genre prone to slapstick and sight gags, ambiguity is not usually an option.

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A playwright also hears how characters communicate; an actor then interprets and inflects that communication aloud. But how is the reader or translator to hear all that is said? It matters. Do the three wives of Husband Swap voice their lengthy complaints about their spouses with anger? With sadness? With both? With some other emotion? As written, a sentence like “Oh, that’s just great” is equivocal, so a novelist might insert “he said sarcastically” to facilitate  readers’ hearing what they cannot see on the page. Thus, when Jehannette of The Farce of the Fart proclaims that it “sounds just great” that the same attorney will represent both her and her husband, I indicate that she should say that sarcastically (FF, 75). Elsewhere, in Confession Lessons, I understand that an unnamed wife isn’t scared at all when she too states—sarcastically—that she is “soooooo scared” (FF, 115). And, by analogy to how so many Shakespeareans read Kate’s final speech in The Taming of the Shrew, when wife Jo-Jo of The Washtub pledges eternal subservience to her husband at the end of the Farce du Cuvier (TBF, #3), verisimilitude demands that she mean the opposite. For the Middle French, Qui a voulu en fantasie / Me mettre en subjection. / Adieu; c’est pour conclusion and Je crie mercy de ma folie, / Prenez en gré ie vous supplie, I translate accordingly: “No worries: you can count on me to stick it—to it—as is right. You’ll be the master, promise. [Under her breath sarcastically] Right—consider it—of this whole house” (TBF, 83). The problem for the translator of theater is how best to impart ambiguities of intonation, which would normally be resolved in real time on stage when a given phrase is inflected for an audience only once. Nevertheless, we shall see in our next two cases that it is possible to retain those ambiguities in a performance-ready translation when we make room for a two-pronged approach of simultaneity and sequentiality.

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Naturally, we’re familiar with homophones: the term that applies to a word that is pronounced the same way as another word (or words) but differs in meaning, as with “carrot,” “carat,” and “caret.” Homophones are ubiquitous in farce, as in Cooch E. Whippet, where saint, ceint, and sein (“saint,” “belted,” and “breast”) are decisive to the denouement (Farce de Martin de Cambray [FF, #11]). When a moronic cuckold is newly anointed as Saint Cooch, he is belted by his (big?)-breasted wife when she places a belt around his waist. In so doing, she hits “below the belt” and “coochie-whips” a man who thenceforth sports a new moniker: “Cooch E. Whippet.” While homophones are friendly to the readerly eye, they can be most unfriendly to the spectatorial ear (Case 7b). Visual support is critical. In Cooch, the three homophones can be embodied by means of action (kneeling, belting), by props (belts, religious paraphernalia), and by casting an actor with certain physical attributes (breastedness). (You can watch a piquant performance of Cooch online.)

A more perplexing question in farce is that of the visual or gestural homophone. Can one and the same gesture signify more than one thing at the same time? The answer is clearly yes—and farce’s myriad sight gags often convey just that. Keeping with our carrots, carats, and carets, one might actualize that homophone by having a husband announce that he has a fourteen-carat gift for his wife, upon which he would bestow upon her fourteen carrots—all, by the way, in keeping with the sensibility of a play like Poor Bastards (TBF, #7). (That said, it would still be challenging to get that punctuation mark in there!) Meanwhile, in the bewildering Confession Follies, gesture is a double-edged sword when the right hand literally does not know what the left hand is doing. Is a valet-in-priest’s-clothing laying a healing, pseudofatherly hand on a suffering wife to ease her physical pain? Or is he up to something more irreligious with that hand (ID, 152-56)?

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Corresponding to the questions of our previous case: Can a homophone like the saint, ceint, and sein of Cooch E. Whippet be heard as three different words all at once? By and large, the answer is no—unless, per Case 4b, you’re an inveterate punster capable of cracking the code of each joke voicelessly in your own mind—and quickly. Habitués of comedy might be up for it, but not everyone is a punster. For that reason, when a single speaker voices a homophone a single time, it is tricky to ensure that an audience will hear the three different meanings simultaneously—unless the homophone is amplified by interpolated gesture (as in Case 7a) or, here, unless it is heard more than once. Absent repetition, a given word or line will generally be heard as either straight or sarcastic but not both. In Bro Job, for example, La Farce nouvelle des Chamberières qui vont à la messe de cinq heures, I amplify Saucy’s punning propensities by having her hit the key term twice with “Get it?” (ID, 197; 199-201). Interpolated repetition allows the translator to preserve a special brand of polysemy that has received little attention in the translation of theater: In farce, there are three types of homophone: linguistic, nonverbal, and accidental (through mispronunciation).

Not surprisingly, homophony is the stuff of umpteen puns. Take the fun to be had in Confession Lessons or Highway Robbery, both of which feature reluctant penitents who are instructed to confess their sins to God (à Dieu). Conveniently, they hear that directive as “bye-bye!” (adieu), and they then try to exit the scene. In Confession Lessons, I had the character say—and do—this: “Wait! Maybe if I say it in French! [Possibly with supporting gestures] I confess—Je me confesse— À DIEU. À DIEU.” The Husband responds: “ADIEU to you too!  Bye-bye, now Father William!” (FF, 133; ID, 363n9). Or take Cooch, where the phrase tu auras ton chief gros authentically has two meanings: “you’ll get your cobbler’s heavy thread for sewing leather” or “you’ll get yours.” A pun in English on all/awl comes close enough to the Middle French homophone (FF, 338; 341; 452n12): “giving it one’s all” and “give the cobbler his awl.”

More intriguing is the nonlinguistic, sonic homophony that precipitates comic confusion in Monk-ey Business (Farce à quatre Personnages: le Savetier, le Moyne, la Femme, le Portier [FF, #9]). When an angry wife gives a perverted priest his comeuppance by beating the crap out of him, the play’s Gate-Keeper thinks, from afar, that he is hearing the sounds of pleasurable sex, not painful violence (FF, 308-09). In a repertoire dominated by violent sexuality, this is a literal double entendre where both meanings of the nonlinguistic homophone can be heard simultaneously.

A third and quintessentially farcical procedure relies on a homophony that is created where it shouldn’t be for the comic effects of mispronunciation. Even today, much French humor revolves around mocking the accents of French speakers outside the “Hexagon” (i.e., France), such as the Swiss, the Senegalese, and, obviously, the Americans and the Brits (as any chagrined nonnative French speaker can readily attest). Indeed, the case of the accent is particularly vexed inasmuch as an accent can be either intentional or unintentional (Eco, 105): It can be idiosyncratic to either a character or to an actor playing that character. But for our present purposes, take the seemingly polite “thank you, sir” of Okay, Cupid (Le Procès d’un jeun moyne et d’un viel gendarme [TBF, #9]). When pronounced à la française, the Latinate grates vobis would have sounded like grattez vos bis or “scratch your dicks, folks!” (TBF, 171). Since the ear cannot hear concomitantly both the correct and the incorrect pronunciation, repetition can arrange for that. Whence my: “Oh, no you don’t folks! [Prick up your ears and don’t beat it yet.] Deo gratias! De-oh-la-la!” (TBF, 189). A comparable misprision informs Blue Confessions for in secula seculorum (the “forever and ever” that typically precedes an amen). But, if you’re speaking Latin with a Middle French accent, your Latin sounds like this: “ces culs-là, ces culs l’auront,” or “Those assholes will win!” or “Those assholes will get it in the end!” For the big joke to land, I doubled the double entendre through repetition and translated accordingly: “Now give thanks to your lord, for he is good. Real good. In secula seculorum. In suck-you-là! Suck-yooh-la-la!” (ID, 77-78; 362).

Our final and most complex case is one in which the two categories that we have been reviewing—sight and sound—are at odds, working not with but against each other. It is here that the translator as virtual dramaturge comes face to face with the ultimate challenge of onstage polysemy. Beyond homophony, at play in farces like Wife Swap and Highway Robbery is the theatrical incarnation of the contronym or Janus word. A contronym is, of course, a word like “aloha,” which has the two opposite meanings of “hello” and “good-bye,” or “sanction” (“to endorse” or “to repel”). Incidentally, any aficionado of French Classical theater is already familiar with the contronymic phrase je suis votre serviteur. It looks like—and sounds like—“your servant, sir,” but more commonly connotes the sarcastic opposite of “at your service.” That is why, in Confession Follies, I understood chambermaid Mandy’s je suis vostre pauvre vasselle / Qui vous a servis plusieurs ans like so: “I am your humble servant. Totally [fuckin’] servicing you all these years” (ID, 158; 372). But the onstage contronym can be expanded in such a way as to function as the bona fide geste d’esprit first mentioned in Part I of this essay. In Cases 8a and 8b, the consummate comic payoff derives from the divergence of gestural inflection (Case 6a) and aural intonation (Case 6b), the better to amuse us with a veritable geste d’esprit. We therefore conclude with an assessment of the forte of the comic theater, which makes its mark with doubletalk and doublespeak, double entendre and “double comprendre.”

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Remember the farting creatures that visually contest the seriousness of liturgical manuscripts with the bodily equivalent of “in your face!” (Part I)? To paraphrase Stanley Cavell’s philosophical question of Must We Mean What We Say? (Scribner’s, 1969), the translator of theater fittingly asks: Must we mean what we do? Can we mean the opposite of what we do? If there is such a thing as a gestural homophone (Case 7a), is there also a gestural contronym? Can a gesture mean its own opposite?

Returning to je suis votre serviteur, we notice that an exaggerated bow can certainly be meant ironically, which farce’s various dramatis personae easily convey by bowing—and farting—in somebody’s face. This is exactly what I have Gwynnie do to Valet Bozo in order to register her offense at the pseudomedical examination she endures in Confession Follies (ID, 155). Ditto for pregnant Sister Bunny of Immaculate Deception (Soeur Fessue), who might demonstrate the gist of a “rectal sign” in the holier-than-thou Mother Superior’s face (ID, 339). And then there’s the ass-backward curtain call with which a student troupe under the direction of Betty Ellzey wrapped their performance of The Farce of the Fart.

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The sounds of sarcasm (Case 6b) regularly transform any given word or phrase into a contronym when that word or phrase is not a contronym (as above with “that’s just great” or je suis votre serviteur). But can words or phrases or whole speeches be heard as their own opposites? Once again, inflection makes all the difference (as for Kate of The Taming of the Shrew; Case 6b). But when a true contronym graces the pages of farce, additional semiotic support is needed, be it by means of gesture or repetition. In Default Judgment Day (TBF, #2), the most crucial words of the play are two related contronyms about a balance due (in this case, of the sexual “marital debt” owed to one’s spouse). But the verbs quitter and s’acquitter denote not only to “forgive a debt” but also to “refuse to pay a debt”: not only “to pay up” but to “fail to pay up.” Profitably for the deadbeat husband who defaults on his own sexual debt, it is unclear which one he means when, legitimately or illegitimately, he bandies about the term s’acquitter. Is he seeking his wife’s forgiveness? Or is he asking her to forgive the debt altogether? Bottom line: it’s pay to play, and play to pay. Somebody wipes the slate clean, which just so happens to be one of the play’s refrains: Il ne luy chaut à qui il paye, / Mais qu’ilz soient quitz (TBF, 50; 55-56). But who pays, who plays, who forgives, and who gets stuck with the tab? Only dramaturgy will tell.

Tell, it does, in Wife Swap, where gestural support can tease out what might otherwise remain shrouded by comical onomatopoeia (Case 5b). On first glance—and first hearing—it is easy to miss Persephone’s comeback to Blotto’s efforts to subjugate her. When ordered to cut seven farts, she replies: “Pouf! Pouf! Pouf! Pouf! Pouf! There! What do you call that?”

I call that only five of the seven requisite farts. I call that the auditory, aural, and bodily equivalent of sarcasm. I call that the epitome of a contronymic sanction that both endorses and repels: a rebellious act committed by a woman who is only pretending to obey. Above all, I call that funny. Thanks to stage directions, moreover, the translator can conserve the contronymic spirit of Persephone’s rebellion—and a little bit of her own besides—in a manner that is resonant with the character. When Blotto praises Persephone’s output and demands some dancing, I script her as executing an acrobatic move that lands her ass—and her farts—right under his nose: “Jumpin’ Jack flash it’s a gas, gas, gas!” (HD, 306). Is that adaptation? Excessive interpolation? Far from it, that’s a supremely faithful, translational geste juste for a theatrical episode that depends on the visual and auditory stimuli of contronymic language and, more importantly, contronymic behavior.

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In position for confession. Luttrell Psalter, Add. MS 42130, fol.185v. Courtesy of the British Library.

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Le Jeu d’Esprit, Le Geste d’Esprit

Nowhere is the duality of the contronym more cunningly displayed than when homophones and contronyms unite at the same time that they part ways in the genuine geste d’esprit. Our final example is in a class all its own in that it displays dimensions of many of our eight cases. At stake in Highway Robbery is the theatrical embodiment of seeing and hearing double: the linguistic, visual, auditory, and aural contronym that is also a double and even a triple entendre (and triple comprendre). It’s a metacontronym, as it were, and a foundational geste d’esprit where verbal and nonverbal language are at odds with action throughout—but with the utmost linguistic subtlety. As in Confession Follies (Case 7a), the pared-down script calls for a dramaturgy of the mind’s eye and ear, which slowly unveils the big payoff: Once again, and quite literally, the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing (ID, 80-81). That is not to say that the language of Highway Robbery is nebulous or abstruse. Au contraire! It is, rather, that the literal words mean something wholly different to each character. The Priest wants to unburden the Highwayman of the weight of his sins; the Highwayman wants to unburden the Priest of the weight of his purse. As the verbal description of a confession plays out in physical counterpoint to the gestural pat-down of robbery, the entire play is one long geste d’esprit in which the dialogue repeatedly invites a verbal response to which an uninvited but not necessarily unwanted physical response is given instead.

“God helps those who help themselves,” says the Priest.

“I’m helping myself as we speak!” assures the Highwayman, while stealthily patting down the victim in search of his sizeable purse (and seen by the audience so doing, but unseen by the Priest).

“Consider your position, my son,” urges the Priest, “you must get it all out.”

That’s precisely what the Highwayman is up to: “I’m doin’ the best I can here but the damn hole’s too small.”

The Priest: “Your confession, my son. Before we adjourn, you must finish up. Come clean.”

The Highwayman comes clean, all right, but with language and gestures that signify something else. “‘Clean’s’ the word for it, pal,” quoth the Highwayman when, at long last, he grabs that purse, “and—good God Almighty!—I’ll be cleanin’ you out if it’s the last thing I do!” Double entendre then morphs into triple entendre when we recall that a bourse is both a “purse” and a “scrotum,” thereby opening up outright sexual dimensions to the Highwayman’s frustrated cry that “the hole is too small” (le pertuis est trop petit). And so on and so on (ID, 91-93). Somebody is making out like a bandit, and it might not be who or how we think. But none of it is specified on the page; the action must be intuited. Failing an effort to see, hear, and imagine the whole thing, the play would be incomprehensible and untranslatable.

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Seriously? Gorleston Psalter, MS 49622, fol. 123r. Courtesy of the British Library.

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Emerging from this taxonomy is a clear message: To exclude performance, as did generations of scholars invested in so-called closet drama, is to deny the complexity and, in the case of comedy, the fun of the most triumphal metalinguistic moments of the stage. In theory and in practice, performance-based media cannot communicate unless they are linguistically and audiovisually legible; that legibility is best captured through virtual dramaturgy. Wary though the translator might be of adaption or interpolation, we have seen that to perform is, in essence, to adapt and interpolate. Whether our focus be the early French comic theater or the Hamburg premiere of Hamilton, a rich theatrical past becomes newly playable in the present when reenlivened by the translator as virtual dramaturge. Once the holistic translator stays faithful not just to the language of a literary genre but to the action of an artistic medium, the sights and sounds of the medieval theater itself can live on. In that way, theater writ large can be performed—and translated—even larger each and every time a translation goes live.

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NOTES:

[1] Eco’s essay was published in 1977 in The Drama Review and reprinted as “Interpreting Drama” in The Limits of Interpretation (Indiana, 1990), 101-10. See also Jean Alter, A Sociosemiotic Theory of Theatre (Penn, 1990); Kier Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (Methuen, 1980). On performance and translation, see, e.g., Theatre Translation in Performance, eds. Paola Ambrosi, Silvia Bigliazzi, and Peter Kofler (Taylor & Francis, 2013); or Ethical Exchanges in Translation, Adaptation and Dramaturgy, eds. Emer O’Toole, Andrea Pelegri Kristić, and Stuart Young (Brill/Rodopi, 2017).

[2] The New York Times (14 September 2022) on the Hamburg premiere of Hamilton: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/14/theater/hamilton-germany.html and https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/14/theater/hamilton-translation-german.html; accessed 29 January 2023.

[3] See my Farce of the Fart and Other Ribaldries (Penn, 2011), hereafter FF, 437n8; and Tissier, Recueil de farces françaises, 13 vols. (Droz, 1986-2000), 11: 124.

[4] From the HBO documentary Six by Sondheim (2013), starting at ca. minute 41:01. This is neither the time nor the place to rehearse a related foundational principle of the history of literacy, i.e., the momentous ramifications for consciousness that accompanied the “technological” shift from the scroll to the codex, the latter enabling readers to return easily to earlier moments of a text.

[5]See John Gatton’s “‘There must be blood’: Mutilation and Martyrdom on the Medieval Stage,” in Violence in Drama, ed. James Redmond (Cambridge, 1991): 87.

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Originally published on Hopscotch Translation
Tuesday, July 25, 2023

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