Censoring Translation

Censorship, Theatre, and the Politics of Translation

Michelle Woods

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781441116987
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Drama
• Index: Literature

A play is written, faces censorship and is banned in its native country. There is strong international interest; the play is translated into English, it is adapted, and it is not performed. Censoring Translation questions the role of textual translation practices in shaping the circulation and reception of foreign censored theatre. It examines three forms of censorship in relation to translation: ideological censorship; gender censorship; and market censorship. This examination of censorship is informed by extensive archival evidence from the previously unseen archives of Václav Havel's main theatre translator, Vera Blackwell, which includes drafts of playscripts, legal negotiations, reviews, interviews, notes and previously unseen correspondence over thirty years with Havel and central figures of the theatre world, such as Kenneth Tynan, Martin Esslin, and Tom Stoppard. Michelle Woods uses this previously unresearched archive to explore broader questions on censorship, asking why texts are translated at a given time, who translates them, how their identity may affect the translation, and how the constituents of success in a target culture may involve elements of censorship.

1

Censorships and constraints

Ballas: Friends! We are all guilty.

THE MEMORANDUM

“Havel was a playwright and essayist who wrote as if censorship did not exist” (Remnick 2006: 145), David Remnick writes, but, when he began his career as a playwright in the 1960s, Havel was aware of the censorship conditions under which he wrote, conditions that were not, however, as “David-and-Goliath” (Coetzee 1996: 118) as the West supposed, that is, just the victimized writer repressed by a faceless censor. Havel, in the 1960s, seemed to have one available option: to write what Jarka Burian has called “camouflaged” (Burian 2000: 101) plays, plays that used allegory and subtexts to convey to a literate and hungry audience truths about the specific society in which they lived—truths that could not be said out loud. “To the Czech audience on opening night,” Carol Rocamora writes of The Garden Party’s premiere, “that wasn’t an absurd world, that was Czech realism” (Rocamora 2004: 48).

It was the Czech audience’s reaction, their act of reading between the lines and laughing, that attracted the first foreign interest in the Havel’s first major play. But translation posed a problem: if this was a “camouflaged” play, pointedly using Czech reality as a subtext, then how could that “local” subtext be translated successfully? The attraction of Havel’s plays abroad was linked to the perceived subtext; he was a writer challenging the regime with absurdist theatre and was, therefore, important on a cultural level (making theatre socially vital) and on a political level (criticizing neo-Stalinist Communism). The fear was that a foreign audience might understand the totality of the message of the subtext, that is, that they were watching a play critiquing Communist Czechoslovakia, but not understand the complexities and nuances of the localized critique, thereby making the play lose its force. In other words, what attracted Western producers to Havel’s plays was also crucially an obstacle: to make the plays more relevant to Western audiences they had to be altered to try and regain some of the effect while at the same time consolidating the source effect of the initial critique. For such a critique of Communism, of course, also consolidated the freedoms of the West.

But were Havel’s plays “camouflaged”? If so, we may be right to dismiss them as now redundant “emblems of the Prague Spring” because the effect they had would speak only to a given historical context, when audiences deciphered the plays like they were news. Similarly, reading correspondence about and reviews of the plays in England and the United States in the 1960s, the translations were also read like news, relevant to an understanding of the post-Stalinist cultural thaw and then the Soviet invasion and crushing of the Prague Spring. Why, then, perform them now, except as acts of appreciation or as historical artifacts? But Havel did in fact have a second option against Czech censorship in the 1960s and that was to write plays that took censorship and its mechanisms and explored them. In this way, his plays were not culturally bound to a particular culture or context, but suggested ways to interrogate an experience we all share—not overt totalitarian censorship, but our own propensity to be seduced by language and to use it to gain or cede power. His plays are also, fundamentally, about reading, about the audience actively interpreting what is going on, and questioning their interpretations; Havel and his director, Jan Grossman, called this “appellative theatre,” theatre designed to provoke questions, to unsettle the audience, rather than to provide didactic answers.

“What is the genuine?” J. M. Coetzee asks, “Is it possible to write the genuine in a regime of overreading?” (Coetzee 1996: 151). Writing about Zbigniew Herbert’s poetry, Coetzee questions the “Aesopian” (p. 153) method of writing and reading under censorship, “to propose that uncloaking the allegory constitutes a reading does far less than justice to it” because such readings arise out of the “paranoia of censorship [. . .] which, constitutionally opposed to innocent readings, spreads its habits of overreading through the whole of the reading community” (p. 151). If the writer writes for this overreading then they too are part of the game, producing a reductive, utterly contextualized piece of writing. For Coetzee, such writing works within a parallel system (to censorship) of a utopian ideal populated by:

absolutists who believe that the universe we presently have is an imperfect form of another, ideal order [. . .] Interpretation is therefore the road absolutists take to the truth behind poetry. The censor is a figure of the absolutist reader: he reads the poem in order to know what it really means, to know its truth. (p. 160)

The censor, in this model, looks for a “second-order writing (metaphor, allegory) that will open itself to interpretation” (p. 160), indeed expects it. The writer writing under censorship, if he or she works on the “between-the-lines” (p. 152) method, may be susceptible to writing in this “second-order.” This may work as a strategy because the censor has to prove “the presence of a something where there seems to be a nothing, a blank” and thus “risks ridicule,” but it also means that the censor “is quite as capable of reading between the lines as the writer is of writing between them” (p. 152). Playing chicken with the censor might be a necessity, but it means that the writer is involved in the game and deliberately self-censoring her/himself not only to evade the censor but also to convey an interpretable, and thereby reductive, “between-the-lines” message to the reader or audience.

Coetzee argues that the best—and not all—of Herbert’s poetry does something different in the face of censorship and that is in thinking about interpretation, interrogating, and evading, interpretation. In making the reader think, in challenging them, the poetry resists the kind of “second-order” reading of the censor and, for Coetzee, resists the “language of the ideal order,” that is, language abstracted from real life that fits a perfect interpretable form, for “human language, which is an imperfect medium born of an imperfect world” (p. 160). The tricky element for art—that necessarily abstracts human language into artistic forms—is to preserve the messiness, the unaccountable elements, the ambiguities that constitute the languages in which we live, “the imperfect, this-worldly language of the flesh” (p. 160).

What was ingenious about Havel’s plays in the 1960s (and beyond) was the mixture of architectonic form—order above all else—and content that dealt with the idea of utopian language or language pushed to the boundaries of rational possibilities and order, and, finally, a subversion of that order in the way that he used that language as it fell apart under its own idealism. Havel does not despair of language, it is not presented as meaningless, even though it may inherently, as an entity or tool, be so—what makes language meaningful are humans themselves. It is the mechanism of those constructions of meaning that interest Havel as a playwright, as do the agendas and interests behind such constructions. Havel’s plays were not enlightening to Czech audiences because they presented an allegorical “between-the-lines” picture of life in Communist Czechoslovakia where the pseudorationalistic language of Marxism-Leninism shaped public discourse. They made people laugh because they saw their own collusion in the game; it made them think about language and how it shaped reality—certainly under Communism—but also in a more general and existential way. To interpret the plays as just Aesopian vehicles would allow an audience to escape their small portion of the blame.

Coetzee’s notion of the reader as a censor is important because it applies beyond totalitarian borders and gets to something universal: the need for overarching and hermetic interpretation and the utopian and idealist bent behind it. Readers and audiences want the satisfaction of knowing what a poem or book or play is about, such interpretation cradles the mind, but it can also lead to entropy and damaging misreading. Havel’s plays came with Western preconceptions about what their subtext and their message was; in part this made them interesting, newsworthy, and thus produceable; but it also defined them in and confined them to a particular reading that served sociopolitical and commercial interests in the West. In Coetzee’s sense, we can see some of these “external constraints”—producers, directors, theatres, dramaturgs, reviewers—on the plays in Britain and the United States as reader-censors, coming with predetermined expectations and readings of the plays that attenuated Havel’s aesthetic and philosophic aims that were, in essence, translatable.

In this chapter, then, I want to explore different forms of censorship and constraints that applied simultaneously to Havel’s work, both at home and abroad, in the 1960s. First, it is important to understand Havel’s theory of appellative theatre as his response to censorship conditions—as an artistic rather than a political response. In some senses, this is a domestic, intralingual translation, what I and Mandana Taban have called “analogical translation,” a mode that is not an encoding of secret political messages as subtext but that actively translates the conditions of censorship into an artistic text in order to investigate and explore the modality of censorship. Havel’s own theories of playwriting challenge the notion of him as just a political, dissident playwright; these theories can elucidate a reading of his plays that tell us something about the mechanism of censorship and its practices, especially as it relates to language and the individual.

The conditions of censorship in Czechoslovakia in the 1960s are central to Havel’s response and central to understanding totalitarian censorship as more covert and invasive, as well as more flexible than has previously been assumed (previous to work by translation studies scholars such as Kate Sturge). This flexibility and invasiveness is important to understand, not only in the Czech case, but also in thinking about strategies to resist and overcome overt and covert censorship practices in closed and open societies.

Havel’s case elucidates what can happen under conditions of source-language censorship when translation enters the equation. Surprisingly, the authority with the ability to censor translations of his work, the state literary agency, DILIA, moved between obfuscation and keen support of the translations. In this case, a totalitarian regime saw advantages in translating ideologically suspect plays for two reasons: money and prestige and, in doing this, curiously reflected producers and agencies in the Western market economies. In addition, DILIA showed little interest in textual interference, using extratextual tactics (withholding contracts, bureaucratic delays, pressure on the translator, withholding income) for censorship purposes; in essence, applying contractual constraints on Havel, sometimes to prevent or delay foreign productions, but also often to leverage better or more prestigious contracts.

Finally, I want to question the redemptive narrative about Havel’s plays, one that suggests that they moved from total censorship to a free-speech stage because of the agendas and misreadings behind the English-language productions of his plays in the 1960s. Left untouched textually under censorship conditions at home, Havel and his translator were under constant pressure to adapt and cut his plays in English. Havel was fully aware that there would be necessary changes to the translations because of cultural and target language differences, but the changes demanded by theatres and producers went beyond necessity and reflected an ideological motive in rewriting the plays for cultural taste and norms. As Denise Merkle, Francesca Billiani, and Maria Tymoczko have suggested, such reductive readings of translated texts exhibit features of covert censorship. Coetzee’s notion of the “absolutist reader”—the reader searching for interpretable texts—opens up questions of why Havel was read in the West as a political playwright mired in his local context and time and whether this case can inform how English-language cultures inculcate the meaning and message of translated plays for their own ends, thereby ridding the plays of their actual “newness.”

Appellative theatre and analogical translation

Havel’s director and collaborator in the 1960s, Jan Grossman, argued as an introduction to the first English publication of The Memorandum (in the Tulane Drama Review, 1967) that the ambiguity in the play was not a political expediency—a means of escaping the censor—but rather a means of making the play interactive so that “the audience should be considered not just as a production requirement, but as co-creator” (Grossman 1967: 118). Havel’s plays, he writes, “create a specific dialogue between stage and audience, with ample room for complementary meanings and associations” (p. 119). Grossman and Havel called this the “appellative” theatre, one which posed questions in jarring juxtapositions for the audience to answer (Burian 2000: 120). Grossman did not regard this to be a revolutionary approach to drama:

Both Shakespeare and Chekhov, in their vastly different ways, through mystery, fragmentation, ambiguity—the strange unspecified space which lures the audience and tempts it to fill the void—evoke a dialogue. A great theatre reveals not only itself and its story: it also reveals the viewer’s story, and with it his urgent need to confront his own experience with the theme presented on stage. Such a play does not end with the performance; the curtain is only the beginning. (Grossman 1967: 118)

Although The Memorandum has been read politically as a critique of the nonsensical “communication in the totalitarian system in which Havel and his fellow Czechs live” (Rocamora 2004: 65), “satirizing the slogan-like phrases of the Communist Party and demonstrating how incomprehensible and meaningless they really are” (p. 66), or, as a critique of “the questionable nature of the post-Stalinist reforms” (Trensky 1978: 120), the play is neither polemic nor merely a political satire of a given situation. What interests Havel is the metaphysics of language as power and the mechanisms by which human control of language only exposes an ontological entrapment by language as a power force itself. In other words, censorship can originate with us, bottom up, as well as from above.

To get his play on the stage Havel could not be political—DILIA, the state literary, and theatrical agency would not have given permission for it to be produced. But Havel did not simply write a “camouflaged” satire of the official or bureaucratic language of the Communist state and state organs such as DILIA. He was, like Czech filmmakers of his generation:

not interpreting meaning for the domestic audience or imposing a meaning—a loaded encoding—because the [plays] are not propagandistic or polemic, but they all allow, amongst other things, a space for interpretation under censorship that directly engages with the censorship practices themselves [. . .] the indirect, the unsaid expresses a modality of translation within the domestic languages the purpose of which was not simply to evade censorship but to engage with its practices, uniformity and uni-lingualism. (Taban and Woods 2006: 105)

Even in the domestic sphere, The Memorandum (as with Havel’s other plays) directly asks for a translation—the “loaded encoding” of the play demands an intralingual translation (what does Havel really mean?), but at the same time, makes the audience aware that in imposing their own readings on the play they are enacting a translation, the dangers of which (given the content of the play) are apparent. In deliberately not imposing meaning—by placing the play in an abstract, dehistoricized context—Havel subverts the political reductiveness of censorship practices, but also questions how we, the audience, attribute meaning and the extent to which we have the potential of being censorial ourselves. In demanding that the audience participate in applying meaning, in translating, Havel demands that they think about the process itself.

In his prison letters to his wife (1979–82), Havel extrapolates on his theatrical philosophy (though denying that it is a philosophy, rather, a set of meditations on the theatre), emphasizing three important elements: first, the notion of openness of meaning; secondly, the danger of ideological playwriting as a threat to this first notion; and thirdly, the importance of structure and order in the play that allows openness of interpretation. Havel, of course, was formulating these thoughts under conditions of censorship; he was instructed only to write about himself and letters from the outside were frequently held back or doctored. What is remarkable about these meditations on the theatre, written under censorship, is how Havel formulated his thoughts about a theatre, that is, at its very basis, antithetical to conditions of censorship on a metaphysical rather than a political (i.e. dissident) level.

The problem with political theatre, in Havel’s eyes, was its codification of reading and meaning, in that it presented a message for the audience to digest rather than provoking them to read the play as it was performed, to interpret, and translate the play into their own experience. He noted that “modern drama is so frequently thesis-ridden, so infected—either deliberately or voluntarily—with didacticism or ideology. Such an approach, it seems to me, throws the baby out with the bathwater” (Havel 1988: 285). Referring to his respect for Brecht, the poster-boy of political playwriting, he wrote “it’s a cool and polite respect; frankly, I only like his non-Brechtian moments, when the thing, as it were, becomes bigger than his is” (p. 285). For Havel, the institution of a political message or raison d’etre in a play cut off the potenti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Introduction: Contexts
• 1    Censorships and constraints
• 2    Gender censorship
• 3    Market censorship
• Conclusion: Leaving
• Bibliography
• Index