Spring is not far off and since my last post my residency, alongside fellow translator Olivia Hellewell, at the British Centre for Literary Translation, has come to its conclusion. This four-month stint embedded within the University of East Anglia was a true gift: I hugely enjoyed all my conversations with colleagues, and in particular it was a real pleasure to facilitate workshops with students of translation and drama on the theme of theatre translation. I was also able to share some of my own translation work with the online scriptwriting forum ScriptXtra, run by playwright Steve Waters, and to present a seminar on the challenges of translating dialect in the works of leading Chilean playwright, Bosco Israel Cayo Álvarez.
In the last days of my residency I took part in two events that felt like a very appropriate farewell. For the National Centre for Writing’s The Writing Life podcast, I spoke to Sue Healy, Literary Manager of London’s Finborough Theatre about all things theatre translation in the UK.
And with Theatre503, I co-hosted the second-ever directors and translators ‘speed-dating’ session. Following an open call, T503 Literary Manager Steve Harper and I hosted an online evening of one-to-one introductions and conversations between seven translators and seven theatre directors. The event was a huge success, I look forward to seeing what projects result from it, and I hope we will be able to do the same thing in 2022.
Creating opportunities for emerging theatre translators is an important theme for me and few are centring this endeavour as enthusiastically as my friends Trine Garrett and Camila França at the international theatre company Foreign Affairs. January saw the culmination of the fourth iteration of their pioneering theatre translation programme which I was proud once again to be a mentor for. The 2020-21 cohort saw translators working from Dutch, German, Spanish, Arabic, Latvian and Brazilian Portuguese working in a fully digital environment over a period of several months before having their translations showcased on Zoom in a celebratory sharing of their process. You can read all about the plays, the translators and the playwrights in this excellent guide produced by Foreign Affairs for the occasion.
As the programme came to an end, Trine and Camila invited me, along with translators Paul Russell Garrett, Charis Ainslie and Daniel Hahn, to talk about the programme and its four-year history.
Showcasing the work of earlier-career theatre translators was also the theme of the opening night of the Winter Warmer, a week-long celebration of theatre in translation by Out of the Wings, the theatre translation collective I’ve been a proud member of since 2014. Hosted online by London’s Omnibus Theatre, the week began with a scratch night of extracts of plays in translation from ten translators, ranging from a German farce from 1806 to a contemporary thriller from Norway, with some children’s theatre from Hungary and a mysterious dreamscape from Mexico on the way.
The Winter Warmer culminated in a one-day forum of panels, conversations and films exploring Black playwrights and theatremakers in the Spanish- and Portuguese-Speaking worlds. All three panels can be found on the Out of the Wings Youtube channel here. As part of the day I had the great pleasure of chairing a session focussing on Spain with Layla Benitez-James and Dr. Jeffrey K. Coleman, featuring an interview with Spanish playwright Silvia Albert.
Another part of the Winter Warmer was the launch of publisher Inti Press and its first six titles, all new English translations of plays from Spanish and Portuguese, including my translation of The Widow of Apablaza, a classic of 20th-Century Chilean theatre by Germán Luco Cruchaga.
Continuing on the theme of my own translation work, in January I completed a translation of the Max Award-winning All the Days I Lied by Catalan writer and performer Marta Aran, and submitting my final draft of Bosco Israel Cayo Álvarez’s Re-Housing Plan 2015-2045 for its forthcoming publication by Laertes Press.
And returning to where I began this post, at the British Centre for Literary Translation. It was wonderful news to learn that, following last year’s first-ever theatre translation strand at the BCLT’s annual Summer School, the workshop will return for 2021 and will again be entirely online, allowing participants to attend from anywhere in the world. Furthermore an impressive suite of bursaries are available. So, if you’re interested in translating for the stage, please take a look!
