First things first: apologies for the ongoing issues with my website. Hopefully you will be able to read this, but a few other functions are failing at the moment. Please bear with me while I get things fixed.
Summer in London is receding and even as theatres have reopened and shows are back onstage, the online world is still very much active, and certainly for me the last few months have reflected that.
In July I was so thrilled to facilitate the theatre translation strand of the annual British Centre for Literary Translation summer school. For the second consecutive year, this took place entirely through screens, but this did not diminish the excitement I felt at working with nine brilliant translators working from languages including Turkish, Estonian, Romanian and Argentinian Spanish. It has been wonderful to see the profession growing, with more people trying their hand at working with playwrights and, in so doing, bringing into English the works of dramatists from more and more countries and different theatre traditions.
The early summer also saw the online talks of the ‘TA at Home’ event, organised by the Translators Association of the Society of Authors. The talks are still available online, and vary from ‘How to Edit Award-Winning Translations‘ to ‘Translating Women’s Non-Fiction Narratives‘. For the event I joined colleagues Vineet Lal, Jamie Lee Searle and chair Rosalind Harvey to discuss the tricky subject of success: we asked what that word even means for a translator working in the arts, and what realities can lie behind the apparent success we see in others.
As the summer continued, the Out of the Wings Festival of plays from the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking worlds at last made its return to the physical stage in August. Following a one-year hiatus owing to the pandemic, we were thrilled finally to share with our audiences six plays from six countries in UK premiere, at the Omnibus Theatre in London. During a remarkable week, we were delighted to see our readings performed to full houses, and even including a live performance from Lima, Peru, via Zoom link. Full information about the six plays and all the artists involved can be found at the Out of the Wings website, and you can hear me and festival director Catherine Boyle talking about all six of them below, and at our YouTube channel you can find videos of our writers, translators and others taking about their work.
Out of the Wings is active all year round with a monthly table read of a new play in translation. All are welcome to join us and for the foreseeable future our meetings will remain online. The next meeting with be on September 24 at 1500BST: do join us!
The OOTW festival included ‘You Shall Love‘ by the Chilean playwright Pablo Manzi, translated and directed by Camila Ymay González. For the Royal Court Theatre I have also been working with Pablo on his new play ‘A Fight Against…‘, a brilliant, darkly comic odyssey through the Americas exploring themes of community, identity, violence, and the concept of the enemy. ‘A Fight Against…’ was originally programmed to open in May 2020, but when the pandemic hit, the production was put on hold. I am hugely grateful that the Royal Court has stuck with us, though, and at last we are able to confirm that the play will be opening in London this coming December, running through into the new year. Booking opens soon, so don’t miss this brilliant play from one of the leading theatrical voices of Chile.
Meanwhile, in Miami… In a first for me, my translation was used by Arca Images for live simultaneous interpreting into English for audiences of ‘Tell Me the Whole Thing Again’ by Abel González Melo, the Cuban author of plays such as ‘Chamaco’ and ‘Weathered’, both produced at HOME in Manchester a few years ago. I don’t envy Carlos Jara, pictured here, having to play every single part in English and keep pace with the action on stage. Bravo!
Last but certainly not least, I begin work this month on a new play from Spain, Mafalda Bellido’s ‘Los que comen tierra‘. (It’s one of those plays where the title in English will need some thought.) This is a beautifully constructed, deeply moving, important play about the legacy of civil war and fascism in Spain and the efforts to find justice for the disappeared and executed of a decades-old conflict whose stories remained untold even when Spain transitioned to democracy. Mafalda’s play moves from the lyrical to the realist, the comic to the tragic, the choral to the personal, weaving history into the present day and asking us all, wherever we are, to acknowledge the aspects of the past that we may as individuals or nations have preferred to keep buried, often literally. I’m grateful to the Fundación SGAE in Spain for its support for the translation.
Another long post! I guess I will never manage to do these updates as regularly as I intend.
Until next time.
