by Philippa Wehle
[I’ve just posted reports on two foreign-language
plays, both part of this summer’s Lincoln Center Festival. One, While I Was Waiting, was in
Arabic and the other, To the End of
the Land, was in Hebrew—and both employed
supertitles. (My reports on these plays
were posted on 1 and 6 August, respectively.)
I’ve often complained about how this device is used in theaters here, a
common phenomenon at international festivals like LCF and the Next Wave
Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
Usually they’re placed so that a spectator like me can’t read them and
watch the actors at the same time—or even alternately. That was the case with To the End of the
Land—though While I Was Waiting handled
the matter differently, putting the supertitle screen on stage as part of the
set. Waiting included a two-level platform and the screen was located at the
half-way point so it was just beneath the feet of the actors on the upper level
or just over the heads of the actors on the stage level—perfect for reading the
text and watching the actors at the
same time. (Another frequent problem,
especially with what Philippa Wehle calls “language based plays,” is that the
text goes by in the supertitles too fast to read. Below, Wehle ponders the need to translate
the whole text.) My friend Diana, with whom
I often go to shows, passed on going the the Lincoln Center Festival this year
because she didn’t want to contend with supertitles. Diana’s an opera fan and she often remarks
that opera houses like New York’s Met have small screens embedded in the backs
of each seat so that patrons can read the titles right in front of them. No playhouse that I know of does this,
probably because, unlike opera, theater repertoires don’t regularly include
foreign-language performances. (I also
presume the technology is expensive to install.)
[I came across Wehle’s two short essays on supertitles while
I was writing my report on While I Was Waiting and I downloaded them to keep in reserve for
reposting at an appropriate time. I
think that’s now, with the Syrian and Israeli play reports just published on Rick On Theater. The first article below was
originally published on The
Theatre Times, a New York website, on 26 October 2016 (https://thetheatretimes.com/musings-on-supertitles/).]
“MUSINGS ON SUPERTITLES”
Thinking about how
to make supertitles more friendly, more accessible to an audience that is
anxious to know what is being said in French or Italian or Lithuanian (as was
the case with the stunning piece I saw in Avignon this summer, Didvyriu
Aikste, directed by Kritian Lupa), but also how they can enhance the
experience of the play. I recently saw two shows that used them
efficiently and differently with great success.
Romeo
Castellucci’s Go Down, Moses at Peak Performances in Montclair
[New Jersey], began with a scrim behind which we could see the players walking
back and forth and exchanging bits of conversation in Italian, of course.
Later a Mother, the main figure in this piece, is being interrogated by a
police inspector who speaks very fast as does the Mother. Instead of
supertitles overhead or on the sides, they were on the scrim and clearly part
of the performance, not a separate entity. The scrim is used throughout
the play not only to distance us from the performance but also as a location
for the supertitles. Of course, Castellucci’s shows are mostly wordless.
They are visceral experiences rather than linguistic, but it is still important
to understand what the woman, who painfully delivers a baby in a public toilet,
whom she names Moses, is talking about. For example:
“We are close, so
close to a new beginning of the world
. . . How can we say
this to the poor?
They are fated to
toil.”
It is fantastic to
be able to watch her and see the words on the scrim at the same time rather
than having our eyes leaving the stage to look upward and our necks aching from
an hour or two of trying to keep up with action and words.
The other show
was Letter to a Man, Robert Wilson’s piece created for Mikhail
Baryshnikov, seen at BAM [Brooklyn Academy of Music] on Wednesday, Oct 19 [2016]. Baryshnikov is wonderful
as always. His dancing is so elegant; his presence throughout is electrifying.
From time to time, fragments of text are heard, either in Russian or in
English. “I am not Diaghilev.” Or “I understand war because I fought with
my mother-in-law.” These are excerpts from Nijinsky’s diaries written when the
great Russian dancer was losing his mind and was put in a mental institution by
his wife. The words we hear are voiceovers recorded by Robert Wilson,
Baryshnikov and Lucinda Childs. When they are heard, we also see them
written as supertitles.
We hear “I am not
Christ. I am Nijinsky.” In Russian, then in English and back to Russian,
spoken by Baryshnikov in audio fragments, repeated over and over. These
phrases add essential layers to the drama of this man whose mind is
deteriorating. We may not know Russian but the English translation follows
immediately and then comes the Russian again. This is fascinating to me. I’m
wondering if the art of creating supertitles couldn’t learn from this.
I’m just dreaming but instead of whole sections of a dramatic text in English
projected up on a screen, for example, could there be shortened versions with
the English on one side and the translated language on the other? The
audience for Wilson’s play was filled with Russians the night I saw it. I
have a feeling they must have been hearing the English as well as the Russian
just as I was and perhaps feeling a melting together of both languages to add
an exciting cultural dimension to the experience.
Of course, I realize
that both of these pieces are mainly visual and physical, and that the problem
remains as to how to successfully create supertitles for language based plays
without translating every word.
MORE MUSINGS ON
SUPERTITLES
[Wehle’s second article on supertitles was posted on The Theatre Times on
24 December 2016 (https://thetheatretimes.com/more-musings-on-supertitles/).]
“Knowing two
languages doesn’t make you a translator any more than having ten fingers makes
you a pianist.” Unknown wise person
I have recently been
asked to translate an important book on the subject of supertitles in the
theatre. Called Guide du Sur-titrage au
théâtre, and published in 2016 by the Maison Antoine Vitez International translation center in Paris.
Written by Michel Bataillon, Laurent Muhleisen and Pierre-Yves Diez, i[t] is a
fascinating and thorough presentation of the principles and practices of
creating the best possible supertitles. Along with answers to questions such as
“Are supertitles absolutely necessary?” there is practical information about
how to set them up on Power Point frames, in terms of length and number of
lines per slide, dialogue and punctuation.
I love the authors’
comments such as “It’s a mortal sin to put any information on a frame that has
not yet been spoken by the actor.” It’s hard enough for the audience to read
the translated words that are zooming by. So please don’t confuse them.
Elsewhere the
authors make it very clear how important the job of sending the supertitles
onto the screen is. It is preferable that the translator of the titles be the
same person as the one who sends the titles.
He or she is in charge of making sure that the comic or emotional
effects hit the right spot. There is
nothing more disturbing to performers and directors than to hear laughter or a
gasp after the delivery. To achieve an optimal result, the translator must
attend rehearsals and consult with the author and the director as well as the
performers. Imagine a show that lasts
for two and one-half hours. The person in charge of sending the slides sends
about 2,000 titles during that time. The least mistake will be noticed.
Needless to say, it is a very hard job and it is not often sufficiently
acknowledged. As translator both from English to French and French to English
over the past several years, I have been amazed to discover that my name is not
on the credits not to mention that a theater company has used my translation
without permission.
Another matter that
concerns me is the question of how to downsize the original text without
offending the author. First and foremost, it’s important to collaborate with
all of the artists involved not just the playwright. I’ve been fortunate to work closely with very
helpful artists whose plays I have had the pleasure of translating. I insist on a close collaboration even if the
artist is in Zagreb and extremely busy.
For example, I worked with Kenneth Collins on three of his shows. These words from him in an e-mail are typical
of the kind of response I’ve had from all of the artists with whom I’ve
worked: “In terms of cutting words, it
is really a case by case basis,” he wrote. “Some stuff I feel is important to
the nature of what is being communicated . . . some stuff, clearly not so
much. Do you want to talk on the phone
and walk me through what you would like to cut? . . . Then I can determine if I
feel they take away from what I’m trying to say or not.”
More musings:
The wonderful Tiago
Rodrigues, head of the Portuguese National Theater in Lisbon, who is a
playwright, performer and director extraordinaire, performs his shows in
Portuguese, of course, but also in French and English. No need for supertitles
with Tiago. It’s fun to think of how
many people get to see his shows in a language they understand without the need
for supertitles.
Talking with a
friend the other day about the thorny problems of supertitles, she volunteered
that she had finally seen Hamilton.
To prepare for this exciting event, she bought the CD and listened to the
lyrics because she knew that even if the company is singing in English, she
wouldn’t follow them as well as she wanted to. Fascinating, I thought.
I’ve been in
theaters where the translation of a text for a show in a foreign language is
handed out to the audience in advance. A
good idea, I think, but it frequently doesn’t solve the problem of a fuller
experience of the play. Either heads are down, reading the text, or the
translation is read later.
[These posts were written by
the author in her personal capacity. The opinions expressed in these articles
are the author’s own and do not reflect the view of The Theatre Times, its staff or collaborators.
[The Theatre Times is a non-partisan, global portal for theater
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forms of human expression.
[Philippa Wehle, an editor
and translator, is Professor Emerita of French Language and Culture and Drama
Studies at Purchase College, State University of New York. She writes widely on
contemporary theater and performance and is the author of Le Théâtre populaire selon
Jean Vilar (Actes Sud, 1991 and 2012), Drama
Contemporary: France (Performing Arts
Journal Publications 1986) and Act French: Contemporary Plays from France (PAJ Publications, 2007). She has
translated numerous contemporary French language plays (by Marguerite Duras,
Nathalie Sarraute, Philippe Minyana, José Pliya, and others). Her latest
activity is translating contemporary New York theater productions into French
for supertitles (ERS, Kenneth Collins, Jay Scheib, Basil Twist, Okwui
Okpokwasili, Tina Satter, Christina Masciotti, and Andrew Schneider). Dr. Wehle
is a Chevalier in the French Order of Arts and Letters.]
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