Caroline Bergvall’s Drift was produced as text, performance and gallery installation between 2012 and 2014. An Old English poem that survives in a single manuscript dated to around the year 1000, ‘The Seafarer’, is one of the beginnings of the project. Drift features translations and rewritings of ‘The Seafarer’ and uses it to chart global transfers – of language, texts, ideas and people – across space and time. This chapter explores how Drift meditates on the personal and political translations that structure our knowledge of the past and present, and how Bergvall marks out the temporal possibilities and ethical limits of movement across and between times and languages.

Translation in a global world is not only literary but also profoundly performative, embedded in how ideas and gestures, sounds and voices transform and move. We draw from dominant theorizations about translation as literary work and rise up to the challenge of thinking translation performatively, within a theatrical setting and beyond, as a medium, a mode and a method. Our inter-related arguments therefore sit at the intersection of three disciplinary (or interdisciplinary) formations – Comparative Literature, Translation Studies and Theatre and Performance Studies – even as they attempt to bridge another set of enduring divides, between theoretical and practical approaches to translation, between Theatre and Performance Studies. In sum, we argue that performance emerges as a generative and indispensable frame and method for thinking translation as an act that is not only transdisciplinary but also necessarily trans-medial.

This chapter explores the possibilities and limits of translating race through a comparative reading of two recent plays by the French-Algerian playwright Mohamed Rouabhi: Vive la France and All Power to the People! It argues that the divergent reception of these plays – Republican outrage about Rouabhi’s play on French colonialism, liberal praise of his representation of racism in the USA – is based on a profound misunderstanding of the ways in which Rouabhi translates race on the French stage. If the reception of Vive la France speaks to a longstanding reluctance to acknowledge the experience of racialization and the memory of colonization, it also inadvertently reveals the political stakes of staging American Blackness in France. This chapter mines transcolonial performance for its transformative possibilities and performative insurgencies, and argues that theatrical performance makes possible a mode of translation that brings the original back into circulation in a comparative, relational, and transitive sense.

The chapter explores translation between images and language through the practice of audio description for blind and partially sighted theatre audiences. This practice exceeds analytical models such as ekphrasis or intersemiotic translation because of the particular circumstances in which the texts are received: they are performed live alongside their sources (set, costume, lighting, gestures), and in dialogue with other performance modalities (such as live and recorded sound). The embodied nature of the practice affects how the describer constructs a spectatorial ‘gaze’, particularly in relation to performers’ bodies. Examples are drawn from two performances that foreground bodies and the gaze: Beauty and the Beast (Julie Atlas Muz and Mat Fraser, 2013), and a short cabaret act, Scarf Dance by Amelia Cavallo. The latter performance suggests ways in which attention to the gaze in burlesque might help to develop a ‘critical audio description’.

In the sixteenth century, the Hapsburg dynasty leveraged burgeoning technologies of print to appropriate an antique Roman ceremony known as the triumph. In collaboration with leading artists and scholars of the day, Hapsburg rulers created documents of triumphal performances that were also themselves performative documents, casting the Hapsburgs as inheritors of imperial Rome, while reimagining the idea of empire itself for a newly globalized world. By looking at three case studies that frame the life and reign of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (1500–1549), I argue that the Hapsburgs drew on new capacities to reproduce text and images to localize their arguments through verbal and visual cues that appealed to audiences’ regional pride and emergent national imaginaries. By virtue of these performative documents – when their complex rhetorical cues were effective – diverse reading publics throughout the transatlantic Empire could participate in political rituals translated across language, space, and time.

This chapter examines what it meant to perform translation in Cavalleria rusticana. It examines: 1) the original novella written by Giovanni Verga in 1880; 2) the 1884 stage version adapted by the author and interpreted by a variety of star actors, including Eleonora Duse and the Sicilian dialect players; and 3) the 1890 operatic version composed by Pietro Mascagni and performed by celebrity sopranos, such as Emma Calvé. Through close examination of newspaper reviews and early accounts, it is argued that performing translation meant generating and circulating an exoticized ‘brand’ of Sicilian-ness in and outside the Italian peninsula shortly after political unification in 1861. This chapter thus offers new perspectives into questions of racial stereotypes, and a provides basis for new insights into the Sicilian dialect players, in particular, who, pioneering a physical and bodily form of communication, transcended language barriers and mediated the foreign text through a kind of translation that went beyond the written word.

This chapter critically explores the implications of including: surtitles in live performance; a multilingual performance archive; and live streaming of a live performance. Drawing on the subjective experience of translation through a live forum theatre piece, Exit (2018) by Drama Box (Singapore), online video recordings of Macbeth (2007) by Tainaner Ensemble and Li Er Zai Ci (2001) by Contemporary Legend Theatre, and both a live staging and YouTube streaming of Beware of Pity (2017) by Complicite and Schaubühne Berlin, the chapter considers how audience members access language through both hearing and seeing them as surtitles. This extends to how textual display and spoken language can combine to determine the subjective experience of a multilingual performance. Hearing affects what one sees on stage, and vice versa, particularly in a context where translation plays an important role.

In this chapter, I consider how translation pertains to the body on stage as a site of multiplicity and propose the term ‘transembodiment’ in my analysis of Weronika Szczawińska and Bartosz Frąckowiak’s Komornicka. Biografia pozorna (Komornicka. Ostensible biography, 2011). My intention in considering transembodiment is to analyse the effects and limitations of physical and fictional bodies as they appear within the mimetic, representational and concrete frame of the theatre space. Ultimately, I argue that the body is itself a paradigmatic site of translation, which can neither be reduced to nor fully dislodged from language, and which is both submitted to and escapes processes of mimetic representation. In this way, I do not offer transembodiment as a methodology but rather as a structure and a consequence of the process of transmission in the theatre that invites new subjects to emerge and come into being.

This wide-ranging conversation, for the first time, attempts to trace possible resonances between Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s thinking of translation going all the way back to her influential essay The Politics of Translation published 25 years ago, and various ideas of performance. She begins by saying that the question might be more complex than simply positing a relationship between translation and performance. Instead, she refers the reader/listener first to Derrida’s notion of spacing as the place to begin thinking about non-languaged aspects of meaning-making (approaching, in this sense, the spatial, non-verbal attributes of theatre and performance), and as such the work of death; and second, to the idea that translation takes place after the death of the sonic/phonic body of language. The interview ends by way of Spivak’s reflections on her experience of translating a play, the futures of créolité, and the pitfalls of machine translation.

In my practice-based research The Archive of Gestures, I revive an array of gestures and movements present in alternative Palestinian narratives, which were suppressed by Israel and left out of mainstream Palestinian history, by re-enacting, deconstructing and commenting on the gestures and context they were performed in, using interactive video dance installation and participatory performance as artistic and archival forms. In this chapter I analyse four artistic works that resulted from this research: A Fidayee Son in Moscow (2014), Cells of Illegal Education (2016), Gesturing Refugees (2018), What My Body Can/t Remember (2019). In all the works interactivity and participation with the audience play a central role. Here, I explain how moving-thinking together, through re-enacting, transforming and transmitting latent gestural archives, helps embody and translate the stories and their gestures to the audience members’ bodies. This allows the audience to identify with the context of these stories, creating empathy and contributing towards future responsibility.

The question of how translation can do justice is not about seeking equivalence but of acknowledging that translation is, following Spivak, insufficient but necessary nonetheless. I suggest that in asking what kind of justice translation might do, the term translation is carried across (trans-latio) from its technical or formal to its ethical-political dimensions, and the term justice is shifted from the terrain of the quest for parity or alikeness (eye for an eye) to the terrain of repair, dignity, care, responsibility, a justice on terms that are yet to be ascertained. This makes translation into a critical concept in theatre and performance, where, perhaps more than in any other art form, there is a systemic concern with how humans relate to each other and to non-human others.

This chapter thinks about ways that language is lived interstitially – between registers, accents, national histories, and personal travels – as something that (embarrassingly) always spills out or crops up when one is least ready for it to do so, revealing or mis-revealing a particular linguistic genealogy. Looking closely at Québécois poet Michèle Lalonde’s iconic 1967 poem-manifesto Speak White, and various recorded performances of this poem by speakers offering distinctive manners of accenting or pronouncing the bilingual (English–French) relations and agonisms enacted in the poem, this chapter further reflects autoethnographically or autocritically at ways the author’s own transnational and hybrid relation to these languages further helps to complicate national and international narratives. At once personal and political, historical, and critical, the chapter reflects on ways that language performatively offers an affective archive of one’s embodied and ancestral trajectories, and fails ever quite to account for how we experience the migrations and misalignments of our everyday.