












































Preface to Special Issue on Performance 
and Translation

The previous issue (Fall 2019) of Delos began with a preface about 
prefaces, and so I will briefly harken back to that meta- literary move by 
beginning this preface with a quote from a preface.

In his famous introduction to what was to become his most infamous drama, 
The Playboy of the Western World (1907), Irish dramatist John Millington 
Synge observed: “In a good play every speech should be as fully flavoured as 
a nut or apple.” Synge had lived among the denizens of Ireland’s rugged west-
ern coast and turned their vernacular into poetry, and he was scornful of 
what he saw as the “pallid” language of realists like Ibsen, Strindberg, or 
Chekhov. To my knowledge, Synge (whose own dialogue was sometimes 
derided as “Synge- song”) knew no Norwegian, Swedish, or Russian, so what 
he found “joyless” in the drama of his foreign peers was likely the result of 
inferior translation. Perhaps the crisp lucidity of Ibsen’s Norwegian, the fever-
ish vitality of Strindberg’s Swedish, and the floating melancholy of Chek-
hov’s Russian had trickled away by the time it made it to Synge’s critical ear.

In this special issue of Delos, the contributors focus on translation and per-
formance, translation for performance. The stage and its performers depend 
on the liveness and liveliness of language. Among translators of plays, there 
is a rule of thumb, though perhaps more honored in the breach than the obser-
vance, that the shelf- life of a theatrical translation is only about twenty- five 
years. In a quarter- century spoken language, as a living, shifting thing, mutates 
enough that what seemed fresh and colloquial then has become staid and dated 
now.

The example of Shakespeare is instructive. In the global English- speaking 
theatre his plays are of course performed, more or less, as he wrote them over 
400 years ago. But in Germany, which since Wieland and Goethe in the 
eighteenth century embraced Shakespeare as if he were a native playwright 
who inconveniently happened to be writing in a foreign tongue, the ques-
tion of which translation to use is a continually pressing one. The magisterial 
Schlegel- Tieck- Baudissin translations of the Romantic era were long the 
gold standard—it was in their words that Hamlet ruminated on Sein oder 

Delos Vol. 35, No. 1, pp. v–vii. Copyright © 2020 University of Florida Press. 
doi: 10.5744/delos.2020.1010



vi    Preface to Special Issue on Performance and Translation

Nichtsein— but the twentieth century increasingly demanded that Shakespeare 
answer to the urgencies of modernism, that he become less elevated and more 
streamlined, psychological, absurdist, political. Or rather that that which was 
already political, absurdist, etc. in his work be excavated and brought forth. 
As recently as 2017 Frank Günther completed a new German translation of 
all 37 plays. So while in England and the U.S. contemporary audiences are 
increasingly daunted by Shakespeare’s archaisms, in Germany, through the 
translator’s art, he bestrides the stage a colossus with a language as sharp, 
breezy, poetic, and idiomatic as it must have sounded at the Globe all those 
centuries ago.

All of this issue’s contributors, in their own way, address the questions of 
the power of language in performance and its connection to both meaning and 
emotion.

Mina Kyounghye Kwon presents an excerpt of her translation of the Korean 
rod- puppet play kkokdugaksi noreum. Of all of the rich puppetry traditions of 
Asia, the Japanese bunraku and the Indonesian wayang kulit may be some-
what familiar to Western readers, but the Korean genres are much less well 
known. Kwon’s translation introduces us to the garrulous folk character Bak 
Cheomji, whose boastful exploits animate the play, and provides a unique win-
dow into this popular tradition.

Following, reprinted here as a tribute to the issue’s theme, are selected pas-
sages from German Enlightenment thinker and dramatist Gotthold Ephraim 
Lessing’s Hamburg Dramaturgy in which Lessing specifically reflects upon 
the question of dramatic translation. At the time, German theatre was trying 
to find an autonomous voice and identity between English looseness and strict 
French neoclassicism. In Caron Cadle’s translation, Lessing’s keen understand-
ing of dramatic form and his sparkling wit emerge intact.

My own renderings of four of Frank Wedekind’s cabaret songs give a taste of 
this literary free spirit whose personal exploits as much as his daring texts scan-
dalized the audiences of his time. One must imagine Wedekind’s hulking figure 
strumming his guitar and singing these bawdy songs in a voice his admirer 
Bertolt Brecht described as “creaky, somewhat monotone, and very untrained.”

Brecht himself is at issue in Peter Ferran’s essay on the most familiar bal-
lad to emerge from his international smash hit The Threepenny Opera (1928), 
the song of “Mackie Messer,” or Mac the Knife. The ubiquitous translation of 
this iconic song by Marc Blitzstein—popularized by Louis Armstrong and 
others—rings in our ears, but Ferran’s careful excavation of Brecht’s gestus 
(what we might call the performative iteration of his social attitude) reveals 
how slyly the ditty implicates its audience in the lionization of crime.



Preface to Special Issue on Performance and Translation    vii

The current Broadway remount of the iconic musical West Side Story 
under the direction of Ivo van Hove and the forthcoming Steven Spielberg- 
directed film make Colleen Rua’s exploration of the politics of bilinguality 
in this piece particularly urgent. Part of her larger work on Latinx represen-
tation on Broadway, the essay reads the ambivalent response to the “code- 
switching” of lyrics in a recent revival as characteristic of the still- problematic 
effort to bring Latinidad to the mainstream stage.

The obverse holds for the case of David Bowie’s musical Lazarus, which 
Susan Ingram discusses in her contribution. German audiences in particular 
embraced the production precisely because it maintained a balance between 
translated dialogue and the original English lyrics. It was the translator’s deci-
sion to leave Bowie’s songs in their original language that allowed them to 
unfold their greatest affective power and resonance.

The Sicilian playwright Emma Dante is the subject of Francesca Spedal-
ieri’s essay and her translation of an excerpt of the play mPalermu. Spedalieri 
traces how the interweaving of Palermitan dialect and standard Italian recapit-
ulates the characters’ ambiguous position between their regional identity and 
their longing to join the cultural and linguistic mainstream of a country that 
relegates them to near- colonial status. Spedalieri’s “foreignized” translation 
makes this contradiction audible, palpable to English- speaking audiences.

Brazilian performer Beatriz Azevedo’s “ground- floor- poem” Peripatetic 
occupies the space between spoken- word poetry and performance art. In 
Charles Perrone’s skillful translation the poem resonates with the pulse of 
urban life as the text of the city and the architecture of the words coalesce.

The issue is rounded out by an expansive review essay by Stephen Rojce-
wicz of two novels by Olga Tokarczuk and their translations. Tokarczuk 
received the 2018 Man Booker Prize and the 2018 Nobel Prize for Literature, 
making the essay particularly timely. Tokarczuk’s writing is rich with linguis-
tic layers and shifting points of view, and Rojcewicz manages deftly to eluci-
date her dense textual and thematic world.

Ralf Remshardt, Guest Editor




