Monday, November 15, 2021
"Where I Call Home": Translating "Gens du pays"
The Theatre Times: Back in April 2018, I’d been reading my way through a selection of French plays proposed for translation by the Eurodram committee. Gens du pays was the thirteenth I looked at – and the first I couldn’t put down.
What was it about this play? There’s a simplicity to it, a lightness of touch, a cinematic sparsity that comes from having only three main characters. It takes you in, makes you laugh.
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This is a super interesting article! Translating any work is a huge undertaking, but I can only imagine the difficulties that come with a play. Maintaining a level of faith and accuracy to the original is vital, but at the same time the lines need to feel natural as they come out of the actors’ mouths. The author of the article was lucky enough to be able to collaborate with the original playwright--many are not that fortunate! She was also lucky enough to have the support of the Foreign Affairs Theatre Translation Mentorship program, which sounds like an incredible opportunity. It seemed like a very lengthy process, but one which ultimately paid off greatly. Her description of the English translation finally going up felt triumphant. One part I found very interesting was the question of relocating the setting of the play. From her description, the play sounds necessarily French, but the playwright was ok with it being set in England. It probably changes some of the themes of the play, but makes it more relatable to audiences. There are a lot of difficult questions to answer while translating.
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