The Voyage of the Trojan Women: from Euripides to Sartre and from Sartre to Theatre Research Laboratory

Year 2013, Volume: 36 Issue: 36, 21 - 60, 01.06.2013

Burç İdem Dinçel

https://doi.org/10.1501/TAD_0000000301

Abstract

The closing words—“Farewell, Troy! Now the lifted oar waits for us: Ships of Greece, we come!”—of the chorus in Euripides’ The Trojan Women have strong connotations in the sense that the very word “journey” evokes. On the one hand, these words put the journey that The Trojan Women would undertake in the course of time on centre stage; and on the other, they draw attention to the relationship between Euripides’ text and the versions that derive from it. Glancing at these two aspects, moreover, one can establish a link between the act of translation and “interpreting” Euripides’ The Trojan Women both on “page” and on “stage”. Within this context, the reception of The Trojan Women becomes a vital issue; all the more so when it is taken into consideration from the respective perspectives that Theatre Studies and Translation Studies provide. In this particular framework, the present paper seeks out to scrutinise a (relatively) recent production of The Trojan Women by Theatre Research Laboratory in Turkey based on Jean Paul Sartre’s “adaptation” of the text. The fact that Theatre Research Laboratory based its interpretation on Sartre’s rewriting of Euripides’ text is intriguing in that it compels one to monitor the way that the company perceived the “tragic” on “page”, and made it reborn on “stage” by means of highlighting the Dionysian element/s intrinsic to the Euripidean dramaturgy. The paper, therefore, sets out to propose a discussion of the production with the purpose of revealing Theatre Research Laboratory’s staging approach which aims to expose the pathos into view through a performance style that actually translates the “tragic” into the dynamics of the twenty-first century.

Keywords

Euripides, Sartre, Trojan Women, TAL, translation.

The Voyage of the Trojan Women: from Euripides to Sartre and from Sartre to Theatre Research Laboratory

Abstract

Euripides’in Troyalı Kadınlar’ında koronun kapanış sözleri—“Elveda Troya! Kürekler çekilmeye hazır bizi bekliyor şimdi: Helen gemileri, biz geliyoruz!”—“yolculuk” kelimesi açısından önemli çağrışımlara sahiptir. Bu sözler bir taraftan Troyalı Kadınlar’ın zaman içerisinde çıkacakları yolculuğu merkeze taşırken, diğer yandan da Euripides’in metni ve bu eserden türeyen çeşitli versiyonlar arasındaki ilişkiye de dikkat çeker. Keza bu iki hususa odaklanarak, çeviri edimi ve Euripides’in Troyalı Kadınlar’ını hem “sayfa” hem de “sahne” üzerinde “yorumlama” eylemi arasında bir bağ kurmak da mümkündür. Bu bağlamda Troyalı Kadınlar’ın alımlanması fazlasıyla mühim bir mesele haline gelir; bilhassa konuya sırasıyla Tiyatro Araştırmaları ve Çeviribilim perspektiflerinden bakıldığında. Bu çerçeve özelinde mevcut makale, oyunun, Türkiye’de Tiyatro Araştırma Laboratuvarı’nın Jean Paul Sartre’ın “uyarlaması” üzerinden şekillendirdiği (nispeten) yakın tarihli prodüksiyonunun incelemesini sunmayı amaçlamaktadır. Tiyatro Araştırma Laboratuvarı’nın yorumunu Sartre’ın Euripides’in metnini yeniden yazımı üzerine inşa etmesi, topluluğun “sayfa” üzerinde “trajik” olanı hangi yollardan kavrayıp, bunu Euripides dramaturjisine içkin Dionizyak unsurları ön plana çıkararak “sahne” üzerinde nasıl yeniden hayata geçirdiğini elzem bir araştırma sorusu olarak ortaya koyulmasına imkân verdiği için merak uyandırıcıdır. Bu yüzden makale Tiyatro Araştırma Laboratuvarı’nın, pathosu gözler önüne seren bir performans üslubuyla “trajik” olanı yirmi birinci yüzyıl dinamiklerine çeviren sahneleme yaklaşımını ortaya çıkarma gayesiyle söz konusu prodüksiyonu tartışmaya açmayı hedeflemektedir.

Keywords

Euripides, Sartre, Troyalı Kadınlar, TAL, çeviri.

References

• Aeschylus, (1961), Prometheus Bound and Other Plays, trans. Philip Vellacott, London: Penguin Books.
• Algan, Beklan et al., (1992), “Introduction to the Concept of Third Theatre as an Expression of Contemporary Man”, pp. 1-4.
• Beckett, Samuel, (1984) Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett, London: Faber and Faber.
• Bentley, Eric, (1955), The Playwright as Thinker, New York: Meridian Books.
• Berman, Antoine, (2009), Toward a Translation Criticism: John Donne, trans. and ed.Françoise Massardier-Kenney, Kent: Kent State University Press.
• Christoffersen, Erik Exe, (1993), The Actor’s Way, trans. Richard Fowler, London and New York: Routledge.
• Copelin, David, (1968) “Sartre’s War—And Our Own”, Theatre, Spring 1968: 1, pp. 116-119.
• Cox, Gary, (2009), Sartre and Fiction, New York: Continuum.
• Croally, Neil T., (2007), Euripidean Polemic: The Trojan Women and the Function of Tragedy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Dinçel, Burç İdem, (2011), “Chabert’i Hatırlamak, Beckett’i Düşünmek”, in Mimesis no.18, İstanbul: Boğaziçi Üniversitesi Yayınları, pp. 323-3
• Dinçel, Burç İdem, (2012), Last Tape on Stage in Translation: Unwinding Beckett’s Spool in Turkey, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
• Eco, Umberto, (1984), The Role of the Reader, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
• Euripides, (1973), The Bacchae and Other Plays, trans. Philip Vellacott, Baltimore: Penguin Books.
• Fisher-Lichte, Erika, (1987), “The Performance as an ‘interpretant’ of the drama”, in Semiotica, 64, pp. 197-212.
• Genette, Gérard, (1997), Paratexts: thresholds of interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Gilmartin, Kristine, (1970), “Talthybius in The Trojan Women”, in The American Journal of
• Philology, Vol. 91, No. 2, pp. 213-222. Greenblatt, Stephen, (2010), “Cultural Mobility: An
• Introduction”, in Cultural Mobility Stephen Greenblat et. al., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1-23. Hamilton, Edith, (1958), The Greek Way to Western
• Civilization, New York: New American Library. Horace, (1971), Art of Poetry, trans. E. C. Wickham, in Hazard Adams (ed.), Critical Theory Since
• Plato, San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Publishers, pp. 68-75. Jakobson, Roman, (2000), “On Linguistic Aspects of
• Translation”, in Lawrence Venuti (ed.), The Translation Studies Reader, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 113-118. Lefevere, André, (1992), Translation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literary Fame, London and New York: Routledge.
• Loraux, Nicole, (2002), The Mourning Voice: An Essay on Greek Tragedy, trans. Elizabeth Trapnell
• Rawlings, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Macintosh, Fiona et al., (2005), Agamemnon in
• Performance, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich, (2007), The Birth of
• Tragedy and Other Writings, trans. Ronald Speirs, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. O’Donohoe, Benedict, (2005), Sartre’s Theatre: Acts for Life, Berlin: Peter Lang.
• Öztürk, Özlem Hemiş, (2006), “Aiskylos’un
• Persler’i ya da Asya ile Avrupa’nın Tarihi Karşılaşması”, in İstanbul Universitesi Tiyatro Eleştirmenliği ve Dramaturji Bölümü Dergisi no. 6, Istanbul: İstanbul Üniversitesi Yayınları, pp. 3-21. Padel, Ruth, (1995), Whom Gods Destroy: Elements of Greek and Tragic Madness, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Pavis, Patrice, (2003), Analyzing Performance, trans. David Williams, Michigan: The University of Michigan Press.
• Peirce, Charles Sanders, (1958), The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Charles Harthshorne, Paul Weiss, and Arthur W. Books (eds.), Cambridge: Belknap Press.
• Robinson, Douglas, (1997), Translation and Empire, Manchester: St. Jerome.
• Said, Edward, (1994), Orientalism, New York: Vintage.
• Sartre, Jean Paul, (1967), The Trojan Women, English version by Ronald Duncan, New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
• Seidensticker, Bernd, (1998), “Peripeteia and Tragic Dialectic in Euripidean Tragedy”, in M. S. Silk (ed.), Tragedy and The Tragic, Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 377-396.
• Seneca, (1972), Four Tragedies and Octavia, trans. E. F. Watling, Baltimore: Penguin Books.
• Snell-Hornby, Mary, (2006), The Turns of Translation Studies, Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
• Sophocles, (1984), The Three Theban Plays, trans. Robert Fagles, London: Penguin Books.
• Steiner, George, (1977), After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Steiner, George, (1996), The Death of Tragedy. Yale: Yale University Press.
• Steiner, George, (1998), “Tragedy, Pure and Simple”, in M. S. Silk (ed.), Tragedy and The Tragic, Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 534-546.
• Toury, Gideon, (1986), “Translation: A CulturalSemiotic Perspective”, in Thomas A. Sebeok (ed.) Encyclopedic Dictionary of Semiotics, Vol. 2, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 111111
• Vellacott, Philip, (1973), “Introduction”, in The Bacchae and Other Plays, Baltimore: Penguin Books, pp. 9-38.
• Walton, J. Michael, (2007) Found in Translation: Greek Drama in English, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Watling, E. F., (1972), “Introduction”, in Four Tragedies and Octavia, Baltimore: Penguin Books.
• Wittgenstein, Ludwig, (2001), Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B.
• F. McGuinness, London and New York: Routledge. Online Resources http://www.tal.org.tr/tarihce.htm (Accessed 31.05.2014) http://mimesis-dergi.org/2011/05/tal-kullerindenyeniden-dogar/ (Accessed 31.05.2014)