Paula Wing
The Treacherous Art

By John Custodio

In 1998, the Great Canadian Theatre Company and the National Arts Centre together commissioned Paula Wing (Acting, 1984) to adapt Dario Fo’s Accidental Death of an Anarchist. In 2002, the Centre des auteurs dramatiques (CEAD) asked her to translate Olivier Choinière’s (Écriture dramatique, 1996) Jocelyne est en dépression. And in 2004, CEAD gave her play, Number One and Jamie, to playwright Marilyn Perreault to translate. What’s it like being both translator and ‘translatee’? We asked Paula Wing to talk about those experiences.

“I’m very fond of the Italian saying, ‘Traduttore, traditore’: to translate is to betray. Translation can be treacherous. In theatre, it makes for yet another interpretive remove from an author’s original intent. On the other hand, a good translator can make the collaborative nature of drama work for her. Do the words on the page work on the stage? Good translators, like good writers, go to rehearsals to find out. They use actors to help them get closer to their meaning.

“But translators should remember that when their work gets produced or published, their name comes after the author’s, and in much smaller print. That’s easy to forget when you’re on draft two or three and haven’t even looked at the original in some time, so when I translated Olivier’s play, I deferred to him.

“When my play was translated, we faced an interesting problem. At the heart of Jamie is a very scared boy. The translator really got the child’s voice thing (Marilyn has a kind of carefree insouciance about her that’s very appealing), but the original has Jamie talking to himself in the second person when he’s really frightened: ‘You walk down the hall, and you just keep walking.’ That didn’t work in French, so Marilyn, seizing on a kind of detective-story motif in the play, had him speak in the third person. ‘Il traverse la rue. Il tremble.’ This gave it a kind of noirish feel. I’m not convinced it worked though, so if ever it’s staged again, I’d like her to try something else.

“Do the words on the page work on the stage?”

“Olivier and I got along famously. I knew we would, even before I met him. Reading Jocelyne, I recognized a certain shared sensibility. We’re both in love with our mother tongues. He’s a fast-talkin’, cheap-joke-crackin’ kind of guy who’s forever making you laugh and showing off how smart he is. I totally relate to that. He does what he does with such tremendous panache: you laugh and laugh, but then he hits you with a depth and seriousness of purpose that just floors you.

“I’ve never met Dario Fo, but he has such a generous spirit when it comes to making changes to his plays—he’s always changing them himself; to him they’re works in progress—that I felt very free working on Accidental Death. My version was billed as a ‘Canadian adaptation.’ We couldn’t call it a translation. That’s fine by me. I find his translators too literal, too faithful to the original; they fail to convey his improvisational spirit. To me, Fo’s world is a big Hilarious Mystery, to borrow a title of his. I love going there. It gives me the courage to take stronger stands. The sexy political jokes I included in my adaptation are a testament to that.

“The translation I’m working on now is of Karin Serres’s Colza. She’s from France. We’ve never met. When I first read her play, I thought ‘wow’, but I couldn’t put my finger on what exactly made me feel that way. It’s so enigmatic, so poetic, so unlike anything I’ve ever worked on. Getting into her sensibility has been quite a challenge. That’s where my training as an actor comes in handy: I can take on other voices, so even if our sensibilities don’t mesh as neatly as mine and Olivier’s do, I still know how to enter her voice.

“My time at the School was a truly seminal experience. Having lived in Europe, I already spoke French, so I loved the bilingual atmosphere. But I remember wishing we weren’t so separate from the francophones. It really was a case of two solitudes. Nevertheless, I met some very talented people in my class: Susan Coyne, Ted Dykstra, Michael Riley, Helen Taylor. I also got to know Assia de Vreeze, the School librarian, whose life story became the basis for the first play I ever wrote.”

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