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Translating paintings into dance: Marie Chouinard’s The Garden of Earthly Delights and the challenges posed to a verbal-based concept of translation

Vanessa Montesi, University of Lisbon

ABSTRACT

This paper analyses the transposition of Bosch’s painting The Garden of Earthly Delights (1490-1500) into a contemporary dance performance as an instance of intermedial translation and reflects on the challenges posed by plurisemiotic practices to a verbal-based concept of translation. Situating itself on the breach opened by recent reflections on the need to go beyond Eurocentric conceptualisations in Translation Studies, this paper looks at previous attempts to enlarge the scope of translation theory to encompass non-verbal artefacts. It questions the implications of considering Translation Studies alongside intermediality, and how merging the tools offered by these two disciplines could help us better understand and analyse choreographies such as Marie Chouinard’s Jérôme Bosch: Le Jardin des Délices (2016), and conversely, how similar dance performances, understood as instances of intermedial translation, could help us understand translation as a situated, embodied, and creative practice.

KEYWORDS

Intermedial translation, dance, intermediality, eurocentrism, The Garden of Earthly Delights, Marie Chouinard.

1. Introduction: Stretching

This paper analyses the transposition of Bosch’s painting The Garden of Earthly Delights (1490-1500) into a contemporary dance performance as an instance of intermedial translation and reflects on the challenges posed by plurisemiotic practices to a verbal-based concept of translation. Taking metaphors to be a powerful conceptual tool rather than a mere aesthetic device, I adopt the structure of a dance class to formulate my argument, dividing it into five parts: ‘Stretching’, ‘Rehearsing’, ‘Adding New Steps’, ‘Performing’, and‘Unwinding’. In the first part, ‘Stretching’, I consider recent criticisms and debates that have spread within Translation Studies regarding the need to go beyond Eurocentric conceptualisations of the field. The cracks created by such questioning as to the nature of text and translation seem to make space for an enquiry into a translation practice that holds the body as the very focus of attention and locus of translation: the transposition of different artworks into dance. Thus, in the ‘Rehearsing’ and ‘Adding New Steps’ sections, I devise a framework from which to study such practices combining the tools offered by Translation Studies and intermediality. This leads to the ‘Performing’ section, where the devised framework is tested against Marie Chouinard’s choreography Jérôme Bosch: Les Jardin Des Délices1 (Marie Chouinard Dance Company 2016), and culminates in ‘Unwinding’, where I point to some assumptions concerning translation that could be challenged and rethought by focusing on dance intermedial translations.

Recent translation scholarship has taken steps towards expanding the object of study of Translation Studies (TS2) in different directions, exploring areas of intersection with disciplines as diverse as comparative literature, geography and memory studies (Gentzler 2016, Italiano 2016, Kershaw 2019, Simon 2011). This need to stretch what we mean by translation is strongly expressed in Maria Tymoczko’s Enlarging Translation, Empowering Translators (2007), which makes a strong argument for the inclusion of translation theories coming from other cultural areas, to be placed on even ground with Western-centred ideas of translation. Following the influential study on conceptual metaphors carried out by Lakoff and Johnson, who unravel the system of metaphors ‘we live by’ (1999), Tymoczko argues that the metaphors we use to picture translation have a sway on how we conceive it and pinpoints the metaphor of transfer as the most widespread in Western conceptualisations. The dominance of this metaphor is challenged by the international turn, a re-appraisal of Western TS from an international perspective and one of the various turns undergone by the discipline. In this paper, I follow Tymoczko’s rejection of a single metaphor and embrace openness towards other conceptualisations, which, according to Hermans (2013), might coalesce around different terms such as imitation, assimilation, transformation, replication, reproduction, and recasting. These are to be complemented by definitions developed in India, Nigeria, China, Polynesia, and out of Arabic, with all the different nuances and chain of associations elicited by their names3 (Tymoczko 2006 and 2007, and Gentzler 2013).

The richness in metaphors and the implications they entail leads Tymoczko (2007) and Hermans (2013) to conclude that no single definition of the phenomenon of translation is possible and to encourage the use of a cluster concept that allows for the inclusion of different notions4. Indeed, a rigid definition of what is meant by translation may result in impoverishing research and dismissing those cultural goods that do not fit current Western or globalised dominant forms (Tymoczko 2006). This is what happens when translation is understood as being limited to carrying written artefacts across linguistic boundaries with the aim of faithfully representing the original, as was the case in the initial stages of translation theory, which focused on equivalence (Nida 1964, Newmark 1981) and translation shifts (Vinay and Darbelnet 1958; Catford 1965). Their definition of translation as “the replacement of textual material in one language (SL) by equivalent textual material in another language (TL)” (1965: 20) still holds sway, as can be seen in the definitions given by specialised websites5. This narrow view of text and language is challenged by scholars like Gambier (2006) and Kaindl (2013), who underline that the history of TS is characterised by an almost exclusive focus on the linguistic modality despite texts being inherently multimodal. Following this, Kaindl calls for a redefinition of text within translation theory and for an increase in the instruments of analysis, pushing towards an updated concept of translation that looks beyond the verbal modality and concluding that “if we take multimodality seriously, this ultimately means that transfers of texts without language dimension or the concentration on non-language modes of a text are a part of the prototypic field of translation studies” (2013: 266).

Situating itself on the breach opened by such reflections, this paper looks at previous attempts to enlarge the scope of translation theory to encompass non-verbal artefacts. It explores the implications of considering Translation Studies alongside intermediality6 and how merging the tools offered by these two disciplines could help us better understand and analyse artworks such as Marie Chouinard’s Jérôme Bosch: Le Jardin des Délices (Marie Chouinard Dance Company 2016). At the same time, it asks how similar performances, understood as instances of intermedial translation, can help us develop a concept of translation as a situated, embodied, and creative practice, as well as a site of negotiation of values and worldviews.

2. Rehearsing

If Tymoczko builds her argument to support an approach to TS that considers the translator’s agency and their political dimension in the consolidation or subversion of power, she also asks whether art codes may not be considered forms of language and therefore if adaptation should not be included in TS. This is not new; already in 1959 Jakobson wrote of ‘intersemiotic’ translation, defining it as “the interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems” (Jakobson 1959 in Venuti 2012: 127, italics mine)7. Although Jakobson’s contribution was fundamental in enlarging the concept of translation to include different semiotic systems, there are some problems with his definition of intersemiotic translation.

The first is the primacy granted to the verbal sign-system as the only one allowed to constitute the source text, hence creating a hierarchical relationship between different modes – verbal, visual, auditory, and so on (Schober 2010). The second has to do with the perspective offered by semiotics, which, as Kaindl explains, considers sign-systems in isolation: musical, verbal, pictorial, and so on (2013: 258). The general mistake consists of equating modes and media, and analysing the latter in isolation instead of recognising that media such as literature, dance or film might share modal elements of presentation (image, sound, and written language). This means that a translation can be both intramedial and at the same time intermodal (i.e., a classic ballet translated into a contemporary performance using also voice and technological devices). Multimodality – and I add, intermediality – recognise that modes are cultural processes manifesting as discourses and exist in conjunction. Moreover, intermediality acknowledges that semiotic systems are unstable and depend on historical and cultural contexts and that therefore no theory can account for a scientific overarching explanation of sign-systems across time and space, something that Mitchell sees as a weakness in the semiotic approach (1995). Following Mitchell’s warnings (1995), intermediality tends to reverse the paradigm and adopt a bottom-up approach that saves it from the pitfalls of historicism and master narratives. The last problem with the definition of intersemiotic translation is that it forgets “the sensuous side of a sign” (Jäger, quoted in Rippl 2015: 8), that is, it only considers one aspect of the sign, the semiotic one, while it ignores its materiality, which in fact has an influence on the production and reception of discourse (Ryan 2004; Kaindl 2013). This is visible in the general neglect of typography or layout in verbal-based theories of translation that only look at the meaning of words and not at the socio-cultural meanings of their material supports. In dance, this would equate with reading the choreography only in terms of signs without paying attention to the actual bodies of the performers and the sociocultural inscriptions they carry with(in) them. Adopting an intermedial approach means paying attention to the material, sensorial, and spatiotemporal modalities alongside the semiotic one, as all of these affect the formation of meaning in one medium and its passage from one to another (Elleström 2010). As both TS and intermediality concern themselves with the transmission and transformation of texts across and within modes and media, it seems reasonable to couple the two. But before singlehandedly replacing ‘intersemiotic’ with ‘intermedial’ translation, the next section delves deeper into the history and potentiality of the chosen dancing partner, ‘intermediality’.

3. Adding new steps

The discipline of intermediality developed from Interarts Studies, opening its investigation to a broader set of aesthetic and technological practices, and thus overcoming the divide between high and low culture (Bruhn 2016). The term Intermedialität (‘intermediality’) was introduced in 1983 by Hansen-Löve and picked up only recently8 as an umbrella term for all kinds of phenomena taking place among media (Rajewsky 2010). Rajewsky divides them into three categories: intramedial, where the borders between media are not crossed, intermedial, which involves a crossing of borders, and transmedial, that is, those characteristics that stand above media borders and which can be found in different media products, such as, for example, narrative. The intermedial level is in turn divided into media combination, where different media are combined to form a new one (comics, ballet), media transposition, which concerns the coming into being of a new media product (adaptation, novelisation – here I will subsume them under the term intermedial translation), and intermedial reference, which happens when a medium imitates or evokes techniques that are normally associated with another but without crossing its own borders (Rajewsky 2010). Examples of this could be Nabokov’s photographic attention to light in Invitation to a Beheading (1936/1969)or the division of a movie into chapters.

Among the various approaches proposed, the one that seems to better account for all the complexities of these phenomena and to offer a method of enquiry is the one provided by Elleström (2010). He combines the fields of intermediality and multimodality and devises a 3D model description of media as having basic, technical, and qualified aspects. The basic aspect corresponds to the modalities of media; the technical aspect involves the material properties and the qualified aspect couples basic and material aspects with historical, cultural, social, and communicative factors, turning a raw and indistinct medium into what we recognise as dance, painting, drama, and so on. All media share four modalities: material, sensorial, spatiotemporal, and semiotic. They exist prior to the label ‘music’, ‘image’, ‘dance’, and so on, since these categorisations are the product of a later stage that according to contextual and operational aspects turns them into qualified media. Hence, “intermediality is the result of constructed media borders being trespassed” (Elleström 2010: 27; italics mine). These borders are defined by modal differences and divergences in qualifying aspects (2010). Elleström’s theorisation proves appealing for various reasons. His description does not shun recent debates, like those around a-priori or a-posteriori intermediality, but instead tackles them head-on by providing a system that acknowledges the fact that they might share modal configurations while at the same time being perceived as separate because of contextual and operational aspects that conventionally define what forms and characteristics they may take. These aspects are bound to change across time and cultures. His approach also accounts for the fact that all basic media can become qualified media in different times, reconfiguring the whole media environment by attributing different positions to the others. An example of this could be the combination of image and text in one small frame shared via social media resulting in the qualified medium ‘instapoetry, which in turn can be cited or included as such at a later stage by any other medium.

The relevance of the tools offered by intermediality for the studies of intermedial translations will become clear in Section 4, where I will describe the main differences between Bosch’s painting and Chouinard’s performance in material, sensorial, spatiotemporal and semiotic terms in order to understand how these were used by the choreographer to put forward her feminist reading while (literally) staying close to the source text. Such an analysis is possible through the combination of theoretical and analytical tools offered by the disciplines of intermediality and TS. On the one hand, intermedial approaches acknowledge the intermedial nature of every artefact while providing a clear description of how qualified media are formed, maintained and interact. On the other, Descriptive Translation Studies and the sociology of translation enable us to consider intermedial translations as forms of ‘rewriting’ (Lefevere 1985) embedded in social and cultural systems and to study the attitude of the translator towards the source text as reflecting the translator’s ‘interpretant’as well as the relationships between source and target systems. An interpretant is described as a sort of third text that permeates the recipient’s understanding and becomes visible in the translator’s choices, revealing the underlying ideology and system of reference (Iampolski 1998). To indicate my reliance on both fields, I will adopt the term ‘intermedial translation’ (Schober 2010: 64). In analysing Chouinard’s intermedial translation of Bosch’s painting The Garden of Early Delights (1490-1500), the attention given to the modal configurations of source and target texts will be complemented by a focus on how the choreographer used tools developed by feminist translators for her rewriting, filtering the source text through her feminist interpretant and questioning its institutionalised reception.

4. Performing

Marie Chouinard, a Canadian choreographer and director of her eponymous company, is one of the most acclaimed names in the dance world and the director of Dance at the Venice Biennale. She is frequently described as an enfant terrible and is known for creating bold choreographies that explore the vital pulsations of bodies, and their anatomy and sexuality, which she imbues with a feminist avant-garde aesthetics. In 2016 she was invited by the Hieronymus Bosch 500 Foundation to create a choreography based on the painter’s oeuvre. Based in Hertogenbosch, the city where Bosch spent his life, the foundation aimed to celebrate the five-hundredth anniversary of the artist's death through a programme comprising three main areas, a format inspired by Bosch’s own tryptic (Marques 2013). Refusing the foundation’s request to cover a range of different paintings, she decided to base her work on Bosch’s famous triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights (1490-1500) and to offer her own reading of it, translating it for the stage (Frota 2018). Not new to this practice, on her website she describes her work Mouvements (2005-2011) based on Henri Michaux’s homonymous book of drawings, poetry and prose (1952), as a “word-for-word transition to dance” that approaches the source texts literally, as a choreographic score.

In the case of this intermedial translation, we can notice the felicitous coupling of choreographer and painter, as they both set about provoking the viewer with images of uncommon and grotesque bodies. Bosch populates the surface of the triptych with grotesque figures, initially considered monsters and chimeras; indeed, some early commentators defined him as an avant-gardist. His style is commonly described in terms of the grotesque and drollery, and as based on the integration of low-brow art forms which could be found in the fantastic and satirical genres but had never been absorbed by the pictorial tradition before him (Fischer 2016). The prosthetic and hybrid bodies depicted by Bosch resonate with Chouinard’s representation of “prosthetic body members, a denaturalised mode of movement, as well as inarticulate sounds” (Tsiakalou 2018: 30). Inserting herself in the modernist endeavour to recover “all the weak, ridiculous, mad bodies that history and the world had removed from our perception and even sometimes thrown into the scrap-heap of existence” (Louppe 2010: 42) – a venture we can see in dance as stretching from Schlemmer’s Das Triadisches Ballet (1922) to Papaioannou’s The Great Tamer (2017) from Sasha Waltz’s Kreatur (2017), to pioneering experiments like the use of industrial robots in Huang Yi’s Huang Yi & Kuka (2015) – Chouinard pushes the limits of what is thought to be human by exploring posthuman bodies and questioning the binary division of sex and gender in her choreographies. Hence, the decision to focus on one of the most intriguing and disturbing paintings, where naked bodies and sexual intercourses are painstakingly portrayed, does not come as a surprise.

To analytically describe the number of differences between the forms of presentation of triptych and performance we can adopt Elleström’s division into four modalities (2010). As for the material modality, we have on the one hand a flat surface, the front of the oak panels, which is further divided into three panels so that two of them can be folded and unfolded to cover the inside and show another picture painted on their back, achieving in so doing a three-dimensional quality. The materials involved are the panels and the oil colours. On the other hand, we have a three-dimensional stage populated with the bodies of the dancers, three screens, props, light and music. The position of the audience in relation to both artworks is similar, as the performance maintains the arrangement of seated audience in front of the performing space typical of a proscenium theatre, which recalls the way one looks at paintings in a museum. The principal sense involved in the reception of the former is the visual, while the latter appeals to sight, hearing, and touch, via proprioception. Both manifest in actual space, but while time in the former is only virtual, the latter has an actual duration and develops in time that which is only a latent possibility in the painting. As for the semiotic modality, both make use of symbols, icons, and indexes, though icons predominate, at least for the modern spectator. From this first description it becomes clear that we are not simply moving from one medium to another. Rather, we are navigating through intersecting, deviating, and overlapping modalities that are only perceived as two separate and distinct media as the result of convention and habituation (Rajewsky 2010). This is further emphasised as the choreographer contrasts painting and dance by having the former projected on the background for a large part of the performance while the dancers actualise it on stage.

Figure 1

Here I will briefly focus on how the choreographer addressed the differences in spatiotemporal modalities and used them to her own ends. In Time-Sharing on Stage, Aaltonen (2000) defines theatre translation as an egotistical act that departs from some needs of the target system and uses the foreign work as a mirror, giving it the task to speak for itself by endowing it with perlocutory functions or using it to assert one’s own identity. In discussing authorship, copyrights and the presupposition of faithful representation they imply, she compares theatre translation to what de Certeau called “la perruque” (2011: 25), the practice of disguising one’s work as that of the employer while subverting it to one’s ends. According to her, theatrical systems have “turned their rebellion into a tacit search for cracks which would give enough room for the practice of theatre” (106). Here it is exactly in the cracks between the two artwork’s modalities of actualisation and signification that one must look to find the translator/choreographer’s voice and interpretant, and especially in the spatiotemporal one. The spatial division into three parts of the triptych is mirrored by the temporal division into three acts of the performance. This means that while we could take in at once the three parts of Bosch’s painting or follow a subjective order, Chouinard forces us to follow her own sequencing, showing us first the panel “Humankind Before the Flood”(central panel), then “Hell” (right panel) and lastly “Paradise and the Creation of Eve”(left panel). While it is true that texts do not possess an inherent fixed reading and the construction of meaning develops from the relation among signifiers and between signifiers and reader, it must be recognised that “dominant readings may arise over the years and become fixed and solidified, at least for some time and some cultures” (30). In this unfolding of the triptych, Chouinard subverts the common reading held by Bosch experts (Baldass 1960; Calas 1969; Manson 2015; Fischer 2016) which goes from left to right, ending with “Hell”, as in several other of his paintings. Instead of taking us to a downward journey, the choreographer seems to follow the traditional path of fairy-tales, starting from a situation of order and joy, passing through a phase of chaos and horror and coming back to light and to an even better order of things.

Figure 2

The order/disorder dichotomy is further explored in the way the temporal discrepancy between painting and choreography is addressed. Indeed, in order to give a temporal dimension to the painting, Chouinard places two circular screens at opposite ends of the stage. For the first part of the choreography, they zoom in on those sections of the painting that are embodied in motion by the naked dancers, who start from the positions of the depicted figures and explore them with their bodies, moving into and out of them, granting them physical dynamism. The painting becomes a surface through which we travel, led by Chouinard’s gaze and the dancers’ bodies, thus unfolding in time. The figures on the screen reflect those on the stage and everything is clear and orderly. This order comes to a halt in the second part of the performance, “Hell” (2016). The suffering of the figures expressed visually by the painting is complemented by auditory suffering as a woman howls in a grotesque way and the dancers rub their nails and bodies on different surfaces, producing piercing sounds. The painting disappears from the background and the mismatch between what happens on stage and the details from the painting reproduced on the circular screens creates a sense of disorder and loss. While the dancers inflict pain to themselves or to others, simulate sexual intercourse and move grotesquely, the circular screens take us to an exploration of the animal figures depicted in the painting, thus indexically alluding to the dancers’ bestiality and breaking up any illusion of order and understanding created by the first part. If the first act uses the relation between the different modes (background image and moving bodies) to accomplish what Kaindl (2013) calls the ‘illustrating’ function, whereby the various modes carry the same information, in the second act it is the contradictory function that dominates, as images and bodies are suddenly disconnected.

The last part, “Paradise and the Creation of Eve” (2016), uses the temporal modality of the choreography to convey a sense of stasis. The painting appears again in the background, showing the same image reproduced on stage: God, in the centre, holds Eve’s hand while Adam sits on the floor, touching God’s cape with his feet and looking up at Eve. This time, the screens displays two eyes, green and blue, looking straight at the audience. For a while, everything stays still. Then, Eve and Adam exchange places. They are joined by other members of the company who situate themselves next to them, duplicating their image and emphasising the contraposition between men and women. Each of the two modes, image and body, supplement the other’s meaning (Kaindl 2013) and further stress the binary division of sex and gender. Slowly, the dancers start to swap positions so as to group themselves regardless of gender, hence blurring any distinction. In today’s social context and in the light of the choreographer’s oeuvre, it is impossible not to interpret this as a feminist stance which exploits the temporal dimension of the choreography and movement to subvert the gender roles of the painting and uses the perlocutory mode “aimed at producing certain reactions in the consciousness of the audience by transforming the presuppositions of the original text and manipulating its point of view” (Aaltonen 2000: 61) to make a comment on contemporary (and past) societies and voice a critique of the source text.

In her analysis of a previous work by Chouinard, itself a translation of Le Sacre du Printemps (Nijinsky 1913), Tsiakalou places it in the context of feminist translation and the theories and techniques proposed by Louise von Flotow (1991), Burton (2010) and herself for appropriating and queering a text (Tsiakolou 2018). In particular, ‘queeriture’ is “the attempt to infiltrate translation practice and theory with the idea that texts and gender are discursively constructed” (31). In this third part Chouinard actively employs some of these techniques to present her queer version of “Paradise” (2016): the inversion of a phallocentric and heteronormative myth, where Eve is literally handed over to Adam, is disrupted first by reversing the roles and secondly by blurring them. Indeed, different dancers play them regardless of gender. By ‘supplementing’ (von Flotow 1991: 74) the images of Adam and Eve with other male and female dancers, the choreographer over-translates Bosch’s binary view of gender and the attribution of different roles according to one’s sex9. Multiplied ‘ad exhaustion’, Adam and Eve represent humanity and its division into a dual conception of gender, something that is only implicit in Bosch’s painting, although being quite unambiguous in its source, the Book of Genesis.

Similarly, the unnaturally white complexion of the dancers’ bodies over-translates the almost exclusive focus on white bodies and the treatment of black bodies in the painting. While a first glance at Bosch’s tryptic fills our eyes with a multitude of mingling white bodies that populate its foreground, a closer look will reveal two black men standing at opposite ends (left and right), a black woman (middle left) and some black women bathing in the centre. Commentators of the painting have traditionally read these figures as representing danger, carnal temptation, sin, or even pointing to an “exotic and untamed counter-world” (Vanderbroeck, in Fischer 2016: 162). Hence, if Bosch – or, better, his institutionalised reception – relegates the black bodies to the role of savages and sinners, Chouinard takes this line of thought to its extreme and simply erases them from among humankind while at the same time pointing to this act of erasure and of homogenisation through the striking view of the unnaturally white bodies, standing out starkly against the colourful background provided by the painting.

Figure 3

The binary view of gender presented at the beginning of the third act is soon appropriated and reversed, adopting the technique of hijacking (von Flotow 1991: 74), by swapping Adam and Eve’s positions. This new tableau sees Eve looking up at Adam, returning his gaze and affirming her desire, while it is Adam who is objectified and looks down. However, this portrayal can only be temporary, and it is soon shaken as the dancers start to mingle and position themselves regardless of gender, in what can be considered a form of queeriture of the source text through the inversion technique proposed by Burton (2010). As one of the reviewers commented, this last act reverses history by bringing us back to a different beginning, one that “eschews strict gender categories and expectations, inviting us to embrace a new Earth and imagine something else after the horror and chaos of hell” (Dallis 2019).

All the while, two eyes look at the public from above the painting. This might be an intermedial reference to another work by Bosch, Table of the Seven Deadly Sins (1505-1510), where the depiction of ‘Paradise’ is coupled with the representation of God’s eyes in a reminder that God sees everything (Manson 2015). In this performance, God’s eyes are replaced by a woman’s eyes. This stands in contrast to the image of a male God in the painting and further complicates a binary view of gender. Or are those the eyes of the choreographer, who, in the spirit of la reécriture au feminine, a movement of feminist translators that originated in Canada in the 1980’s, decides to translate texts displaying patriarchal inclinations as a way to challenge them and reclaim her own voice? In weaving her voice with that of the male author while literally facing his painting, Chouinard recognises herself as part of a tradition of women translators set against men creators (Chamberlain 1988; Simon 2005). As cleverly shown by Lori Chamberlain (1988), this tradition is inscribed in a patriarchal structure whereby issues of authorship, originality, and paternity are tightly interlaced and women are relegated to the task of reproduction, for which they are afforded no authority. In showing her presence in the translation, Chouinard actively questions this bipartition. Moreover, the first act of the performance, with the juxtaposition of source and target texts as if in a facing-page translation, is a reflection on the process of translating that unveils the translator’s agency. While we follow the order chosen by Chouinard, we are alerted to the possibilities of many different possible renditions and of the translator’s manipulation of the text. In “show(ing) the friction between the prescriptive singular and potentially plural” (Szymanska Forthcoming), Chouinard’s work can be considered a meta-translation .

Like the ‘translation multiples’ studied by Szymanska, the different combinations of male and female dancers in “Paradise”, and the insertion of the translator’s body into the text, generate a narrative of their own that reflects not only the multiplicity of possible translations but also the multiplicity of the translators’ voices, hence foregrounding translation as a collective and co-operative work against the assumed individuality of original writing. This discourse surrounding and contesting individual authorship finds echoes in feminist translation (Chamberlain 1988; Simon 2015) and inscribes itself in a more general re-examination of the figure of the author in literature (Barthes 1967; Foucault 1995) and in the art environment (McCartney 2018). The questioning of individual authorship that translation multiples bring about is paralleled in dance by the inevitably collaborative nature of choreography, which works on and with human bodies, each with their own specificity and subjectivity that cannot but be reflected in the final performance. I suggest that Chouinard’s performance shows an admirable self-awareness in reflecting on the tension created between ‘original’ and translation, and in presenting the latter as the result of a choice among various possibilities, a choice partly dictated by the choreographer’s interpretantthat of a white female artist coming from a country with a strong tradition of feminist writing and translating. Similarly, as Venuti (2007) remarks, it is not only the translator who filters their reading through an interpretant; the same can be said of the scholar who describes and comments on (through?) the translation. Likewise, my brief analysis is the result of my status as a young, white, female scholar who has previous dance experience and is familiar with translation and feminist studies and with the ‘universe of discourse’ (Lefevere 1985) of this choreography. Other interpretations and critiques are possible – for example, while the performance strongly problematises the treatment of gender, the critique of racial implications remains a vague allusion.

I will conclude by returning to Aaltonen’s text on theatre translation. In her perceptive book she mentions two different stances that the translator can display towards the source text: reverence, or subversion and disregard. Reverence is dictated by the high cultural value attributed to the source texts, which are seen as increasing the target system’s cultural capital. These texts come from perceived superior cultures or from canonised authors and texts. Through translation, the “positive qualities of the Other are introjected into the Self in order for the indigenous system to experience a oneness with it” (Aaltonen 2000: 64-65). In these cases, alterity is not concealed, and the source text is translated in its entirety. On the other hand, when the target system does not need the Other anymore, this is made to speak for the receiving end, “whose expectations outweigh the constraints of the source text” (73). The translation in this case will rebel against the original by deconstructing, parodying, re-actualising, and subverting it. In instances of intermedial translation these stances can also be seen as applying to the relationship between source and target media and their perceived position in culture, with literature and painting generally occupying more central positions than dance or performance. However, to simply divide translations into reverent and subversive ones would blind us to the manifold ways in which these approaches can be combined to generate a richer commentary and accomplish diverse functions. The intermedial translation realised by Marie Chouinard shows indeed both tendencies, reconciling a (perceived) tension between reverence and subversion. The task of translating one of the most famous works by a canonical and world-famous painter is a way of accumulating symbolic power and cultural capital for Chouinard’s company. This is reflected in the full translation of the painting as well as in the decision to show parts of it during the performance and the rather faithful translation, especially of the first two parts.

On the other hand, Chouinard distances herself from institutionalised and fixed models of interpretation by adopting a feminist and queer perspective and by altering the order of the reading, so that what was a warning against the sin of lust – Adam’s lascivious glance towards Eve developing into the pleasure-seeking activities of the central panel and ending up with punishment in Hell – turns into a celebration of life in all its pleasure and pain, as it all leads to the quietness of the finale, where men and women move and interact freely and equally, overcoming the culturally constructed boundaries of gender. The emergence of Chouinard’s point of view is made possible by the choreographer’s treatment of the cracks between the modalities employed by the two qualified media of dance and painting. While the choreographer strives to keep them as close as possible on the material and semiotic levels and uses the sensorial modality to amplify the atmosphere of the source text, the subversive stance is mainly entrusted to the spatiotemporal modality. This enables the choreography to display at the same time reverence and rebellion to the canonical artwork and its institutionalised interpretation, attaining Maier’s call for women translators to “get under the skin of both antagonistic and sympathetic works” and to “become independent, ‘resisting’ interpreters who not only let antagonistic works speak […] but also speak with them and place them in a larger context by discussing them and the process of their translation” (Maier 1985: 4).

5. Conclusion: Unwinding

In this paper I have presented Chouinard’s choreography Jérôme Bosch: Le Jardin des Délices as an intermedial translation of the so-named painting by Hieronymus Bosch (1490-1500). The analysis shows not only the relevance of considering dance staging of other artworks (in this case paintings) among the objects of study of TS, but also reflects on the best way to do so, as well as on the manifold issues that dance as a form of intermedial translation raises for the scholar. Indeed, turning to Tymoczko’s list of assumptions held in TS, one will soon realise that dance questions many of them while at the same time offering alternative models. To the common presupposition that translation is necessarily interlingual and intercultural (Tymoczko 2006: 16), dance opposes the materiality of the human body and its expressivity, together with the set of props, costumes, lights, setting, and music that contribute to the formation of meaning in this qualified medium. That translation involves written or fixed text (17) is denied twice in Chouinard’s choreography as neither the source nor the target texts involve the verbal mode. At the same time dance’s ephemerality challenges the presupposition of a fixed text while prompting us to reflect on the illusion of conceiving texts as fixed in general. Similarly, due to the collaborative nature of choreography, dance intermedial translation lay bare the fallacy of viewing the translators as black boxes (18) working on their own, denying their embodiment, situatedness and the recourse to collaborative online platforms for translators where they can give and receive help. Other common assumptions interrogated by this art include the following: “primary text types with which translators work have been defined and categorised” (17), translators are generally trained in translation (18) “translation theory has defined the objects of its study” (20) and the inescapable trope of fidelity. Lastly, to the historically uninformed idea that translation is entering a new phase because of movement and diaspora involving hybridity (19), dance practice contrasts its traditional dependence on national and international tours and the microcosm of translation that inevitably comes into life when dancers coming from different backgrounds – not only national and linguistic but also technical and stylistic – gather around a company and engage in a daily act of translation. To study dance as intermedial translation is therefore to be presented with an array of questions and issues that are deeply ingrained in TS. Moreover, by working at what may be considered as the periphery of translation, the liminal space where transgression and creativity are more likely to occur, the study of intermedial translations is likely to result in insights into the transnational, transcultural and transhistorical (Tymoczko 2007) category of translation.

Acknowledgements

This research was realised within the International FCT PhD Programme in Comparative Studies (PhD-COMP), funded by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT). Special thanks go to the editors Francis Mus and Sarah Neelsen for their advice, to the anonymous reviewers for the comments, and to Matthew Benwell for his careful and generous proofreading.

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Performances
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Websites
Biography

Vanessa Montesi is a PhD student in Comparative Studies and FCT
scholarship holder at the University of Lisbon, Portugal, where she forms part of the research cluster P’ARTE at the Centre for Comparative Studies. She holds an MA in Translation Studies from the University of Sheffield and a BA in Foreign Languages and Literature from the University of Bologna. Since March 2020 she has been part of the Dramaturgical Ecologies research group, based at Concordia University, Montreal.

E-mail: vmontesi@campus.ul.pt

Portrait

Note 1:
Staged and attended at the Centro Cultural de Belem on 18 May 2018.
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Note 2:
From now on, I will use the abbreviation TS to refer to the field of Translation Studies. Although I am aware that more and more scholars prefer using the acronym TIS, in so doing including Interpreting Studies, my use of TS in this paper is due to the fact that the literature I discuss focuses only on translation theory.
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Note 3:
The international turn deriving from these efforts elicited a lively debate and an edited volume (Van Doorslaer and Flynn 2013) around the definition of Eurocentrism, the continentalisation of TS and the fear that discarding what are considered as Eurocentric views in TS may only lead to the assertion of (North) American perspectives and as such be implicated in academic struggles for dominance (Van Doorslaer and Flynn 2013). However, as Wakabayashi explains in the same volume, Eurocentrism is to be understood as a mental construct rather than a geographical indicator (2013).
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Note 4:
An example of this openness to different approaches is the last edition of Munday’s Introducing Translation Studies (2016), in which he lists different developments in Translation Studies, mentioning those influenced by text typology and discourse analysis as well as sociological, postcolonial and translator-based approaches. However, it must be noted that the focus on verbal language as monomodal is still present in the procedures offered by the Van Doorslaer’s ‘map’ as well as by the absence from the discussion of media different from the verbal and audiovisual (which is only addressed in a sub-chapter).
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Note 5:
Examples include: Translation Journal (Osman 2017), Globalization and Localization Association (no date), and the National Network for Translation (no date).
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Note 6:
See Section 3 for a short presentation of this discipline and for the differences between multimodality and intermediality.
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Note 7:
Here, Tymoczko understands adaptation in the acceptation given to it by Adaptation Studies, which entails a shift in medium, typically from literature to film. This can be equated to Jakobson’s shift from verbal to non-verbal sign-system. For more information on the subject, see Giannakopoulou (2019).
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Note 8:
In 1996 Wagner claims to be introducing the English term intermediality (Wagner 1996).
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Note 9:
Over-translation is a feminist translation technique that aims at making clearer what the source text says in a subtle way, so that the reader/spectator will not be able to overlook what it is implied. If, for von Flotow (1991), this means translating “Ce soir, j’entre dans l’histoire sans relever ma jupe” as “today, I enter history without opening my legs”, for Chouinard, it means revealing the synecdochal function of Adam and Eve in the Book of Genesis.
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Here, I use the term in a slightly different way than Szymanska’s multiples, which she defines as the “practice of multiplying different translation variants and putting them next to each other as part of one artistic work” (Szymanska Forthcoming).