162 | Articles & Essays • Featured Translator: Johnson
Featured Translator: Nicholas Johnson Nicholas Johnson is Assistant Professor of Drama at TCD and a performer, director, and writer. He recently co-edited the special “performance issue” of the Journal of Beckett Studies (23.1, 2014). His research appears in The Plays of Samuel Beckett (Methuen, 2013), Theatre Research International, Journal of Art Historiography and Forum Modernes Theater. He has translated/directed works by Ernst Toller (2008/2014), Franz Kafka (2009), and Max Frisch (2010); as adaptor/director, recent projects include The Brothers Karamazov (2014) and various works by Samuel Beckett. He is co-director of the Beckett Summer School and artistic director of Painted Filly Theatre.
On Translating Ernst Toller’s Die Maschinenstürmer The translation of drama intended for performance will always be judged on the first
hearing, rather than being carefully assessed by repeated reading. Because the mode of reception for drama is as event, rather than as object, the translation of drama is inherently
different from prose or poetry, though both verse and prose might be contained within a play (as with Ernst Toller’s Die Maschinenstürmer). While the reception of all literature
is both embodied and bounded in time, theatre is unique in that one must appear at a particular place and time in order to experience it, and for most viewers (those who attend
only once) this is the sole opportunity for communication of the thought. A translator must think not only about service to an author’s original concept and language, but also about service to the present audience, with whom the implicit contract of a ticket has been
drawn up. Though an audience might later have access to a published script, “re-reading”
of drama is not immediately possible, so the validity of a translation in theatre should partly be judged on how easily it can be received live. This means that all translation of
drama is also adaptation, since one must consider the cultural and intellectual context
in which the live event will appear, and alterations will frequently be required from the original that would not seem justifiable in print, but seem required for the ephemeral event to be legible in the local context.
Ernst Toller is a fascinating figure of world drama whose legacy has been complicated
— and ultimately unduly minimized — first by anti-Jewish sentiment in Germany of the mid-1930s, then by anti-German sentiment in the US and UK of the late 1930s, and finally by anti-Communist sentiment in the Anglophone world after World War II. Born in 1893
in Samotschin, at that time in the province of Posen but today in Poland, Toller fought for
