Mounted on the wall outside the Brian Friel Theatre at Queen’s is a poster which reveals one man’s artistic passion - a production of Lorca’s Blood Wedding ‘in a new version by David Johnston.’
David is Professor of Hispanic Studies at the University and a translation studies scholar of international reputation whose work is noted for its emphasis on creative engagement and ethical responsibility. He is frequently invited to deliver keynote lectures both at academic conferences around the world and at symposia organised by a wide range of cultural bodies, including the National Theatre in London, The Mexican Ministry of Culture, and the Nobel Academy in Stockholm. ‘My work is both theoretical and practical,’ he explains, ‘and a key part of that practice is translation for performance.’
It is this practical side to his work that has created immense international cultural impact. He has become a multi-award winning translator who, in the last three years alone, has had over twenty professional and thirty amateur productions of his work in eight different countries. In Ireland he has worked with the Lyric and the Abbey, and has had national tours with Galloglass and Bruiser theatre companies. But his translations have been performed by some of the leading companies around the world – from the BBC to the Royal Court to the Washington Shakespeare Company. Furthermore, he has been commissioned three times by the Royal Shakespeare Company.
‘Like all subjects in the Humanities, translation studies is about thinking, about critical analysis and response - but translation is also deeply involved with the making of culture in a very real way’, he explains.
Much of this involvement has been with Spanish Golden Age theatre. Of the twenty-five professional productions of the great Lope de Vega on the British stage since 1900, fourteen of"We’re talking about the heartbeat of world culture." them have come from David, picking up a number of prestigious international awards along the way. ‘Translation for me is a way of understanding the complex processes at play in any moment of cultural encounter, but it is also an opportunity to introduce English-speaking audiences and practitioners to the huge riches of the Spanish and Latin-American theatre world’. And such audiences have turned up in numbers – his recent Washington production of Lope de Vega’s The Dog in the Manger, for example, played to over 26,000 spectators and was nominated for five Helen Hayes awards (including best play of the year).
His emphasis on translation as dialogue, an encounter, between two different cultures and languages has also led to success in securing external research funding. He is currently working with colleagues from Oxford and King’s College, London on a £1m grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
‘We’ve set up an interactive website – Out of the Wings – that functions as a virtual theatre environment, providing the English-language theatre professional – critic, historian, practitioner – with a range and quality of access to Spanishlanguage theatre that is fit for professional purpose’.
The breadth of translation studies is evident in the range of innovative projects in which his PhD students are engaged. One is translating the Irish playwright Marina Carr into Brazilian Portuguese, one is working on the Latin comedies of Plautus for contemporary performance, while another is developing a new practice in film subtitling ‘so that subtitles are seen not as a necessary evil, as blemishes on the screen, but as a way of enhancing the aesthetic impact of the film as a whole.’
David says, ‘There’s also someone working on images of Polynesia in 19th-century French writing, another student who’s looking at translation and public policy in Northern Ireland, and another who’s examining how located communities imagine – translate – unmapped communities, such as the travellers in Ireland or the favelas in Brazil. All of this is translation in the sense of cultural encounter. It’s translation in the way that Brian Friel uses it when he talks about the importance of looking outwards from your own cultural homeland and beginning to engage with the alternatives’.
For David, this is what translation is about: ‘It’s the heartbeat of culture, the establishing of connections of thought and feeling across the divides of time and space.’
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