ABSTRACT
All translators for the theatre know that meaning on the page is not exactly the same as meaning on the stage. When the verbal leaves the page and is translated into the vocal and the gestural, meaning comes to life for the short time of a production; it acquires specific intention, expressiveness, corporeality, and the individual actor does with the words what no printed page can ever convey: a bodily incarnation of the verbal into living drama. Lists of properties of the page/stage opposition have long been provided, marking a rigid binarism that contrasts the dialectical and collaborative dimension of theatre and the authoritarian univocality of the page (Ritchie 66–67)— or, as Worthen has put it, the “‘performance’ (transgressive, multiform, revisionary)” and the “(dominant, repressive, conventional, and canonical) domain of the ‘text’” (1997: 5). The post-modern endorsement of the performative turn in certain areas of literary studies has aroused impatience against what has been labelled as a justification of directorial originality, against which a page-centred approach has been advocated in support of the reasons for the verbal. 1 Recently Weimann and Bruster have rightly pointed out that the gap between language and performance should not be looked at according to an order of hierarchy, but rather in terms of “interactive relationship of text and performance” (15; Weimann 2000). This balanced view sounds perfectly reasonable, and resolves the page/ stage opposition into the ‘bifold authority’ of a dialectic not much distant from what the semiotic approach contended a few decades ago (Serpieri et al. 1978, 1981; Ubersfeld). As Elam has argued: “The written text/performance relationship is not one of simple priority but a complex of reciprocal restraints constituting a powerful intertextuality. Each text bears the other's traces … it is a relationship that cannot be accounted for in terms of facile determinism” (209).
