Invisible agents in translation history: Censors and actors in performed drama of eighteenth-century England

Abstract

In dialogue with the social turn in translation studies, this article uncovers the work of invisible agents shaping the translation of performed drama in eighteenth-century England.Unlike other genres, performed drama was subject to a system of state censorship that shaped translation practices in ways that have not been fully accounted for by translation historiography. Using Carlo Goldoni as a case study, the article reveals the intervention of censors and actors in shaping Goldoni's translations, making visible for the first time the central role they played as 'rewriters' in English theatrical culture. In reading translation through the material conditions of eighteenth-century theatre, an argument is made for a re-evaluation of performed drama in the historiographical account of eighteenth-century translation in English.

Doubly invisible: Anna Larpent, domestic censorship, and the translation of performance cultures in Georgian Britain

“…Recent studies on theatre censorship and translation have stressed the value of theatre archives in uncovering the complex and often overlapping practices of translation and censorship (Woods 2012;Krebs 2007). By putting human agency at the centre of cultural production, my own recent work on the Larpent archives provides new perspectives on the material conditions that shaped the translation of drama and uncovers the invisible role played by censors and actors in the shaping of translated plays (Marinetti 2020). This article extends that work further by considering the question of gender and the added invisibility that established gender roles imposed on the labour of women as cultural agents.…”

“…A likely reason for such extensive excision is that the Larpents would have considered Holcroft's overt criticism of the hypocrisy of aristocratic life as dangerously subversive and a threat to the established class hierarchies in 18 th -century British society. Multiple examples of the Larpents' suppression of any suggestions which were critical of the ruling classes are visible in other censored translations, especially by Goldoni, which include the deletion of some of the most political speeches Goldoni places in the mouths of his servants (Marinetti 2020). Like so many genteel women in this period, Anna Larpent developed a sophisticated understanding of contemporary drama as a theatregoer and a consumer of culture.…”

“…Importantly, the translation of performance cultures involved different cultural forces and forms of labour from those that shaped poetry and fiction (Marinetti 2020). These forces were not the result of literary criticism or the economics of publishing but were embedded in the process of theatre making and involved the intervention of actors, theatre managers, censors, and audiences.…”

Mapping Salience and Trajectory: On How to Situate Literary Translators in Publishing Legends of the Condor Heroes With Visualization

“…First of all, translators are getting more and more involved in multiple tasks (Everson, 2020; García, 2018), they offer book recommendations, engage in strategy discussion, compare editions and provide suggestions on titles, typography, and illustrations, and even provide ideas for advertising and marketing assignments (see Vandal-Sirois, 2016). Second, translators are just a proportion of the multi-layered and heterogeneous translational phenomena (Daghigh & Amini, 2022; Marinetti, 2021), which include other agents such as authors, fellow translators, publishers, literary agents and editors. The ensuing new changes in translation industry have added to the complexity of Translation Studies and presented a problem as to how to situate translators in their working practices.…”

Introduction: translation and performance cultures

“…It also defines translated texts in broad ways to include scripts and repertoires in a range of performance cultures. While cross-cultural encounters and transnational exchanges have characterised theatre history from its inception (Knowles 2010), little attention has been paid to the agents mediating those encounters and to the multiple forms of translation they engendered (Marinetti 2013b;2021;De Francisci 2022). In this introduction, we set out our own reflections on how to begin this dialogue between theatre and performance studies and translation sociology, focusing simultaneously on the importance of developing performance-sensitive forms of knowledge and highlighting performance cultures as fruitful contexts for studying translation as a social practice and the multiple forms of agency shaping it.…”