Reading with Marilyn: titles in translation
Sunday, December 14th, 2008
Sometimes you finish a translation, feel like opening a celebratory bottle of Buzet and find yourself thrown into a heated discussion concerning the German title with your publisher and the theatre doing the première. To translate certain titles can be a real nuisance, because if there is no immediately convincing equivalent, often the German version becomes too obviously explanatory or just sounds a bit daft. The latter was the case with my first translation, Catherine Hayes’s Not Waving. As the Stevie Smith poem it alludes to is hardly known over here, after one of the songs featured in the play it became Lieber fröhlich als tot (“Better happy than dead”). As a statement this is hard to contradict, as a title it is disingenuous. The translator is heard when it comes to choosing a title but sometimes gets overruled by publisher or theatre. So David Hare’s Teeth’n’Smiles in Bonn was turned into Rock und Seele (“Rock and Soul”), and many spectators will rather have thought of the piece of clothing (“Rock” means “skirt” in German) than of rock music as was intended, because the play is about a band performing at a Cambridge College May Ball. Neil Young famously sang: “Even Richard Nixon has got soul”, but Rock und Seele simply appeared misleading. The titles certainly weren’t the only reason, although perhaps it is no coincidence that in both cases there was just one German production.
To avoid unfortunate compromises sometimes you need a bit of chutzpah. With Michael Frayn’s Democracy I didn’t expect any difficulties, but another publisher already had a play registered under the title Demokratie and refused permission to use it again. This led to a lengthy e-mail exchange with the author who could not know that a suggestion of his like Vaterländer for a German audience immediately would have brought to mind the jingle of a tv-spot for sausages. The chutzpah in this case was the trick to call the play Michael Frayn: Demokratie which solved all our problems at one fell swoop. The alternative would have been to keep the original Democracy. This is what theatres sometimes do on their own. With Mark O’Rowe’s Howie the Rookie most of them decided to stick to the English title and not to take up the suggested German one Anfänger (“Rookies”). Only in Vienna the play was called Blutige Anfänger (“Bloody Rookies”), and a Cologne pub theatre added: “Die fette Vivienne präsentiert” (“Fat Vivienne presents”) referring to Howie’s seriously overweight girlfriend: “Sixteen stone, size forties on her chest”. On the other hand, occasionally you have no trouble with a title but the price of that is a limited appeal as with Kevin Elyot’s Der Tag, an dem ich still stand (The Day I Stood Still), Kenneth Lonergan’s Lobby Hero (Lobby Hero) or Robert William Sherwood’s Vergebung (Absolution), three of my translations which remain unperformed. Therefore you’re always glad if a play is called Cooking with Elvis, because you know that the title will immediately appeal to quite different groups of spectators. However, I am still waiting for Reading with Marilyn. Any dramatist desperately looking for a catchy title: feel free to take it!
