Sophie Stevens, Uruguayan Theatre in Translation: Theory and Practice. Cambridge: Leyenda, 2022.

Reviewed by Brenda Werth

Sophie Stevens’ Uruguayan Theatre in Translation: Theory and Practice is a welcome and much needed contribution to Uruguayan theatre studies and translation. Building on a growing interest in Spanish language plays in the UK, Stevens’ book lends visibility to Uruguay’s rich theater tradition, often overshadowed by theater hailing from neighboring Argentina and Chile. In dialogue with recent books on Uruguayan theater like Sarah Misemer’s 2017 Theatrical Topographies: Spatial Crises in Uruguayan Theater Post-2001, Stevens turns our attention to translation “as practice and mode of analysis” as she guides us expertly through an exploration of useful frameworks for approaching the mobility of dramatic texts between source and target culture. Throughout the book Stevens reinforces links between scholarship, practice, and performance, deftly breaking down disciplinary boundaries between translator and scholar and troubling the binary between source and target text often theorized and reinforced in translation studies. Though not a guide, she affirms, the book’s objective is “to identify strategies, techniques and approaches that can be adopted by other translators” (12). In her book she identifies key steps in the translation process (close reading, dramaturgical analysis, contextual analysis) and the collaborative work within and beyond the university that allows translators to negotiate between the “rootedness and possible mobility of the dramatic text” and ultimately brings a translation to fruition (6).

The book consists of six chapters, alternating between contextual and dramaturgical analyses of plays and full-stage ready translations of three of the plays, designed for a UK audience. The six plays included in the book were written between 1957 and 2008 and reflect a range of forms, styles, and themes of relevance to Uruguayan cultural production such as “bureaucratic disease, the intergenerational divides, and the types of violence and repression experienced in Uruguay” (184). In her analysis of each play, she reflects on how themes present in the original context might resonate with events and cultural phenomena in the UK context, citing the 2016 referendum on UK’s membership to the European Union, bureaucratization, social assistance, and domestic violence, as some of the most prominent ones. Particularly enriching was Stevens’ discussion of her multiple points of entry into the dramatic texts as script consultant, workshop facilitator, and her participation in rehearsals, table reads, and university seminars. Her rigorous approach to the translation process is informed by interviews and consultation with playwrights, actors and directors. Of note is her ongoing collaboration with Out of the Wings, a London based collective that fosters the translation of Spanish language plays from Spain, Portugal and Latin America.

The book’s joint focus on critical analysis and translation is effective in bridging theory and practice. I found Stevens’ choice of theoretical texts refreshing and productive in generating new perspectives on the relationship between source and translated texts. She engages a range of theoretical concepts including Patrice Pavis’ theory of the preverbal; Antoine Vitez’s notion of the stage as a laboratory; Jean-Luc Nancy’s conceptualization of touch in establishing proximity and distance; Roland Barthes’ metaphor of the network for the source text; and David Johnston’s notion of “bold blend” to refer to the multiple types of audience engagement with a play that incorporates both “familiar and remote cultural contexts” (143). Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s idea of the translation as an extension of the source text, Stevens elaborates the concept of “afterlife” to refer to the continued resonance of the source text in a translation that nonetheless becomes modified, transformed, or renewed (11). Her treatment of the “afterlife” is one of the most compelling theoretical contributions in the book, as it relates not only to the practice of translation but also to some of the most central themes of the plays dealing with disappearance, the passage of time, and death.

Chapter 1, “Frames of Analysis,” juxtaposes analyses of the plays M’hijo el dotor [My Son the Doc] (1903) by Florencio Sánchez, and La biblioteca [The Library] (1957) by Carlos Maggi. Guiding Stevens through the chapter is the question: “What is at stake in the dramatic text?” Her analysis of M’hijo el dotor, an established play in the Uruguayan canon, provides an introduction to rioplatense theater production and Uruguay’s national theater tradition. While this framework is useful to the reader, the chapter’s strength lies in her analysis of La biblioteca, a less known play she translates for the book (Chapter 2), for which she offers insightful accounts of the work she undertook to create a stage-ready English translation.

In Chapter 3, “Conceptualising Distance and Proximity,” Stevens follows a similar structure, pairing a well-known Uruguayan play, Pedro y el capitán [Pedro and the Captain] (1979) written by Mario Benedetti from exile during the civic-military dictatorship, with a less known play, Bailando sola cada noche [Dancing Alone Every Night] (2008), by Raquel Diana (translated in chapter 4). In this chapter, Stevens centers on how a play “might find a place in the target culture and she introduces Jean-Luc Nancy’s concepts of distance and proximity to discuss both the relationship between source and target cultures and the process of translation. Stevens’ expertise shines in this chapter, as her work as script consultant (together with Catherine Boyle) for the 2016 London staging of Pedro el capitán reveals how translation decisions affect stage direction and other aspects of the theatrical process. Her analysis brings two plays together in an exchange that might not seem intuitive at first glance, but which becomes clear through Stevens’ excellent discussion of afterlife both as it shapes the liminal experience of the protagonists in the plays and the translation process itself as it negotiates between cultures.

In chapter 5, “Form and Theatre Translation,” Stevens introduces two plays that “use theatre as a site of resistance” to Uruguay’s civic-military dictatorship: El herrero y la muerte (Death and the Blacksmith) by Mercedes Rein and Jorge Curi, premiered in Montevideo in 1981, and Punto y coma (Ready or Not) (2003) by Estela Golovchenko (translated in chapter 6). Stevens’ focus here is on form and how engagement with the folkloric (in El herrero) and the flashback (in Punto y Coma) in both plays leads to the exploration of translation strategies that resist form as a limitation and instead embrace the translation of form as a unique challenge with the potential to unleash creative possibilities. In this chapter Stevens engages with the rich literary and cultural heritage of the folkloric form and proposes ways of reshaping and recreating form for a new audience. In Stevens’ analysis and discussion of her translation of Golovchenko’s Punto y coma, Stevens offers enlightening firsthand account of the decisions she made as translator.

Stevens’ translations are thoughtfully crafted, beautifully articulated, clear, and amply tested for the stage. They reveal the careful and meticulous work of a researcher who has investigated thoroughly the context, formal aspects of language use, rhetorical devices, and style of the target text in collaboration with playwrights, actors, directors, scholars and students in workshops, rehearsals, table readings and seminars. Virtually unknown to most English audiences, the translated plays included in this book are true gems and will be of great interest to theater scholars, students, and practitioners. Through juxtaposing analysis and translation of theater in one study, Stevens pioneers dialogue between the fields of Uruguayan theater and translation studies in a book that will hold great appeal to theater scholars, translators, students and practitioners. 

Brenda Werth is Associate Professor Latin American Studies and Spanish at American University. She also co-translator and co-editor (with April Sweeney) of the anthology, Fauna and Other Plays by Romina Paula (Seagull Press 2023). Her current monograph, “Fictions of the Real: Synergies between Screen and Stage in Argentine Performance,” examines the rich transfers between theater and film that are revitalizing the performance scene in Argentina.