Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1477424
maltatoday | SUNDAY • 28 AUGUST 2022 7 THEATRE Loranne Vella IT was a surprising moment for me when two years ago I received a phone call from Te- atru Malta asking me if I want- ed to translate the play Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder into Maltese, specifically because this text was open right in front of me at that moment. I was reading it to use elements from Courage's character, and aspects from Brecht's epic the- atre, for two of the main char- acters in Marta Marta (Ede Books, 2022), my last novel. Moreover, since I describe my- self as a writer, an actor and a translator, I wasn't sure which part of me was mostly saying "yes" to accepting the task of translating this play. This question became clearer once the translation work be- gan. During the first phase, it was the translator in me who took over. As I read the play in German, a play I was more fa- miliar with in English, specifi- cally Eric Bentley's translation (Methuen, 1962), I tried to forget everything I knew about it and read as if it were the first time, while I immediately started to look for equivalent words and expressions in Maltese. During the second phase, after finish- ing the first translation draft, I revised the entire text, this time from a writer's perspective. As a dramatic playscript also in- tended for publication, I wanted it to be read as a literary work. And I could have stopped here. However, from the very begin- ning, I was asking myself the following questions: how am I going to translate a play which, despite the fact that the charac- ters' present is set in the seven- teenth century and their reality is the war which endured thirty years in Europe, will in fact be staged in Malta in 2022? There- fore, how am I going to make it sound valid for today's audience without erasing the past it's oc- curring in? In addition, how am I going to translate into Maltese a play which was written for a specific type of theatre – Bre- cht's epic and dialectical thea- tre; a theatre created to address the political situation in the times of the Second World War; a theatre which requires from the spectators to neither identi- fy nor empathise with the play's characters but rather to engage in a rational understanding of the theatrical action happening on the stage and a deep discus- sion about it? During the last revision phase of the translation process I kept in mind the political com- mitment of Brecht's theatre; I allowed my theatrical experi- ence to direct me while I tried, as much as possible, to remain faithful to the original text and emphasise the literary aspect of the writing itself. I can safely say that I had never felt the three fields of my career – as writer, actor and translator – combin- ing into one discipline as much as I have while translating Ma Kuraġġ u Wliedha. Translating foreign workers into Maltese