Metaphor and Metonymy: the Translator-Practitioner’s Visibility

Abstract

That the discussion that follows relies on practice as its touchstone may seem reassuringly concrete to some. But it is not a position devoid of its own difficulties. The discourse of practice is frequently a literal one, its sphere of reference often anecdotal, so that practice-based writing may be easily dismissed as lacking any real theoretical interest or philosophical engagement. This leads in some quarters to an over-determined view of the practitioner, where the virtue of the concrete is dismissed as the merely situational. To some extent, of course, this reflects the core critic—creative divide that, spuriously or not, still cleaves many departments of literature and theatre within the institution. Terms like ‘performance’ and ‘theatricality’ are brandished and disavowed, press-ganged into service both as the embodiment of an authentic, but fleeting and necessarily subjective, communication, and equally, as a form of deceptive synchronism that detracts from more objective and universalizing judgments. In the words of Shannon Jackson (2004, p. 123), theatre itself becomes ‘an index of anti-disciplinarity’, while institutional practices and successive theoretical retrenchments, for the moment at least, rest more happily on paradigms rooted in the disciplinary.

I dedicate to speech, to pomp and show, This playhouse re-erected for the players. I set my saw and chisel in the wood To joint and panel solid metaphors; The walls a circle, the stage under a hood — Here all the world’s an act, a word, an echo.

(Seamus Heaney, from ‘Peter Street at Bankside’)