Looking Back at the Audience: The RSC & The Wooster Group’s Troilus and Cressida (2012)

The controversy around the RSC & The Wooster Group’s Troilus and Cressida (Stratford-upon-Avon 2012) among the spectators and critics in Britain revealed significant differences between the UK and the US patterns of staging, spectating, and reviewing Shakespeare. The production has also exposed the gap between mainstream and avant-garde performance practices in terms of artists’ assumptions and audiences’ expectations. Reviews and blog entries written by scholars, critics, practitioners, and anonymous theatre goers were particularly disapproving of The Wooster Group’s experimentation with language, non-psychological acting, the appropriation of Native American customs, and the overall approach to the play and the very process of stage production. These points of criticism have suggested a clear perception of a successful Shakespeare production in the mainstream British theatre: a staging that approaches the text as an autonomous universe guided by realistic rules, psychological principles, and immediate political concerns. If we assume, however, that Troilus and Cressida as a play relies on the dramaturgy of cultural differences and that it consciously reflects on the notion of spectatorship, the production’s transgression of mainstream patterns of staging and spectating brings it surprisingly close to the Shakespearean source

Traps of the trade. Gender and mistranslation in five polish translations of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land

The article touches upon gender translation problems, which arise on the level of grammar, culture and imagery. The problem is signaled with reference to five Polish translations of the opening passage of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922). The analysis concerns the following translations: Czesław Miłosz’s Jałowa ziemia (1946), Krzysztof Boczkowski’s Ziemia jałowa (two translations – from 1990 and 2001), Andrzej Piotrowski’s Ziemia jałowa (1996) and Jerzy Niemojowski’s Kraj Spustoszony (1978). Eliot’s poem introduces an axiological paradox: spring appears as life-giving and cruel at the same time, while winter seems protective, because it encourages immobility and sleep. In this model, the seasons are attributed female qualities and roles. The Polish translations are not always successful in rendering the gender aspect of the English original with adequacy, as grammatical and cultural habits of target readers differ from those of the original audience. Thus, the category of gender constitutes a perilous trap for the translators of the poem – it cannot be escaped; however, its danger might be neutralised thanks to the sensitivity to the imagery of the original poem. When you are citing the document, use the following link http://essuir.sumdu.edu.ua/handle/123456789/1102