Literariness And Performability

Dramatic texts have a dual nature-literariness and performability. On the onehand, as a genre of literature, drama puts as much emphasis on the beauty of wordsand art of expression as other literary genres. On the other hand, as a time-honoredform of performing art, drama had been performed and passed down by generationsorally before the invention of written record. Seen from this perspective, itsperformability came earlier than its literariness. However, studies on the literarinessof theatre translation significantly exceed those on its performability in time and scale,resulting in an unbalanced and unfair judgment of translated plays. This paperconducts a comparative study of Liang Shiqiu’s and Zhu Shenghao’s Chineseversions of Shakespeare’s comedy The Tempest from the two dimensions of drama-literariness and performability, so as to give them a more comprehensive andreasonable assessment.A good play must be a perfect combination of literariness and performability, butcan its translation preserve and carry out both of the elements? Will the successfulreproduction of literariness impede the achievement of performability? Thecomparative study of the two Chinese versions of The Tempest shows that Liang’sversion is better than Zhu’s in both literariness and performability, which indicatesthat the two requirements do not exclude each other.This paper examines the recreation of literariness in the two Chinese versions ofThe Tempest from four perspectives-poetry, rhetoric, implications and idiosyncrasies-with rhetoric theories, relevance principles and other theoretical tools. In themeantime, this paper divides performability into speakability, actability andtarget-language audience acceptability according to the interpretation of this termfrom three angles, and uses these three criteria to analyze the performability of thetwo Chinese versions. Both translators show their full understanding and respect ofthe original play and its author, as well as their efforts in bridging the gap betweenEnglish and Chinese culture. While the two Chinese versions are good in their own ways, Liang manifests a more powerful command of literariness and performability.Unfortunately, Liang’s version has not had its due credit in the target culture, whichtriggers the consideration of theatre translation strategies in the hope of appreciatingthe “other” and realizing cultural exchange.