Translation Workshops and Performances
The workshops are facilitated by Cristina Viti, a professional translator who has refined the techniques of co-translation in her own highly acclaimed poetry translations from Italian and French. Co-translation begins with preparing a literal translation of a given text into English that is then collectively reworked.
Performances are directed by Maëlle Dequiedt, Simon Hatab and members of the La Phenomena, a French theatre collective. Participants develop their own script, combining objects, narration, sound and movement, to draw out the tensions and contradictions latent in revolutionary language that is over two hundred years old.
These public events, translation workshops and performances are documented on the project blog.
Our developing reflections on this process, as well as new collaborative translations of key revolutionary texts for public or classroom use, can be found in the Radical Translations Toolkit: a resource for others engaged in the process of translating radical ideas today.
Translating the Manifesto of Equals
What does revolution mean to you? Have you ever wondered who wrote the first revolutionary manifesto? How do we translate and perform the Revolution today?
These were among the questions tackled at a series of workshops with students across King's Arts & Humanities Faculty. Between October 2019 and June 2020 the group worked towards a new, co-translated English version of Sylvain Maréchal's Manifeste des Egaux (1796), which is considered the first political manifesto and gave voice to the demands of the secret Conspiracy of the Equals led by Gracchus Babeuf. At a time when the most radical phase of the Revolution had come to a close after the fall of Robespierre, the Equals wanted to re-start the Revolution to win equality and happiness for all. The plot was discovered and its leaders, Babeuf and Alexander Darthé, were guillotined on 8 Prairal (27 May 1797). Maréchal's text is a rallying cry to the people of France to revive the revolutionary spirit of equality. In a heady language that combines rational reasoning with the rhetorical flourishes of revolutionary speeches, it denounces those who have profited from the Revolution and betrayed its ultimate aims, warning them that their time is running out, and heralding the beginning of a new era. Most striking of all is perhaps the conviction that the universal happiness is within grasp, and that everything can be sacrificed, including art, in exchange for "real equality".
Co-translation begins with preparing a literal translation of a given text into English that is then collectively reworked. This method enables participants with a diverse range of language skills to explore aspects that matter to them. We approached the Manifesto looking for ways of translating the language of the French Revolution into today's struggles and sensibilities. Our original plan was for this new translation to be turned into a live performance directed by professional dramaturge Simon Hatab, but the Coronavirus crisis broke out just as rehearsals were taking place. Despite this, we were able to complete the translation work via Zoom, and you can read it in the Radical Translation toolkit section here. You can also explore the blog to find out what students had to say about their experience of the translation workshops.
Performing Utopia / WRITING ON THE SAND – A film and performance of the Manifesto of Equals
Image credits: Lou Reichling, Bodies of Evidence (2021)
In January 2022, this collaborative translation of the Manifesto of Equals became the basis for a further collaboration with La Phenomena theatre collective, who started working with a group of King's students to create a performance of the Manifesto of Equals, based on the English text produced in the translation workshops.
The project has faced unprecedented challenges: from the Covid pandemic to Brexit and political crises the world over, from strikes that have roiled the UK higher education system to the myriad personal problems experienced by the participants themselves.
This experience has been made into a performance and a film – WRITING ON THE SAND – recounting a struggle for collective ideals constantly hindered by the entropy of everyday life.
La Phenomena spent a week with the students in a room at the top of one of King's campus buildings, by the Strand. These performances took expressions extracted from the Manifesto of Equals as titles. Thus reduced to a series of words or phrases, the performances explored the text’s powerful poetic dimensions, the text as a reservoir of potential dramatic scenes. The Manifesto became a means of liberating the imagination. Yet the film of these performances is interspersed by readings of emails from students apologising for their absence, or their abandonment of the project – meaning that the project had constantly to reorientate itself, to reassess itself.
The film also explores the streets around the Strand campus and the London School of Economics, where David Graeber – anthropologist and militant anarchist – taught before his death in 2020. The film follows Graeber, for whom it is necessary to as if we were already liberated, not to look to destroy the system but to stop reproducing it, to conceive a revolution which would not be a Great Event but a long, continuous improvisation, without end.
The performances responded to the translation, and the film partly responds to the performances, creating a loop of interpretations of the manifesto and its translation which attempt to think about what the document might mean for us now.
WRITING ON THE SAND was performed live with the screening of the film at Sands Films Studio, a space dedicated to performing utopias of all kinds, on the banks of the River Thames in Rotherhithe, a once thriving port whose own fortunes have ebbed and flowed with history's tide.
You can watch the film here:
The Last Judgement of All Kings
In 2021 we tackled another work by Sylvain Maréchal, his incendiary one-act play Le Judgement denier des rois. The play is notorious for featuring an exploding volcano that kills off all European and Russian royalty as well as the Pope. Cristina led a group comprising graduate and undergraduate students as well as early career translators in a series of online workshops. The length and difficulty of this more elaborate literary text required a different strategy: the text was divided into chunks and each section was assigned to a smaller group of 2-3 translators, who worked in their own time and shared their work on a single live document. This served as the basis for discussion and revision in plenary group sessions. This translation is still a work in progress - get in touch if you'd like to be informed of future workshops.
The challenges of translating descriptions of the kings' and prelates' elaborate costumes prompted a visit to the wonderful Rotherhithe Picture Research Library as soon as lockdown eased. Go to our twitter feed to see what we found.