Turtles All the Way Down: Performative Translations

The relation between the three basic genres—epic, poetry, drama—is often characterized through comparative descriptions of form, themes, plot, and characters. Despite their multiple variations and subgenres, the overarching genres are grosso modo recognizable across periods and cultures. Yet, when the problem of translation is introduced in the genre description a fundamental difference comes to the surface. While epic and poetry may or may not be translated without losing their genre status or their value, a dramatic text must be translated from text to stage. The text itself may or may not be translated; but being only a pre-text for a performance, its status as a dramatic text, rather than just a text, requires a multidimensional translation for every performance. This constitutive translation—in a broad understanding of translation—and its relation to the dramatic text, itself subject to a verbal translation or not, provides the dramatic text with a unique dynamic cultural significance. With a focus on Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s and Lorenzo da Ponte’s recreation of Pierre-Augustin de Beaumarchais’s French comedy Le Mariage de Figaro (1783) as the Italian opera Le nozze di Figaro (1786), the article discusses constitutive translation.