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Download fileLuzel’s ghosts: The unfinished business of translating folktales for performance
This article emerges from the author’s work on translating a selection of folktales collected by the nineteenth-century Breton folklorist Francois-Marie Luzel. It argues for a new approach to the translation of folktale texts that draws less from the traditions of literary translation and more from the current thinking around stage translation. It proposes that our understanding of the folktale text could benefit from a consideration of theatre scholarship (particularly Marvin Carlson’s theories of ‘ghosting’) and that the emergence in recent decades of the figure of the contemporary professional storyteller asks us to think of the folktale not simply as a text of performance, but as a text for performance. Furthermore, it argues that the act of translation is in itself an act of performance, made within the context of all previous performances and is, therefore, like all performances, provisional, incomplete and subject to revision.
History
School
- The Arts, English and Drama
Department
- English and Drama
Published in
Book 2.0Volume
7Issue
2Pages
159 - 168 (10)Citation
WILSON, M., 2017. Luzel’s ghosts: The unfinished business of translating folktales for performance. Book 2.0, 7 (2), pp.159-168.Publisher
© IntellectVersion
- AM (Accepted Manuscript)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Acceptance date
2017-12-01Publication date
2017-11-01Notes
This paper was published in the journal Book 2.0 and the definitive published version is available at https://doi.org/10.1386/btwo.7.2.159_1.ISSN
2042-8022Publisher version
Language
- en