Translating The Proposal

By Polina Shafran

Wise men say that every translation is also an interpretation, because each translator adds something of himself or herself into the translated work. When I read Chekhov, I immediately imagine the people he writes about. In most cases these are just ordinary people, that one could have easily encountered if one lived in the 19th century.  Chekhov’s way of telling a story is through the characters he creates. His heroes are simple: doctors, engineers, teachers, land owners and other common people. The playwright is very particular about giving each one of his ordinary heroes their own distinct features. Like a painter, Chekhov uses small strokes to create a whole picture.  

When translating The Proposal one of my main desires was to preserve the characters Chekhov created. I wanted to capture the way each of the character speaks in the original Russian, then carefully transfer it to English without taking away the substance.  At times this task was quite challenging and required more thought and research: I am grateful to those who contributed their time to help and shared their advice with me. I am very excited to have the opportunity to bring these funny, awkward and naïve people to the audience. These people are part of my history and culture and I hope the audience will like them, laugh with them, and sometimes, at them. 

A Note From The Director…

It is always a pleasure to work with the great writers, and Chekhov is one of the true masters. I am generally attracted by the quality of writing in a play - how brilliant the dialogue, how meticulous the plotting, how seamless the transitions of tone and action. When you work with a play that has good writing, you have one problem less to worry about, and it allows actors, designers, and director to be able to concentrate on doing their jobs in producing something exciting and enlightening, and hopefully entertaining. To look at it in a certain sense, a good writer provides a scaffold of solid bone, onto which the better actors add flesh and sinew to make a living thing of those bones. The task of the designer then is to put clothes on it, while the director is required to give the new creature the manners and etiquette necessary to appear before the public.  All are necessary for a production or performance to be at its best, but without that strong initial bone structure, the rest can only be a chimera at best and a monstrosity at worst.  

We hope that this afternoon, you take as much pleasure in watching these plays, and that you learn as much about the period, the writer, and the culture, as we did in rehearsing them.

Event Poster (PDF)

This presentation will propose a neuro-scientific approach to the heightened realism of Matteo Garrone’s film Gomorrah. Research on the workings of “mirror neurons” has shown that certain techniques, above all the use of the steadicam, have been particularly effective in producing an embodied response in the viewer. In the case of Gomorrah, where the majority of the shooting is done by steadicam (wielded by Garrone himself!), the film’s heightened realism may well find its explanation at the neurological level. The talk will include close analysis of key scenes throughout Gomorrah, with a brief foray into a second film, Gabriele Salvatore’s I’m Not Scared, before concluding with some general reflections on the critical possibilities opened up by this exciting new field of research.

Millicent Marcus is Professor of Italian and Film Studies at Yale University. Her speciali-zations include medieval literature, Italian cinema, interrelationships between literature and film, and representations of the Holocaust in post-war Italian culture. She is the au-thor of An Allegory of Form: Literary Self-Consciousness in the 'Decameron' (l979), Ital-ian Film in the Light of Neorealism (l986), Filmmaking by the Book: Italian Cinema and Literary Adaptation (l993) and After Fellini: National Cinema in the Postmodern Age (2002), and Italian Film in the Shadow of Auschwitz (2007). She has also published nu-merous articles on Italian literature and on film, and is currently studying contemporary Italian cinema within the theoretical framework of “post-realism.”