Brodie, GS; (2016) The translator takes the stage: Clair in Crimp's The City. In: Woods, M, (ed.) Authorizing translation: Literature, theory and translation. (pp. 47-60). Routledge: Abingdon, United Kingdom.

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Abstract

Martin Crimp is a contemporary experimental playwright who translates and is translated. However, translation is not only the system within which Crimp operates: it also informs the content of his writing. This chapter studies Crimp’s fictional translator, Clair, in his play The City (2008), investigating her representation of the practice and phenomenon of translation and querying the boundaries of invention within translational narratives. The nature of theatrical representation imposes specific parameters which render theatre translation a relevant site to examine the literary representation of the translator. The City, with the centrality of the translator Clair, documents the presence of the translator in the text, even where the text, the translator, and the play itself, are literary fabrications. Clair epitomizes the paradoxical creativity and destruction of the translational act; the boundaries between creation/original and derivation/translation are insistently teased and worried. In his deconstruction of the role of the translator, embodied by Clair, Crimp addresses the issues of translation as a creative activity and the nature of the translator’s re-enactment of an author’s invention.

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