Schmerzgrenze

Theater plays often revolve around violent events, war, abuse, violence in various forms. In theater texts, this violence is captured in drastic language. When we translate these texts, we have to deal with solutions for this specific language.

How exactly do we work with such language? Where is this threshold regarding pain? Is it the point where the violence becomes too much for the audience? Where they no longer want to feel it and want to protect themselves from it? Or is it not also or rather the point where we make the audience feel something? Where language introduces the audience to a sensation of violence with artistic means, in this case, language?

In a panel discussion, Annette Kopetzki, Sabine Heymann, Corinna Popp and I will talk about how we deal with these issues in translation. We translate from Italian, French and English into German.

Schmerzgrenze – Translating Violence in Theater Texts
2 May 2023, 7:30 pm
MarmorSaal at the Deutschen Schauspielhaus in Hamburg

Annette Kopetzki has been translating fiction and poetry from Italian for 30 years. In publications and seminars she devotes herself to the theory of literary translation and organizes events on translation.

Sabine Heymann has been a cultural journalist, theater critic and translator of theater texts, non-fiction and fiction, especially from Italian, for more than 30 years. She teaches at various universities and publishes scholarly texts on Italian and Chinese theater.

Corinna Popp is a dramaturge and translator plays, prose and philosophy from French. Her translations included texts by Gwendoline Soublin, Jérôme Meizoz, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and Alain Badiou.

Henning Bochert is a literary and theatre translator, writer, dramaturg, member of Drama Panorama: Forum für Übersetzung und Theater, raum4 -netzwerk für künstlerische alltagsbewältigung. Since the mid-90s, he has been translating English-language plays and running a translation agency.