Jiří Levý’s contributions to drama translation revisited

Jiří Levý’s contributions to drama translation, especially chapter V of his canonical study “The Art of Translation” (1963, the 1969 German and the 1974 Russian versions, respectively) have been remarkably often referred to. They are affirmed, in some points questioned and, first of all, developed further in hosts of translation studies since then. While the similarly canonical article (containing just a few remarks on drama translation) “Translation as a decision process” (1967) “aims at constructing a generative model of translation” (Levý, p. 1182), i.e. clearly envisages a theoretical approach to translation, the explanations dealing with drama translation are, of course, corpus-bound, i.e. they are applicable to so-called textbound theatre texts of certain historical periods and theatre landscapes only. When revisiting Levý’s contributions to drama translation, some positions, e.g. the idea of an “objective meaning” and an “objective centre” of a work of art (1969, p. 48f.; 2012, p. 57f.) have to be dismissed, and other positions have to at least be questioned now. The paper discusses such “starting points” in Levý’s works as the unfortunate catchword “speakability” , the tension between stylization and spontaneous oral expression in dialogue, the importance of forms of address (concerning the direction of an utterance, “Sprechrichtung” , and the relation of role figures, “Beziehungsdefinition”), rhythm, etc. The discussion will, first of all, rely on several decades of comparative analysis of drama translations, but also refer to a number of scholarly works on the theme.