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Tongues of Fire (A Play for the Theatre)

(written in Macedonian)

The key research questions addressed by Tongues of Fire are what happens to meaning in the process of translation, and how and why it may become obfuscated and lost during transmission. The play investigates the themes of chasms in communication, clashes between different cultures and symbolic orders, and failures of translation.

The play develops an affective articulation of issues of culture and communication that are explored in theoretical texts such as Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (Hall, 1996) and Is That a Fish in Your Ear (Bellos, 2011). The play’s narrative tackles linguistic and philosophical issues around the translation of the Bible, literary translation, translation as manipulation, intercultural sensitivity, and cultural and linguistic lacunae. It deals with the semantic noise which impairs communication, and which can be caused by a variety of cultural, social, political and psychological factors.

The play also investigates historical events and draws on texts dealing with the cultural and religious clashes between East and West, the Latin and the Orthodox worlds - for example Byzantine Missions Among the Slavs (Dvornik, 1970) and Byzantine Commonwealth (Obolenski, 1971).

The play uses the methodology of practice-based research to articulate the affective aspects of the loss of meaning that occurs in translation. This creates new knowledge by giving audiences and readers an alternative understanding of these issues - knowledge which is often oblique and paradoxical rather than logical and cerebral. As a theatrical narrative the objective of Tongues of Fire is to show the conflict between cultures and symbolic orders and the problems of translation in a dramatic present tense. In this way the play investigates the same issues that are discussed in cultural, political and social forums through academic discourse – in contrast, using dramatic articulation, Tongues of Fire investigates the neglected emotional deep-structure of these issues.

The play opens in the present time in front of a statue of the brothers St. Cyril and Methodius, Apostles of the Slavs, translators of the Bible and creators of the Cyrilic alphabet. The narrator is Sly Peter, a trickster from Macedonian folklore, here imagined as centuries old and a part of the brothers’ mission. The play suddenly moves to Moravia in 867, when the mission was brutally destroyed by Frankish priests. Later Peter returns to contemporary Macedonia in a series of scenes about identity, translation and the clashes between the Latin and Cyrlic worlds.