Ahead of WhatsTheirNames Theatre’s upcoming theatrical production Skieken f’Tiġieġ, translated into Maltese by SIMONE SPITERI, the writer speaks to Lara Zammit about her interaction with the work and its underlying themes.
Scottish playwright David Harrower’s first produced play Knives in Hens (1995) has become one of the most performed Scottish plays of all time. WhatsTheirNames Theatre is set to stage the acclaimed production this month, under the direction of Philip Leone-Ganado, with a script translated by Simone Spiteri in the play’s first-ever rendition in Maltese.
Skieken f’Tiġieġ is set in a pre-industrial landscape and centres on a love triangle that emerges between a young woman, a ploughman and a miller. The young woman journeys from ignorance to knowledge as she finds herself through language, finding liberation in her need to name things to understand their place in the world and her own by extension.
Speaking to Times of Malta about her translation of the play, Spiteri said she was unfamiliar with Knives in Hens before Leone-Ganado approached her with the prospect of rendering it in Maltese.
“I knew Harrower’s work but not Knives in Hens. It was Philip who approached me with a proposal to translate it and as a result introduced me to it. There was a very short time window in which I had to give him my answer, so I really had to trust my gut on the first impact it had on me.”
She explained that she was not sure what to make of it, but since the play was so particular and the task of translating seemed so daunting, she decided to go through with it.
“My gut proved right,” she quipped. “I loved delving into it, exploring and discovering it as a reader, an audience member, writer and a translator at the same time.”
When asked what difficulties the play posed during the task of translation, Spiteri said she was prepared to face a lot of challenges, but said that she found the play “married itself to the Maltese language like a dream”.
“I made a conscious decision almost straight away to rely on Semitic vocabulary exclusively and I feel that this decision immediately opened up a lot of exciting possibilities.
“There is a rawness about the way the characters speak, interact and process their environment, as well as themselves and each other in the play, that is visceral, profound and robust in its simplicity. The Semitic roots and sounds of our language conveyed that wonderfully. It was a constant search for the right word in Maltese, many of which are within our reach all the time and which we have sadly given up on seeking, opting instead to rely on plainer, lazier options,” she said.
A constant search for the right word in Maltese
Skieken f’Tiġieġ concerns particularly the power of words. It is set in a rural community where conversation is blunt and functional – a tool like a plough or a knife – and where figurative language is seen as nonsensical.
Elaborating on this aspect of the narrative, Spiteri said she would venture to say that, in general, “the functionality of language has overtaken its figurative counterpart across the board, perhaps in a new way.
“Social media has much to answer for that, as well as the fast-paced, noisy but often vacuous ‘busy-ness’ our lives seem to be tinged with. But that is not the type of functional language that the play uses.
“On the contrary, its very starkness imbues it with a different type of poetry. The characters use blunt language to express deep and meaningful sentiments. The fact that there is a switch in language was not an issue. I believe that it’s the way we approach expression that increasingly favours form over substance,” she maintained.
Spiteri went on to note that the play shows that grandiose language does not necessarily elicit any sort of essence, saying that it just sheds light on how layered meaning in language may still be delivered “through spartan means that need not make a victim out of poetry”.
Speaking about her collaboration with the play’s director and actors as the play progressed, Spiteri described how Leone-Ganado gave her the space to discover the play on her own before sharing his thoughts on its finer details, even though he had already directed the play before.
“That freedom is essential for a writer to meet the play on their own terms first and he sensed the necessity for that part of the process without my asking for it. Once a draft was ready, however, that’s where the collaboration kicked in.
“We had a reading with the actors, long discussions about – sometimes – singular words that we didn’t feel did justice to a moment or a character and allowed the translation to keep blossoming in that way.”
Skieken f’Tiġieġ by David Harrower, with a new Maltese translation by Simone Spiteri and directed by Philip Leone-Ganado for WhatsTheirNames Theatre, is showing at the Valletta Campus Theatre between April 7 and 10, subtitled in English on April 7. Supported by Arts Council Malta through the Programme Support Scheme 2021.