The playwright as epic translator? Mother Courage and the intertextual construction of an 'English Brecht'

Since the earliest translations of Brecht’s plays into English, translators, directors and actors alike have struggled to reconcile a desire for textual accuracy with a style of performance that is considered ‘Brechtian’. While the dialectic between text and performance is celebrated by Brecht’s theories of theatre, his translated texts are often seen to bear sole responsibility for ‘fidelity’ to a concept of the Brechtian, and the continuing emergence of new translations of the plays is sometimes interpreted as a (hopeless) striving for perfection in the Anglophone understanding of Brecht. However, it is not one individual translation but rather the interaction between the translated texts that is central to an understanding of Brecht in English. If authorship can be understood as a discursive construction, ‘Brecht’ circulates in English as a fluid author-function that is more than the sum of the individual versions, and which shapes them in its turn. Through the example of Tony Kushner’s Mother Courage and her Children (2006), a translation shaped by Brecht’s Anglophone author-function but one which also enters into critical dialogue with previous translations, this paper explores the implications, for Anglophone Brecht, of the translator’s attempts to observe Brechtian principles in his translatorial behaviour as well as in the translated text.