By Sophie Girard
Medieval farces are filled with surprisingly contemporary themes, with characters that range from drag queens to priests, says Jody Enders, a UC Santa Barbara historian of rhetoric who translates them from French.
“The more I delved into it, the more I started to find that it was stunningly modern, stunningly contemporary, stunningly post-modern, as wacko and open-ended as any Bacchus play as you can imagine,” Enders said at a recent Humanities Decanted event hosted by UCSB’s Interdisciplinary Humanities Center.
Jody Enders, a UCSB Distingushed Professor of French and Theater, spoke about her two recently translated books of farce at a Humanities Decanted event hosted by IHC.
Enders is a historian of rhetoric and part of the Medieval Studies program at UC Santa Barbara, having received numerous accolades for her contributions to theater. She and Leo Cabrantes-Grant, a professor of Spanish and Portuguese, conversed about Enders’ newly translated books on medieval comedies, “Trial by Farce: A Dozen Medieval French Comedies in Modern English” and “Immaculate Deception and Further Ribaldries: Yet Another Dozen Medieval French Plays in Modern English.” The audience included Enders’ family and friends, colleagues, and students of French and medieval farce.
Medieval farces were written and performed by lawyers in the Middle Ages, who aimed to “skewer the justice system, show their superiority to everyone, and make fun of institutions,” Enders said. These performances were marketplace theater, presented in the center of the audience’s daily lives. Farces attracted publishers and audience attention in the past, and have managed to remain comedically relevant to society centuries later.
Enders’ translations have allowed theater groups to perform previously forgotten works and for readers to be able to enjoy and understand the comedies. Translating the farces also means accounting for how the reader will interpret the meaning in the present context. Enders said it can be challenging to translate farces for the stage when she “comes face to face with things where a contemporary meaning will completely overwhelm any original meaning.”
She cited a play called the “Husband Makeover,” where two husbands are put into a giant oven for their makeover. “The material is really funny on the page,” she said. “But then you start to think, how can I possibly translate this visual material? It would be very difficult to imagine an oven on stage without conjuring visions of the Holocaust.”
Jody Enders’ book Immaculate Deception and Further Ribaldries: Yet Another Dozen Medieval French Plays in Modern English.
Centuries have elapsed since the farce was performed, so the script must be edited for its antiquated language, as well as for any content that would inappropriately connect it to recent events. In this scenario, Ender suggested incorporating “an idiotic Easy-Bake Oven” to avoid any unrelated connotations in modern adaptations.
She has also encountered opportunities to incorporate modern themes into her translations. In the farce “Wife Swap,” two heterosexual couples swap partners and the story ends with a debate over who is staying with whom. The farce never gives any indication of who is saying what in the debate, and Enders decided to write ten different endings, including a queer ending where the women choose one another. “Nothing in the text ruled it out,” Enders said. She added that this pairing might seem unimaginable, but is not “when you consider the attitude of these particular comedians and everything that they are doing.”
As the instructor of a course on medieval French farce, Enders describes navigating in a classroom setting the sensitive topics and obscenity found in farces. In order to prepare her students, she directly addresses these topics. “What I do in the classroom, as a medievalist, is talk about obscenity and talk about language.”
The comedy in a farce challenges its readers to look past the shocking themes to gain a greater understanding of the writer’s message. “It's there to make you uncomfortable, it's there to be in your face,” Enders said. “But it's also there to suggest that you might be able to take away some kind of profitable social message or have a good laugh and forget it.”
Jody Enders, who specializes in medieval French theater, and Leo Cabrantes-Grant, a professor of Spanish and Portuguese at UCSB, discussed the challenges of translation and navigating sensitive topics in the classroom.
One of Enders’ students, Luci Picarelli, said those in the class also engaged in improvisation activities and got to give their own current interpretations of the farces. “For our final we got to write our own farce, so we did a modern take: a tinder date gone wrong type thing,” Picarelli said. “It’s my favorite class I’ve ever taken.”
At the close of the discussion, Enders said she has been able to express her inner playwright through translating. “This is the part of me that always wanted to do art, that didn’t think I had my own stories that I could write to tell,” she said. Translating, Enders said, has given her a new perspective on theater. “Most of us literary people get into this biz because we love the stuff, but creating the stuff gives a whole different picture.”
Sophie Girard is a second-year UC Santa Barbara student majoring in Communications and pursuing a minor in Professional Writing and Earth Science. She is a Web and Social Media intern for the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts.