When Nicola Gunn was a teenager, she picked up three different copies of Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita in a bookstore to work out which cover she liked. Then she looked at the first page of each, and her understanding of language changed forever. “The words were in a different order, sometimes completely different words,” she says.
“The same book. My mind went ‘what?’.” The three editions were different translations of the same text, beginning a lifelong fascination with the vagaries of interpretation.
“There’s no word-for-word translation,” says Gunn. “Language is unstable. It’s just a fiction, an invented tool we created.
This fascinates me.” Nicola Gunn will be performing her new work, Apologia, at Malthouse Theatre. Credit: Simon Schluter Apologia , Gunn’s new work which opens at the Malthouse Theatre on Thursday, is her way of teasing out the threads of language, translation and identity.
In the show, Gunn portrays herself as a tragic Francophile who aspires to be a French actress. She’s Australian, and doesn’t speak French, but that won’t be a problem. She’ll learn the lines phonetically, and project the studied elegance that French film stars exude.
If Frenchness, whatever that is, can be quantified, it can be appropriated. Severine Magois, Gunn’s acerbic French translator friend (or at least, her disembodied voice assembled from hundreds of hours of recorded conversations), disagrees. “When I was you.