Ludwig Wittgenstein once said: ‘the limits of my language mean the limits of my world’. All our communication, our expression, our articulated thoughts must at some point pass through the medium of language: artificial grammars, constructs and semantic boundaries. Even our silences must be eloquent in the framework of a broader on-going conversation with our fellow man. The theatre is no exception. Although theatre is by definition an art of performance and spectacle, it has long engendered the tradition of speech within it. Sometimes it aims for simple expression, sometimes for poetic ambiguity, but always dialogue is a crucial vehicle to carry the weight of theme and sense. This too is subject to the limits of language and our understanding of it.

The argument concerning plays in translation is one that extends to all literary media: can the flow and subtlety of an original piece of literature, with its own nuances of style and idiom, really emerge unscathed in a new and foreign tongue? Perhaps it is déclassé to butcher Italian opera with stylised English libretti and even to translate is solely a populist manoeuvre, perhaps, for those who cannot appreciate the artistry of the original.

True, there is the theatrical mystique of the foreign words. Maybe some plays such as those of Shakespeare seem to require the particular pentametrical tendencies of English and the mores that inspired them. It is also true that sub- titles can be well and subtly placed so as not to detract from a performance. No one would deny the merits of plays in their original language being performed out of their original context, and yet a play, or any other art form, in a foreign language is by its very nature exclusive. It cannot not always be accessible, since one would like to keep an eye on a translation flashing overhead, or a finger poised above an English script, and even then you are still at the mercy of the translator for sense. It is certainly not possible to be fluent in any language that might crop up, nor is it acceptable, I believe, to be restricted to the artistic contributions of one’s own tongue.

It is not even as simple a matter as that. ‘Translation is an art both estimable and very difficult, and therefore is not the labour and portion of common minds; it should be practiced by those who are themselves capable of being actors, when they see greater use in translating the works of others than in their own works.’ These are the words of Ignacy Krasicki, a Polish poet and multi-lingual translator. Translation must take into account less concrete constraints: context, not just grammar and idiom. More often than not a literal translation will simply fail to do a work any justice. Fidelity and transparency, or fluency, are two qualities to be striven for in a good translation and they are not necessarily compatable. A 17th-century French critic coined the phrase, ‘les belles infidèles,’ to suggest that translations, like women, could be either faithful or beautiful, but not both at the same time.

And what of the cultural transposition to take place for something to hold equivalent weight in its new linguistic setting? Radical translations have placed Sophocles’ Electra in a post-Freudian context to evaluate her isolation and madness, or Macbeth in Nazi Germany to exploit its themes of totalitarianism. In effecting a smooth transition between original and reproduction, the translator’s role is often described as that of a ‘bridge’, transferring and supporting, no less than that of an ‘artist’, creating and innovating.

Dryden, discoursing on then creative scope of the translator, said: ‘When [words] appear… literally graceful, it were an injury to the author that they should be changed. But since… what is beautiful in one [language] is often barbarous, nay sometimes nonsense, in another, it would be unreasonable to limit a translator to the narrow compass of his author’s words.’ As a student of Classics, this vision of the power of a translation appeals to me. A translator must be judicious, insightful, sympathetic, expressive and not to mention flexible.

The very art of translation can provide as much pleasure to an audience as the original, providing an almost dual level of intellectual engagement. The audience is in the power of the translator, who chooses which themes to exaggerate or suppress, which word-plays to reproduce literally and which to invent. It is important for an audience to understand that they are at a second remove from the original, but it is their responsibility to enquire into the calibre and fidelity of the translation. From the opening curtain, they must yield to the art-form of the translation itself and all the richness it can offer.

Spanish homosexual intellectuals (quite a mouthful) certainly do love their women. In recent years, prolific film maker Pedro Almodóvar has delighted audiences with a string of films focusing on the lives of female protagonists, providing an insight into the way women think like no straight man could. If you’ve seen his most recent offering, Volver, for example, you’ll remember how well he captured Penelope Cruz’s character’s awareness of her own breasts as she cleaned a blood-stained-knife at the kitchen sink. Inspired.

With this (the bit about women, not Penelope’s breasts) in mind, a group of us from Merton, relishing any and every opportunity to soak up Oxford’s pseudo-intellectual student theatre scene, set off to see The House of Bernada Alba, a Spanish play with an all female cast by Lorca (another Spanish homosexual – see where I’m going?) performed at the OFS.

Despite having booked the seats a week in advance, we still managed to get that annoying single row of chairs at the top.  After much confusion about which side we were meant to be sat on and a brief spat with an irate Spanish woman (we made her move three times, taking the wise decision to send our Northern Irish friend to negotiate with her), we took our seats, leant our right arms over the banister, and watched the play.

However, during the first half, some of us were left increasingly confused. The audience had been laughing. Laughing? Had they never read Lorca? Had they failed to grasp that wonderfully melodramatic tone that gay Spanish writers capture so well? In fairness, some of the characters were played comically, the maid in particuluar with exaggerated mannerisms and a rather out of place Somerset accent. But still, when a menacing old woman who has locked her daughters away to mourn, for eight draining years, a husband she never really loved shouts, ‘Your only right is to obey me!’, the correct response is icy horror, not roaring laughter!

The audience did manage to grasp the chilling tone in the second half, but not until the final scene, in which the sight of one of the daughters hanging herself was met initially with muted chuckles, which died down as the perpetrators realised that they had completely misunderstood the tone of the whole play.

Oh well, at least it made me feel clever.

Cast your mind back to the summer of 2006. For second years, it was a summer of post A-Level bliss, of hope for the coming three or four years, of freedom. It was also the summer of the Kooks, of ‘Naïve’. Luke Pritchard and his tousle-haired chums rocked the socks off thousands at Reading and dominated every single play list Radio One had to offer.  And then came Konk.
 
You see, the problem with the album is that it smacks, not of the freedom and promise offered by Inside In/Inside Out, but of a band which has sold off its ideals for a quickie in the loos. In my opinion, it’s because the album was recorded in America. The same happens to most potentially great British bands: the tragedy, the disappointment, the hangover caused by too many shots of liquor in LA bars; the smell of broken dreams, beer soaked clothes and sore eyes. Pete Doherty made this into a modern Romantic lyric. The Kooks just failed.
 
Their initial potential for greatness is disputable, of course, but since when has stature been about credibility? Most distressingly, nowhere is there a spark of genius; ‘Naïve’ has not been topped, or even approached. The riffs sound the same; the choppy indie chords have lost their spark. The only potential singles, ‘See the Sun’, ‘Always Where I Need To Be’ and ‘Mr Maker’ are fairly standard Radio One fodder. I expected more.
 

 
The only redeeming feature is ‘One Last Time’. It’s different; it’s not the intrusive, noisy and non-directional attempt at ‘Reading rock’. The rest, however, can be tragically encapsulated by Pritchards own lyrics: ‘I see the sun rising, but all I see is it fall, fall, fall…a plastic cup to be used and then disposed off’.
 
I can only assume they’re referring to a plastic Carling pint glass.
 
2 stars out of 5 

Oxford five-piece Foals have generated considerable hype on the indie-rock circuit. But can Antidotes, their first full album, provide a cure to increasingly derivative music acts?
 
The best-known single is probably ‘Cassius’, and much of the album shares the same frenetic high-energy, drum’n’bassish feel. The songs really make you want to get up and do a bit of that kind of dreamy robot that all the kids seem to be doing- the drumming is consistently excellent, the bass is smooth, the guitars vary from hypnotically melodic to tweakily perky and the vocals, though somewhat nondescript, blend well with the overall sound.
 
The lyrics are quite stream-of-consciousness, reflective with a general theme of loss. Some may read ‘emo cry-baby nonsense’ from the above, and they probably have a point: on ‘Olympic Airways’, they do after all express a desire to ’disappear till tomorrow…if only we could move away from here’. ‘Electric Bloom’ describes ‘an empty morgue with gurning hearts and hollowed crowns’, concluding that ‘it’s just another hospital’. However, the band can be forgiven their occasional forays into self-indulgent nihilism as most of the lyrics are catchily repetitive, cheerfully meaningless and pleasingly assonant.
 
If Foals’ brief was to make music that could get people on the dance floor, then they have succeeded. Antidotes is a layered album that works on a number of levels, taking the best parts of bands like Bloc Party and mixing it up with unusual time-signatures, afro influences and technical excellence to produce something that hails back to early Cure. While this is certainly not pony, it remains to be seen whether Foals can become stallions.Monique Davis
 
4 stars out of 5 

For those with two minutes to spare, the YouTube video ‘Where Daft Punk got their Samples from’ is a treat. Less perhaps for its actual ‘revelations’ than for the mixture of revulsion and disillusionment represented (alongside more sensible opinions) in the comments section. For some, it’s a Crying Game moment. The indie kids are through the looking glass, their icons shown up for the talentless, thieving scoundrels they really are.Sample-bashing of this sort pervades widely-held opinions on many genres. Rappers are said to just talk over others’ music; DJs to cannibalise a hook and repeat ad nauseam; pop acts to nick the backing and submit to diminishing returns. It’s all too easy to denigrate, chillin’ as we are in the indie ghetto. But, on closer inspection, we’d be better off cleaning up our hood before talking trash about others’.

Anyone who has ever heard a mash-up will be aware of the interchangeability of so many songs, chord changes lining up eerily. Unintentional though it may be, the parallels with the samplers are obvious. One could easily accuse Green Day, to quote one well-known example, of ‘singing’ ‘Boulevard of Broken Dreams’ over ‘Wonderwall’. There is very little virgin territory out there, then, and even artists looking to take a walk on the wild side will find themselves treading in the footprints of countless predecessors. However close to their influences, artists are attempting to produce something new. Whatever debt they have to others, they will be contributing something singularly their own to it. In the case of the good, this even improves upon what has gone before.

And this brings us back to Daft Punk. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of that YouTube video is its claim to debunk. Odd, considering the French duo have released a compilation of this source material, hardly the act of secretive fraudsters. A similar video shows how easy it is to create ‘One More Time’ from its source material using editing software. This is all well and good. But it misses the point. The editing required to produce ‘One More Time’ may be simple, but how many of us could hear a floor-filling chord progression in such unpromising source material? Looping Ray Charles may be child’s play, but how many of us have the flow to turn the result into a global hit?

Obviously, much sampling is lazy, unoriginal and even cynical. But that doesn’t make a damning case against the whole technique, no more than dross indie bands forfeit the genre’s right to acceptance. It may be bad art, but it is art all the same. If we are to accept that bands are a product of their influences, then the use of samples is simply the logical conclusion. And just as we look for value-added in any band, so we do so when a sample is used. Watching the video, for me, did not lessen my respect for the duo as musicians. My first thought, rather, was to wonder how the hell they had produced such gems from such dross.

Conventional wisdom may tell us otherwise, but perhaps it is possible to polish a turd.

I’ve got to say, I came to this festival a bit perplexed. What exactly is a film classified as ‘gay/lesbian/queer cinema’? Is it a film that contains a definitively gay relationship? One that explores taboos or Gender and Sexuality? Or focuses on transgender?

I look to the programme for answers: there are plenty of gay and lesbian shorts, films and even dance events listed. However, there are also films that have been included because they contain one of those elusive ‘gay icons’, a cross dressing element, or even, though lacking any substantial queer element, simply because they are directed by someone who has once made a ‘gay’ film.

Next question: who goes to a Lebian and Gay film festival anyway? On entering the British Film Institute (BFI), I’m immediately struck by just how unstriking the crowd is. Plenty of gay people, but also quite a few straight folk. Most are twenty- and thirty-somthings, but even children and the aged are visible. There’s evidently no rule of thumb for fans of Lesbian and Gay film, and as the day progresses, I find that the films the festival offers are as varied as their audience.

I first watch a series of ‘lesbian’ shorts, hailing from places as diverse as Norway and Brazil. The collator of this event, Anna Dunwoodie, tells is that she found it difficult finding a common idea under which to unite them, concluding with a loose idea of transition, driving, and first steps ‘Starting Out and Driving On’.

I’m as torn as she is when it comes to finding a single theme: not all are definitively lesbian. Some feature lesbian romances, some make reference to lesbian identity. But many deal simply with questions of female space, female creativity, or the struggle for personal identity in a heterosexual, male orientated society. One might be funny, one, experimental, and one a classic anecdotal short.

The friend who has come along with me to the event mentions Brokeback Mountain, and complains that Hollywood has not been inspired by Ang Lee to make more ‘gay’ movies. I beg to differ – gay culture has been there in mainstream movies for a while, especially when it comes to ‘romcoms’, from Four Weddings and a Funeral to Imagine Me and You. Hollywood will always argue, mainly to combat a homophobic reaction leading to a loss of sales, that the film is not about ‘gays’ or ‘lesbians’ but about two people falling in love. And perhaps in the end it all just comes down to labels, whether they are applied by society, audiences, or even the creators of the films themselves.

Perhaps queer cinema is really just about falling in love, be that with yourself, an identity, a boy, a girl, or a whole gang of people!