Relating through Opacity: The Versatorium Translation Collective and Elfriede Jelinek's Die Schutzbefohlenen

Elfriede Jelinek's Die Schutzbefohlenen was the most prominent of numerous plays about refugees produced in German-speaking Europe in the mid-2010s, and its varied stagings raised ethical questions about representing refugees under conditions of unequal social power and linguistic access. This article examines these questions through the lens of translation, focusing on the Vienna-based translation collective Versatorium and their multilingual translations of Die Schutzbefohlenen, which they performed under the title Die, Should Sea Be Fallen In between 2015 and 2017. Versatorium staged translation as an open-ended process of linguistic encounter, privileging shared sensory experience above semantic comprehension. Drawing on & Eacute;douard Glissant's Poetics of Relation, I argue that Die, Should Sea Be Fallen In asserted refugee artists' "right to opacity" within European spaces of cultural production by refusing to represent refugee experiences as fully comprehensible-and thus reducible and consumable. Instead, Versatorium's performance of opaque translation enabled a more ethical form of relationality between diverse performers and audience members.