Marie Vieux Chauvet’s Theatres

Marie Vieux Chauvet's Theatres bridges scholarly engagement with Chauvet's performance oeuvre and the creative adaptation and translation work undertaken by academics.Writing in the turbulent mid-twentieth century in Haiti, Chauvet's theatre and prose, like the author herself, was made invisible, remaining for decades out of print, untranslated, and neglected by many.As Gina Athena Ulysses puts it, this inspirational project "does the digging" (p.vi).By rendering Chauvet's work more accessible to a broader audience, the acts of cultural (and linguistic) translation collected here, as Kaiama L. Glover suggests in the After-Words, "render Haiti more legible outside of and beyond the proverbial 'converted'" (p.234).In October 2016 Glover and Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken gathered an impressive assemblage of scholars and artists to commemorate the centennial of Chauvet's birth, which was staged at the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center in New York.1 Invited actors brought to life Chauvet's first, lesser known play, La Légende des fleurs (published in 1946), using Benedicty-Kokken's superb English translation.Also notable is the actors' reading of Lena Taub Robles's translation of Chauvet's Amour (1968), adapted for the stage by José Pliya in 2007.In the book's final section, Judith G. Miller and Robles offer invaluable insight into the challenges of the creative process of translation, and what Robles describes as becoming "intimate with two texts" (p

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