Relating through Opacity: The Versatorium Translation Collective and Elfriede Jelinek’s <i>Die Schutzbefohlenen</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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 Édouard 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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".