This talk addresses interactions between Classics, theatre, and te reo Māori, the indigenous Polynesian language of Aotearoa New Zealand. The principal focus will be two quite different works:

• Hemi Kelly’s Ngā Whakamāoritanga, a Māori translation of Brian Friel’s play Translations published in 2022.
• Charles Royal’s unpublished Māori translation of Euripides’ Bacchae, which was the working script for ‘the Māori Bacchae’, a planned Greco–Māori intercultural production.

Though little known among scholars or the wider public, these texts are of great historical importance. To my knowledge, Ngā Whakamāoritanga is the first published Māori-language literary text to include substantial passages of non-biblical ancient Greek and Latin translated in Māori (translations include substantial chunks of Greek and Latin). Charles Royal’s Bacchae, though unpublished, is the first complete translation (known to the speaker) of a non-biblical ancient Greek text. I will address specific nuances of mediated translation from Greek into Māori, and I will set Ngā Whakamāoritanga and the ‘Māori Bacchae’ in the wider context of classically-inflected Māori theatre (not least Puppet Antigone and the Māori-language Troilus and Cressida) and classical reception in Māori literature more generally.

Speaker:
Dr Simon Perris is an Associate Professor of Classics at Te Herenga Waka–Victoria University of Wellington, where he teaches and works on classical languages, literature, and society. His main research interests are Greek drama, especially Euripides; and the reception of Classics in contemporary literature, especially in Aotearoa-New Zealand. In addition to numerous articles and book chapters on these subjects, he is the author of The Gentle, Jealous God: Reading Euripides’ Bacchae in English (Boomsbury, 2016) and a co-editor of Athens to Aotearoa: Greece and Rome in New Zealand Literature and Society (Victoria University Press, 2017) – twice reprinted. His second monograph, a study of classical reception in Māori literature, is forthcoming in 2027 with Bloomsbury.