Metamorphosis from a Distance

The particular language I work from is Japanese. Even languages closer to English—French, Spanish, and so forth—despite their affinities, still possess areas of expression that need some sort of domestication into English in order to prove themselves effective when spoken on the stage. And how much more so is that true of a language such as Japanese, which, other than for some imported slang, bears so little resemblance to English either in vocabulary or rhythm. Some of the stumbling blocks, such as the fact that verbs generally come at the end of sentences, find parallels in German and other languages. In addition, there are certain features of the language that really do cause special problems. Generally speaking, English is a much more specific language; the Japanese language spoken in the theatre gains much of its power from its very ambiguity, and any translator must perforce trim back those suggested overtones, leaving a sometimes luxurious tree with only a few bare branches. In general, to make a rough analogy from those stages of cultural accommodation outlined by Patrice Pavis in his Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture, I have generally found that the emphasis for me in creating a usable translation must be placed on what the spectator can be expected to usefully receive, rather than on attempting to maintain any overly stern fidelity to the nuances of the original.²⁵

During the course of many years I have worked to translate theatre texts both from contemporary and classical Japanese, and I have translated a certain number of critical texts from both as well. Let me make a few observations about all four categories.

In terms of modern, certainly postwar plays, the issues at stake are obvious though perhaps banal. One of them concerns slang. While it is true that all translations date, it seems to me that, given the relatively few Japanese plays that have been translated and published in English, the results should be as durable as possible. What this means to me, at least, is that, even in the case of colorful language in the original, slang should be rendered in such a fashion that the English-language text won't seem out of date and even embarrassing in, say, ten years. This strategy certainly represents a compromise, but in my view a necessary one. Another problem lies in the fact that in many modern and contemporary Japanese plays, the sentences are occasionally longer and more complex than American actors may be prepared to deliver with the requisite panache. So I often break them up.

And then, of course, there are those terrible moments where a playwright will quote a European author in Japanese translation, with the poor translator trying to guess what the original might be. In a translation I am now working on of a beautiful 1953 play by Tanaka Chikao, Kyôiku (Education), I am still in the process of trying to locate some citations from Baudelaire, translated into Japanese using sometimes obscure characters, so that I can put those phrases into the dialogue where they belong (in either French or English—we'll see). But then, come to think of it, what US playwright these days would have his characters quote French poetry anyway? Larger cultural questions lurk beneath.

In translating classic texts, there are certain models or traditions of translation, set by early masters such as Arthur Waley, to which most of us still adhere or occasionally flout, as did Royall Tyler (whose work I admire enormously) in his early translations of medieval Japanese nô plays. His later ones, which can be found in a first-rate 1992 Penguin paperback, Japanese Nô Dramas, draw both on the principles employed in his more fanciful originals and on more standard approaches.

Perhaps the most significant issue in translating classical Japanese theatre texts centers on the fact that, from a Western perspective, nô, bunraku (the eighteenth-century puppet theatre), and kabuki texts resemble more the librettos to operas than they do any fully sustained dramatic texts. Nô in particular is often described as a kind of total theatre, involving text, music, dance...