Tags
Alexander Pope, Bill Rauch, bowdlerisation, James Shapiro, Nahum Tate, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, shakespeare, Translation
So it seems that the Oregon Shakespeare Festival has commissioned new versions of Shakespeare’s plays. They took 37 playwrights and asked them to rewrite Shakespeare’s plays, to translate them into contemporary language.
Why, you may ask?
Here you can read Bill Rauch, artistic director of the OSF, explaining the reasoning behind the project. He talks of an operation Shakespeare himself would have appreciated, considering the brilliant word-wizard he was. And he speaks of recovering the immediacy of the many references that were obvious to an Elizabethan audience but are not to us. “Removing the brown glaze,” he calls it.
Here instead you can read James Shapiro voicing his doubts for the New York Times. More than doubts, actually: Shapiro, who had a chance to read the pilot translation of Timon of Athens, calls it “dismal reading”.
Well, whether you are shocked or not, this is hardly news. Remember the Restoration authors revamping Elizabethan tragedies? And what about Alexander Pope, glibly rewriting or cutting off huge quantities of lines he felt were too ugly for the Bard? And then there was Garrick, tweaking Hamlet to “save it from all the nonsense in Act 5”. And let us not forget the Bowdlers, sanitizing characters and language for family consumption, and far more recently, I seem to recall, Julian Fellowes “rewrote” some parts of Romeo and Juliet for the screen – to much scandal and with questionable success.
What I mean is that the OSF is doing nothing new. Shakespeare seems to be a little like the Blue Water in Beau Geste: just looking at it doesn’t feel enough – it makes you want to do something with it. For centuries now writers, playwright, poets and translators, as well as directors, actors, scenographers and costumers, have felt a compulsion to change the Bard’s plays, to update them, to actualise them, to tweak them to suit the “modern” age. Actually, language tweaking is just as old as the practice of modern-dress productions – if not older.
Do I like it? I don’t know. While I’m not sure I’m buying Rauch’s rally against old-language elitism, I think I can understand the urge to “do something” with Shakespeare’s stories and language – just as Tate, Pope and all the others did before.
On the other hand, how can we be sure that it won’t become just… easier? The same day I found out about the Play On! Project, a friend told me that her ten-year-old child’s teacher had him and his class read a modern-language translation of Il Giornalino di Gian Burrasca. Nothing very literary, just a turn-of-the-century children’s book of the naughty-boy variety. It used to be very popular and, back in the day, no childhood was considered complete without Gian Burrasca. Then it rather faded away, and I’m rather surprised to see it brought up again. Except, my friend says, because the children did not like the antiquated language, the teacher recommended the “translation” and, lo and behold! now they are all enjoying it a good deal.
And I don’t know what to think. Now they will laugh over Gian Burrasca’s antics, told in a language that is not that of Gian Burrasca’s author. They will have fun, very likely, but wasn’t it worth it to try a little harder? Not for Gian Burrasca’s sake – but to make them appreciate how the antiquated language matched the story? On the one hand it is true that this way they will experience Gian Burrasca’s story in their own language – just like the children of 1907 did… On the other hand, they will not be quite reading Gian Burrasca, and they will have lost a chance for gaining some kind of historical perspective, and they most certainly will not go back to the original later. They won’t because frankly the book is nothing you can relish past the age of ten – but, even if that were not the case, how many would, considering how much easier it is to go with the translation?
Now substitute Timon of Athens for Gian Burrasca – and you’ll see why Play On! worries me a good deal: won’t the translations just feel easier? Won’t they discourage people from making the effort to tackle the original? What do you think?
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If writing means “choosing the right words” – to paraphrase a guy that used to fish for tuna – then if you change the words, the writer’s work is dismantled.
But after all, one could say, it’s like a translation, right?
Nobody understands the lingo anymore, we may as well put “Hamlet” in modern English.
And yet, reasoning as a translator – translating is cheating, and the farther culturally are the languages of origin and destination, the larger the swindle (there’s a fun article out there called, IIRC, “On translating Japanese, and other delusions”).
So, what shall we do?
I think we can still enjoy the original, maybe with abundant footnotes – let’s keep the right words as right as Bill Shakes saw fit.
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Ah, but you see, there are no footnotes on a stage.
(Oh my… Footnotes/footlights… doesn’t this just beg to be made into something? A song for a musical, perhaps? ♫)
But let’s be serious, shall we?
My faith in literary translation was lost many years ago… And mind – I translate for a living, but (mostly) non-fiction.
That said – yes, the OSF playwrights are doing more or less what we non-Anglophones have been doing for centuries. The past is a foreign country, and all that.
As I said, I think I can understand the urge, the game, the experiment… But I’m very much scared that it becomes something else. The easier way, giving people leave to say “I’ve seen Shakespeare’s Timon…” And no, they won’t have, not really – but will those who haven’t seen the original (or would see it anyway) care enough to seek it out and think over the differences, the changes, the nuances?
It could be interesting, in fact, to see what changes and how – but… but.
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Ah, the joys of augmented reality! You get in the theater, and they give you a pair of glasses that can provide notes, subtitles and other information.
Now THAT would be fun.
But to remain on topic – I agree, the OSF guys are doing what the Lambs did over a century ago… and reading the Lambs does not equal reading Bill Shakes.
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It most definitely does not – but I’m not quite sure they are lambing the Bard, either. At least, sanitisation does not seem to be the intent. I can’t help feeling that they are doing what any translator does who translates into non-XVIth Century Italian, German, Lithuanian – or whatever. The assumption seems to be that Modern English and Elizabethan English are two different languages… which they are, in some ways, I guess.
And actually, at OSF they call them “translations”, and not “rewritings”…
And yes – translating is always cheating, we agree on that. Still, say, Quasimodo’s beautiful Shakespearean translations are hardly Renaissance, although he manages a kind of timelessness. That’s what makes his translations especially lovely in my opinion – but is it petty crime, then?
You know, I really want to rant against the notion – because I do dislike it, and yet whenever I start, I find myself asking questions…
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To me, it feels like those guys (I’m looking at you, Ted Turner!) that colorize old b/w movies based on the assumption that the younger viewers will feel daunted by seeing the world in black and white.
So… Why not make the public better instead of making the show simpler? It’s called education.
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You know I’m seldom in favour of “taming” the past or its expressions, and I find Rauch’s reasoning about the perceived superiority of “old” language either off the mark or disingenuous… Or both, come to think of it: disingenuously off the mark.
That said, yes – by all means, let ut educate the public, or at least, let us not spoon-feed them.
And yet…
I don’t – and never will – like PlayOn!, but I can’t help liking the questions it raises about language, time, cultural shifts, writing, translation, theatre, art in general and, ultimately, mankind.
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