Theatre Translation Theory and Performance in Contemporary Japan

Native Voices Foreign Bodies

Beverley Curran

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138144828
• eBook ISBN: 9781317641254
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

What motivates a Japanese translator and theatre company to translate and perform a play about racial discrimination in the American South? What happens to a 'gay' play when it is staged in a country where the performance of gender is a theatrical tradition? What are the politics of First Nations or Aboriginal theatre in Japanese translation and 'colour blind' casting? Is a Canadian nô drama that tells a story of the Japanese diaspora a performance in cultural appropriation or dramatic innovation?

In looking for answers to these questions, Theatre Translation Theory and Performance in Contemporary Japan extends discussions of theatre translation through a selective investigation of six Western plays, translated and staged in Japan since the 1960s, with marginalized tongues and bodies at their core. The study begins with an examination of James Baldwin's Blues for Mister Charlie, followed by explorations of Michel Marc Bouchard's Les feluettes ou La repetition d'un drame romantique, Tomson Highway's The Rez Sisters and Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing, Roger Bennett's Up the Ladder, and Daphne Marlatt's The Gull: The Steveston t Noh Project.

Native Voices, Foreign Bodies locates theatre translation theory and practice in Japan in the post-war Showa and Heisei eras and provokes reconsideration of Western notions about the complex interaction of tongues and bodies in translation and theatre when they travel and are reconstituted under different cultural conditions.

1. How Do You Say ‘Mister Charlie’ in Japanese?

Black Speech in Japanese Translation and Performance

DOI: 10.4324/9781315760131-2

Introduction

In her 1964 essay ‘Going to theater, etc.’, Susan Sontag comments on the state of current theatre in America as a “public art”: “[T]here are few plays today dealing with social-and-topical problems. The best modern plays are those devoted to raking up private, rather than public, hells” (Sontag 1966: 141). Among the productions Sontag discusses is James Baldwin’s Blues for Mister Charlie, which, four months after the assassination of John F Kennedy, opened on Broadway and ran for 148 performances at the ANTA Theatre from April to August in 1964. According to ‘Notes for Blues’, Baldwin’s preface, the play is “based, very distantly indeed, on the case of Emmett Till — the fourteen-year-old Negro youth who was murdered in Mississippi in 1955” (Baldwin 1965:9). The Till case drew unprecedented media attention and front page coverage; the murderer was acquitted but later recounted details of the crime to a reporter.¹ Baldwin also dedicates his play to “the memory of Medgar Evers and his widow and his children and to the dead children of Birmingham”, casualties in the struggle for civil rights. The nature of the plot and dedication suggest that Baldwin intended his play to be ‘social-and-topical’. Sontag, however, sees it as “an extraordinary sermon” about sexual anxiety:

¹ The reporter was William Bradford Huie, whose article appeared in Look (24 January 1956). The highly publicized Till case occurred just months before the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and both are considered to have contributed to the instigation the black freedom struggle. Blues for Mister Charlie was not the only cultural production by African American writers inspired by the Till case. Baldwin’s play is preceded by poems by Langston Hughes (‘Mississippi, 1955’) and Gwendolyn Brooks (‘A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi’), which appeared in 1955 and 1960, respectively. Others have followed, including Toni Morrison’s 1986 play Dreaming Emmett, Audre Lorde’s poem ‘Afterimages’, and novels by Lewis Nordan (Wolf Whistle) and Bebe Moore Campbell (Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine).

The truth is that Blues for Mister Charlie isn’t really about what it claims to be about. It is supposed to be about racial strife. But it is really about the anguish of tabooed sexual longings, about the crisis of identity which comes from confronting these longings, and about the rage and destructiveness (often self-destructiveness) by which one tries to surmount this crisis. It has, in short, a psychological subject. The surface may be [Clifford] Odets, but the interior is pure Tennessee Williams. What Baldwin has done is to take the leading theme of the serious theater of the fifties — sexual anguish — and work it up as a political play. Buried in Blues for Mister Charlie is the plot of several successes of the last decade: the gruesome murder of a handsome virile young man by those who envy him his virility. (Sontag 1966: 155)

In a certain sense, Sontag’s reading is astute, but she presents Baldwin’s dramatic style as something of an inadvertent anachronism when it certainly is marking a social shift. During the play’s run on Broadway, the Civil Rights Act went into effect, making racial discrimination in public places illegal and requiring businesses to provide equal opportunities for employment, but riots in Harlem and in other urban areas were violent explosions of angry impatience for more radical change. Blues drew media and public attention because of its timely topic, cast and prominent director (Burgess Meredith), and Baldwin’s own celebrity; he was at that time arguably the most ubiquitous black man in America. Baldwin had been the subject of a Time cover story a year earlier and his essay collection The Fire Next Time was on the bestsellers list; he had met with Robert Kennedy to discuss civil rights, and was hobnobbing with Hollywood writers and directors, such as Elia Kazan.

However, Blues for Mister Charlie marks a changing point in Baldwin’s career in terms of his popularity as an articulate cultural interpreter, explaining black people to white people. “After this play, Jimmy was demoted to the margins of US literature”, states Amiri Baraka, but it is “a great play, one that marks, very clearly and indelibly, a transition in the mindset of the Afro American people” (Baraka 1996: xiii). By the time Blues for Mister Charlie was staged in Tokyo in 1967, Baldwin had a much lower public profile in the States due largely to the very ideological struggle his play traces between the non-violence of Martin Luther King and the pro-active self-defence of Malcolm X, and the shift from democratic pluralism (integration) to the “romantic Marxism” (Baker, Jr. 1981: 3) of Black Power. Radical black activists had no time for the “Uncle Tom’s hat-in-hand approach to revolution” (Cleaver 1968: 67) that non-violence, Christian love and Baldwin represented. “Baldwin, who once defined the cutting edge was now a favorite target for the new cutting edge” (Gates, Jr. 1993: 153). By 1973, Time would decline to publish a Henry Louis Gates, Jr. interview² with Baldwin, dismissing the writer as passé.

² The interview with Baldwin and Josephine Baker would eventually be published in Southern Review 21 (Summer 1985): 594–602.

Baldwin registers the shift in public consciousness in his play’s mix of languages and voices, but the ‘code switching’ and more aggressive tone cannot be seen as a move by the playwright to jump on a new bandwagon or off a sinking ship. Nor can the tense racial situation depicted in the play be considered simply “a kind of code, or metaphor for sexual conflict” as Sontag suggests (1966: 155), although Baldwin is certainly making a connection between sex, manhood and racism. Instead of seeing the fifties plot of the murder of a young man motivated by envy of his virility buried in Blues for Mister Charlie, I would argue that Baldwin’s play outs the black man buried in that prior plot. Further, the play performs a test of circulating narratives that vie to give meaning to Americans, and stages the crisis that occurs with the realization that a narrative used to shape a life has betrayed it.

Baldwin’s play is an attempt to find suitable vocabulary, grammar and emotion to articulate the social shifts taking place in the early sixties, which the writer sees as translating the engagement of blacks and whites in America, that is, the national subject and its story, into the unknown. George Shulman (forthcoming) articulates the linguistic stakes of this “visionary story-telling” project:

To face race in America is to be compelled toward prophecy. […] At worst, liberal norms of pluralism, tolerance, or deliberation are the smiley face of white supremacy. At best they prove inadequate to the task of naming let alone confronting it. Critics repeatedly turn to prophesy, therefore, to pose questions unvoiced in — and dimensions of experience silenced by — the liberal ordinary. In principle they could use other genres of political speech besides prophesy, but […] they see no other powerful vernacular for framing […] issues of domination and disavowal, of accountability and collective purpose. They do not cede this language to adversaries, but rework it.³

³ I am quoting from the manuscript of American Prophecy: Race and Redemption in American Political Culture, forthcoming by University of Minnesota Press in 2008. I thank George Shulman for allowing me to read and cite his work.

Baldwin’s particular prophetic language is influenced by “the King James Bible, the rhetoric of the store-front church, something ironic and violent and perpetually understated in Negro speech — and something of Dickens’ love of bravura” (Baldwin 1998 a: 6). To this list from Notes of a Native Son (1955) must also be added a queer inflection and a diasporic locus of enunciation. Baldwin left the States for France to escape not only racism in America but also homophobia. As he puts it in his ‘Notes for The Amen Corner’, the preface to his first play, “I left because I was driven out” (Baldwin 1998 b: xiii). His years in France and exposure to different cultural attitudes, including those concerning homosexuality, may be a factor in the importance he places on desire when addressing issues of white supremacy in the States.

In Intercultural Movements: American Gay in French Translation, Keith Harvey observes a “systemic contrast between discursive universes grounded in, respectively, practice (for the American) and desire (for the French)” (Harvey 2003 a: 234); the former requires taking a definitive stand concerning one’s identity, while the latter opens itself up to the contradictions of the unconscious as a possible way to understand and overcome “private and collective impasses” (Harvey 2003 a: 234). As a writer, Baldwin weds this desire with his own sense of “responsibility, which is also his joy and his strength and his life, […] to defeat all labels and complicate all battles by insisting on the human riddle” (Baldwin 1998 a: 691)⁴ and eluding prior definitions of self and other. This includes the refusal to essentialize race, class, gender, or culture, as “causes of difference rather than effects of a specific power imbalance” (Massardier-Kenney 1994: 11). Instead, as Dwight McBride explains, Baldwin keeps reminding us that “whenever we are speaking of race, we are always already speaking about gender, sexuality, and class” (McBride 2007: 444). Baldwin himself resisted being labelled and bristled at being classified as a black writer; although his novels Giovanni’s Room and Another Country represent homoeroticism and a range of possible sexual relationships, he had serious reservations about calling himself ‘gay’.⁵

⁴ ‘This Nettle, Danger…’, in Collected Essays, 687–691. ⁵ See Baldwin’s discussion of sexuality in ‘Go the Way Your Blood Beats’: An Interview with James Baldwin’ by Richard Goldstein, in James Baldwin: The Legacy, 173–85.

Frantz Fanon has observed that “Every dialect is a way of thinking” (Fanon 1967: 25), acknowledging the distinct ‘discursive universes’ that can exist within what is considered the same tongue. In Blues for Mister Charlie, Baldwin lodges “authority in a black voice that ‘sentences’ the conduct of whites, [and] testifies to the imbrication of one in the other, and to their entwined fate” (Shulman, forthcoming). In terms of translation, this blurs the distinctions made between interlingual, intralingual, and semiotic translation proposed by Roman Jakobson (1959), forcing translation to rework its own definition. As Leo Tak-Hung Chan argues:

Most existing theoretical models are founded on a concern for how meaning is translated from one linguistic system to another. But if the systems are not themselves separate, but implicated in one another, the notion of translation as a process of transferring meaning immediately becomes destabilized. (Chan 2002: 68)

The languages of Baldwin’s play operate as a performative counter to a discourse of segregation, which, at the same time, refuses to assimilate. The use of the blues as iteration offers a further challenge to Jakobson’s divisions, particularly in terms of theatre translation, where performance always and necessarily goes beyond what is spoken.

In her discussion of Balinese performance, Jennifer Lindsay has called attention to “translation and/of/in performance”, where internal translation, taking place among verbal, visual and musical languages, as “an aesthetic of repetition, recapitulation, and reiteration”, repositions the translation process as a mode of “multiplying […] points of view” (Lindsay 2006: 15). Baldwin’s play seems to be crafted with similar intention. Sontag sees “moral simplification” in the plot of Blues for Mister Charlie, and complains that “the play gets bogged down in repetitions, incoherence, and in all sorts of loose ends of plot and motive” (1996: 153), but she is missing the complex play of sociolects and anti-languages inflected with Baldwin’s politicized sexual style, which uses the arch tone and emphatics of camp “to suggest a non-authentic voice” (Harvey 2003 a: 214) to expose the ‘American’ tongue and its repertory of mythic falsehoods that normalize and de-sex racial hatred and violence.

The use of “Mister Charlie” in the play’s title not only signals Baldwin’s intent to privilege black speech and its lexicon, but also its employment as a discourse of resistance. With it Baldwin challenges the myths of the nation, and their mixed messages. As he explains in his essay ‘A Talk to Teachers’ (1963):

On the one hand [the black man] is born in the shadow of the stars and stripes and he is assured it represents a nation which has never lost a war. He pledges allegiance to that flag which guarantees ‘liberty and justice for all.’ […] But on the other hand he is also assured by his country and his countrymen that he has never contributed anything to civilization […]. He is assured by the republic that he, his father, his mother, and his ancestors were happy, shiftless, watermelon-eating darkies who loved Mr. Charlie and Miss Ann, and the value he has as a black man is proven by one thing only — his devotion to white people. (Baldwin 1998 a: 679)

As a counter language, black speech resists, revises or replaces these myths by using words in different ways and with different semantic intent:

The roots of African American speech lie in the counter language, the resistance discourse, that was created as a communication system unintelligible to speakers of the dominant master class. Enslaved Africans and their descendants assigned alternate and sometimes oppositional semantics to English words, like Miss Ann and Mr. Charlie, coded derisive terms for White woman and White man. This language practice also produced negative terms for Africans and later, African Americans, who acted as spies and agents for Whites — terms such as Uncle Tom/Tom, Aunt Jane, and the expression, run and tell that, referring to traitors within the community ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. How Do You Say ‘Mister Charlie’ in Japanese?
• 2. Speaking Lily-White: Michel Marc Bouchard’s Les Feluettes as JQ Translation Theatre
• 3. Is the ‘Rez’ in The Rez Sisters the Same ‘Rez’ in Rezubian?
• 4. The Limits of Aboriginal Theatre Translation: Roger Bennett’s Up the Ladder
• 5. Translating Nô: Daphne Marlatt’s The Gull
• References
• Index