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2006 will see the thirtieth anniversary of the
Guy Foissy theatre in Japan, where our classical
contemporary playwrights – as well as Yasmina Reza and Éric-Emmanuel
Schmitt – are staged on a regular basis. But
what about our other contemporary playwrights? The
International Institute of Theatre in Japan wants
to promote them and has organised a contemporary
French theatre festival in March for that purpose.
A symposium will bring together Japanese directors
and academics with French playwrights.
Actes du Théâtre has asked Shintaro
Fujii, a critic and academic, to take stock of the
current state of contemporary French theatre in Japan.
What place does French-language theatre and playwriting
have in Japan today? The answer is not very encouraging.
French theatre does not have great visibility in
contemporary Japanese society, despite the latter’s
high consumption of cultural and ‘‘agricultural’’ products
made in France such as films, songs, novels,
poetry, dance, fashion, perfume, wine, cheese, champagne,
foie gras… (and did you know that the museum
most visited by the Japanese is inside the Louvre
Palace?). French theatre seems to have moved to the
fringes of the current Japanese landscape, although
it was still the benchmark for modern theatre until
quite recently.
The Current Response to the French Repertory and
its Consequences
The 1960s and ’70s were a rich, almost euphoric
era for theatre exchanges between France and Japan.
The catalyst for this was Jean-Louis Barrault, who
brought both traditional and contemporary Japanese
theatre troupes and figures to Paris. A group of
researchers got together with Barrault and founded
the Franco-Japanese Theatre Association (afjth).
In 1966-1967 this association published five volumes
of plays and texts about the theatre entitled Théâtre
français aujourd’hui, and it members
left behind an impressive legacy of translations
of French plays. Finally one could read all or most
of the works of Corneille, Molière, Racine,
Marivaux, Dumas, Giraudoux, Anouilh, Cocteau, Ionesco,
Arrabal and Beckett.
The subsequent era was unexceptional. The Japanese
people’s interest in what was happening abroad
declined in the ’80s, a period when the country’s
economic position was strengthened and the level
of general culture plummeted (people became rich
and stupid). Directors and audiences showed little
interest in foreign plays. Oriza Hirata and Hisashi
Inoue, two playwrights, had this to say in a book
about Japanese as a spoken language: ‘‘The
Japanese people undoubtedly have more to learn from
themselves than from the Europeans’’ and ‘‘Japanese
playwrights are at a very high level – among
the five top nations.’’ One should not
be surprised that these assertions are unfounded.
That vague feeling of no longer needing to refer
to European sources was a societal phenomenon of
the times. Translations and performances of French
and European plays became rare. The Franco-Japanese
Theatre Association gradually became dormant (it
is currently experiencing a reawakening), with one
notable exception – Guy Foissy. Thanks to the
enormous enthusiasm of Masao Tani, the Compagnie
Guy Foissy was created and continues to exist in
Japan. It is exclusively devoted to plays by Foissy,
about thirty of which have been performed in Japan
since 1977.
Luckily, an upswing in exchanges between France and
Japan has been developing over the past ten years.
This is due on the one hand to the development of
public theatre and its concurrent subsidies – a
recent phenomenon that only started in the ’80s
on the part of community authorities and in the ’90s
on the part of the Government – and on the
other hand to an increasing interest in exchanges
with other people in the theatre world. Two platforms
for exchange have resulted: the Setagaya Public Theatre
and Oriza Hirata (and his Agora Theatre).
The Setagaya Public Theatre, with two stages inaugurated
in 1997, was mainly financed by the city of Setagaya
and founded on the model of European, and especially
French, public theatre (evident in its name). It
is by far the most active theatre in Japan in terms
of co-productions and international collaboration.
Thanks to its French-speaking producer Megumi Ishii,
the Setagaya Public Theatre not only buys many foreign
performances (Oh les beaux jours, L’Homme qui… and
La Tragédie d’Hamlet by Peter Brook
as well as numerous French dance and circus productions),
but also presents a large number of plays from the
French repertory in the form of performances (Roberto
Zucco, Dans la solitude des champs de coton by Bernard-Marie
Koltès, directed by Makoto Sato), co-productions
with French and French-language artists (Frédéric
Fisbach for Les Paravents, Josef Nadj for a new work
at the Festival d’Avignon 2006, or Robert Lepage
for a Japanese version of Projet Andersen) as well
as staged readings. This last aspect is of particular
interest to us, as the theatre has produced J’étais
dans ma maison et j’attendais que la pluie
vienne by Jean-Luc Lagarce, Théâtre
by Olivier Py, Les Drôles by Elisabeth Mazev,
La Nuit juste avant les forêts by Bernard-Marie
Koltès, La Demande d’emploi by Michel
Vinaver, Anne-Marie by Philippe Minyana, Souterrains
by Emmanuel Darley, and Histoires d’hommes
by Xavier Durringer. It also collaborated with the
Théâtre Ouvert in 2002 (staged readings
of the four above-mentioned plays by Koltès,
Vinaver, Minyana and Darley), with the Mousson d’été and
the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh in 2004 on a staged
reading of Durringer’s play directed by Michel
Dydim.
Hirata’s theatre, a small and convivial space,
has hosted French directors such as Frédéric
Fisbach, François-Michel Pesanti, Laurent
Gutmann and Arnaud Meunier. Several contemporary
plays have been or will be performed there as part
of the exchanges, including Nous les héros
by Jean-Luc Lagarce, staged by Fisbach and Hirata
in 2001, La Demande d’emploi by Michel Vinaver,
to be staged by Meunier in May 2006 in Tokyo with
Japanese actors.
Add to that the x Theatre (kaï), an alternative
space in Tokyo, which frequently presents plays in
translation with outside partners, although the quality
of the productions is uneven. In March 2006, it organised
a French theatre festival with iit-Japan featuring
Erreur de construction by Jean-Luc Lagarce, La Ballade
des planches and Jeux de planches (excerpts) by Jean-Paul
Alègre, Les Cendres et les lampions by Noëlle
Renaude, Babel Ouest, Est et Centre by Jean-Yves
Picq, and Le Sas by Michel Azama (the translator
for all the plays was Yasushi Sato, a member of the
afjth). One shouldn’t forget the network of
French cultural centres and above all the Villa Kujoyama
in Kyoto, a residence for artists and writers run
by afaa and the Kansai Franco-Japanese Institute.
Nonetheless, this list cannot hide the reality that
French plays do not have sufficient visibility in
Japan. With the exception of plays by Yasmina Reza
and Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt, who have access
to a wider public, French theatre strikes Japanese
audiences as too artistic, too abstract and too distant.
Few plays have enjoyed true productions, and even
fewer have been published. The only title we have
is the volume of three plays by Koltès (La
Nuit juste avant les forêts, Dans la solitude
des champs de coton and Roberto Zucco) which came
out in 2001, translated by Takayuki Saeki and Megumi
Ishii. What is the explanation for this absence or
lack of French theatre?
Translation Problems
The first misfortune for our play translations is
that the translators have most often been academics
like me (alas!) who are far from being poets. Many
academics don’t understand the idea of faithfulness
(they often cheat in order to remain faithful),
and tend to give preference to text over texture,
and to meaning over sensations and sensuality.
As a result the plays translated are unperformable
and produce very little enjoyment when read. Furthermore,
most Japanese speak badly. The gap between the
oral and written language remains huge and is getting
bigger as the oral language is evolving faster
than the written one. And in the theatre, considered
above all an art of the spoken language, audiences
have great difficulty accepting the written word.
An even more fundamental difficulty is that translations
are only conceived of on an ideal and imaginary plane
between two standardised languages that are supposed
to have perfectly corresponding systems of reference.
Indeed, the grammatical and lexical regulation of
the Japanese language undertaken after the Meiji
Restoration undoubtedly made up for some of its deficiencies
with respect to the new political, economic, scientific,
social and cultural realities coming from the West,
brought the two languages closer together and facilitated
the job of translating up to a certain point (which
is being done through economic globalization today,
by bringing consumers’ lifestyles closer together).
But poetic language is full of digressions and deviations
from normal usage. Plays on words, double meanings,
polysemy, deliberate vagueness – all characteristics
of contemporary writing – are the enemies of
our desire for word-to-word faithfulness (for instance,
how can you translate the subtle difference in Quebec
French from the French spoken in France without resorting
to the use of dialect?).
Moreover, the organisation of the French and Japanese
languages still differs so radically that the translator
often has a feeling of powerlessness about the difficulty,
and even the impossibility, of translating. Even
to translate the simple word ‘‘I,’’ the
translator hesitates about what solution to choose.
The most neutral equivalent would be ‘‘watashi
ha’’ (ha indicates the introduction
of a subject), but with a slightly feminine nuance.
If the subject is male one could also use ‘‘boku
ha,’’ or even ‘‘ore
ha,’’ with its greater feeling of virility
and familiarity. But the most natural choice in Japanese
would be not to have any subject at all in the sentence
(a bit like in Italian). That would also be the most
desirable choice, because if it were translated as ‘‘watashi,’’ the
very light ‘‘I’’ would have
four syllables in Japanese, completely altering the
musicality of the text. This detail could become
a major issue if for example one wanted to preserve
the dry, rough and jerky tone in La Demande d’emploi.
But it isn’t easy to respect the materiality
of a language without sacrificing the meaning.
This example of the pronoun is a sign that human
relationships are not expressed in the same way in
France and Japan. Japanese pronouns (and along with
them, verbs and adjectives, and everything relating
to levels of politeness) change according to the
gender of the person and their relationship to the
speaker. Japanese is a heavily gender-based language
endowed with infinite degrees and varieties of polite
phrases. This means that neutral expressions are
practically non-existent, making it a complex
affair to translate a play such as J’étais
dans ma maison et j’attendais que la pluie
vienne. The play involves five women from the same
family who are anonymous, speaking to one another
through a choral voice that is only slightly differentiated.
In Japanese, forms of address must be differentiated
according to age; and feminising speech loads it
with too many undesired connotations.
The Japanese language sometimes seems unsuited to
transposing French plays. The specificity of theatre
language resides of course in its double nature – reality
and fiction, speech and writing; yet modern and contemporary
Japanese theatre have always given preference to
realism (and thus remain highly vulnerable to the
criticism ‘‘that’s not how people
talk’’). I believe this preference has
a historical origin. After the failed attempt to
modernise kabuki, traditional theatre contented itself
with its own preservation and codification, controlling
the way the ancient language was written (which has
become almost foreign to us today) in rhymes, and
endowed with great musicality, often sung and danced,
and consequently far from realism. This left modern
theatre with the sole task of constant renewal (resulting
in productions that are continually repeated) and
prose, in a modern language almost devoid of any
musicality that is more spoken, more realist and
poorer than the written language. For instance, modern
Japanese has numerous homonyms typically used only
in writing and not very suitable for the theatre,
where everything must be understood the moment the
word is uttered, with no confusion.
Translation, an Impossible Task?
‘‘Traduttore, traditore’’ : our profession indeed
involves betrayal, as if we were doomed to fail. But I am not pessimistic.
Translation, like love, is an impossible undertaking. It is useless to believe
in partial or biased faithfulness. My question is this: if it is impossible
not to betray, could we at least betray without cheating, and allow the play
to reveal its own secret dimension? Meanwhile, we dream of one day being capable
of inventing a new language for the stage that would enable us to have the
writing heard and the speaking read. |
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