Lost in Translation

Growing up immersed (and simultaneously alienated from) both Japanese and American culture, I tend to forget sometimes just how difficult it is to bridge the gap between the two. Beyond linguistic obstacles, there are many things that are extremely difficult to convey and explain cross-culturally; the epitome of Japanese beauty lies in the subtle, the ambiguous, that which cannot be articulated whereas the American ideal is direct honesty and resounding open clarity. This fundamental discrepancy creeps into different aspects of the culture, like the sense of aesthetics, for example, or feeling, or HUMOR. Here's an example - my brother sent this youtube link to me this week. I circulated among the Japanese staff at my job, and people were literally unable to control their laughter. It's a dumb monologue of what Commodore Matthew Perry might have said to the Japanese to convince them to open up their country to foreigners after several hundred years of national seclusion.



The humor is not just in what he’s saying (which is pretty fucking hysterical) but in the timing, the tone, the negative spaces. Even if I were to translate his text faithfully, I seriously doubt a non-Japanese would find this amusing at all! (Actually I would be interested to hear what you thought of it)

Translation is the process of communicating an idea that is manifest in one system/language into another system/language. The systems are not necessarily compatible, but there is an assumption that we (the human race) have enough commonality to be able to understand one another. But what do you do when you’re trying to convey a concept that doesn’t exist in the other culture? To be more specific, in the case of theater – do you try to find an equivalent analogous relationship that the local audience can identify with, or leave it as is, faithful to the original concept, but risking alienating the local audience? Of course it’s never that black-and-white, it is a precarious balance of the two, upon which the success of cross-cultural communication rests.

On Tuesday I went to see The Play Company’s English-language premiere of The Attic, translated by Leon Ingulsrud and Keiko Tsuneda, originally written in Japanese by Yoji Sakate. Based on my prior conversations with Sakate, who happened to be in town and took part in rehearsals/production, he seemed concerned with the size of the set and the cast, which led me to have very low expectations for the American production – especially being so attached to the original Japanese production which toured the U.S. in 2005. But I was pleasantly surprised to find the show resonant and engaging, a rendition of the original that has a life of its own. The Attic is an exploration of a current Japanese phenomenon, a societal affliction called hikikomori (which literally means ‘withdrawn’), referring to a subculture of people who live their lives in total seclusion, holed up in their room without any direct contact with the outside world and stewing in their fanatic obsessions (for anime, for porn, for instant noodles, whatever). It’s not such a surprising symptom of a social disease, considering it is a reaction to a.) extremely rigid societal structures and expectations, and b.) limited physical space. I mean, we complain about the sizes of our New York apartments, but think about the land of capsule hotels. The conceit behind the play is that these isolationist have paved the way for a high demand new product called The Attic – a pre-fab, cabin-like, tent-sized structure you can stick anywhere (your bedroom, on the street) for added privacy. Buy it on-line, lock yourself in, block the rest of the world out and call yourself the king of infinite space (as long as you’ve got your wireless connection!). Multiple storylines collide through the course of 20+ vignettes: a college student is found having committed suicide in an Attic in his dorm room, and his older brother vows to get to the bottom of it by tracking down the mysterious manufacturers of the Attic; a pair of bumbling detectives/samurai/soldiers (played by the same two actors over three different scenes) find refuge in an abandoned Attic during a stakeout or on a battlefield; a mentally unstable OCD woman convinced that she is pregnant finds solace in the womb-like Attic; and a mother discovers that her violent son has been keeping a young girl locked up in an Attic – for the last 10 years (based on a true incident) – and many many more. The Attic itself becomes a metaphor, a microcosm, a macrocosm, a container that limits its contents to the darkest, most intimate secrets of the human psyche, and holds the entirety of the universe, boundless and timeless.

Sakate originally developed and wrote these 23 characters for 17 members of his company Rinko-gun. The American production featured 8 actors in multiple roles; and though the actors were up to this feat of extreme versatility, they seemed forced to make broad, and often stereotyped/caricatured character choices that resulted in less nuanced performances. Nonetheless, the strength of the original script shone through unquestionably. Perhaps the one thing that fell into the category of what could not survive the translation process was metaphysics, or sense of spirituality. The Japanese, though far from fervently religious, acknowledge the spiritual world in the day-to-day (the animist influences of Shinto): the dead, the living, the souls of animals and plants all co-exist. On the other hand, from the Western perspective, the living are living, and the dead are, well, dead, and if the dead make visitation upon the living, something is definitely awry. This difference in attitude towards the spiritual realm plays a significant role in The Attic. So what happens when a fluid concept built on ambiguity is forced into clarity? You lose the beauty of mystery.

On Wednesday, I attended a performance of they say the men are over in the Steel Tower by Hideo Tsuchida (translated by M. Cody Poulton) which was an unfortunate example of failed translation. What should have been a light-hearted yet grippingly poignant comedy about a rollicking band of schlocky vaudevillian clowns caught in a war zone on enemy territory while entertaining the troops – turned out to be an painful exercise in patience. First, the English script was in terrible shape; stuck in an academic limbo of word-for-word translation, the dialogue was stiff and clumsy. For a comic work (in which the rhythm of text is paramount in communicating playful levity) to be so stunted by strange phrasings and word choices was a shame. They kept the character names in Japanese, which is fine except for the fact that the actors could not wrap their mouths around them, let alone embrace them. The actors were also unfortunately miscast; though each actor had his own charm, they all seemed out of sync with their characters. For example, the character of Yoshimura, who from the script seems to be the most naïve, exuberant, zippy one of the bunch, is played by an actor whose strength seemed to be in playing a lumbering doofus. But truly the greatest tragedy of this comedy was that it was not funny. Not one iota. The jokes weren’t funny, the bits weren’t funny, the song & dance number, the physical schticks, nothing. Without the humor, the And the blame lay not only in the script, but in the lack of love and verve of the ensemble, and, bad direction. It was as if the director had decided she was working on Someone Who'll Watch Over Me (the Frank McGuiness play an Irishman, an Englishman and an American who are kidnapped by Arabs and held hostage in Lebanon – sound like a set-up for a joke? It’s not) or something; actually it was more like she had her humor center in her brain removed. Is this completely unfair? (as this is the third time I’m having to write this, I am quickly losing my patience.) The truth is, both Sakate and Tsuchida are writer/directors, who, like many writer/directors in the Japanese theater, are founder/artistic directors of their own small theater companies – and they write FOR their company members, who work and sweat together. Work generated from years of hard work and commitment and relationships forged over time cannot be emulated by casting the 5 best comic actors who show up to an open-call audition and rehearsing for 4 weeks. Don’t need much of a sense of humor to figure that out. They say comedy is the most difficult thing to translate, which I believe, and comdey also seems so contingent on the MOMENT -- who is in the audience, how tired they are, the mood of the day and the room, etc. No amount of intangible circumstances of the day could truly affect the accumulation of bad choices, though.

I didn’t want to end on such a down note, so I will quote Dawn who said to me after the show, “Bad theater is better than no theater.” Hey, it’s Dawn’s quote, not mine. onwards.