2/14 Post

 On Jeremy Tiang

Jeremy was probably one of the most entertaining people I've ever met in real life, and his observations on where translators stand in the theatrical world was highly informative. I think what shocked me the most and what I assume will be the start of much discussion, is how seemingly okay critics and patrons seem to be with the various renditions of The Seagull. The lines between translation and adaptation seemed to blur more and more as examples were introduced, each almost more absurd than the last. This quality is almost the opposite of what translation of text has been, where in the past translations that deviated greatly from the originals were so much more prevalent. 

And as a whole, much like how translations and adaptations are treated so different in both theater and literature, Fable for Now's translation was also written with a mindset unlike what I would believe most translators would have; Jeremy spoke a lot about how important it was for lines to hit the right note for the local audience, and even welcomed the little extra addition some of his translations may have brought to the play. This is seemingly in contrast to what I believe most of us practice, that we first try to be loyal to the original author and text, and then worry about how a reader may perceive things. We struggle to translate without deleting or inserting lines, and worry about how much we're changing our texts, while somewhere out there a man translated The Seagull as Stupid Fucking Bird.

On Readings

I cannot read Chinese, and I did not read the source texts for Tracy K. Smith's translations. I find however, that her approach to translating Chinese poetry is the sort of translation that I can agree with fully. Translating poetry between Chinese/Japanese, when it is so vastly different in terms of sound and structure that I personally believe it is impossible to maintain either and create a poem in English that would create the same world for the reader, as it would for a reader of the original language. Therefore, while I am sure that many people would call her translations more of an adaptation, and while to some extant I can understand why, I believe that all the subtle changes and the insertion of her own voice are in service of a proper poetry translation. To borrow a metaphor, at the very core of the original poems, Tracy sees a figure through a foggy window, but knows that there is some deep and powerful about it. While a reader of the source language may be able to follow the path of the original poem to reveal the figure completely, those same steps translated into English might lead to nowhere. In my mind, Tracy instead changes the path just enough that we can enjoy the journey, and be able to open the window for ourselves.

Steven