Kevin Maher on Darren Aronofsky and Mickey Rourke’s director-actor relationship:
…to get him there, Aronofsky admits that he had to use everything in the director’s handbook. Rourke, for instance, refused to even attempt one elaborately choreographed fight sequence. “He’s like, ‘Why don’t you do the routine?’” says Aronofsky. “So I got into the ring and I did the f***ing routine, the whole thing. And that f***ing shut him up for the day.”
I have been writing a bit about my future translation projects for some applications these days. The idea, which isn’t really my idea, comes from the work of people like C. Moraga and O. Solis and other bilingual playwrights who I’ve been lucky enough to know & see work.
What I’m especially moved by in their work is this:
Lines where a character is speaking one language in the grammar of another, or lines that blend vocabulary from both languages.
The twist I have on it is that this kind of mix should be used for other translations, like rendering plays which were originally written entirely in French into English. There should be French vocabulary words mixed in, and French grammar mangled throughout.
Take, for example, this very famous final stanza from Baudelaire’s poem “Au Lecteur” (To the Reader)
C’est l’Ennui! L’oeil chargé d’un pleur involontaire,
II rêve d’échafauds en fumant son houka.
Tu le connais, lecteur, ce monstre délicat,
— Hypocrite lecteur, — mon semblable, — mon frère!
The link has several translations of the poem available, courtesy of fleursdumal.org. Here’s a very, very literal one, by William Aggeler in 1954:
He is Ennui! — His eye watery as though with tears,
He dreams of scaffolds as he smokes his hookah pipe.
You know him reader, that refined monster,
— Hypocritish reader, — my fellow, — my brother!
Say that these lines were lines in a play, designed for performance. The take I would put on them, then, would be this:
C’est l’Ennui! The eye watering d’un pleur involontaire,
He dreams of scaffolds as he smokes son houka.
You him know, lecteur, ce monstre délicat,
— Hypocrite reader, — mon semblable, — mon brother!
The ideas is to get as much of the French into it as possible, even to the extent of bad English grammar (You him know, The eye), all the words which are close enough cognates (Ennui, involontaire, houka, monstre délicat, even Hypocrite, which could be pronounced as in French) to leave in some particles and possessives in French (mon, d’un)…and so forth.
The word “lecteur,” which some people know and others won’t (think of “lectern”) could be translated in some instances and not in others.
The word “semblable,” which is variously translated as fellow, likeness, twin, double, etc., shouldn’t be translated at all.
Again, this would be for the purposes of a performance text. Read the entire thing with a French accent and French emphasis.
It would be like you were immersed in a bilingual household, hearing them speak, getting some of the words but not others.
You can only justify working like this if you believe, as I do, that playoetwrights like Molière and Racine and others cared just as much about the sound and rhythm of their words as the meaning – or, if you believe, as I also do, that we are justified in doing just about anything to a performance text, and that even the most grievous errors of misinterpretation will reveal more about it.
(Perhaps, and this is me being so Comp Lit, we could argue that the act of reading is in itself an act of misinterpretation.)
Say you were to do this method on a TARTUFFE script – perhaps you could begin with all English, incorporate more and more French as it went along, eventually get to the point of all French with English supertitles…of course you could preserve more rhyme & meter this way too, but the great thing would be to get the flavor of the original language.
That’s my idea. Qu’est-ce que tu penses?
The smallest things made him happy – a blue sky, bicycle bells in the morning, the change of seasons, even the height of skyscrapers.
Pride filled her wrinkles.
– Diane Wei Liang, THE EYE OF JADE
My parents gave me an extra copy of this mystery, having somehow accidentally acquired two (this happens to our family a lot!) in Thanksgiving, and I only just read it now. I found it hard to get into a lot of the writer’s style, but those two lines stood out to me.
headline: “Another LA theater critic gets the ax.” Right after SLM’s downmotion at the LA Weekly, Daily Breeze theater critic Jim Farber has been let go. My proud, former, first, last and only city, what’s happening to you? Where are the days when a director of 24 with her head alternately in the sand and the clouds could get eloquently slammed for her improvised choruses, at the fabled hands of SLM’s witticisms? Where, oh where, are the smackdowns going to come from now?
In politics, “realism” is usually just another term for pragmatism, or Realpolitik. But “Dreams From My Father” suggests that for Obama the word is rooted less in a political than in a literary tradition, where it has a far richer meaning. It signifies the watchful eye and patiently attentive ear; a proper humility in the face of the multiplex character of human society; and, most of all, a belief in the power of the writer’s imagination to comprehend and ultimately reconcile the manifold contradictions in his teeming world. It’s not much to go on, but, so far, naming his cabinet and organizing his inauguration, incorporating into the narrative characters and voices quite different from his own (like Hillary Clinton’s or Rick Warren’s), Obama has demonstrated an impressive consistency between his instincts as a writer and his performance as president-elect. He reminds us that novelists, no less than apprentice politicians, are in the business of community organizing.
– Jonathan Raban, “All The Presidents’ Literature,” WSJ
The Recently Deflowered Girl, with illustrations by Edward Gorey. One of the object cases is a Method actor, with dungarees that, as indicated, could not be mistaken.
You smile encouragingly and say, “I hear you’ve been away at summer stock.” He says, “In the middle of winter?”
Channel-surfed, recently, to the Hand Jive scene from GREASE, and insisted that it be watched, despite the presence of a less-than-choreography-loving friend.
A: You have to understand – this movie – and this scene in this movie – has made my work what it is. This may be the most influential source I have.
B: (incredulously) Really?
A: (proudly) You don’t know this, but right before I got to Chicago, I spent almost ten years working on the chorus in theater.
B: That’s a different kind of Greece.
All part of the same chorus.
What I didn’t say, and could have, is that I once made a very experienced actor perform the hand gestures from the Hand Jive throughout an entire serious monologue of Agamemnon’s. At the time, I was entirely hung up on having one gesture per line. I wasn’t working with a choreographer, and I had run out of gestures.
If you look at this Broadway clip of the Hand Jive, perhaps you can see why I thought some good might come of this choice. See how automatically the movements come out of their arms. When you’re doing the dance, you become focused completely, like some kind of weird pat-your-head-rub-your-tummy sensation. It strips away facades. It’s an “activity,” for goodness’ sake, like Meisner.
Choruses have to be moving. Stylized text requires stylized movement. I knew there was something about the Hand Jive that worked to make individual actors behave like parts of a chorus – to unite discrete individuals into the swarm-of-bees mentality. It builds ensemble between the dancers.
Did I make this clear, to myself, the actor, or any audience member? Probably not. But it’s clear to me now.
In the light of B’s comment, perhaps, although I didn’t know it, I was making some kind of mash-up chorus-on-chorus commentary. GREASE meets Greece. These are the kinds of things that it’s best not to know about yourself, but knowing them is so satisfying.
I have been riding three hours a day, twice a week, on three different buses and trains to audit an undergraduate class devoted to the works of the playwright whom Leland Stanford Stamper calls “Willy the Shakes.” The professor is an expert on S. in performance, and we are never far from the text as spoken. He frequently soliloquizes, from memory, during the class. Very old-school.
Something that surprised me, as I prepared to read R3 and R2, was how little I enjoy experiencing these plays as books. It’s as if we are discussing the scores of great symphonies without ever listening to the music. Although it isn’t possible to watch a Shakespearean film without disagreeing about interpretation, I think that, in the future, I will always watch the movie first, if there is a movie. These lines don’t work for me on the page.
It is odd, too, to be gathered anew in a room with a large group of people, discussing a play, and to not have it begin with a read-through. I keep looking round for the designers, notebooked and spectacled, scribbling illegible cue notes. I expect to hear, murmured from behind me, “Dara, here’s the new script.” How do they even know what they’re talking about if they haven’t read it aloud?
Were anyone to be so misguided as to give me the direction of a drama seminar, I would abolish the sections and replace them, instead, with a reading (aloud) of each play in question.
The LA Weekly’s corporate owners have eliminated the position of theater editor.
My friend Meredith, who’s really more of a Super-Friend, is documenting her year in photos, on her blog. Mere has a great eye and a great sense of humor – plus amusing things happen to her, like corporate Monday 9 AM coffee with Kahlua. Clearly, I am in the wrong field.
Dara Weinberg 