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Abstract
As a western canonical text, Shakespeare has been translated and staged in East Asia in various ways and often adapted into traditional performance styles to counterbalance its western textual canonicity with the authenticity of eastern performative forms and styles. Negotiations between west and east, which reflect the colonial and postcolonial experiences of the region, have been a critical focus of academic investigations.
What is remarkable, yet often overlooked in the west and in Asia itself, is that there were complex negotiations among East Asian translators and theatre practitioners in the early reception and translation of Shakespeare. The doubleness of Japanese colonialism – which first behaved as the “east” that absorbed western culture and later took the position of the “west” that provided advanced modern culture and technology to neighbouring countries – is the most notable element in inter-Asian cultural negotiation in the early twentieth century in general, and in the translation and staging of Shakespeare in particular. Such historicity in translation was nevertheless generally unrecognized, and even ignored, in the post–World War II cultural and social contexts in East Asia.
This essay aims to explore the “erased” historicity of the translation in East Asia by examining Japanese translation of the National Changgeuk Theatre of Korea’s production of Romeo and Juliet (2009) as it was published in a multilingual online digital archive called Asian Shakespeare Intercultural Archive (A|S|I|A), and to add another layer to the existing discourses on translation in this region that have mainly focused on the east-west binary. The translation strategies employed by the A|S|I|A team have sought to address the complexity of the history of translation of Shakespeare in Korea and Japan, and of discourse making in the postcolonial South Korea. The article also suggests the potential of a digital platform like A|S|I|A in capturing and representing inter-Asian negotiations thanks to its capacity to juxtapose multiple elements of translation on the screen.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Asian Shakespeare Intercultural Archive (A|S|I|A) is a project organized by the National University of Singapore with financial support from the Ministry of Education, Singapore (MOE2013-T2-1–011). A|S|I|A can be accessed at http://a-s-i-a-web.org.
2. Initially, A|S|I|A started in three languages, namely English, Chinese and Japanese; however, we are now adding Korean translations of the scripts. Currently, we have 52 productions online (14 from China including Hong Kong and Taiwan), 14 from Korea, 14 from Japan and 9 from Southeast Asia).
3. Itō was appointed Japan’s first Resident General in Korea in 1905 before being assassinated by a Korean nationalist in 1909.
4. All translations from Japanese sources are mine unless otherwise stated.
5. The Lambs’ text was also influential in the early reception of Shakespeare in China. It was translated orally by Wei Yi and rendered freely into a style influenced by traditional Chinese story telling by Lin Shu (1852–1924).
6. Kaeryang in Korean and kairyō in Japanese share the same Chinese characters (改良).
7. This type of theatre was also called Shinpa in Korean.
8. There are noticeable similarities in terms of Japanese influence between Korea and China in the first few decades of the twentieth century. China also saw a rapid increase of the number of exchange students to Japan in the same period as Korea’s education boom.
9. Carrying on the ideals of Tsubouchi’s Bungei Kyōkai, Osanai tried to import Western methodology directly into Japanese theatre. He used a script written in modern Japanese which was totally different from traditional Kabuki style with the intention of introducing the text to the audience, rather than focusing on the actors’ performance that had been the core of Kabuki’s star-based production system (Ōzasa Citation1985, 104). To accomplish this aim, he declared that he would produce only plays in translation and no Japanese plays at all, at least for the first few seasons after he set up Tsukiji Shō Gekijō in 1924 (Rimer Citation1974, 31).
10. As of July 2015, there were only three resident companies; the other two are the National Dance Company and National Orchestra.
11. The A|S|I|A team created its original English translation upon the agreement of the company to reflect the contemporaneity of the language used in the Korean script, which was uploaded to the website along with the version by the company.
12. The reference to the contemporary political situation in Tsubouchi’s translation of Julius Caesar has been widely discussed as a key to understand the popularity of this rather ambiguous play in Meiji Japan. Tsubouchi was known for his proximity to the liberal Kaishintō party that played an important role in the Jiyū Minken Undō (Freedom and People’s Rights Movement), and his translation of Julius Caesar was meant for informing the masses of the ideology of the movement (Ōshima Citation1955, 109). Aragorn Quinn argues that Tsubouchi “allies the play with the political progressives in his rendering of the concept of jiyū”, which had been “appropriated in democratic circles as a translation of the words ‘liberty’ and ‘freedom’ and became a popular buzzword among political progressives at the time” (Citation2011, 174).
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Notes on contributors
Ken Takiguchi
Ken Takiguchi is a research fellow at the Theatre Studies Programme, Department of English Language and Literature, National University of Singapore. He is also the Deputy Director and Translation Editor of Asian Shakespeare Intercultural Archive (A|S|I|A) which has been developed by the Programme. His research interests are in Japanese and Southeast Asian contemporary theatre, theatre translation and cultural policy. His recent publications include “Translating Canons: Shakespeare on the Noh stage”, Shakespeare 9 (2013) and “Bridging Japanese Cultural Exchange Endeavors: Re-evaluating the Asian Traditional Performing Arts (ATPA) Program”, in Japan and Southeast Asia: Past and Present, ed. Ricardo T. Jose, Teow See Heng and Yoshimura Mako (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2014). Takiguchi has also participated in a number of intercultural productions as a dramaturg/translator/producer.