Tuesday links

• David Biespiel calls for poets to involve themselves in civic discourse in the cover article for the new issue of Poetry. “American democracy needs the citizen-poet to address a gamut of difficult-to-solve public issues such as cultural fragmentation, national health care, decrepit infrastructure, threats of terrorism, energy consumption, climate change, nuclear proliferation, warfare, poverty, crime, immigration, and civil rights. ” He continues: “And just as soon as the American poet actually speaks in public about civic concerns other than poetry, both American poetry and American democracy will be better off for it.” But culture rarely has the civilizing effect Biespiel hopes for. Take, for example, Peeling the Onion, where Günter Grass describes lusting after masterpieces of art – Botticelli, Caravaggio, Frans Hals, Rembrandt – only to enthusiastically join the Waffen-SS as a 17-year-old. Artistic and moral faculties develop separately, he would later write. Poetry is unlikely to make us civically engaged, vote smarter, or even better people in the timeframe demanded by elections.
• Poet Karl Kirchwey looks at Derek Walcott’s new book, White Egrets, in the NYTimes Book Review.
• I recently linked to an Edith Grossman article in Guernica and a review of Why Translation Matters in the Times Book Review.  Chad Post reviews the book over at the Quarterly Conversation, arguing that her thoughts on translation (especially the poetry section) are worth the price of admission, but that the book is ultimately “a bit misguided” as a defense of the art.
• The poetry of Langston Hughes has been adapted by Walter Marks and Kent Gash at the UrbanStages Theater. (Extended through May 9). A favorable notice in the New Yorker:
  

  This new musical, about the life of the poet Langston Hughes, does a beautiful job covering a lot of ground. We learn about the time Hughes spent hanging out in Harlem with Zora Neale Hurston in the nineteen-twenties, when they were young and unknown, and that during the Harlem Renaissance he was subsidized by a rich white woman with connections in publishing who found out about his poetry from her maid; we are also told that he became so angry about what he saw on the streets of Harlem in the nineteen-forties and fifties that he lost, for a while, his patron, his friends, and his ear for poetry. But what’s astounding about this show, directed by Kent Gash, with music by Walter Marks, is how well Hughes’s evocative verse, used as dialogue and for all the lyrics, lends itself to the biographical musical-theatre genre. Because the poetry is deep and gorgeous, the book (co-written by Gash and Marks) and the lyrics are, too. And it doesn’t hurt that the singing—jazz, gospel, rhythm and blues—and the dancing, choreographed by Byron Easley, are inspired.

• Harvard UP announces the Murty Classical Library of India series with the goal of providing critical editions of works from Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Marathi, Persian, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu, and other Indian languages.

Theater in Translation News

• Strawdog Theatre’s production of The Good Soul of Szechuan by Bertolt Brecht is receiving solid reviews in Chicago. Dir. Shade Murray uses a 2008 translation by David Harrower (Blackbird, Knives in Hens). Through May 29.
• August Strindberg’s Creditors gets a new translation by David Greig.  Ben Brantley writes favorably about the production, directed by Alan Rickman (Through May 16 at BAM Harvey Theater):
  

  In the world of August Strindberg, where everyone is always armed and dangerous, it takes only 90 minutes to destroy a marriage. That’s the time required to perform the thrilling new interpretation of “Creditors,” which opened Tuesday night at the Harvey Theater of the Brooklyn Academy of Music. When this impeccably acted three-character drama has put the last of those minutes to cruel and careful use, you’re likely to feel you’ve had the breath knocked out of you. Despite yourself, you’ll probably be smiling too.

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Theater in Translation – Toshiki Okada’s Enjoy

Periodically we’ll write on works for the stage. Folio Found was named for a book of plays after all.

New translated theater is rare enough that it deserves special notice. Enjoy by Toshiki Okada, trans. Aya Ogawa, has extended its run through May 1. Presented at 59E59 in New York, the play has received strong reviews and (not to sound like an ad) offers an incredible $5 student rush ticket policy.

In the New Yorker:

Toshiki Okada’s play, about part-time workers at a Tokyo manga café, is a delightful study in frustration. Anecdotes are eagerly introduced, then derail before arriving at a point. Ideas are overexplained into incoherence. Ambition dissolves in a nervous laugh. This is the first production of an Okada play not directed by the playwright himself, and the first one performed in English. He put his work in good hands: the director, Dan Rothenberg, displays an acute understanding of Okada’s experiments with movement and shifting perspective, Aya Ogawa’s brilliant translation meets the challenge of finding an English equivalent for Okada’s highly colloquial Japanese, and the actors are wonderfully loose and nimble. In short, it’s a treat.

The Play Company, dedicated to “an international view of contemporary playwriting,” does phenomenal work year after year.  Their translation program takes particular care to highlight the distinction between academic translation and translation intended for the stage:

The U.S. lags behind other countries in translating foreign work, and our exposure to production texts is limited. Many American translations come from the academic world and, while useful for study, are not suitable for professional performance.

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Theater in Translation: An Open Letter to Producers

For all of the critics who claim poetry can’t and shouldn’t be translated, theater gets it worse. Take all of the logistical thresholds theater generally has to overcome – budgets, a local audience, available rehearsal and production spaces, a pool of talented actors, sets, lighting, design, sound, costumes – and add in the challenges of translating both a different culture as well as a few hours of spoken language.

It is significantly difficult that out of the many thousands of stage productions each year in the US, only about a dozen non-English playwrights are performed with any regularity. Records are hard to come by, but I attempted a one-city sample with the Chicago Theater Database.  The list is deserving, but small: the Greeks, Ibsen, Chekhov, Strindberg, Brecht, García Lorca, Ionesco, Molière, Sartre, Pirandello, Beckett, Calderón, Dario Fo, and a few others.  But that isn’t to say it doesn’t work when put to the test – works of Ionesco, Beckett, Yasmina Reza and a new translation of Schiller all succeeded as “prestige shows” on Broadway last season.

So, producers: Want to bring fresh work to new audiences? Get at me – I’ve got a boatload of never-premiered-in-English classics with your name on it. Let’s talk Thomas Bernhard or Alfred Farag.

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