Translations: part 1 of 2

Translation is cultural kidnapping –- cultural because the act of turning a foreign word into a domestic word is like painting, with shades and colors and contrasts, and every language has its own palette; and kidnapping because the bad ones always end with the victim’s escape from your clutches, while the good ones always end in a kind of Stockholm Syndrome marriage. Even the best translation can’t help but substitute a value for every word, what Noam Chomsky would probably call the myth behind the language. Which is why, in much the same way that every Hollywood movie about Ancient Rome becomes a replay of the American myth -- the war of freedom and democracy against tyranny and dictatorship -- every British translation of Chekhov is about the English character: class snobbery and repressed emotions.

(And it's not just Chekhov. Check out Night Creatures, the Hammer version of the Dr Syn story starring Peter Cushing, and compare it to Disney's Scarecrow of Romney Marsh. In Night Creatures, the Robin Hood figure is an ex-pirate who must pay for his past sins with his life. In Scarecrow, the Robin Hood figure is anti-tyranny ["There's a new spirit in the world, Mipps. Men can't beat armies. But ideas can."] and risks his neck to save a proto-Son-Of-Liberty from the gallows. Or to put it another way -- in England: repressed emotions; in America: a secret identity.)

And in Chekhov? It depends on the translation. There's a lot of repressed emotion and blindness in Tom Stoppard’s new Bridge Project version of The Cherry Orchard, which is currently playing at BAM. There's also a lot of comedy, which is not a tree that is usually found in most Orchards, despite Chekhov's insistence that comedy describes the play perfectly. But then most translations of the good doctor's plays go for the wistful over the wacka-wacka-wacka; it's only in the one-acts, the obvious farces, that you're given a clear and consistent presentation of the over-the-top craziness that is Chekhov deliberately going for a laugh. Of course, if you listened to Anton talk about his own work, every page of his plays has laughs galore. But since an author's blindness to his own work is not limited to modern writers whose program notes have no relationship at all to what's on the stage, you have to take Chekhov's self-professed label as a comedian with not just a grain of salt, but a lemon and a shot of tequila.

The laughs in this version are more Stoppard than Chekhov, which is at the same time a plus and a minus. It’s no secret that, because English is Stoppard’s second language, he has a wider brush when it comes to wordplay. His émigré status is also the reason why there’s a continental feel to even his most British pieces -- the sense that they’re not taking place in London but in Schnitzler’s Vienna, where any ill-considered word could provoke pistols at dawn. In Chekhov it’s exactly the opposite; in Chekhov there are nothing but ill-considered words, which (when they are not deliberately ignored) provoke the distant sound of sleighs and carriages as much as they do gunshots. The best translations of his plays show people verbally stepping on each other’s toes, and meanwhile hiding a wince when their own little piggies get trod on.


Is Stoppard's that kind of translation? No. But then I don't think there's a translation in English that reproduces this aspect of Chekhov's writing. I don't even know if it can be done without tearing the plays apart and re-inventing them as American fables. And even then. Setting Cherry Orchard in Virginia circa 1900 and turning Lopakhin into the son of one of the plantation's slaves would be the only comparable analogy to what Lopakhin represents as the son of a Russian serf, but the American representation comes with its own unique cultural baggage which (a) warps the role of "servant" into something so culturally charged that (b) in essence you've got a totally new play, not about repressed emotions but a repressed race of people. (I'm putting it on my project list right under the 1950's version of Hedda Gabler. Oh wait--Cate Blanchett already did that one.)

Next: so if it's impossible, why do it? or, The Everest Effect.

The Cherry Orchard at BAM

The very tall
Rebecca Hall
Thinks plummy vowels equal sense

While Simon Beale
Will never kneel
To anything but excellence.

There is something very British about Tom Stoppard’s new Bridge Project version of The Cherry Orchard, which is currently playing at BAM. As directed by Sam Mendes, in a style which deliberately tries to build a bridge between Anton Chekhov and Samuel Beckett (hence the project name?), the show is one part willful blindness, one part class warfare, and a dash of despair served in a mug of repressed emotion, which adds up to a portrait of the British character more than an unblinking look at Russian landowners. But those qualities are always the ones which have attracted the Brits to Chekhov. There is no vodka sweat in their productions of Chekhov, just the bright perspiration of teatime. Which is not a complaint, mind you; translations are tricky businesses (and the subject of a later post) but this one seems more innately British than most.

Possible reason why? It's not really a translation, but a revisal. Stoppard said earlier this year that he wanted to treat this Cherry Orchard as a working play, not a rote exercise in word substitution, and in that he's succeeded. There's a loose vernacular feel to the script; it's so fresh in places that, if you're familiar with the play, it makes you misremember things. Is Yasha's part really so small? (If it is, as a friend of mine remarked, then Josh Hamilton is getting gypped.) Does the dialogue between Trofimov and Ranevskaya really go on that long? And is Varya secretly in love with Trofimov -- is that why she's always sniping at him? The last question was one of a number of little revelations this new version provides. By opening up the script to the kind of working rewrites he'd do for his own work, Stoppard is stretching familiar characters into unfamiliar places. For that alone, you should see it. But the main reason to see it, of course, is for the acting.

Sinead Cusack
Still has the knack
Of making women who are blind

To their own flaws
Look sweet because
At heart they're basically kind.

The Bridge Project is a British/American joint venture (heavy on the Brit side) which will be doing this play in repertory with Winter's Tale at BAM through March and around the world for the next year. It is also a master class in acting, with the Brits as teachers. While there's a certain anti-Colonies bias in the casting (the Yanks play the cad, the schlemiel, and the perpetual student) , everyone is in the same play (how rare that is), there are no fake British accents from the Americans (no Peter Sarsgaards in this production, thank God), and everybody brings game whenever a Yank and a Brit have a scene together.

The direction by Sam Mendes is a solid mix of drawing-room intimacy and impressionistic stage pictures. There are a series of triptychs, three people looking out into the audience as if through three bay windows, that reminded me of the opening of Olivier's Three Sisters. (Homage? I'd have to see the Olivier film again; I only saw it the once, when it came out 30-odd years ago, but I still have vivid memories of Alan Bates and Joan Plowright in it.) And the end is straight out of Samuel Beckett -- the old man in bare feet and a nightgown, falling to the stage and lying there in the bright white lights of a room empty of everything except for a child's chair.

Give Ethan Hawke
A chance to talk?
There's nothing he won't give tongue to.

He'll race the course
A little horse
(And so's his voice by sentence two).

There are a great many directorial brilliances in this show (Beale's Lopakhin running amok at dinner being the brightest), and only one mis-step that I can think of. [Spoiler alert] There's a point in Act Three where Lopakhin kneels beside Ranevskaya and leans in to kiss her. It's a brilliant touch (if Lopakhin is in love with anyone, it's the mother, not the daughter), but it makes hash of the Act Four moment when Ranevskaya plays Dolly Levi and sends her daughter Varya to Lopakhin so he can propose to her. It says something either stupid or nasty about her character that she wants to see her daughter married to someone who so obviously wants her instead. (Sinead Cusack goes the willful ignorance route; there's a lot of Mother Lord from The Philadelphia Story in her performance, especially the Mother Lord of the second half, where the once-sharp matron seems to have lost half her wits upon the return of her errant husband.)

Picky picky picky, right? Still, it's the rare revival where you find yourself seeing a play and its characters with fresh eyes, and this is one of them. If you saw The Seagull that was just on Broadway and liked it, then you'll love this. And if you hated the Broadway Seagull, then you owe it to yourself to see this, if only to cleanse your Chekhovian palate.

And while we're doing poetry, here's the play in six lines:

The servant's son
is Number One --
He buys the house (including tax).

Proposal? Nope.
Regret trumps hope
And puts the orchard to the axe.


Next: some thoughts about translations, or, The Myths Behind Language . . .