“Between Poetry and Performance”: The Nemesis of Richard III in Two Contemporary Japanese Translations

Abstract

Shakespeare translation may be conveniently evaluated in terms of the two generic standards of poetry and drama that constitute poetic drama, each of them affecting the way that stage translations of Shakespeare’s plays are received within non-Anglophone theatres. In the long history of Shakespeare translation in Japan, for example, we can see how translators through to the 1970s were preoccupied with finding an appropriate poetics of translation that to some extent reflected the development within the recipient culture of new poetic forms away from traditional syllabic verse, while for contemporary translators such as Matsuoka Kazuko and Kawai Shōichirō—riding on the phenomenal growth of the modern Japanese theatre—the focus is inevitably theatrical. The dichotomy of poetry and drama risks subordinating Shakespeare translation to powerful cultural norms that determine how Shakespeare should sound and appear in performance. Against this tendency, the views of theorists such as W.B. Worthen (drama) and Lawrence Venuti (translation) can be assimilated to argue that what Shakespeare translators are in fact doing is to generate a sophisticated dialectic of poetic and dramatic elements that makes translations not so much meaningful as highly interpretive, or rather open to theatrical interpretation. My discussion of two recent translations by Matsuoka and Kawai of Richard’s nemesis in Richard III (5.4) suggests that Kawai’s translation is slightly more “poetic” than Matsuoka’s, and Matsuoka’s slightly more “dramatic,” based on my own analysis, a survey of colleagues and students, and on what they themselves have said about their respective translating styles, and yet the differences are only slight.