2008-04-04 - 4:08 p.m.
Hameru: A Brief and Highly Informal Report that it is Unlikely Anyone Will Gain Information of any Importance From by ELOFTING@HOTMAIL.COM
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Polonius and Ophelia were great, Laertes and Claudius were kind of awful, and the language was - as I'd expected - torture to understand. (But Shuhei and Nobuo said they had a hard time with the language too, and I believe them.)
Here's what happened in Hachinohe last Sunday:
1. The dialogues and scenes that got cut (this was necessary, Hamlet in its entirety would be four or five hours long) included absolutely everything that would explained the kind of relationship Hameru had with Ophelia and with his mother, Gertrude. At first, I thought that the super-nerd who translated this thing had botched it and created an overly-masculine version of Hamlet for his Japanese cast. But, after thinking about it a little more, I've decided that he got it exactly right.
One, because amae* is, supposedly, an important part of Japanese culture. Therefore, Hameru didn't need to talk about his relationships with his girlfriend and his mother because everyone in the audience this Sunday already automatically understood.
Two, because Shakespeare's tragedies** all lack feminine characters, by which I mean, the female characters in Shakespeare's tradegies are not kind or nurturing ladies. Lady MacBeth's fanatic ambitions destroyed her husband, and herself. Tamora (from Titus Andronicus) had herself set on nothing but getting revenge, even though her quest for revenge only hurt her own family further. And Hameru's Gertrude was summed up pretty well with "frailty, thy name is woman".
Shakespeare might have made these ladies terrible on purpose, to make the tragedies more tragic, or he might have just been kind of bad at imagining up female characters. (Lots of writers have trouble creating characters of the opposite sex.) Either way, leaving Hameru's relationships with Ophelia and Gertrude kind of vague could have been the super-nerd demonstrating how well he understands Shakespeare in his own translation.
2. The local references that made the old people sitting in the front row laugh bugged me at first, but Shakespeare did it too.
(Except that Shakespeare did it with balls. Balls, I say!)
When I imagine Shakespeare, I imagine him huddled over a piece of paper with a delicate little quill and wearing that ridiculous fouffy collar. I never really appreciated before what a dark guy Shakespeare actually was.
Hameru's local references were about senbei crackers, a famine that happened hundreds of years ago, and people in Osaka being crazy.
Hamlet talked about pocky, syphilitic corpses, incestuous marriages, Polonius blowing his last role as Julius Caesar, and people in England going crazy, all of which were actually happening then, in the present tense.
I accept that the super-nerd who translated Hameru knew he was writing it for an auditorium full of old people in Hachinohe on a Sunday afternoon, and he couldn't exactly afford to upset his audience. However, in this regard, Hamlet was a much, much better play than Hameru was, and Shakespeare is cooler than I'd given him credit for before.
3. Mousetrap, the play within the play, was really disappointing, but my love for frame tales and I were looking forward to that part so much that it probably couldn't not be disappointing.
Hameru's Mousetrap was made into a French Romantic comedy, and it was probably pretty clever. Unfortunately for me, in a dialect of Japanese with a fake French accent on top of that, I couldn't understand a thing, and that was a little upsetting.
4. The crusty academics' favorite topics for wasted ink - why Hamlet hesitates, and whether or not Hamlet is actually crazy - were no more worth discussing in Hameru than they are in Hamlet. Hameru, like Hamlet, goes kind of nuts and neglects to kill Claudius right away because, if he didn't, this play would have no plot. (Why, oh why are the crusty academics still struggling with this? Why can't things happen in literature strictly for the sake of the plot?)
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* Amae is, simply speaking, to just sort of expect that the people who should love and take care of you will love and take care of you, without needing for it to be demonstrated expicitly. I think that this, as a key to understanding Japanese culture, is way over-rated. So let's never talk about it again.
** The only Shakespearian plays that I'm willing to pretend to understand are the tradegies. I know almost nothing about the romantic plays, or the comedies.
