 Hello, and welcome. I'm Esther Allen, a professor at City University of New York, and I'm here with Allison Mark and Powell, who translates Japanese literature, works with the Penn Translation Committee, and has been a driving force co-organizing translating the future, which is the conference that you're now attending. In the past weeks, we've seen in horror how massive global protests against atrocities perpetrated upon the Black community in the United States by the police seem only to have exacerbated that brutality. This has been a moment of awakening and a time for education. One valuable resource is the Black Liberation Reading List, published by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library. On that list is Wayward Live's Beautiful Experiments, Intimate Histories of the Social Appeal, an extraordinary book by Sadia Hartman, who, among other things, is a former fellow at the New York Public Library's Coleman Center for Scholars and Writers. Hartman has just had a piece in bomb magazine titled, The End of White Supremacy, an American Romance, and I strongly recommend that you read her book and her latest article in their entirety. I'll quote one passage from the article. When the pandemic overtakes the city, they will die in greater numbers. They will suffer more. When the mob arrives, they will be as courageous as Mary Turner and call out the names of their killers. They will not yield. They will not be moved. In this other variant, the question is no less pressing. How is love possible for those dispossessed of the future and living under the threat of death? Is love a synonym for abolition? Thank you, Esther, and thank you all for joining us for this sixth installment of our weekly series, Translating Plays and Playing with Translation, featuring two enormously talented people, Aya Ogawa and Jeremy Tian. Aya is a Tokyo-born, Brooklyn-based playwright, director, performer, and translator whose work reflects an international viewpoint and utilizes the stage as a space for exploring cultural identity, displacement, and other facets of the immigrant experience. Jeremy is a translator, playwright and novelist originally from Singapore and now based in Queens. You can read their full bios on the Center for the Humanities website. This series of weekly one-hour conversations is the form that Translating the Future will continue to take throughout the summer and into the fall. During the conference's originally planned dates in late September, several larger scale events will happen. We'll be here every Tuesday until then with conversations about the past, present, and future of literary translation and its place in the world we find ourselves. Please join us next Tuesday at 1.30 for the first of a mini series within our program titled Motherless Tongues, Multiple Belongings. The first of these conversations will be between Jeffrey Angles and Mónica de la Torre, inspired and moderated by Bruna Dantas Lobato, which will explore linguistic multiplicities in their writing and in their translation. Please check the Center for the Humanities site for future events. Translating the Future is convened by Penn America's translation committee, which advocates on behalf of literary translators, working to foster a wider understanding of their art and offering professional resources for translators, publishers, critics, bloggers, and others with an interest in international literature. The committee is currently co-chair by Lynn Miller-Lachman and Larissa Kaiser. For more information, look for translation resources at penn.org. Today's conversation will be followed by Q&A. Please email your questions for Aya Ogawa and Jeremy Chiang to transitingthefuture2020 at gmail.com. We'll keep questions anonymous unless you note in your email that you would like us to read your name. And if you know anyone who was unable to join us for the live stream, our recording will be available afterward on the Howl Round and Center for the Humanities site. Before we turn things over to Aya and Jeremy, we'd like once again to offer our sincere gratitude to our partners at the Center for the Humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center, the Martin E. Siegel Theater Center, the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and Penn America. And now over to you, Jeremy and Aya. Hi. Hey. How are you, Jeremy? Surviving the present moment like us all. How are you doing? Same. Same. Surviving. Keeping people alive in the house. But it's lovely to connect with you like this, even though we're not in the same room. Yes, likewise. So I just want to kick things off, Jeremy. I mean, I've known you for years, really. We haven't been super close until now, I would say. But I've known you to be both a playwright and a translator and many other things. And I'm just curious how you arrived at where you are in your career as a translator and a playwright. I guess like all the best things I sort of stumbled into it. I grew up in Singapore, which as you probably know is a very multilingual place. So I grew up bilingual, speaking English and Chinese, and also being surrounded by other languages. Then I went to the UK to train as an actor and sort of fell from acting into playwriting. And at a certain point realized that translation was a way to make sense of all the different languages and cultures and identities swirling around inside myself. So now I sort of balance my own writing with my translation work. And I see them as part of the same body of work as a kind of spectrum, rather than to distinguish things. And that's equally important to me. And what was your first translating gig or like how did you how did you start translating your work? Well, like many novice translators, I set my sights impossibly high. So the first thing I tried to translate was a play by Gao Xinzian. Because why not start with a Nobel winning playwright? So I found his email. I can't remember who gave it to me, but someone gave me his email and I emailed him saying Gao Xinzian, may I translate your play? I want to and I stand by this actually. I wanted to translate it for performance because the existing translations of his work were done in a more academic way that I don't think would work as well on stage. And in fact Gao Xinzian is very little performed in the English-speaking world. And he phoned me. Like I do not know why I included my phone number in the email, never do that. But Nobel award winner Gao Xinzian phoned me and said that's already a translation of my work. And it was this very polite Chinese thing and he's like so it's not very nice for that to be another translation. And I didn't really have the vocabulary at the time to talk about different interpretations and also like you know I had no actual body of work to back me up. So it's like thank you Gao Xinzian. And I like to think that was an auspicious start to the whole thing because you know starting my career from a point of humility has I think kept me aware of the need to I guess bring others into the conversation and sort of think more holistically about what I'm doing with this whole ecosystem which at that point was not translate the work of a Nobel prize winner. And then a little after that I approached a Singaporean playwright who had actually been my teacher in high school and said may I translate your plays. And he said yes and my translation was performed in Singapore and I was like oh this worked I'll do more of it and here we are. So yeah kind of a convoluted way in but we find our own way to where we need to be. How about you Aya what was your path into writing and translation? It's so funny I'm finding a lot of resonance with your story. I was born in Japan and we moved back and forth quite a bit between Japan and the U.S. and that kind of gave me a pretty like disjointed childhood. It wasn't an unhappy one but when I did land in California for middle school and high school I really felt like I didn't know I didn't know really where I was and I also didn't know who I was and so I started acting in the high school drama program and that was actually a place where I finally felt like oh I could be here I could live here I can be myself here. And so my entry into the theater world was through acting and I thought I wanted to be an actor. I came to New York I went to Columbia and I did study some playwriting there and directing but I really thought that you know I was meant for the stage but quickly also realized this was in the early I'm mid 90s mid to late 90s when I graduated that you know the field did not have a lot of work for me or someone like me and it was very humbling and extremely frustrating to be in this kind of powerless position of the professional acting life having to be somebody else that is not that I have no control over you know. So I started more and more focusing on writing. I was working with a company that was very collaborative and we would kind of devise our own work and from there after I left I really primarily focused on writing and also directing simply because I didn't think anybody else would be interested enough in my work to direct it so I just started doing that and you know I the translation bit it's funny I had a day job working at the Japan Society for a very long time and they bring artists from Japan to perform in New York and all over the U.S. and oftentimes these pieces whether they were traditional no plays or contemporary theater pieces they would have no translation and being the kind of bilingual person that I am in the department I would often be tasked to translate or create subtitles for these shows and so that's how I stumbled into it because it was part of my day job and I kind of for a really long time didn't want to be didn't want my translator identity to be the thing that people knew me for because you know 10 years ago I would say there was really still a sense that the translator is invisible should be invisible is like a filter rather than an entity themselves but now I've reached a point I think in both of my my writing and my translating work that I feel comfortable and in fact really embrace both aspects of my work and think that they really feed each other and nurture each other do you find it that way I mean how does your translation work and your playwriting work collide or coexist? I think first and foremost by expanding my sensibility because translation pushes me into all kinds of areas that I might not enter into on my own just because you're engaging with someone who lives elsewhere and works within a different theatrical culture and that pushes you to explore that and what they're doing and I find it gives me a whole new vocabulary translating plays from Singapore and Taiwan and Hong Kong and China has kind of shown me what's happening in these theatrical worlds which are quite different also and then I bring some of that into my own work my own writing has become much more multilingual than it was and I use language I think in a way that is more fluid I think there can be a tendency in the English speaking world to use non-English languages as a kind of seasoning like you know here are a few non-English words just to amp up flavour but actually translation has brought me to a place where I'm more fluid of language and it's like actually this person would totally say the speech in Chinese or whatever and let's just do that so I feel I've become more open but I guess it's chicken and egg it's my tendency to want to be more open that's brought me into translation and made me want to work in this realm yeah I think this is something that I'll continue to explore and I'll continue to impinge on each other in different ways but they definitely are part of my work and enrich each other and I wouldn't want to let either of them go do you find the same that your writing and translation feed each other? Yes yes they definitely do and and the way yeah I never really reflected too deeply on my deliberateness in using multiple languages in my own place but I think for me it really came from wanting to challenge the idea of a monolithic white English speaking America in the theater you know and saying actually there's there's a whole world out there that I can begin to kind of show aspects of by bringing in other other languages but I have also found that as you might know I've translated a lot of Toshiki Okada's work and I've not just dealt with his text but have also translated like interpreted for him when he's like doing a workshop or during a rehearsal process or something anything like that and I've found that certain exercises that he's done or certain ways he has structured ideas in those exercises have subconsciously and directly affected the content of my plays and so and it's often like much later on that I realize that that's happened I'm like oh no but it's not as if I'm you know in any way imitating him or his writing style but I think because the process of translation is so intimate I would say you're really entering into someone else's mind and trying as best as you can to see through their eyes that it cannot I can't help but have that kind of leave some residual shadow on my own creative impulses do you find that too like more more than just like a language like incorporating other languages thing do you think that other playwrights ideas have influenced your work in that way yeah definitely um I think as you say you can't spend that much time with someone and and not have some trace of them remain on you it's kind of imprinting and I think that that can be really because the relationship is so close it can be really fruitful that sort of mind mouth it's a bit like the borg isn't it as a writer everyone you've ever translated remains in you and so by working with such a good because we both worked with quite a range of playwrights I think the influences on us then become really rich and multiple I'm intrigued about Okada specifically because he has such a distinctive style and is there an example that comes to my mind um yeah I mean and this may sound so um superficial but um so he has this exercise he does with his actors um or I guess he has he has used it to audition actors and he has used it in part of his rehearsal process and it's a very simple exercise when one person stands up and describes the house that they are living in or their childhood home they basically one person described a space and then the next actor has to come and describe this space the same space even though they've never had a direct relationship to that space and for him this exercise is not about one actor mimicking the other but it's he describes it as um you know when we speak and move in the world in real life extemporaneously we have an image behind we have an image of something and we are trying to communicate that image using text and movement and so text and movement are at a sibling relationship to each other not a hierarchical relationship to each other but when we're acting on stage actors have to memorize their lines right um and and their movement and the movement tends to become uh like in a the a child a child relationship to the text so the text overrides the movement so in his work he's trying to um deconstruct that that artifice of the theater but that's not what has influenced me it's just this very simple exercise of describing a house and that because i saw that so many i i probably have seen like 30 or 50 people do this exercise of describing their their home and it just for me i was working on a play called ludic proxy which you've seen um and it it was about the first act is about a woman who um lived in Pripyat which is a a town that housed the workers of Chernobyl and had to evacuate after the nuclear disaster and was never able to come back and in the play she's trapped somewhat in in this kind of feeling of nostalgia for her childhood home and she just endlessly in her mind revisits and revisits her home and describes it so um it it's very much like a weird shape or structure to borrow um but it definitely came from him i have to say yeah that that play immediately sprang to mind um when you were describing the place exercise because that is so vivid isn't it that the whole idea of trying to recapture a place that you've lost and can no longer go back to and then rediscovering it but it's not the same which is as i say this occurs to me it's also a metaphor for translation um so it sounds like you've worked really closely with okada um are you generally very collaborative in your writing and translation um yeah well i guess as i was describing that my translation process it's it's very intimate and it is very uh i guess isolated um i'm i'm lucky if i have some editors or proofreaders to work with me but usually it's just really me dealing with the text and dealing with the playwright but with my own writing i find that i depend heavily on collaborators um my actors and also my designers and those conversations really have are just essential to me being able to create my work um i i actually always um feel a little bit shy when i say i'm a playwright because i um i feel like the playwright as known to the world is someone who like actually sits at a computer and writes a lot of text and like shows up with a complete script and i like to show up with nothing at all and kind of play in the room with people before i start writing um so yeah that kind of collaboration has been essential for my for my own work and i imagine what the process must be like for you i mean i read part of your salesman play which is almost entirely in chinese um and i know you're working with a director who is who is not you who's not chinese uh culturally but who has spent a lot of time there i mean what is the is there a lot of rewriting that happened in the development process of that play with the director or how does how did that text come about oh yeah i mean we've done quite a lot of workshopping um but also because this play um takes as its starting point the production of Death of a Salesman in Beijing in 1982 which Arthur Miller himself directed despite not speaking chinese um it already actually happened this actually happened yeah uh in fact you can watch the entire production on youtube and really good it's that's crazy that is amazing um and also the translator of the text Ying Ruocheng played Willy Loman um so it uh the the director Michael Liebenloft came to me um and said i've got an idea for a project we should take this production that happened in Beijing in 1982 and do something with it um and we started in 2017 um and initially it was more of a recreation of the production and seeing what came out of that and then we kind of realized that it was an opportunity to explore a lot of things that we've both been interested in because we both work um bilingually and biculturally and also come from different directions because Michael's American um but went to Shanghai to study theater and study directing and i grew up in Asia and then came to the UK and then to New York where i am now um so we kind of both had this experience of working in a different place and seeing how the stories we wanted to tell took a different shape when you transpose them um and as a translator that's something that really resonated with me this idea this play about the American dream what happens when you take it out of America and do it with actors um who've never really had any contact because China in 1982 was just out of the cultural revolution they had very little contact with the west and a lot of the tropes of the play were unknown to them and the play itself was not the monolithic work that it would be in New York in the States i should say so um all of that um i've actually forgotten where we started but i'm just going to keep going this um became a site on which we and the many actors we've worked with and the larger creative team um all brought our um i guess cultural fluidity um because apart from the actor playing Alpha Miller the entire cast was bilingual um and quite a lot of the creative team as well so being in the workshops and then the rehearsal room was just this amazing experience of just moving between languages um translating for the people who didn't speak Chinese but mostly we just went and it really took a life of its own and i would emerge from each session this wealth of material that i have to kind of bring into a shape and find a coherent form for so we were destabilizing the story in all kinds of ways it's being performed by an all-female cast um just because um because i quite like the idea of a woman playing Alpha Miller that has actually already um discombobulated some people yeah we've had some strange emails so um wait but yeah so that process it sounds like it was really kind of a devised devising process or it was and i think it's not a true devising process in that i did start with a text um so rather than going in with a blank page i kind of start with a text bring it into the workshop and in the course of the workshop completely rewrite the text um but not necessarily taking what the actors have said verbatim but so going oh you did this i'm going to take that it there instead i i guess that is a form of devising um it's it's hard to pin down um for sure i couldn't do it without the collaboration of um the entire team um and then the text that you brought into the room was it actually in chinese when you brought it into the room uh huh got it yeah no i think that is a presumption that i write in english and then trans self translate into chinese but actually when i'm writing in chinese i become a different person um than i am in english um and also i i think a lot of things just aren't possible like trying to imagine what these people in beijing would be saying in english and then translating it wouldn't work for me you kind of enter into their world completely and they're speaking chinese just try to transcribe that yeah that makes a lot of sense to me ludic proxy also contained a lot of languages which i was excited about um because that's japanese and russian if i remember right yeah yeah i yeah i was gonna say do you speak russian at all no i don't i don't speak russian at all and so i worked with a a translator um dramaturg who who helped me and also in the development of that piece which spanned about five years because uh you know the play company they were so generous and they they commissioned me to create a play and they said you can make it about whatever you want and i was like great um and as soon as i started writing or thinking about what to write um some big life events happened um including the earthquake in japan um in 2011 and quickly followed by the death of my mother um then followed by the birth of my second son um so i kind of had to process all of this as i was creating this play and all these things um i'm sure you will recognize have made themselves work themselves into the into the play um but yeah the for that the russian section that i had a ukrainian woman who is part of the workshop who was very generous and giving me a lot of feedback and i also worked with a translator who at the end kind of cleaned everything up and also came in as a speech coach um and the conceit being because it the russian section of this play was is the memory of this woman and she's casting the people in her american life into characters in her memory it was okay for them not to be actually russian or ukrainian whereas in act two which takes place in japan after the earthquake and it was about the present moment and it was about the audience exercising their agency and actually exerting their uh their ability to take action in the moment by uh choosing what one of the japanese protagonist says and does like a live video game through the course of the act that was all conceived in japanese and um also developed with two japanese actors and who were who helped immeasurably in creating this like crazy branching narrative um but it's funny while i was working on the japanese i was writing in japanese but i was also already thinking about the subtitles um yeah and and being very conscious of what kinds of things were not translatable or um deliberately omitted in the translation to keep the subtitles tight you know and and yeah so even though you wrote that entire section in japanese for the american audience most of them would experience it through the cert titles exactly did you put in any bits that were just for japanese speakers i i can't remember if there was any kind of special treat like that um but do you think they would have had a different experience of that scene absolutely yeah absolutely and that was really a learning lesson for me too because the reaction i got from japanese audiences was just so different from from non-japanese audiences and um i mean it's hard to kind of encapsulate right now but you know my intention in wanting to place the audience in that spot of giving the audience the power to choose what the character does and says um i think that um that decision in terms of the theater form was received very differently from the japanese audience and the non-japanese audience because for i think for japanese people it was very those decisions were very real and high stakes you know and and it was a bit more of a reach i think for the non-japanese audience i mean it you know i think my plays are always kind of a litmus test in that way uh it kind of it kind of laid bare like where the audience is at i had another play that was that was about translation and there was a scene with spanish speaking people and english only speaking people and it was really about how they were unable to communicate but that immediately divided the audience right between the people who can understand spanish and those who can't understand spanish and so there was a divide that occurred that was that was fun i think it really like brought the audience alive and kind of aware of themselves and aware of like who else was in the sitting here in the theater with me you know yeah i mean i like what you said about litmus test because quite often i think with an audience you tend to become part of this homogenous mass right kind of in communion with the play and then when the play throws it back at you and goes no actually going to split you up or going to divide you up a bit and then you start to think about your own relationship to the people around you and how a lot of that has accomplished through language um a moment ago you said something about the things that were untranslatable for the ser titles which is always a fun concept right what is untranslatable and in our own translation work other things that just don't make it across the divide yeah it's i mean the the stupid examples are just about you know the clumsiness of of of translation and and grappling with like well i can say this thing in you know three words in japanese but in english it's going to take up 12 words so i've got to do something about that you know but i think that what i bring to the table as a translator is my experience as a playwright and a theater maker so i'm not just kind of dealing with the text and the author's intentions but i'm also really grappling with um like cultural translation cultural context um finding equivalent cultural markers in order to make that jump really quick into another to an american context um also you're completely at home in both cultures i'd imagine well it's complicated i mean i don't know how you well i imagine i've never been to singapore so i imagine that it's like everyone is kind of inhabiting multiple languages and ethnicities all the time anyway but you know japan japan is still such a homogenous place and it's still very hierarchical and very kind of you know like if you're not japanese ethnically or by blood like you're not really japanese that kind of attitude and so i i find it really stifling and so it's not that i i feel like linguistically speaking yes i would be fine it's just my soul does not feel right at home in japan yes yeah i mean maybe i shouldn't have said at home but um i guess having full access to um perhaps i i don't know that that's interesting though because as someone who was born in japan and is of japanese heritage where then do you position yourself as a translator yeah it takes some explaining um i actually i'm i'm just realizing that one of the first things that i say to uh japanese people especially japanese um playwrights who are thinking of working with me is that i'm not japanese you know like i might look japanese i might sound japanese i have a japanese name but but that in in my heart i'm probably not as japanese as i present you know so that that it's very important for me that they are aware of that gap you know and for me i think that gap is what um what's exciting in a way that there's room there right um which the room to make the translation possible yeah where do you feel at home these days um well cop out answer but um i guess everywhere and nowhere like there's nowhere where i would say a few completely at home um but at the same time i guess i have gotten used enough to fluidity that i am able to make a home for myself wherever i am um it also helps i guess that singapore is so multiple in so many ways um when i'm working with a playwright or a writer from china or taiwan it becomes really short-hand go i'm from singapore and be like oh okay we get it oh interesting what is it that they get do you think because it's not about the language right it's partly that like it's the idea that i will have grown up with familiarity with chinese although some expressions they find odd because the language has evolved but also with english as a primary language so it's that kind of in between us that i think a lot of people in former colonies feel where there are multiple layers of culture and you kind of have access to all of them but also don't fully own any of them and because singapore kind of um you know the chinese were newcomers to singapore um it after colonialism ended or right i should say after it stopped being a colony it was not a straightforward but i mean it's never a straightforward process of going back to the previous culture but because we were also geographically removed um and in my case because i'm also mixed race my dad is part Sri Lanka there was a lot of um not really being able to go back to an existing culture and kind of existing in the state of limbo where you have a bit of everything but not all of anything which it turned out is a really good place to start translating from so i think translation has become the only thing that really allows me to make use of all these parts of myself and all these places i've lived and all these influences on me and kind of synthesize them so like rather than the metaphor of translation as a bridge i see it more as a crucible like this thing that you bring all these things into and then come up with something else that's really beautiful it's yeah i i'm really interested in people like us who are kind of um multiple or hybrid um who aren't you know entirely in one place but kind of have offshoots and the way translation is a way of making sense of that um yeah going going back to a point earlier about the presumed invisibility of the translator and the way translation has gained more prominence um it's been nagging it to me that it's not actually every translator who is expected to be invisible and i'm thinking back to you know even 10 20 years ago the with something like art by Yasmina Reza Christopher Hampton was hyper prominent in the production of that and there are certain translators who are given the status of artistic creator whereas for us it's been more of a struggle so i'm interested in firstly the power dynamics of that but also whether our position as being in between has what that has done to where we stand vis-a-vis the translation and writing yeah that's a really interesting point you bring up who and i i don't know i guess partially for me because i seem to have fallen into every part of my practice like backwards like you know i didn't seek out translation as a as a path but it i was kind of pushed onto it backwards and i was like ah um so there was always a part of me that was not i don't know it didn't feel comfortable fully owning it and so that may have done that may have played a part in my feeling and kind of um not just like not not whole in it or i don't know maybe it's because i'm a woman i don't know that maybe it's because i'm asian yeah i don't know it's it's there's an endless kind of cycle of questions that can begin to unravel um but i do feel like actually now finally in the last few years i've been feeling i guess the reason i feel like i'm able to embrace my identity as a translate that's translating being part of my artistic identity is because that it actually um requires a lot of responsibility and i'm in a position of actually choosing who i work with whose words do i translate which playwrights do i want to introduce to an english speaking audience and that process has been really exciting to me um yeah i mean we're back to the theme of collaboration um and the way that it's really about forming a really close relationship with another writer and a text and bringing your own artistic energy to it right and how are you how do you work with trans like with playwrights do you go and seek out writers to work with that or how does it work for you um at this point it's about 50 50 um both with my um fiction and theater translating work um well it's 50 50 of the fiction um with playwriting i'm still seeking out more work and finding playwrights i want to collaborate with just because translation as you know isn't as prevalent in the theatrical world um but um i've been quite lucky in that a lot of um Taiwanese theater particularly um the play scripts are just available online to download and it's quite easy to get hold of them so i've been able to read through a lot and then reach out to the playwrights that i feel i want to have collaboration with and the other thing is that theater culture is as interconnected anywhere as it is here so once you know a few playwrights you kind of have access to them all and i found that when i find a playwright i want to work with um i often ask them what are you you know interested in who are you talking to who's exciting you and often those are the people that i also find exciting and interesting um and so i branch out that way yeah is that yeah how yes that's how it has worked for me to um Toshiki Okada he works with them i guess are they a manager managing company or yeah let's just say it says his manager it kind of works differently there but they handle several other playwrights um and they have introduced me to a lot of other playwrights who are really working outside of like the traditional and conventional theater landscape um i'm thinking of Yudai Kamisato who um he's Okinawan and but raised in Peru and so has this Japan South America connection and a very international kind of point of view over history and colonization and and Japan and um it's been really fun to delve into his work um and also Satoko Ichihara who's a Japanese a female playwright whose work i find so transgressive and um exciting and i just can't wait for somebody to produce her work here because i think that it would actually really resonate with an American audience yeah is that oh i think i think we're probably running out of time is it time for questions we have some questions it's been like it's so i mean you know your your conversation has been flowing so organically it was hard to find a spot to jump in but we did um we do want to get to some of the questions from uh from the audience and viewers and it's thank you so much it's been really really fascinating to hear others like the way it's sort of like um a therapy session where the the juiciest questions come at the very end all right so we have a um a two part question that came in uh it would be great to hear Jeremy elaborate on how translating Arthur Miller moving him across the language border into Chinese also translated into his engendering as a woman and the second part of that question is does the gendering have any parallel with the translation um so i should make it clear that i have not translated in Arthur Miller Arthur Miller's lines in this play are all in English um and in a way that makes the presence of Arthur Miller starker in that everyone around Arthur Miller speaking in Chinese but i've actually leaned a lot on Ying Ruocheng's existing translation of Death of a Salesman which was the one used in that production and looking at the solutions he found to a language Arthur Miller's language bring that into the Beijing dialect of 1982 was a fascinating exercise in and of itself um i i think in indirectly though the fact that the play transgresses linguistic borders made it easy to go and they will all be played by women so yeah um i guess once you go off piece in one way it gives you license to do it in many others but we have another question um a more general one that i i'm sure you'll both have a very vehement response to from Jonathan Cohen he wonders what percent of plays produced each year in the u.s are translations do you have any idea i have no official statistics at hand but i would say 0.3 i would say one two three one two i call it synapse strength oh yeah yeah i mean but but that's it isn't it um translations of living playwrights are yeah probably 0.03 um yeah i i wish someone would do account but ultimately that would be really depressing so it also goes to show how at least in the theater world right now we're really have been inward looking um and i hope that that can change i mean there are are great um theater companies like the play company that are trying to change that yeah no for sure um i just i guess i would like to see an expansion of um what stories we see told on american stages and i think that's a broadening of an existing conversation about diversity because i think great strides have been made in terms of representation and diversity but those often stop short at the borders of this country and i'd just like to see that pushed further so that all american stories are told but also stories from elsewhere can come in and be told here through translation um so there's a multi-part question questions for each of you and for both of you um for jeremy what do you see as the distinction between translation for performance and academic translation is it the inclusion of paratextual material or is it the style of the dialogue and dida scalia itself um the second part of the question is do you feel now that you have the vocabulary to explain to the first playwright you reached out to why to re-translation but didn't take away from previous translations what would you say to them now um i i'm completely outside the academic world um and i probably shouldn't have said academic i would make a distinction between translation for publication in which case the play is to be read and translation for performance in which case you have to think about the other artistic collaborators and what a director and actor would find most useful in the creation of their performance um i have no imminent plans to reach out to Nobel prize-winning playwright gauzing zian to um relitigate our conversation from 50 years ago but if i did um i i would say i would point out to him that in the english speaking world there are like a billion versions of the cherry orchard we seem to have a new one every three years and why on earth shouldn't there be multiple versions of gauzing zian each new translation brings is an opportunity for a different artist to bring the interpretation to the text and to create something that is rich and vibrant and is one interpretation of hopefully many that reminds me of what we were talking about um the other day jarme which is when i was asserting that there is no perfect translation or there's no complete translation that that idea is false um in the same way that they're that as the same way as the idea that the translator should be invisible is cannot be true because it is inevitably as you say an interpretation through one artist. Here's another really interesting question that came in is the u.s a good place to be a translator whose identity or home is part here part there feel free to define good in any way you feel appropriate i think maybe good in the sense that because there is such a diverse population here um i'm trying to contextualize it as a translator um but i i've definitely received a lot of work translation work being here i think more so than i would receive if i were living in japan um and there there because it's it's so diverse and international here in new york um there are so many resources for for people who are who are translating um and by that i mean you know in my case like other japanese people who i can bounce ideas off of other cultural institutions and you know universities that have kind of the research materials that i might need and things like that yeah i think in terms of infrastructure um living in new york because there are so many resources and also so many places to draw inspiration from um that it's good in that sense but as we've talked about the monolithic nature of american theater and how hard it can be to find a foothold in it and to bring something different into it um that's more of a challenge alison do you have another question yeah there's another what's another part of one of the earlier um questions um this one was for you both do you feel when translating or writing a play that you are directing the show or do you feel that by interpreting at theatrical text you are contributing something to the plays eventual mise en scene with the choices that you have made i don't feel that way um but i think it's it is a tricky question i'm thinking particularly of my translations of toshiki okada's work toshiki is um a playwright obviously but he also directs his own work with his company in japan um so in japan it's very hard to divorce his scripts from his direction but he is very open to uh in in having his work translated into english he has no um kind of hang ups about how that text is eventually staged in america he he's actually i think excited by the idea of other people interpreting and directing his work in ways that he couldn't have imagined um so i do always feel that in order to get inside the text and inside his point of view it's very helpful to understand how he directed it and how he how his audience received his work it helps me create a context for the american audience to receive the translated work in a similar and perhaps like parallel way but i don't think that it is really um dictates anything about the staging or the direction itself also aya you you are a director so i i think does that bring an awareness of what what the direction of a piece would require in your work like do you ever have the idea of if i directed this this is what i do it's so funny i in terms of my translations like i have no desire to direct them because i've already had such a personal relationship to them i think it might be that's where my breaking point is in the same way when i ask you if you would ever direct your own work you were like no i need my other people yeah that's where i would draw the line yeah i realized um at some point that i don't really use stage directions even in my own writing it's like you decide um i like the collaborative nature of it of just being able to hand it on to someone else um to have their good interpreting so i think we've run out of time that had what a wonderful conversation i learned so much from both of you it was such a pleasure to listen to you talk and um i wish you could go on for another another long while but uh yes right time thank you both so much i am jeremy and once again we'd like to thank our partners pen america the center for the humanities at the graduate center cuny the colman center for scholars and writers at the new york public library and the martin e seagull theater center thank you everyone for being here and we hope to see you again next week thank you bye