Thursday, September 01, 2011
'Wicked' world: Composer-lyricist Stephen Schwartz reflects on his Oz with a twist show
Post Gazette: Much to his surprise, Stephen Schwartz discovered that the Japanese don't have a tradition for rhyming lyrics, which makes it impossible to translate lines like "It's obscene!/Like a froggy, ferny cabbage/The baby is unnaturally/Green!" And so far, he hasn't found an equivalent idiom in any language to represent the dual-meaning title "For Good."
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5 comments:
Stephen Schwartz career gives hope to all of those artists in the world who are worried about being "pigeon holed" into a certain type of work, actors afraid that if they choose only stage work they will never be able to break into film, or writers who write screenplays, but worry there career will never lead them back to writing for the stage. Stephen Schwartz is obviously very talented and his work can take him anywhere.
I was intrigued by the discussion of translating (and in many ways, transforming) a production for an international audience. There are some concepts that are inherently very American about Wicked: the buddy story and how they're torn apart by circumstance, down to the puns and jokes on Elphaba's, well, greenness. Last semester I attended a talk with Jeff Lee, associate director with Disney Theatricals, who spoke on the challenges of bringing The Lion King to Seoul and Johannesburg, specifically citing the translation of The Morning Report (a song full of animal puns like "we haven't paid the hornbills"). I'd be very interested to compare the translated lyrics of Wicked back to the original songs to see the choices made.
It's always good to see not only CMU graduates who have achieved high levels of success in the industry (such as Stephen Schwartz), but who also have a desire to return to the program to teach. The fact that Stephen Schwartz speaks so highly of the training and skills he both received and sees being taught here when he visits speaks to a sense of community which carries through even after graduation.
On an entirely different note, knowing that works such as Wicked are translated and brought to countries around the world to bring the same messages shows that culture only makes so much of a difference. The core of who we are as human beings, what we perceive as fundamental rights and wrongs, and what we believe we have to take away from art as well as from one another, is a strong binding factor between all humans.
I would be interested to find out more about the translating process. It seems as though it would be extremely difficult to translate into a different language and change cultural references and still keep the characters and the plot intact. As the article stated, there are some languages that do not rhyme lyrics such as we do in English, but for the ones that do, it must be tough to take something that you've worked so hard on and adapt it to potentially have to be quite different in order to have the flow of the songs and the show as a whole continue to be successful.
I knew about the problems with the Japanese translation of "For Good" before this, and once had a conversation about it with my sister. We were intrigued and went on an internet search to see if any other languages had a word that meant forever and better at the same time but couldn't find anything. I find this rather sad because in was really neat double meaning in English that is lost on foreign audiences.
I was interested in the "non-replicated" productions in Denmark and Finland. I would like to see what someone else has come up with to portray the story everyone here now knows so well. I wish the article had a little more information on them. But it really is fantastic that Schwartz talks up Carnegie Mellon like he did in this article. It is comments like his, from people with his success that that remind us students why we choose this school.
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