Carrie Preston is a Professor of English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and the Arvind and Chandan Nandlal Kilachand Professor and Director of Kilachand Honors College at Boston University. She is the author of Modernism’s Mythic Pose: Gender, Genre, & Solo Performance (Oxford University Press, 2011) and Learning to Kneel: Noh, Modernism, and Journeys in Teaching (Columbia University Press, 2016). She is currently working on a new book entitled Participate! Race and Gender in the Audience for Interactive Theater, a critical examination of the political and pedagogical work of audience participation.
Carrie Preston
Contributions
Fluidity
Please humor me with a thought experiment. Imagine introducing T. S. Eliot and “The Waste Land” (1922) to your class with some of the bare biographical details: T. S. Eliot was born in St. Louis but, like other modernist poets, made a career abroad. Ezra Pound, whom Eliot met in London in 1914, helped get “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” published in Poetry magazine and edited the first drafts of “The Waste Land.” Perhaps you had already introduced Pound’s editorial relationships with and advocacy for other young poets by telling the story of how Pound launched H. D.’s career by editing early poems, scrawling “H.D. Imagiste” at the bottom, and sending them to Harriet Monroe for Poetry. Your students might assume that, regardless of T. S. Eliot’s sex at birth, the initials T. S. were intended to be as gender-neutral as H. D.[1] Many of your students grew up reading J. K. Rowling, who was convinced by a publisher that Harry Potter would sell better without the feminine name of Joanna (no middle name) Rowling. T. S. Eliot as a gender-neutral name undoubtedly sounds a bit ludicrous to modernists who cut their teeth and their teaching on Eliot’s famous and infamously difficult long poem. It is far more plausible to our students, many of whom are engaged in an evolving terrain of categories and possibilities related to gender and sexuality. Making space for a gender-neutral approach to Eliot and “The Waste Land,” while acknowledging that such an approach was not accurate to Eliot’s historical moment, has given some of my students a purchase on the poem. These students have taught me about new conceptions of gender and their relevance to readings of “The Waste Land.”
Translation in Noh Time
Translation takes time; it also gives time, a new and complex temporality, to a source text that exists in a relation of misunderstanding and inspiration to the translation. Early twentieth-century Japanese-English translation practices and theories offer a case study for a version of global modernism informed by ancient aesthetics and subjectivities—but not the typical version in which the ancient is non-western and modernity is firmly Euro-American. Two competing committees translated James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) into Japanese before it was legal to sell in any English-speaking country.[1] Ezra Pound, that great promoter of Joyce as well as translation “by a committee,” did not encourage the Japanese interest in translating Anglophone modernist texts.[2] He worried that Japanese artists would be swept up in “the apeing of Europe,” as he put it in The Classical Noh Theatre of Japan (1916), a controversial translation of ancient noh plays he published in spite of his minimal knowledge of Japanese.[3] Noh plays and other classical texts, like Lady Murasaki’s famous The Tale of Genji (c. 1000, translated by Arthur Waley from 1926–33) were present in Anglophone modernism before many of its great works were produced, translated, and at risk of being “aped.” While western modernists celebrated a version of Japaneseness based on translations of classical texts, translators in Japan were eagerly tackling contemporary works like Ulysses.[4] This discrepancy in translation practices troubles the common presumption that Japanese modernism lagged behind Euro-American modernisms. Some theories of global modernism suggest that we need to expand the modernist period to accommodate the time of translation and open its geographical boundaries to include non-Western countries.[5] While these approaches work to be inclusive, they can imply that nonwestern modernisms were derivative; they also maintain a version of temporality that does not accommodate the messy, fertile, and multi-directional creativity of cross-cultural translation and exchange—much less the temporalities featured in noh plays.