Worlds Elsewhere (70 page)

Zhang smiled again, this time a little grimly. ‘You see, it is very interesting. These are the dilemmas of translation.'

Painful decisions about metre followed. Zhu had simply aimed for readable Chinese prose, but Fang Ping and his team decided to
attempt something more sophisticated – a verse form that echoed the original. For all the richness of classical Chinese poetry, there is nothing that resembles the muscular and flexible ten-syllabic structure of Shakespearian blank verse, a ‘mighty line' forged by Christopher Marlowe and purpose-designed to echo around Elizabethan theatres. An entirely new scheme had to be concocted.

After long months of trial and error, Fang developed a strict ten-syllable system, using caesuras or breaks to replicate the
di-dum, di-dum, di-dum, di-dum, di-dum
pulse of iambic pentameter. It was devilishly complicated to work in. Zhang showed me an example from
Romeo and Juliet,
Friar Lawrence's response to Romeo's admission that he has abandoned his early love for Rosaline and fallen for the beauteous Juliet. The original sits alongside a literal back-translation:

In order to keep within the verse structure, even more compromises had to be made: colourful images abandoned, precise equivalences painfully rejected. It was like re-tailoring a suit jacket to someone else's body; you painstakingly let out a hem or made a tiny adjustment to a sleeve, only to find the back had ripped in two without you noticing.

Zhang looked rueful. ‘Because of the differences of the language, you can only translate as much as possible. So that leaves much work for teachers and students. That is why I always advise my students, if possible, do not read the Chinese translation.'

He was a translator who advised his students not to read translations?

He shrugged. ‘Translation is always inadequate. At
best,
it's inadequate. At worst, it's misleading, quite misleading. So keep to the original.'

Nonetheless, he was optimistic about the state of Shakespeare in China, something new translations could only help. Just the other week he had taken part in a flash mob to mark the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare's birth and World Book Day. Academics and actors had crowded into central Shanghai to read from the works in both Chinese and English.

He proudly pulled out his commemorative copy of
Life Week.
I hadn't been able to find one in Beijing; this was the first time I'd seen it. There Shakespeare was, cover boy – a cartoonish rendering, done in lurid green, depicting the playwright sitting pensively in a fireside chair, the characters he'd created writhing through the smoke. The issue featured long articles on his life, Chinese interpretations of the plays, competing translations and much more.

‘Just a couple of days ago, a student wrote to me. She never believed that she would be interested in Shakespeare because he was such a classic, and because he wrote in ancient English. She came to a couple of sessions in my class, we studied the language and talked about translations.' His eyes gleamed. ‘She found great fun in Shakespeare!'

He was keen to show me the grounds. In the spring sunshine we strolled across tidy walkways and green lawns. At the centre of the university complex was a huge statue of Mao, one of the few still standing in Shanghai. The chairman stood to attention, greatcoat austerely buttoned, an inscrutable smile playing across his lips. He seemed to be enjoying some private joke.

I thought suddenly of Solomon Plaatje in South Africa. It must be risky, I said, being a translator: bridging two cultures, one was always at risk of being stranded.

Zhang chuckled. ‘You know the story? The central translation bureau were asked by the government to retranslate the complete works of Marx and Engels into Chinese. The translations needed updating, they had not been looked at for years. When the new translators looked into the text, they found the original translators had made so many errors – Marx didn't mean that, Engels didn't mean that! A catastrophe, the whole thing would have to be redone. But when they produced the report saying this, the Party decided to forget the whole project and bury it.'

His smile was broader than ever. ‘It would have called into question the entire Chinese Revolution!'

As the photograph of Yan'an I'd seen back in Beijing testified, the Great Helmsman had shown a sizeable degree of interest in literature and art, even before the Revolution. A speech he had given at the conference in 1942 outlined what he described as ‘the proper relationship between our work in the artistic and literary fields and our revolutionary work in general'. The principles will be familiar to anyone acquainted with Soviet socialist realism. ‘Elitist art' that served the ‘exploiters and oppressors' should be overturned, in favour of an ideological art aimed at the toiling masses. (In 1949, perhaps as many as 80 per cent of China's population was illiterate.) As well as promulgating revolutionary art, Mao placed artists and intellectuals alike on stern notice:

At first it seemed likely that Shakespeare could be recruited to this brave socialist mission. Rubber-stamped by Marx and Engels, swooned over by Russian academics, he experienced an astonishing boom in popularity in the years after the 1949 Revolution. Having finally been published in twelve volumes in 1954, a decade after his death, Zhu Shenghao's translations were rapidly reprinted, with as many as 300,000 copies sold by the early 1960s. Perhaps another 200,000 copies of individual plays entered circulation.

The works also benefited from an upswing of interest in theatre, created when Mao, eager to revive Chinese culture, diverted state resources to set up drama schools and troupes. Perhaps 160 companies came into being in the first decades of the People's Republic, with Shakespeare and other western dramatists providing the core of the repertoire. Courtesy of the cosy relationship with Russia, Shakespeare also began to appear on Chinese movie screens, with nationwide screenings of Sergei Yutkevich's
Othello
(1955) and Laurence Olivier's
Hamlet
(1948) and
Richard III
(1955). (Many people I met, especially those over the age of fifty, still spoke of Olivier –
‘Aolifo'
– in honoured terms.)

May 1956 was when things began to get more complicated. Uttering the words, ‘Let a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend,' Mao announced a welcome switch in policy. Narrow ideological observance was out, to be replaced by a spirit of openness and tolerance. The Party could be criticised, new thoughts aired, particularly by intellectuals – many of whom did exactly that, mounting increasingly vocal attacks on the way China was being run. As his critics flooded into the open, Mao abruptly ordered a U-turn. (It is an open debate whether this had, in fact, been the intention all along.) In the crackdown that followed, opposition leaders were dispatched to labour camps or executed. The revised version of Mao's speech noted balefully there were both ‘fragrant flowers and poisonous weeds'. The year it was delivered, 1957, the chairman published his own collection of artful poetry in classical Chinese forms. No irony was apparent.

The Hundred Flowers campaign paled beside what came next. Mao's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, launched in Shanghai in August 1966, engulfed the People's Republic. Schools were closed, fanatical young Red Guards dispatched to attack the ‘four olds' (old ideas, old customs, old habits, old culture). Schoolchildren were urged to denounce parents, married couples to turn on each other. Revolution became anarchy. Millions were sent to work in the fields or factories, or imprisoned. Over a million more died. The catastrophic economic reforms of the Great Leap Forward (1958–61) may have killed more people – as many as 45 million dead in four years – but the Cultural Revolution tore China apart from top to bottom.

Teachers and academics (‘the same old corpses', in the chairman's chilling phrase) were rounded up and forced to do penance, or simply shot. Shakespeare was suddenly regarded as an anti-revolutionary influence. As early as January 1964, an article in the government-controlled newspaper
Liberation
argued that ‘to suppose that Shakespeare is some sort of god who cannot be surpassed is to lose direction and proceed contrary to the spirit of this epoch'.

Among millions of books, the Shanghai Theatre Academy's historic copy of
Rou quan,
that early version of
The Merchant of Venice,
was consumed by the flames. Tian Han, the revered playwright who had
translated
Hamlet
as an honour to his country, was denounced as a ‘bourgeois revisionist' and tortured.

Although nearly all foreign authors were banned, it seems that special venom was reserved for Shakespeare. I had difficulty working out why, until I came across the story of Jiang Qing, better known as Madame Mao. Jiang was instrumental in the Cultural Revolution: it was at her behest that ‘anti-revolutionary art' was banned, a category that initially covered plays and books criticising the Party, but which grew to encompass anything she deemed unacceptable. Mao's doctor, Zhisui Li, claimed that Jiang had once spent a long conversation with him listing Shakespeare's shortcomings, and arguing that the works of a long-dead Englishman had no place in a progressive, forward-looking country like China. ‘Just because Shakespeare's plays have ghosts doesn't mean we have to have ghosts too,' she said, warning him to ‘pay attention' to her words. ‘The chairman has discovered many problems in literature and art.'

In 1964, cancelling plans for the celebration of the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's birth, Jiang announced a national festival of
‘Jingju
on Contemporary Themes'. It launched the movement for so-called Revolutionary Operas, which junked the ‘emperors, kings, generals, chancellors, maidens and beauties' of traditional
jingju.
Replacing them were storylines that venerated the People's Liberation Army, the stout courage of the masses and – naturally – Mao himself.

Titles like
Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy, The Red Detachment of Women
and
Raid on the White Tiger Regiment
displaced everything else from Chinese stages for the entirety of the Cultural Revolution, as well as appearing on posters, cigarette cases, stamps, school curriculums and being blasted from loudspeakers in every public place. Although more operas were eventually written, the well-worn joke was that for ten years 800 million people watched eight shows.

It shouldn't have been surprising to learn that Jiang had been an actor in a previous life. Having come to Shanghai in 1933 to perform professionally, one of her most successful stage roles had been Nora in
A Doll's House,
after which she had become well-known in movies. Long before meeting Mao, she had tried to catch the attention of Tian Han, then one of the biggest names in Shanghai drama, but felt slighted by him; some have speculated that his downfall thirty years later had been Jiang's way of getting revenge. Perhaps this was also why she had taken such an exception to Shakespeare. As far as I could
make out, Jiang had never appeared in one of his plays. It seems a pity. She would surely have made a fine Lady Macbeth.

One afternoon, having coffee with a theatre producer at the Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre, I played a game. I had heard many dire stories about censorship in contemporary China, and wanted to know where the boundaries really lay.

Could one criticise the government on stage? He shrugged. ‘Happens all the time.' Senior officials? ‘Generally OK. Lot of people hate them.' Make fun of Mao? ‘Not a problem, ancient history.' Sex, violence, swearing? His grin was broad. ‘Nudity a problem, but we do our best.' How about a play on Tibet or the Hundred Flowers Campaign? The grin disappeared. ‘That might cause you issues.'

It is easy to be scandalised by a world in which some things are regarded as too sensitive to put in a theatre. In Britain, since the 1968 Theatre Act, it has been more or less impossible to get anything taken off stage for reasons other than obscenity or libel. Following the chaotic, embarrassing court case over Edward Bond's 1965 play
Saved,
which had caused controversy for – among much else – a scene in which a baby is stoned to death, the ancient right of a royal flunky to censor plays prior to performance was revoked. The day after the Act was passed and the Lord Chamberlain's powers annulled, the musical
Hair,
with its copious scenes of hippyish nudity, opened in the West End. English drama was henceforth allowed to let it all hang out. Barring intermittent assaults on freedom of speech such as the witch-hunts mounted by the House Un-American Activities Committee during the 1940s and 1950s, in contemporary American drama things are, if anything, freer still.

Shakespeare would have found such freedoms astonishing. Operating in conditions infinitely more tense and circumscribed than those of the modern west, playwrights of the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras worked in continual fear of losing their livelihoods, or much more. When a scabrous comedy called
The Isle of Dogs
(‘a lewd plaie … contayninge very seditious and sclanderous matter') went on stage in summer 1597, not only was every London theatre temporarily closed, but some of the cast were also flung in jail. Ben Jonson, who had co-written the script, only narrowly escaped having his nostrils slashed and his ears cut off.