{"id":20496,"date":"2021-05-27T18:00:56","date_gmt":"2021-05-27T23:00:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/?p=20496"},"modified":"2021-05-27T18:00:56","modified_gmt":"2021-05-27T23:00:56","slug":"pozzo-diaries","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2021\/05\/27\/pozzo-diaries\/","title":{"rendered":"Pozzo Diaries"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n<p>I have been really enjoying getting to work on <cite>Waiting for Godot<\/cite> and Pozzo, in preparation for rehearsals starting next week. I don\u2019t know whether anyone is interested in this detailed stuff about my preparation\u2014I have a fairly idiosyncratic set of methods for text analysis, and I don\u2019t know if it would help anybody else to know what mine are, or if it would be interesting to anyone who isn\u2019t an actor. But anyway, typing my ideas out in posts probably helps me think more clearly, which is helpful anyway.\r\n<p>The first really odd thing about <cite>Godot<\/cite>, as an actor preparing a role, is that it\u2019s a translation by the playwright, who is a native speaker of English. I don\u2019t think I\u2019ve ever worked on something like that\u2014there is an original text, and it\u2019s in French, but presumably the English translation of that text is as authoritative as the French text, since Samuel Beckett speaks better English than French. Why does this matter? It\u2019s kind of complicated\u2014ultimately, I am playing the text that I actually have in front of me. And yet, if I am doing any sort of adaptation\u2014<cite>Nicholas Nickleby<\/cite>, f\u2019r\u2019ex, or <cite>Les Liaisons Dangerouses<\/cite> or <cite>The Thirty-Nine Steps<\/cite>\u2014I do have the original work as a kind of resource. If I am not certain I understand the playwright\u2019s intention on a particular line or aspect of a character, I can at least see if the source work helps me figure it out. Sometimes it\u2019s helpful, even if in the end what I\u2019ve learned is the way the text I am working with <i>differs<\/i> from the original.\r\n<p>An example from <cite>Godot<\/cite>: Pozzo twice says of Lucky\u2019s luggage-carrying \u201cIt\u2019s not his job.\u201d Same sentence both times; there is a lot of repetition in this play. But in the original, the first time it\u2019s \u00abCe n\u2019est pas son travail\u00bb and the second it\u2019s \u00abCe n\u2019est pas son m\u00e9tier.\u00bb There\u2019s a difference there (which, having no French, I certainly don\u2019t understand fully) and yet when Mr. Beckett chose to put it into English, he chose not to retain the difference (It\u2019s not his calling, not his specialty, not his business, not his department, not his forte, not his responsibility, not his task, not his bailiwick, not his wheelhouse, not his work, not his gig, not his place, not his position) to keep the repetition instead. Now, if it were someone else translating a French original, I might decide that the playwright meant the two lines to have different implications, and thus choose to deliver them differently\u2014but the translator here is presumably no traitor to the original intent of the playwright, so maybe I should emphasize that Pozzo is repeating himself.\r\n<p>Anyway, that\u2019s the sort of thing I do during this pre-first-readthrough preparation stage.\r\n<p><I>Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,<\/I><br>-Vardibidian.\r\n\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In Which Your Humble Blogger gets to work.","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[209],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20496","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-theeyater"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20496","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20496"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20496\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20498,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20496\/revisions\/20498"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20496"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20496"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20496"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}