Carmen (an opera review post)

Carmen marks the first opera I have seen more than once. Evidently, it's one of SFO's favorite operas to perform, so I suppose you should expect another Carmen review in two to three years. This was a different production than the one we saw last time, and, I have to say, this one fell short. It's something that I'm saying that, too, because, at the point of the intermission, I announced to my wife, "I like this one better than the last one." I was wrong. But I'll get more to that in a moment or three.

First of all, this was a much more traditional production than the previous one. What I'm learning is that the new general director of SFO, having taken over in 2016, just after we started attending, is very much a traditionalist in his approach to the productions of older operas. He's British, so maybe that's why? It's not that they don't perform newer operas, after all, since we've been going, they've debuted several new opera productions, but, since he's been in charge, the trend has been to return all the staple operas to more traditional styles of productions. So, last time we saw Carmen, we had a show set in the 60s or 70s, while this recent production returned us to the 1800s. I don't know that this traditionalist approach is a detriment or not, but Carmen, in particular, seems to be ready for a more up-to-date interpretation.

I believe the reason I liked the first half of this particular production as much as I did is that Don Jose, the male lead, is not actually in it much. I enjoyed J'Nai Bridges in her role as Carmen. She very much embodied the character and was fun to watch. Matthew Polenzani, however, was barely believable in his role as Don Jose. He creates no romantic, sexual, or violent tension, and all three of those things are required in the male lead.

I would kind of love to break it all down, but I think that would take too long and, ultimately, prove to be uninteresting, so I'll give the highlights:
1. Polenzani turns what should have been a highly charged meeting of sexual tension into something that more resembles insta-love, as he ignored Carmen during the entire exchange. Once she's off the stage he picks up a flower she threw at him and decides he's in love with her.
2. During the pivotal scene where Jose is forced into running off to the mountains with Carmen, it doesn't actually feel forced. It comes across more as an "oh, well..."
3. During the final scene, Carmen keeps going on about how Jose should just go ahead and kill her if that's what he's going to do, but Polenzani managed to be so non-threatening throughout the production that it comes across as emo whining on the part of Carmen rather than any real threat upon her life. It makes her murder somewhat out of the blue and arbitrary feeling, more like he did because she was saying it rather than there being any threat of murder hanging in the air.

It's so bad, in fact, that when the romantic rival shows up, I really felt like Carmen should go off with him. You're not supposed to be rooting for this guy and, in the previous production we saw, I wasn't. In the that one, he felt like the villain he was supposed to be but, in this one, he felt like the better option. You could feel his passion for Carmen and could support that over Jose's milk-toast ambivalence.

Now, I realize that a lot of these issues could be directorial, but I think the lack of believable passion from Don Jose falls squarely on Polenzani's shoulders. Unless, maybe, the director told him to be as uninterested as possible, but I highly doubt that. Maybe it all would have been fine if I had just shut my eyes and listened to the music only but, then, I wouldn't have understood it because I need the translation on the screens.

All of which is to say that the specific production can make a huge difference in an opera. Yes, I knew that... in my head... but I had never experienced it before. Not in an opera, anyway. It's interesting to get this perspective.

"The Quest of Iranon" (a book review post)

"The Quest of Iranon" is the most interesting of the Lovecraft stories I've read so far (I'm somewhere in the two dozen range). I'm not saying it's the best, but it's the only one that has give me a "huh, that was interesting" reaction. [Ignore the image. This is in no way a horror story.]

This will be full of spoilers and, actually, I'm going to ruin the ending, so you should go read it before going on with my review.

To put it simply, Iranon is a dreamer. He's a singer of songs and a teller of stories. And he's on a quest for his homeland, a land he remembers from his infancy, a land in which he was a prince. But he was for whatever reason left to be raised by another family, and he now seeks home.

During his journey, he acquires a travelling companion, a youth who wants to move on to a better place than where he lives, another dreamer, though not one who dreams as deeply as Iranon. They travel together for years, until the youth passes Iranon by in age and, eventually, dies, all the while Iranon ages not a day. There's no explanation as to why Iranon doesn't age, so it's to be assumed that it is because he is of a people of another place, a superior people.

This is the bit that's interesting to me (and here comes the real spoiler), because, at the end, Iranon, still on his quest, stays with an old man, an old man with whom it turns out he was friends with during his childhood. The old man only has distant memories of the boy, Iranon, who used to tell fantastic tales, tales about being a prince from a far off land, but tales that couldn't be true because he and everyone had known Iranon since birth,

Hearing the truth deprives Iranon of his eternal youth, and he becomes the old man that he really ought to be. The general interpretation of this is that Iranon had stayed eternally youthful because he was a dreamer, and that it is the death of his dream that causes him to grow old. I suppose this is a logical interpretation and it is what it presented in the story.

However, if you look deeper, it's possible to see that Iranon was only youthful in his own eyes. He was, for a while, a famous and popular entertainer in the city Oonai, but, eventually, the people turn to a new group of entertainers. It is pointed out in the story that these are young people. Iranon, no longer feeling appreciated, leaves the city. But, maybe, he's just grown old and he's the only one who doesn't see it. It's an interesting question.

How To Be... a Translator

I was listening to NPR the other day; they were talking about this dude that worked as a translator for the State Department and, later, CNN on recommendation from the State Department. They even played some clips of him translating during a CNN interview. It's what gave me my idea for "T."

Of course, it was all wrong. Which I knew but was forgetting during the moment of listening to the report on NPR about this "translator." But, see, he's not a translator. He's an interpreter. A translator is someone that works with documents. As wikipedia puts it:

Translation is the communication of the meaning of a source-language text by means of an equivalent target-language text. Whereas interpreting undoubtedly antedates writing, translation began only after the appearance of written literature.

[The bold print is mine.]
It was surprising to me that NPR made such a fundamental mistake, but, then, I'm sure most people would never even think about thinking that it could be wrong, because we, culturally, use the idea of translation incorrectly all the time. And that's where it gets even more complicated, because many languages don't make a distinction between the two: it is all "translation." But, here in the USA, we do make a distinction, and it's for rather important reasons, which I will get to in a moment. One other note, when interpreting, it is always "interpreting" or "interpreter;" it is never "interpretation," because that means something entirely different and is more related to translating, which we'll also get to in a moment.

I do have one friend who became an interpreter. She was fascinated with Japan and had decided by our senior year that she wanted to be an interpreter. She went on to get a degree in Japanese cultural studies (or something like that) and graduated from college with a (very) high paying job for some corporation in Japan.

I mention that because my impression is that people think that interpreting is difficult while translating is fairly easy and straightforward. That anyone who knows two languages well enough can sit down and translate, but acting as an interpreter requires much more command of both languages. And, while it's true that interpreting is no easy job, especially high level interpreting (especially high level interpreting like for the UN or the State Department), most of what I found leans toward interpreting as being the easier of the two because it doesn't involve so much interpretation. [See, I told you these word distinctions are important. Okay, so I didn't explicitly say that, but I implied it.]

But why interpretation? Because languages don't always translate directly. There may not be an equivalent words between two languages. Or, as is the case with "interpreting" and "translating," one language may make a distinction in meaning when using a particular word. Or there may be phrases that mean a particular thing, but the individual words, if translated, won't add up to the meaning of the phrase. OR... Or it may be an artistic work, like a poem or a work of fiction, and the translator becomes tasked with evoking  more than just the meaning of the individual words. (S)he must make an interpretation of the work as (s)he translates.

Yes, it's all very complicated.

So, then, how do you become a translator?

Well, to start, you have to have a more than competent grasp of both languages you're working with but an even greater grasp of the language you are translating into. But it doesn't stop with knowing the languages; you also have to be versed in both cultures. Remember that I mentioned phrases that mean something other  than the individual words mean? And, then, there's slang, which is often difficult to keep up with within your own language. [When my brother was still in high school (he's six years younger than me), he used to love to use whatever the latest slang was on me, because I never knew what he was talking about. Seriously, it was weeks before I knew what "Baby's got back" meant.] Translating just the words in those circumstances will lead to a bad translation even though the words are technically correct. This is called knowing the difference between when to "metaphrase" (translating the words literally) and "paraphrase" (translating the meaning of the phrase, creating an interpretation of what the author meant). [In other words, "she has a big butt," which I found offensive just on general principal once I knew what my brother was saying.]

You should also be familiar with the subject matter, so translating, say, The Three Musketeers by Dumas, would require you to know both about Alexandre Dumas and 19th century France and 17th century France, which is when the story is set.

All of that aside, the role of the translator is actually growing, right now, as the Internet reaches more and more of the world. Computer translation devices can do no more than translate the individual words, which can lead to a very many misunderstandings, so the demand for people who can translate web pages is on the rise. It probably doesn't require quite as much dedication as manuscript translation does and could also provide good experience for anyone wanting to get into manuscript translation.

And, now, I'm wondering how my books must read in other languages when translated solely by Amazon's computer translators...