In March 2022, a Tibetan version of Hamlet took to the stage in the capital. This is the follow-up to Pu Cunxin's graduation drama directed by the Tibetan class of the Shanghai Theater Academy's Acting Department. "Hamlet" is performed in Tibetan, although it did not start from this version, but because of the mental energy injected by Pu Cunxin, the performance attracted wide attention. The performance coincided with a new round of the epidemic, and the actors also sang songs at the end of the curtain to send tibetan New Year and blessings from the epidemic to the audience in the capital. What is published in this edition is Pu Cunxin's handwriting method and the newly written director's testimonial. — Editor's Note
"If words come from the breath, and breath comes from the heart, please keep it a secret for me."
"Originally, there is no right or wrong word in the world, it is everyone's mind that discerns it."
"To survive or to perish... If it weren't for the fear of the unknowable afterlife, the fear of the mysterious kingdom that no traveler had ever returned... It is this fear that paralyzes our will, and the brilliance of determination is grayed over by prudent thinking. It will cause all far-sighted plans to die..."
Shakespeare's talent is evident in his lines. Words, the great masterpiece of mankind. This is the greatest sign of being human. And today, the crystallization of shakespeare's era that is still being staged and disseminated in the 21st century, the language and writing, should be far from the English of four hundred years ago, and its ancient aberration may be similar to the Spring and Autumn Chu Ci we read today, and contemporary languages should spend more annotations on it.
English has undergone the evolution from old English to modern English, and our Chinese language has also experienced the transformation of literary language to vernacular language during the New Culture Movement of the last century. In the past hundred years, the cultural ancestors represented by Mr. Zhu Shenghao have translated Shakespeare's plays in the Chinese vocabulary of that year. By the early 1990s, there was this version of Hamlet translated by teacher Li Jianming for Lin Zhaohua Drama Studio, which highlighted the colloquialism of the lines, removed the language format of some poems, such as comparative sentences, and shortened the gorgeous play of words. It is more conducive to the audience to listen to the words and sentences, rather than reading in black and white in the written sense, which increases the speed of the development of the plot of the theater, in short, concise and concise, easy to understand. However, the strong philosophical rhyme in the original work and the inner drama of the characters have not been destroyed. The stylistic context makes us believe that this can only be Shakespearean style language, and must not be the work of Chekhov, O'Neill, or Ibsen.
So Shakespeare's greatness can't be worn away by any adaptation, and in the hundreds of years of evolution and metamorphosis, Hamlet is still that "Hamlet"... I've seen hamlets from more than a dozen different countries around the world, and it's a "grandma-like" one, it's still the storyline, the relationships of the characters, and the ideas of language.
Stills from the Tibetan version of Hamlet
When rehearsing this play for the Tibetan graduating class of the Department of Drama, in order to give 22 students the opportunity to play important roles, I did not use the AB system and let the two groups of actors perform a version together, but suddenly wanted to come up with a Tibetan version, and immediately got the support of the theater. The Tibetan script was translated by Mr. Nyima Dunzhu, an expert in Tibetan, on the basis of the Chinese version translated by Teacher Li Jianming. About two months after the agreement, the Tibetan script was obtained. Under the two-day guidance of Zong Ji, the resident teacher of the Tibet Autonomous Region Repertory Theatre (she is also a famous drama actress in Tibet), I heard the lines recited by the students, which were so vivid and beautiful, the lines read by the children in their native pronunciation were strong and strong, straight to the role, and the length of the sentence speed was basically the same as the rhythm of Mandarin. This facilitated rehearsals, and even Han Stage Technicians who didn't know Tibetan later were able to work with them effortlessly.
It was performed in a month and a half, and everything went surprisingly well. And we also completed another language homework: more than half of these 22 graduates are not Lhasa people, and different rural sounds and accents are mixed... During the rehearsal, they also strengthened the language training of Lhasa.
In this year's Beijing performance, the audience said that if they wanted to choose the Tibetan version of the ticket, they may have come to the Tibetan version to have more aural characteristics.
Of all the audience comments that praised the show, the most rewarding thing I said was: They were like a troupe from Shakespeare's hometown, and Shakespeare seemed to be writing for them backstage, sending them page by page to the stage...
Think of the transmission of a play for four hundred years, the evolution of different languages and scripts over the past four hundred years, and shakespeare, a great world cultural and artistic heritage, still shines brilliantly on the stage of Beijing. Imagine what kind of verbal lines can make Hamlet share this great legacy and revel in it in the theater of the future... (Editor-in-Charge: Sun Xiaoning)