Aristophanes 'The Bird' "flew into" the Grand Theatre

The actors of the National Centre for the Performing Arts Drama Cast Team demonstrated the various forms of "birds". Courtesy of the National Centre for the Performing Arts

From 26 April to 2 May, the Aristophanes comedy Bird, produced by the National Centre for the Performing Arts, will be staged at the Grand Theatre, the first ancient Greek play produced by the Bolshoi Theatre. On March 27, World Theatre Day, the two co-directors of the play, Luo Jinlin and Luo Tong, jointly introduced the creation and scheduling of "Bird" at the media meeting. In order to facilitate stage performances, Luo Tong, who has long been engaged in the study of ancient Greek drama, also retranslated the script.

Why Bird?

Aristophanes' most mythical comedy

Aristophanes is known as the "father of comedy", and his masterpiece "Bird" was premiered in 414 BC, which is the earliest comedy work with mythological color and romantic poetry of mankind. With the construction of the "Cuckoo City in the Clouds", that is, the bird country in the air, as the core, the whole drama combines ancient Greek mythology and legends related to birds to weave skillfully, not only criticizing the negative phenomena that existed in the society at that time, but also pinning on the desire to find a pure land and establish an ideal world.

Director Luo Jinlin said: "The biggest feature of ancient Greek comedy is not as strict as tragedy, comedy is more concerned with social and practical problems, so Greek playwrights at that time often used comedy to praise and disparage social phenomena, especially for bad phenomena, forming the characteristics of ancient Greek comedy, and the influence is still there." ”

More than 10 years ago, Luo Jinlin directed a comedy by Aristophanes in Wuhan, "Women on Mother Mother's Day". "For the second time, I chose Bird among more than a dozen plays that Aristophanes had saved, because this was one of his most mythical and poetic romantic comedies."

Luo Jinlin said that in the creation of Chinese and Western theatrical aesthetics should be integrated, "ancient Greek drama is characterized by simplicity, exaggeration, humor, wit, and funny. Although this play is more than two thousand years away from us, we are performing to Chinese audiences today, so we want to integrate the virtual, symbolic and freehand traditions of Chinese theatrical aesthetics into the play. In addition, the Chinese art of paper-cutting was introduced in the play.

Why retranslate?

The new translation is colloquial for stage performances

Another director of the play, Luo Tong, is the daughter of Luo Jinlin, and her grandfather Luo Niansheng is an important researcher and translator of ancient Greek drama in China. This time, Luo Tong recompiled the original script of "Bird", and without deviating from the plot, carried out stage language processing, selected and explained the ancient Greek myths and allusions in the play, and deleted some branches.

Why re-translate the script? Luo Tong explained: "According to scholars' statistics, Greek drama has been introduced to China since the Ming Dynasty, but the systematic translation of ancient Greek tragicomedy began with Luo Niansheng, the first time "Bird" was translated by Mr. Yang Xianyi in 1954, and there is still a big gap in the annotation of the existing ancient Greek drama translation. ”

In the translation process, Luo Tong combined ancient Greek and contemporary Greek for translation, "ancient Greek tragicomedy are written in poetic themes, with strict rhythm and beat, the previous translation is usually prose or poetry, both of which are more suitable for reading, not suitable for stage performances, in this translation we preserve the poetic premise of colloquial language, both catchy, but also without losing the lyrical temperament." ”

In order to facilitate the audience's understanding, the play involves the translation of the name of the god, and Luo Tong adds functions in front of the name of the god, such as the goddess of agriculture, Demeter, instead of just saying the name.

Beijing News reporter Tian Chao intern Zhang Xinxin