Kyōgen in English: A Bibliography

Abstract

A Brief History of Kyogen Translation into English Eighty-five plays, nearly one-third of the current repertory, have been published in English translation by individuals in a wide range of fields. British Japanologist Basil Hall Chamberlain's 1879 rendition of Hone Kawa, titled Ribs and Skin, marked the beginning of the first wave of attempts to render the short comedies into English. Between 1879 and 1907, twenty-three English translations--nineteen different plays--were published. More than half were by the hand of poet Noguchi Yone [jiro], friend of W. B. Yeats and Ezra Pound, who published the first collection of kyogen, Ten Kiogen Plays in English (1) in 1907. Such bilingual publications seem to have been the preference of Japanese translators at the time. In 1905-1906, the Japanese journal Nogaku (No and Kyogen), published four plays bilingually (Furukawa 1976: 74-77); and Tsuda Umeko (1864-1929), pioneer in women's education in Japan and founder of Tsuda College, did the same with Shimizu (Spring Water) in her Leaves from Japanese Literature in 1906. During the Taisho (1912-1925) period, Itow [sic] Michio (1892-1961), a modern dancer who performed the role of the Hawk in W. B. Yeats' no-influenced At the Hawk's Well in 1916, translated three plays with poet Louis V. Ledoux (1880-1948). Active and influential during his long residence in the United States (1914-1941), Itow [Ito] performed at least two of these jointly translated plays: She Who was Fished (Tsuribari) and The Fox's Grave (Kitsune zuka) in the late 1920s, first in New York and later in California (Caldwell 1977: 77, 85). These are certainly some of the earliest English-language performances in the U.S. The next wave of translations in the 1930s saw the publication of Japanologist A. L. Sadler's Japanese Plays: No--Kyogen--Kabuki in 1934, and Library of Congress Japanese Collection librarian Sakanishi Shio's Kyogen: Comic Interludes of Japan in 1938. Of the forty-five plays contained in these two collections, twenty-five were appearing in English for the first time, greatly expanding the number of plays available to the English-speaking world. The growing tensions of the Pacific War seem to have interrupted the flow of English translations, if not interest in kyogen, and no new ones appeared for more than two decades after the end of World War II. In 1960, Tuttle republished Sakanishi's translations under the new title Japanese Folk Plays: The Ink-Smeared Lady and Other Kyogen, noting in the preface to the new edition that while had become more widely known to Westerners, it remained one of the lesser known of the Japanese dramatic art forms, an unenviable status it arguably retains to this day. In the 1960s, Richard N. McKinnon, then a professor at Washington University, was instrumental in raising awareness of the art form by bringing actors to teach in and later tour the United States, organizing the first all-kyogen tour of the United States in 1968, featuring members of the Nomura Manzo family. As a companion volume, he published translations of the nine plays included in the tour's three programs in Selected Plays of Kyogen, including five not previously published in English. This overseas tour came on the heels of the flourishing kyogen boom in Japan (see Kobayashi's article in this issue) and marked the advent of English-language performances by both amateur and professional actors in the United States (see the Tsubaki, Doi, and Kominz articles in this issue). In Japan, American Don Kenny, longtime student of Nomura Mansaku, formed the Kenny and Ogawa Kyogen Players and began performing English-language in 1976 (Kenny 1986: 59). Kenny's The Kyogen Book: An Anthology of Japanese Classical Comedies, published in 1989, includes thirty traditional plays, fourteen of which had no prior published English translations. Kyogen translations have also begun to be contextualized in publications of the past few decades, as in Royall Tyler's no play cycles, Pining Wind and Granny Mountains (both 1978). …