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TRANSLATING SILENCE: CORRELATIONS BETWEEN BECKETT, CHEKHOV, AND HIRATA
performed various characters" personalities and emotions through shifting
facial expressions, gestures and voices. In addition, the orchestra was also in
the movie theater, and they played music to accompany the Benshi, while also
providing sound effects.
Thus, the most significant effect of Benshi is that he provides voices to
the voiceless. In other words, such non-verbal aspects as facial expressions,
gestures, and tone of voice are communicated by Benshi in such a way as
to effectively convey the verbal message of silent movies. Although Beckett
was not Benshi, his uniqueness lies in the way in which he gave voices to the
voiceless.
SILENCE IN BECKETT’S COME AND GO
When Beckett is analyzed in relation to Chekhov, the process of waiting for
an unexpected hope in Waiting for Godot is often compared to the similar
situation in The Three Sisters. As explained by Tomio Yamanouchi, “The most
direct form of Beckettian elements represented in Chekhov most deeply is
undoubtedly The Three Sisters. The three sisters, who hope to escape from
the tedious monotonous days in the provincial city and to spend a new
vibrant life in Moscow, end up with frustration and passing of their time.”
According to Kunihiko Yamamoto, “depicting the human existence surely
means depicting the passage of time. In this sense, the Russian Chekhov
had already produced such a play more than half a century before Beckett."
Such analyses focus on the absurdity and plotlessness of the two plays, in
which characters never stop talking in order to pass the time as they wait
for Godot to arrive or themselves to go to Moscow. Instead of examining the
similarities in these situations of waiting, this section and the following parts
of this essay highlight how silence is effectively employed in the Japanese
productions through discussions of "intersemiotic translation," that is, "an
interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of non-verbal sign systems”
by scrutinizing plays that feature three women: Beckett’s Come and Go and
Chekhov’s The Three Sisters.
Beckett’s Come and Go utilizes silence to enhance the sequential entrances
and exits of three women who whisper about the one of them who is not on
stage at the time. In the Japanese Noh version by NOHO Theatre Company
* Tomio Yamanouchi: Vision of Drama, Tokyo, Hakuosha, 1997, 125; my translation.
Kunihiko Yamamoto: Adventures of Twentieth Century Theatre Challenging the Poetics by
Aristotle Samuel Beckett, Terayama Shuji, Bertold Brecht in Annual Bulletin of Research and
Education at Nara Women’s University Department of Literature 1 (2005), Nara Women’s
University 92; my translation.
Roman Jakobson: On Linguistic Aspects of Translation, in Lawrence Venuti (ed.): The
Translation Studies Reader, 2" edition, New York, Routledge, 1959/2004, 139.
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