Don Giovanni--Ming

Naturally I'm given to focus on the fiery hell-pit and the powder-wine.

I had never seen an opera before. And as with To Kill A Mockingbird, I kept myself away from the Wikipedia entry for Don Giovanni and any other cultural Cliff's Notes that might start to change the way I spectated by virtue of augmenting the contextual information that so clearly shapes our reception of the fictive world.   It's such a very different experience to go in “blind” to something, without a tiny A.O. Scott on my shoulder critiquing the art before me. It makes everything more hilarious. It's like new criticism. The New Spectating! I've never seen opera and I have no idea what's going on, but here I go!  But even I was reasonably sure that Don G. doesn't always spill wine on half-naked women and dine off their stomachs. I was fairly sure there were other productions of Don Giovanni out there, ones wherein our bad boy comes off less like Kanye West in a music video.  I had the wonderful fortune of running into Sara at intermission and learned from her that there's also normally slightly less gallivanting around at operas, that the actors simply move around a bit less.  Which made me consider what void the actors' unusually big movements might be filling.

Ahem.  A word about the words above the stage. The literary translator in me had a bunch of thoughts again, this time prompted by the prompter. In Jerome's letter to Pammachius, defending his translations into Latin, which I referenced in my post on 9/11, Jerome famously states that he does not translate “word for word,” but rather “sense for sense.” He was going, in other words, for what, besides the sound of a language, is normally lost in translation—the feel of it.  Though sense-for-sense translation has specifically come to mean “translated sentences” for their meaning, versus word-for-word translations of words in a sentence in more or less their exact original order.  (In the history of the tradition, translators have been put to death and buried, then exhumed decades later so their remains could be burned up again—essentially put to death twice—for the heresy of getting a “sacred” script wrong in meaning or syntax, so Jerome had good reason to try and defend himself. Word-for-word was arguably a much safer bet for someone translating the Bible around 400 CE.) 

I waffled on which kind of translation I saw more of up there—sense-for-sense, or word-for-word--during Don Giovanni, and marveled at how little poetry the prompter permitted through its maw.  I'd guess many more people love opera than know Italian, and none of them went to Don Giovanni on Saturday for the poetry of the translated transcript of the opera projected above the stage.  

Because that was some bad poetry. That was some clunky, clunky prose. I actually rather admired the thoroughness with which the translator/prompt's language abandoned any attempt to render beautifully what it communicated: this conferred the beauty on the sounds of the actors' voices themselves. To me, Italian is a sonorous, gorgeous language. The English used in the prompter was not gorgeous; it surrendered anything but communicating the meaning of the Italian script and occasionally, through the diction, the register of humor intended. But that was it.

So, given that I have no Italian; haven't nurtured an awareness of opera beyond reading a Wayne Koestenbaum opera essay and a book of opera poetry by Cole Swenson; and found no beauty in the prose: where could a spectator like me find the transport? I was not transported in that I ever forgot I was in the theater or forgot those were actors up there, so Brecht might approve of the experience. Which thought brought me to yet another quandary about the fabled “zone”: does the “I'm here, I have a self, a moral self” engagement Brecht talks about cultivating run counter to “transport”? Is “the zone” when you're so identified with the character that you don't make moral judgements of them, thereby failing Brecht's class, or is “the zone” when you're completely engaged in the other direction: engaged in a moral assessment of the characters? Don Giovanni makes so plain and easy a moral assessment of its main character; the play is one big overt moral assessment of him, down to the fiery pit into which he descended in an MTV-Awards-worthy climactic shabang. Cavall writes that “a character is not, and cannot become, aware of us.” But of course, Don Giovanni wouldn't exist if we weren't aware of him: if we weren't there to judge him.  If fiction is the playground of the word “should”,  Don G's the monkey bars.

I was never “transported” in the sense of forgetting myself. I don't think I was meant to be—if even I can pick up on the wink-wink nature of this particular production, it's unlikely that many audience members identified terribly much with the “reality” of what was going on in the fictive world shown to us. Rather, I think the over-acting and over-the-topness of this opera had something to do with filling the space left by the poetic beauty the prompt could not translate along with the meaning. I believe the passion and affect we find in poetic language had to be made up for in the passion of the actors' movements. And that affective response rested more than it might have in Italy on the quality of the actors' voices, since to me, at least, they were simply trilling syllables.