Becoming Ionesco
Tina Howe has been writing for the stage for more than 30 years. Her best known works include The Art of Dining, Painting Churches, Coastal Disturbances, Approaching Zanzibar, One Shoe Off and Pride's Crossing. She won an Obie Award for Distinguished Playwriting, an Outer Critics Circle Award, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, a Rockefeller grant, two NEA fellowships and a Guggenheim fellowship. In 1987 her play Coastal Disturbances received a Tony nomination for Best Play. Pride's Crossing was selected as a finalist for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize and awarded the 1998 New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play. Howe's latest project is translating from the French a pair of absurd plays by Eugéne Ionesco: The Bald Soprano and The Lesson. The one acts, translated by Howe and directed by Carl Forsman, is now playing at the Atlantic Theatre. Here, Howe discusses her discovery of Ionesco's work and her subsequent "transformation" into him.
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One week after I graduated from Sarah Lawrence College, my father gave me the no-brainer choice of my life--which would I prefer? Being sent to graduate school for a year… or Europe? Three months later, Jane Alexander and I were crossing the Atlantic on a student steam ship--she on her way to the University of Edinborough to study mathematics, and me on my way to the Sorbonne to study philosophy. In less than a month, Jane dropped out of school to act in the Fringe Festival, and I had dropped out to write my first full-length play. It was 1959-60, and being an adventurous sort, I ended up living in the most beautiful spot in all of Paris. It was on the tip of the Ilê de la Citê with a staggering view of Pont Neuf and the Seine right under my window. The hotel was a fleabag and I had to trudge six long flights up to my closet-sized room, but I was in heaven. HEAVEN! My father sent me $100 a month. My rent was a mere $60, so I lived like a king, dining on grilled cheese sandwiches that I made on a portable kerosene stove.
I was a living cliché of the American in Paris--hanging out with other expatriate writers, exploring the city and working steadfastly on my dreadful play. But the most thrilling experience of all was stumbling into the tiny Théâtre de la Huchette and seeing Eugéne Ionesco's La Cantatrice Chauve and La Leçon. Never having studied theater in college, I had no idea who Ionesco was. But the minute the curtain rose on The Bald Soprano, I was struck with such rapture I thought I'd expire. What scholars label "absurd" was totally familiar to me! I knew the characters on stage! I'd grown up with them. I spoke their language! I shared their longings and fears. It was the most astonishing flash of déjà vu I'd ever experienced.
What sparks these blinding connections? A WASPY young woman from the States feeling an instant kinship with a balding middle-aged Romanian? We didn't share a country, a common history, or even a language, yet when I saw his plays I never felt more revealed. More alive! More myself!
So you can imagine my excitement when I was approached about translating these masterpieces. Having played the Maid in a student production of The Bald Soprano at Hunter College, where I teach, I remember struggling with my lines because they were so ponderous. Because it was a literal translation, all the joy had been sucked out. There was no punning, rhyming or alliteration. I was a lousy actress to begin with, but having to speak those leaden lines didn't help. Not that the audience ever booed me, I just wished I could veer into French.
French is a funnier language especially when spoken fast. The chewiness of it all--those rolling "r"s and gutteral explosions--it's like listening to someone consume a box of caramel corn. So how does the dutiful translator proceed? With a helium hand and brimming heart. She struggles to become Ionesco! To find that desperate clown inside who took such joy in turning language on its head. People keep saying, "You must know French very well!" I speak it and can carry on a decent conversation, but it's hardly perfect. The trick in translation is knowing the language you're translating into. If one is too caught up in the French, the English will never leave the ground. It's not so much about mindfulness as surrender. Yielding to those moments of inspired chaos and letting them soar; being true to the man on the flying trapeze. It's not about the net but the flight! I just pray I can reach the same dizzy heights!