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jcs-study · 6 months ago

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Thinking About JCS Too Much, Vol. 1: "Jaded Mandarin" - Lost in Translation?

Intro

In my second attempt at an introduction for this blog, I pondered aloud, "Ever wonder if you’re too big a fan of your favorite piece of entertainment?" Suffice it to say, that is far from the only time that thought has crossed my mind.

You see, unlike many faded celebrities attempting to jump-start their careers afresh by "finding religion," I followed the opposite path. I don’t remember hearing about God, Jesus, or anything like that before a certain age. I was about 4 when I first started becoming aware of religion. Something related to Christendom spawned a cover story in Time magazine, and they had this beautiful traditional artwork of Jesus on the front that caught my eye. I became obsessed with religion in general, and the Christ story in particular. (Even today a lot of my extracurricular reading is devoted to religious fiction and non-fictional religious studies, and the shelves of my film collection are strewn with biblical epics, both Old Testament and New. I’m by no means invested in the Abrahamic faiths -- in fact, I'm now an avowed atheist -- but I won’t deny that I’m very knowledgeable about them.)

This obsession led me to Jesus Christ Superstar, and so my life as a show biz professional, and my switch from a special interest (yay, spectrum!) in religion and the surrounding scholarship to one in a single telling of a story that happens to deal with religious subject matter, began.

Naturally, this has led to a few embarrassing incidents of over-thinking where I nerd out just a little too much, primarily from a literary perspective. (Case in point: my answer to a recent question posed to this blog about the lack of a detail from the biblical story in the show. Did I need to go "all in" on whether or not Jesus was actually prophesying that Peter would deny him three times by the time a rooster crowed? Probably not. Did I anyway? Oh, c'mon, you've read it by now, don't make me relive it.)

So, in a similar vein, I'm going to periodically write about those moments where I nerd out too much, in hopes that my immense nerdiness will maybe give someone a deeper understanding of the show, even just a small part of it. You've seen one, thanks to an inquiry from an anonymous fellow fan; after the jump, here's another.

Translation vs. Adaptation

Among the many unique features of JCS, it was one of the first musicals of its kind to be widely adapted into the local vernacular when presented internationally, rather than merely importing an English-language cast as the custom used to be.

Besides its mother tongue, JCS can (theoretically) be heard in:

Czech

French

German (anecdotally, it has been reported that the German translation is not the best, which is why many productions in German-speaking countries opt for the English instead; however, that might be about to change, as the production at the Luisenburg Festspiele Wunsiedel this summer is supposed to mark the debut of a new authorized one -- we'll see how it goes!)

Hungarian (there's two Hungarian ones, actually)

Japanese

Polish

Portuguese

Romanian (in a translation recently debuted in, of all places, Chicago)

Russian (there are several, both official and unofficial; we will deal with all of them today)

Spanish (both the European variety and two Mexican ones)

Swedish (at least two that I'm aware of, the original and whatever Ola Salo uses for productions involving him)

(And those are just the ones I know about.)

While I appreciate JCS most in its original language, being a native English speaker myself, I realize translation and adaptation are important, for all the reasons that they usually are: not everybody speaks a foreign language with dexterity, or is capable of processing it at the pace a play or musical is performed; almost without exception, people respond better to the language they grew up speaking, especially in a piece of entertainment; and, most importantly, translation allows ideas and information to spread across cultures, sometimes changing history in the process. (After all, no matter what your religious belief, part of the reason the Bible -- the show's source material, as if you needed a reminder -- has had such an impact on history is the sheer number of translations, which, at last count, is 531 languages.)

However, translation into any language (pro or amateur) is a delicate art, especially where a play or musical is concerned. As Don Bartlett, who has translated Danish, German, Norwegian, Spanish, and Swedish books into English, put it in a piece where several translators were interviewed for The Guardian, “There’s always a tension between being true to the original and being readable.” On the one hand, translating the meanings of words and phrases in a literal way maintains fidelity to the text; on the other, translating sense-for-sense, taking into account the meanings of phrases or whole sentences, can improve readability. And that’s just books… imagine doing this for theater or film!

Personally, I subscribe to the assessment of Edith Grossman (also interviewed in the aforementioned Guardian piece), who once said: “…the most fundamental description of what translators do is that we write — or perhaps rewrite — in language B a work of literature originally composed in language A, hoping that readers of the second language — I mean, of course, readers of the translation — will perceive the text, emotionally and artistically, in a manner that parallels and corresponds to the aesthetic experience of its first readers. This is the translator’s grand ambition. Good translations approach that purpose. Bad translations never leave the starting line.”

(Or, to tie this back into our topic somewhat more closely, I'm mashing together two quotes from two different interviews with the late Herbert Kretzmer, the adaptor of such popular foreign musicals as Les Misérables, Marguerite, and Kristina: "Words have resonance within a culture, they have submarine strengths and meaning. If I wanted a literal translation, I would go to the dictionary. Translation — the very word I rebut and resent, because it minimizes the genuine creativity that I bring to the task. [...] I offer this advice to any lyricist invited to adapt or translate foreign songs into English: Do not follow the original text slavishly. Re-invent the lyric in your own words, remembering that there may be better ways of serving a master than trotting behind him on a leash.")

Nowhere is this job harder than JCS, especially in Russian. As languages, Russian and English are just too different from each other, each very rich in emotional shadings that the other language lacks (or at least conveys differently), to a point that nearly every new production of JCS over there has led to a fresh translation. Tim Rice's unusual wordplay, masterful (at times) in English, is very difficult to convey in a foreign tongue, especially when it can be safely argued that the expression in question is hardly common to its native audience.

The Piece We're Evaluating

As if the title didn't give it away, I speak, of course, of a certain insult Judas hurls at Jesus during their climactic argument at the Last Supper, calling him:

A jaded mandarin A jaded mandarin As a jaded jaded faded jaded jaded mandarin

That's a doozy in English, to say the least. I may have written on this blog previously that I’ve heard enough jokes about the Last Supper being at an all-you-can-eat Chinese restaurant or Jesus’ penchant for citrus fruits to be tired of them all.

In case you missed Tim's actual meaning: mandarin is not just a variety of orange, a form of the Chinese language, or a term for an official in any of the nine top grades of the former imperial Chinese civil service (or clothing characteristic of what they’d allegedly wear or porcelain objets d’art depicting them). The root word for mandarin in Hindi means “counselor,” and – unfortunately, given this definition’s origin in unkind Asian racial stereotypes – the term came to refer (in colonialist British parlance) to a powerful official or senior bureaucrat, especially one perceived as reactionary and secretive. When he calls Jesus a “jaded mandarin,” Judas is saying that Jesus is corrupt, washed up, and useless as a leader.

Could Tim Rice have found a better way to say that? Probably. But this is the method he chose, and for better or worse, it has gone down in history ever since, including a recent parodic reference in the second season of the Apple TV+ series Schmigadoon! to a “sour macaroon.”

Now, it took all that explanation to convey its meaning in English. How well do you think it crossed over to Russian? Well, no less than 16 translators decided to try; some were official, others fan translations that were used in little-known productions. (The number should not be surprising. This is very much the viewpoint of an outsider looking in who lived long after that time, but when an album is banned by the government, bootleg copies change hands for huge sums "underground," and the music on that album is in a style also banned by the government… well, let's just say something "forbidden" is going to attract a lot of people. After that initial burst of enthusiasm, then it's like any other piece of literature which is translated a number of times by multiple people -- someone who thinks they can do a better job of conveying the foreign meaning in their native tongue, perhaps in a more modern dialect or a more relevant way.)

Inspired by a conversation I had on ye olde JCS Zone Forum (RIP) with Russian fan Pasha Levcovetz, we're going to take a look at all of them, evaluating them for literal vs. poetic accuracy and also offering opinions on which might have even -- dare I say it -- improved on the original. For the sake of most of my readership, I'll render the Russian in (literal but accurate) English so you can understand what the adapted lyrics intend to say. (Special thanks to Pasha for his help!)

Translating "Mandarin"

As one might expect with a phrase that is not exactly common linguistic currency, and the number of jokes made about Tim's choice of words, the first problem Russian translators might encounter is "mandarin" -- more specifically, whether or not it is a literal reference to mandarin fruit.

Much to both my dismay and my amusement, two of the official translators and three of the fans decided that the lyric indeed referred to the fruit.

In the Teatr Mossoveta production in Moscow, which has been presented numerous times from 1990 to the present (and which made much larger departures that I've previously written about in response to a question from @nemoverne), Yaroslav Kesler rendered it like so:

Like a pitiful tangerine Like a pitiful tangerine Like a pitiful, pitiful, pitiful, pitiful, yellow tangerine!

For the more faithful version recorded on CD in 1992, Vyacheslav Ptitsyn traveled in a similar direction:

Squeezed lemon! You are a squeezed lemon! You are a pathetic, petty, pathetic, petty squeezed lemon!

Lastly, for something that is not a variation on either of the above, fan translator Yevgeniy Susorov gives us:

You are a withered fruit You are rotten, tasteless fruit You are a withered fig tree that will die in the flames!

I can see their intention, and, in my opinion, both Ptitsyn and Susorov improved on the original line, although this was probably coincidental in the former's case.

As far as Kesler is concerned, it's more of a vague fruit comparison that sort of makes sense. A yellow tangerine is overripe, and as tasty as overly ripened fruit can be, it's prone to developing patches of mold, and goes bad when left uneaten for too long. The meaning here when Judas applies it to Jesus as an insult should be clear, as he's been saying something like this about him -- metaphorically speaking -- for the entire show. (In the fan category, Vadim Zhmud makes the same choice and is even more explicit about his intentions, rendering the fruit as a "lethargic," "well-fed" tangerine. Mikhail Kokovikhin's take also chooses "tangerine," but gets caught up in trying to use it in exactly the way Tim uses "mandarin," repeating the word for emphasis and relying on the fact that Russian has three different synonyms for the word "rotten" to pad out the stanza. There's nothing wrong with trying to match Tim's choices as closely as possible, but just calling someone a rotten fruit in all the ways one can is a little weak.)

Ptitsyn's is more intriguing, partially because of a (likely) unintentional double meaning. If you recall, he refers to a pathetic lemon that has had all the juice squeezed out of it. In American English, in addition to referring to the fruit of the same name, "lemon" is also used to refer to a product, usually an automobile, that has flaws -- like manufacturing defects, in the car's case -- too great or severe to serve its intended purpose. (To cite a more abstract usage, the late Jim Steinman aptly used the "lemon" analogy in the Meat Loaf song "Life Is a Lemon And I Want My Money Back.") In Russian, the phrase "squeezed lemon" similarly refers to someone very tired, a person who has lost their strength or abilities. Poetically speaking, Judas calling Jesus a "lemon" at this moment has an extra layer of meaning that works really well in either language.

Lastly, my favorite (if only as an atheist theologian) is Susorov, who doesn't just spin the line into a much better fruit metaphor -- he even gets biblical with it, referencing both Jesus' teaching about "trees bearing bad fruit" and also one bad tree in particular that figured into Jesus' final week in the original Passion narrative.

Quoting loosely from the King James Version of Matthew's Gospel (an incident also recounted in Mark, chapter 11): "And seeing a fig tree by the wayside [Jesus] went to it and found nothing on it but only leaves. And he said to it, 'May no fruit ever come from you again!' And the fig tree withered."

In Susorov's text, Judas is not only condemning Jesus as the tree bearing bad fruit against which he preached, but also comparing him to a specific, very recent failure that might still sting.

(Susorov's choice is made even more ironic by the fact that Lloyd Webber and Rice intended to musicalize this moment in JCS themselves, but ultimately decided to cut it from the original album when concerns of length were raised, as previously discussed here. If that scene was still in the show, this would be quite the burn!)

Getting at the Meaning

Moving away from the poetic toward conveying the lyric's literal intention without getting bogged down in language, both official and fan translators seem to settle for general insults, so it becomes a different question: whether they are just that (i.e., general insults) or they convey the same meaning as intended by "jaded mandarin."

The latter is achieved adequately by Viktor Polyak (Yaroslavskiy Gosudarstvennyy Teatr Yunogo Zritelya, 1989-1994):

You are a crashed idol You are a crashed idol You are a crashed, broken, dirty idol!

It works. The show is called Jesus Christ Superstar; a fallen celebrity metaphor is far from out of place. Maksim Samoylov, in the fan department, goes for a similar take, having Judas call Jesus a "little, fallen star."

Svetlana Peyn, whose translation has appeared at Stas Namin in Moscow from 2011 to the present, is on a similar wavelength:

You are a pompous hero You are a pompous hero With poisonous loud glory you are a self-important pompous hero

Ouch!

Mikhail Parygin, a fan translator, is in the same boat, going for "a [...] pathetic, petty, pompous king." Likewise Andrey Voskresenskiy, with "a [...] surrendered, fallen, finished prophet," and Vera Degtyaryova, who settles for "a miserable [...] former leader." Also rather close is Aleksandr Butuzov, who has Judas call Jesus "a loser" and "a mediocre, brainless, stupid leader." Though Russian fans I've spoken to don't especially care for his choice of words in their own language, it's on the mark as far as literal meaning goes.

Another official translation is not quite in the same realm, but close enough to make sense. Specifically, Grigoriy Kruzhkov and Marina Boroditskaya, holding the pen for the St. Petersburg Rock Opera State Theater in an adaptation which has been produced since 1990, provided:

Like a rebel! Like a simple rebel! Like a deceiver and a thief! Like a self-proclaimed king!

Metaphorically speaking, if you squint at it, it looks similar; full-bore insults that at least fit the plot.

Things get a little more interesting when translators move farther afield. For example, on the official front, Valeriy Lagosha's version for the "Free Space" Theater in Oryol, which ran from 2003-07, is:

No, I do not want this, prophet I do not want this, prophet After all, in this life I was able to do much more

It's an interesting idea to follow Judas' suggestion in "Heaven On Their Minds" that everyone would be better off if Jesus had not become famous and reinforce that point.

On the fan front, Kirill Sukhomlinov chooses to turn Jesus' biblical language about the religious authorities back on him:

You are a pathetic hypocrite You are a pathetic hypocrite You are a pathetic, pathetic, pathetic, pathetic, nasty hypocrite!

And Maksim Zakharov doesn't really hit on the exact idea, but manages to create something that at least fits the character and situation:

You are a dark person You are a terrible person I am glad that you will end your life in prison!

Conclusion

Will there ever be a perfect translation? The jury's still out, especially -- it would seem -- in Russian. (There are more examples just from Russian translations to talk about that I will contemplate in future posts.) But it's always fascinating to view a piece from someone else's perspective, isn't it?

#jesus christ superstar #andrew lloyd webber #tim rice #jcs #jesus christ super star #jesus christ super-star #jcss #jcs study

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