Essay Thank you, Master Bunchin! By 桂三輝	フレームで見る  英文をプリントする  脚注をプリントする
ありがとうございます、文珍師匠！ 今年の4月に東京・国立劇場で10日間にわたって行われた落語家・桂文珍さんの独演会を収録したDVD（10巻）が発売された。 実はこのDVDには筆者が英語字幕を付けているのだが、4ヶ月にわたるその作業の中、一番苦労したのは、日本語の「しゃれ」や「語呂合わせ」をどのように英語で表現するか、ということだった。

From June through September of this year, I had the opportunity to work on the project of a lifetime. The great Rakugo Master, Katsura Bunchin, has just completed a new 10-DVD set of Rakugo stories. For the first time in its history, the Yoshimoto Creative Agency decided to release a rakugo video complete with English subtitles. I had the honor of translating the stories and creating these subtitles.

I have to admit that when I started the project in June, I had no idea that it would consume my life for almost four months! In April, Master Bunchin became the first Rakugo storyteller ever to perform 10 days straight at the National Theater of Japan. All 10 performances at the 1,600-seat theater were completely sold out, meaning that by the end of the run he had performed for 18,000 people.

Master Bunchin performed two stories per show, ranging in length from about half an hour to the marathon Jigoku Bakkei, which ran over 70 minutes. In total, there were 20 stories, totaling 12 hours and two minutes of Rakugo to translate!

One of the biggest challenges to translating Rakugo is the prevalence of wordplay and puns. At first, these seem almost impossible to translate. A pun depends on the coincidental phonetic similarity of two words with completely different meanings being used together in a clever or funny way. So what are the chances of finding, in a different language, the exact same coincidence of meaning and sound? What to do? Find a similar play on words and compromise on meaning? Or translate the meaning and ignore the humor? One might think that the meaning is more important, but in the case of a comic video, if you ignore the humor, the watcher is left puzzled as to why the audience is laughing so much.

I had the pleasure of working with a talented and experienced translator, English Rakugo expert and university lecturer, Ms. Chiho Kitagawa. What we found was that, if you think and think and search and search and ask around enough, you can usually come up with a reasonable solution that preserves both the meaning and the play on words.

For example, in the story Rakuda is Dead, a character notices that the teapot he was hoping to sell off has no bottom. "Banji Kyusu!" he quips. This phrase means, "all is lost, nothing to be done." But the second word also sounds like "kyusu," which means teapot. At first, this looks like a difficult pun to emulate in English, but with a little searching, a solution presents itself: "Oh, this has gone to pot." "Gone to pot" just happens to be an English phrase for something that has "become useless, gone bad." When used to refer to the teapot, the English reflects almost exactly what was said in Japanese, as well as preserving the wordplay.

Ms. Kitagawa and I relied on the help of several ingenious friends and colleagues, but when all was said and done, it was actually quite remarkable how many of the "impossible to translate" parts actually came out quite nicely.

I feel like four months of my life are contained in Master Bunchin's DVD set. Four months that I get to share with hundreds of people around the world who will watch the Master's rakugo stories and use the English subtitles as a point of entry into the wonderful world of Japanese comic storytelling.

Thank you for the opportunity, Master Bunchin!

Shukan ST: October 22, 2010

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