What Is Art? And What Is Friendship?
Yasmina Reza’s Art produced by the Godot Theatre Company and Alexander Nehamas’s On Friendship
Happy August to everyone. I saw many of my friends go out on vacation and share wonderful pictures, and it was so nice to see everyone enjoying the summer sun.
This piece is on a play I watched at the end of June: Yasmina Reza’s Art produced by the Godot Theatre Company. There were so many twists and turns before I finally got to watch the play: the performance was originally scheduled in May last year, but it was postponed to this year because of the COVID-19 outbreak. Though the play was performed as scheduled this year, the family members who planned to go with me fell ill (now recovered), so I had to find others to go on short notice. Well, eventually I still managed to watch the play.
Regarding our reading club, the next online meeting will be held at 10:00 am (Taipei Time) on August 20 for City Of The Queen: A Novel of Colonial Hong Kong by Shih Shu-Ching. If you are interested, feel free to leave a comment, reply to this e-mail message or write to me at transcreation@substack.com to register.
Thank as always for your reading and sponsorship :)
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這篇文章的中文版在這裡。
I first learned of Yasmina Reza’s play, Art, while translating Alexander Nehamas’s On Friendship a few years ago. Friends are indispensable in our life, but the nature of friendship seems elusive. Why do we love our friends? Is friendship a moral virtue? Friendship may not always lead us to a bright, moral future, but why do we still celebrate friendship? On Friendship answers precisely these questions.
Quite conventionally, Alexander Nehamas starts with Aristotle and guides the readers quickly through the Middle Ages and the Enlightenment. The first half is a sort of literature review, and the main argument is developed in the second half. It takes time for friendship to develop and mature. The interaction between friends is ordinary and repeated, much expressed through body language and tone of voice, which is difficult for paintings to capture and wordy for novels to describe. In this light, plays are the best genre to explore friendship. On Friendship uses Art as an example in Chapter 5, and illustrates with the movie Thelma & Louise in Chapter 6, both of which vividly describe friendship.
I have watched Thelma & Louise before, and Art sounds a great play even through the retelling of Nehamas, so I decided I have to watch the live performance one day. When looking up for information, I found that the Godot Theatre Company has produced Art in 2003 and 2016, and I was happy to find that they prepared to stage the play again in 2021. The performance was postponed for one year due to the COVID-19 outbreak, and I finally got to see the performance this year.
Art tells the story of the friendship of three middle-aged men: Serge (starred by Chu Chung Heng 屈中恆), a dermatologist, spent millions1 to buy a white oil painting “with white diagonal lines.” Marc (starred by Bright Pu 卜學亮) severely criticizes Serge’s decision. Yvan (starred by Sam Tseng 曾國城) tries to be a peacemaker, but he seems to make the situation only worse, and the other two criticize him for being a fence-sitter. A 15-year friendship is about to be ruined in one fell swoop all because of a white oil painting.
The words that used to be innocuous now sound provocative as their relationship goes sour, serving as ironclad evidence of the speakers’ narrow-mindedness and self-righteousness. In the end, the three try to reconcile, and cautiously start their “trial period” of friendship, hoping to restore the decades-long friendship.
Art offers an interesting juxtaposition of friendship, art, and interpretation: how we view each other and how we interpret each other’s words and deeds are affected by our relationship, which in turn affects as our relationship as well, and there is more to the relationship between friendship and art.
Nehamas’s On Friendship points out that as friendship involves interpretation, it is almost like an artistic taste, and the two can even influence each other (as the plot of Art reveals: friends influence each other’s artistic taste, and the change of artistic taste in turn may jeopardize friendship). Further, the relationship with our friends is very much like the relationship with our favorite works of art: the latter is a metaphor worth exploring over and over again, carrying endless meanings, extending into the future and influencing our future direction. In this light, friendship is actually an aesthetic and an important mechanism for creating individuality. I think Art can be said to be the most central example of On Friendship, which embodies and summarizes the arguments of On Friendship.
In general, I liked the production of the Godot Theatre Company. The performance of the three actors was full of tension; their quarreling, probing, and conceding for reconciliation were convincing. Seeing the three men fighting, however, I could not help but starting wondering if the characters were changed to women, would it not be completely different? (Perhaps Nehamas had thought about this, so he took Thelma & Louise for another example.) Also, I thought the stage design could be simpler. The translation in general was very smooth2, but there were a few lines that confused me a little, so I read the English translation3 for comparison (the original play is in French, which I do not speak).
1. Adding lines for humor?
Yvan: Paula is not life-denying! …
淑芳不是冷冰冰的,至少對我。(My back translation: Paula is not cold, at least not to me.
When the three are talking about Paula, Marc’s wife, the Godot added a line for Yvan: “at least not to me,” as if to imply that Paula may have seduced Yvan. The English translation does not have this line, and I guess nor does the original. This comment on Paula is not related to the later plots, and I think is inappropriate.
2. Localization
(1) In the English translation, Serge suggests Marc “read Seneca,” which is changed to Zhuangzi 莊子.
(2) Olives eaten by the three in the final reconciliation scene are replaced by pistachios (開心果, which literally means “happiness nut”).
(3) Contemporary art is translated into “modern art (現代藝術)” instead, perhaps because the Godot thought the general audience do distinguish between modern art and contemporary art, and decided to use a more general and familiar term.
3. Adding lines for clarity
Probably to highlight the main idea and explain why Marc is so opposed to Serge’s buying the painting, in the Godot production, Marc says explicitly that “molding friends is my ART.” (That is, if Serge has an artistic taste of which he disapproves, Serge is no longer a friend molded by him, so he cannot stand Serge buying a painting he hates).
In the English translation, Marc does say “I’ve had to mold you,” but he does not go so far as to say “molding friends is my ART.” This added line is difficult to deliver, as it should be serious but may sound ridiculous at the same time. Fortunately, no audience laughed at it, so the delivery should be successful, but I cannot decide if the addition is a good one.
Back to the play, what is the fate of the white painting in the end? To reconcile, Serge gives in and invites Marc to draw a skier on it. Fortunately, the ink is erasable, and the two work together to clean up the painting, which is restored to a white one in the end.
Marc’s closing remarks seem to make both his own and his friend’s artistic tastes compatible by offering a reinterpretation of the painting. On Friendship suggests that this actually reflects two artistic traditions: Alphonse Allais’ one-color paintings with complex titles in an earlier time, and Kazimir Malevich’s one-color paintings with concise titles in a later time.
I adore the ending of the play. The painting goes from a stage where it is purely white, to one where a skier appears, and finally to one where the skier disappears, just like the twists and turns that the three of them have experienced. Everything seems peaceful and settled again, yet not without a trace.
I close this piece by quoting Marc’s beautiful closing remarks:
Marc: Under the white clouds, the snow is falling.
You can’t see the white clouds, or the snow.
Or the cold, or the white glow of the earth.
A solitary man glides downhill on his skis.
The snow is falling.
It falls until the man disappears back into the landscape.
My friend Serge, who’s one of my oldest friends, has bought a painting.
It’s a canvas about five foot by four.
It represents a man who moves across a space and disappears…
In the original, the price of the painting is two hundred thousand francs. In the 2016 production of Godot, the price was 5 million NTD, and in the production this year, the price went up to 8 million NTD — the inflation seems serious.
In my personal experience, when foreign plays are translated and staged in Taiwan, in most cases the translations are fluent, probably because the lines have been repeatedly pondered and localized in spoken language and thus sound natural.