“Struggling With a Dead Language”: 
Beckett and the Japanese Avant-garde Theatre in the 1960s
Mariko Hori Tanaka
People in Shingeki, whose theatre started from translations of European theatre and imitated its representation, considering the language used in Kabuki as archaic, played an important role in permeating the newly translated language into Japan.  Though most of us innocently accept today’s Japanese language as naturally our own, some radical people in the avant-garde theatre in the 1960s like Makoto Sato feel it unnatural and consciously endeavor to revive the “dead” language “physically fit our bodies”, challenging the established theatre, Shingeki. Sato’s contemporary, Tadashi Suzuki, also criticizing Shingeki, emphasizes that actors should be aware of and control their bodies, from which, he believes, comes poetic language. 

Such estrangement of language from bodies is much more obvious in the case of Irish people: for under the British rule, their language being deprived, they were forced to speak English.  Though Anglo=Irish-born Beckett does not strongly show his criticism on this matter, he gives a very short reference on it in All That Fall:

Mr Rooney: …Do you know, Maddy, sometimes one would think you were struggling with a dead language.
Mrs Rooney:  Yes indeed, Dan, I know full well what you mean, I often have that feeling, it is unspeakably excruciating. 
Mr Rooney:  I confess I have it sometimes myself, when I happen to overhear what I am saying.
Mrs Rooney:  Well, you know, it will be dead in time, just like our own poor dear Gaelic, there is that to be said. 

Beckett may only rouse the anxiety of the couple losing communication each other here, but he, who witnessed the Irish Renaissance, might have felt sympathy with those who were “struggling with a dead language”.  Besides, Beckett himself challenged the language of his own by acquiring new languages and translating from one language to another in his creative process. 
An act of translation often causes insecurity in the act of speaking, for what one says is not always what one means to say.  The language foreign to us or later acquired does not fit our bodies.  One who speaks it possibly resists it when he/she tries to express it physically.  The disparity between what one speaks and what one means to say visualized in Beckett’s work reflects such insecurity in the process of “translation”. 

This paper aims at discussing how language of Beckett was received in the Japanese avant-garde theatre in the 1960s by analyzing the meaning of “translation”.
Aoyama Gakuin University
Borderless Beckett:
International Samuel Beckett Symposium in Tokyo 2006
September 29 – October 1