| Tennessee Williams is a great dramatist in the United States after Eugene O'Neill in the 20 th century,who is as famous as Arthur Miller and Edward Albee,imposing wide influences on the world drama and theatre.The Glass Menagerie?A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof are the classic repertoires of the world stage.In 1963,Ying Ruocheng translated SomethingUnspoken,which marked the opening of acceptance,performance and adaptation of Williams' plays in China.The number of Williams' plays is huge.This research is mainly based on some of his long dramas,taking The Glass Menagerie,A Streetcar Named Desire,Cat on a Hot Tin Roof as the basic texts of the study,and attempts to systematically investigate the introduction and translation,stage performance or adaptation,and influence of Williams' plays in China.Williams' plays are highly autobiographical,in which we can find his anxiety about his homosexual identity,boredom with constant illness,worries about the declining of creativity,frightfulness of the fleeting youth and fear of death,thus choosing to flee and drift.As he drifted and fled,Williams felt the repression and pressure of space.For this reason,he conceived a beautiful place to stay for himself—— China,hoping to alleviate all kinds of anxieties.And all these have become his "intrinsic" creative content.In order to fully show his intrinsic character,in the course of his drama creation,Williams set up the hidden-stage characters in the plays,applied the structure of ancient Greek drama,drew lessons from a large number of myths and legends;meanwhile,he absorbed the freehand elements of Chinese opera to create his symbolic world of drama.In the 1980 s,Chinese theatrical circles concentrated on the translating and introducing his The Glass Menagerie,A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.Of course,the translation of Williams' plays by Chinese translation circles cannot be separated from the "regulation" of ideology,patrons and poetics and so on.In addition,the duality of literary and performative nature of drama itself makes Chinese translators have to adopt domestication-based and foreignization-assisted translation strategies when introducing three masterpieces,thus presenting a brand-new "Sinicized" translation for Chinese readers.On the stage of Chinese drama,the performances and adaptations of Williams' s plays have been splendid and active.The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire produced by Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre have become the classic translated plays in recent years.The physical theatre production The Poker Night Blues adapted from A Streetcar Named Desire can be said to be a useful attempt to combine the performance characteristics of Chinese and Western dramas,which went abroad and won praise from the audience all over the world.If the translation and performance in China is a strong acceptance of Williams' drama,then after accepting,Williams' drama has had an inestimable influence on Chinese drama and novel creation.The Chinese playwrights learned his spirit of neo-realism and tragedy,his various means of mobilizing lighting,set designs,music / audio,setting up narrators,using expressionism and symbolism,etc.Finally,the formation of the psychological memo drama has appeared,like Zhao Yaomin's "Liangchen Meijing".In Taiwn,Bai Xianyong,the descendant of general,not only had an astonishing consistency with Williams in his life course,but also resembled Williams in his novel creation,using symbols,psychological memories,and other techniques to concern the joys and sorrows of the homosexuals,to disclose and criticize the violence of human nature severely,to express the feeling that youth is easy to die,and to lament the transient beauty,all of which make him the most influenced writer by Williams in China. |
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