| NOTA |
(*)(Translated by Donald Keene [近代能楽集]) (★)(Este libro es version renovada del ´TO-0016´.)(A great art form that has long fascinated men of letters throughout the world has been brilliantly revived by Yukio Mishima. In his introduction, Donald Keene calls these the first genuinely successful modern Noo plays, and adds :´If the medium is given a new lease on life it will be because of Mishima and his work.´ He merely echoes the best critical opinion in Japan. As long ago as 1916 William Butler Yeats and Ezra Pound were excitedly discovering Noo plays. In 1922 Arthur Waley´s fine translations appeared under the Knopf imprint. Since then, interest has grown steadily in the Occident. In Japan, Noo had become almost exclusively a court entertainment, an esoteric ritual, stylized, symbolic, understandable only to the initiate. The astounding thing that Mishima accomplished was to write plays so modern and direct and intelligible that they could, as he suggested, be played on a bench in Central Park ; and yet he preserved the outer form and the inner spirit of Noo. At the heart of Noo lies the accidental encounter through which the workings of Fate are revealed. Often one of the persons is not what he seems to be : perhaps a ghost or a person fallen from high estate. Mishima was marvelously successful in preserving the weird and haunting mood of classical Noo, but his characters and situations have the directness and hardness of an encounter on a city street. Mishima´s use of the original Noo dramas varied from play to play. Sometimes he chose only the general themes ; at other times he followed even the details of the originals. Whatever the method, he always managed to suggest much of the uncanny symbolic quality of the original. Even the uninitiated can feel the powerful overtones. The emotion of these plays is so communicable that one can imagine them staged anywhere in the world. Or they can be read and reread in Donald Keene´s excellent translation. ◆Yukio Mishima was born in Tokyo in 1925. Upon his graduation from the Peers´ School in 1944, he received a citation from the Emperor as the highest honor student. He was graduated from Tokyo Imperial University School of Jurisprudence in 1947 ; his first novel was published in 1948. Following that he wrote constantly : ten novels, many successful plays, and a travel book. He said that his ´lesser writings´ included fifty short stories, ten one-act plays, and several volumes of essays. ´The Sound of Waves´, a novel published in Japan under the title of ´Shiosai´, won the 1954 Shinchosha Literary Prize. It was published in the United States in 1956. His tragic death in 1970 brought an irreparable loss to the world of Japanese letters. ▼CONTENTS : 1.Sotoba Komachi, 2.The Damask Drum, 3.Kantan, 4.The Lady Aoi, 5.Hanjo) |
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