© Columbia University Press
Zeami: Performance Notes
April, 2008
Cloth, 528 pages, 28 illus.
ISBN: 978-0-231-13958-8
$45.00
/ £26.50
"Thomas Hare is a highly gifted, graceful, and imaginative translator. Building on his previous masterful work in Zeami's Style: The Noh Plays of Zeami Motokiyo, he has brought Zeami's notes to life in English with great immediacy and verve. Zeami's 'performance notes' became public only in the twentieth century, having been written for his closest associates and artistic heirs and then kept as the tightly guarded property of successor performance lineages. The texts can, most obviously, be read as a window into Zeami's own thoughts, as his legacy and strategic guide for his immediate followers. They make it possible to reimagine a remarkable amount about performance practice in Zeami's day, and they are also of great interest as a window into the matter of writing itself in Zeami's time. The texts vary in the degree to which Zeami uses a consciously elevated style, writing in a sort of pseudo-Chinese. His use of terminology borrowed, adapted, expanded, or distorted from other discourses of his time, notably the discourses of poetry and of Buddhism, is fascinating as a study in its own right." — Susan Matisoff, emerita professor of East Asian languages and cultures, University of California, Berkeley