Roger Pulvers (born 4 May 1944) is an Australian playwright, theatre director and translator. He has published more than 45 books in English and Japanese, from novels to essays, plays, poetry and translations. He has written prolifically for the stage and has seen his plays produced at major theatres in Japan, Australia and the United States
Pulvers has also directed widely in Australia and Japan, both in English and Japanese. He has written original scripts for radio documentaries and dramas that have been produced by ABC (Australia), as well as television scripts for NHK (Japan) and screenplays for feature films.
Early years
Pulvers was born into a Jewish-American family in Brooklyn, New York on 4 May 1944. Soon after birth, his family moved to Los Angeles, where he grew up, attending Burnside Ave. Elementary School, Louis Pasteur Junior High School (now LACES and Alexander Hamilton High School (1961), at which he was Student Body President.[1]
Early exposure to show business came from annual trips in the 1950s to Las Vegas, where Pulvers saw dinner shows of The Ritz Brothers, Sammy Davis Jr. and other entertainers. Also, his father, Louis (1903–1993), had worked as a lighting technician at Warner Bros. during and after the war, bringing home piles of glossy enlargements of actors on set. His mother, Miriam (1912–2006), had been secretary to William S. Klein, lawyer for the Shubert brothers, owners of New York theatres. In her later years she became private secretary to Bette Davis.
Education
Pulvers was an undergraduate at UCLA, completing the four-year course in three years with a major in Political Science, summa cum laude.
After graduation in June 1964, he went to Bloomington, Indiana to attend a Russian-language intensive course, going from there to Finland, the Soviet Union and Italy. In the Soviet Union he travelled extensively, visiting Moscow, Kyiv, Kharkiv, Yalta, Riga, Leningrad and Novgorod.
In September 1964 he entered the Russian Area Studies Program at Harvard University Graduate School, living on campus at Perkins Hall. He completed the two-year Master's Course in one year, receiving his MA with a thesis on "The Planning of Soviet Science."
Pulvers spent the summer of 1965 in the Soviet Union, Finland, Denmark and Switzerland, returning to UCLA to further his studies of Eastern Europe and to study Polish. In September 1966, he went to Poland to do post-graduate work at Warsaw University on a scholarship from the National Students' Association (NSA) of the United States. While there, his interests turned away from political science to film and theatre, thanks to almost daily visits to the theatres and cinemas of that city. In January 1967 he moved to Kraków but was soon to leave Poland due to a scandal involving the NSA and the CIA. Though he was entirely innocent of any connection with the latter organization, he felt that he would never be able to return to Poland or the Soviet Union. He spent three months in Paris attending classes at the Sorbonne until his return to Los Angeles in May 1967. In September of that year he left the United States for Japan.
Career
In the late autumn of 1967, after spending four weeks in Korea to change his visa, Pulvers took up a lectureship in Russian and Polish at Kyoto Sangyo University. He spent five years in Kyoto teaching at that university and at Doshisha University, where he conducted a course in American poetry.
In 1969 he published his first book, a collection of short stories under the title "On the Edge of Kyoto." This was followed in August 1970 by the publication of a short play in Japanese translation, "The Perfect Crime of Mrs. Garigari", in the leading drama magazine, "Shingeki". In 1972 he was one of the winners of an essay contest sponsored by the Mainichi Shimbun. This led to the publication of the essay, "Kenji Isn't Here Now." This was Pulvers' first published work about Japanese author and poet Miyazawa Kenji; and it prompted a long association with the Mainichi Daily News.
In August 1972 Pulvers travelled to Australia for the first time to take up a lectureship in Japanese at the Australian National University in Canberra. It was not long before he was writing articles and stories for The Canberra Times, The Australian, The National Times, Newsweek and other publications, as well as doing regular radio broadcasts for a programs on the ABC. He also produced and directed plays in Canberra. His own plays were produced in Melbourne, Adelaide, Newcastle and Canberra. On 6 July 1976 he became an Australian citizen.
During the 1970s, Pulvers frequently went back to Japan to continue his involvement in Japanese arts and to be with his many friends who were their practitioners. He became particularly intimate with novelist/playwright Inoue Hisashi, at whose home he stayed. Pulvers also travelled to Europe, especially to Poland, where he was greeted in 1970 by film director Andrzej Wajda. His close friendship with Wajda has continued over the years.
In January 1980 Pulvers left the ANU to become Writer-in-Residence at the Playbox Theatre in Melbourne. It was at the Playbox that he directed his own work and that of other playwrights. In the summer of 1982, Pulvers went to Rarotonga in the Cook Islands to be assistant to director Nagisa Oshima on the film "Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence." After that he returned to Japan to take up the position of literary editor at the Mainichi Daily News in Tokyo.
Since the 1980s, Pulvers has published hundreds of articles in the Japanese and world press (the Far Eastern Economic Review, The New Scientist, etc.), as well as books of fiction, non-fiction and translations from Japanese. He has appeared frequently on Japanese television and radio, and acted in the NHK Taiga Drama, "Sanga Moyu."
Since the early 1990s, Pulvers has divided his time primarily between Tokyo and Sydney, with frequent trips to Europe, particularly Poland, Ireland and the U.K. From 1996 to 1999 he was a professor at Kyoto University of Art and Design; and from 1999, professor at Tokyo Institute of Technology, where he was Head of the Centre for World Civilizations. He retired in 2013 to devote himself entirely to his writing.
In Tokyo he continued to write articles, including his weekly column, Counterpoint, in The Japan Times, to publish books of fiction and non-fiction, to direct in the theatre, to write screenplays and to act in film. In Australia he most recently directed at the Roxy Theatre in Leeton his translation/adaptation of Nikolai Gogol's "The Government Inspector."
He wrote the script and directed the feature film of "STAR SAND" on location in Okinawa in 2016. The film was released in Japan in the summer of 2017.
Setting the Stage: Articles and essays about the state of our world today (2005)
新バイブル・ストーリーズ (Shin baiburu sutōrīzu) (2007)
わが友フロイス (Waga tomo Frois = My Friend Frois) (2007)
日めくり現代英語帳 (Himekuri gendai eigochō) (2007–2008)
英語で読み解く賢治の世界 (Eigo de yomitoku Kenji no sekai) (2008)
Delighting in Cultures—世界の中の日本人と日本人の中の世界 (Sekai no nakano nihonjin to nihonjin no naka no sekai) (2009)
英語で味わう名言集 心に響く古今東西200の言葉 NHKギフト～E名言の世界～ (Eigo de ajiwau meigenshū kokoro ni hibiku kokon tōzai 200 no kotoba) (2011)
もし、日本という国がなかったら (Moshi nihon to iu kuni ga nakattara = If There Were No Japan) (2011)
宮沢賢治『銀河鉄道の夜』 (NHK100分de名著) (Miyazawa Kenji "Ginga tetsudou no yoru") (2011)
賢治から、あなたへ 世界のすべてはつながっている (Kenji kara anatae sekai no subete wa tsunagatteiru) (2013)
驚くべき日本語 (Odorokubeki nihongo) (2014)
ハーフ (Hāfu = Half) (2014)
こんにちは、ユダヤ人です (Konnichiwa yudaya jin desu) (2014)
星砂物語 (Hoshizuna monogatari = STARSAND) (2015)
10年間勉強しても英語が上達しない日本人のための新英語学習法 (10 nenkan benkyou shitemo eigo ga jyotatsu shinai nihonjin no tameno shin eigo gakushūhou) (2015)
英語で読む啄木: 自己の幻想 (Eigo de yomu Takuboku: jiko no gensō) (2015)
ぼくがアメリカ人をやめたワケ (Boku ga America jin wo yameta wake) (2020)
Books in French
Poussières d'étoiles ( (Star Sand in French translation) Amazon/Crossing France 2017)
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