Who should do NOTES? Initial endoscopic performance of laparoscopic surgeons compared to gastroenterologists and untrained individuals

INTRODUCTION: Natural orifice transluminal endoscopic surgery (NOTES) is a multidisciplinary surgical technique. If conventional endoscopic instrumentation can be easily mastered, surgeons with laparoscopic experience could head NOTES interventions. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Thirty individuals were tested for endoscopic dexterity. Group 1 included seven gastroenterologists, group 2 included 12 laparoscopically experienced surgeons lacking endoscopic experience, and group 3 included 11 interns who had no hands-on endoscopic or surgical experience. Each individual repeated an easy (T1), medium (T2), and difficult (T3) task ten times with endoscopic equipment on a NOTES skills-box. RESULTS: Group 3 had significantly poorer performances for all three tasks compared to the other groups. No significant differences were seen between groups 1 and 2 for T1 and T2. The initial T3 performance of group 1 was better than that of group 2, but their performance after repetition was not statistically different. Groups 2 and 3 improved significantly with repetition, and group 2 eventually performed as well as group 1. CONCLUSIONS: The data indicate that laparoscopic surgeons quickly learned to handle the endoscopic equipment. This suggests that a lack of endoscopic experience does not handicap laparoscopic surgeons when performing endoscopic tasks. Based on their knowledge of anatomy and the complication management acquired during surgical education, surgeons are well equipped to take the lead in interdisciplinary NOTES collaborations.

Strange Relations. Cultural Translation of Noh Theatre in Ezra Pound’s Dance Poems and W. B. Yeats’s At the Hawk’s Well

Drawing on the reception of Noh drama by Ezra Pound and William Butler Yeats, the article analyses both the literary and cultural ‘translations’ of this form of Japanese theatre in their works, focusing on Yeats’s play At the Hawk’s Well (1917). I conceptualize ‘cultural translation’ as the staging of relations that mark a residual cultural difference. Referred to as ‘foreignizing’ in translation theory, this method enables what Erika Fischer-Lichte has termed a ‘liminal experience’ for the audience –– an effect Yeats intended for the performance of his play. It evokes situations in which opposites collapse and new ways of acting or new combinations of symbols can be tried out. Yeats’s play will be used to sketch how an analysis of relations could serve as a general model for the study of cultural transfer as cultural translation in general. Keywords: cultural translation, translation theory, performance, William Butler Yeats, Itō Michio, Ezra Pound, At the Hawk’s Well