TRANSLATING IBSEN
“Whatever we read in translation is always in danger of being more or less misunderstood, since unfortunately translators themselves are too often somewhat lacking in understanding.” (Ibsen to the Swedish Society of Authors, April 11 1898.)
Reviewing a performance of Euripides' Medea in 1920 at the Holborn Empire in London, T. S.Eliot famously complained that Gilbert Murray’s English translation of the play "interposed between Euripides and ourselves a barrier more impenetrable than the Greek language." (1) Not because Murray’s text was difficult: on the contrary, it’s poetic idiom (imitation Swinburne) gave the impression the original fitted congenially into the cultural milieu of Edwardian England rather than coming from a different, even alien, time and place. Reinterpreted as a social reformer, Euripides, along with George Bernard Shaw and Henrik Ibsen, earlier was recruited into the Royal Court Theater’s 1904-07 progressive agenda under Harley Granville-Barker,.
Nineteenth century Norway is culturally and linguistically closer to the modern English-speaking world than sixth century B.C.E. Athens, so Ibsen translation would seem a more straightforward affair. Despite this, Ibsen in English has resulted in misrepresentations of the original as unfortunate as Murray’s of Euripides. Adaptations and experimental productions that announce they use Ibsen’s texts as springboards for totally original projects are not a problem: these, that do not claim to be translations, are to be welcomed. Along with Shakespeare Ibsen will undergo transmogrifications into something rich and strange according to the modern theater's revisiting and revising of its traditions. These openly proclaim their departures from the original and can be seen as independent works in their own right. Actually harmful is a large grey area of 'versions' (ignorant of Dano-Norwegain yet often claiming to be 'translations') professing to be by Ibsen but departing substantially from the original with no warning they are doing so. These result in diminutions of the original, where the adaptor’s limitations of imagination are taken for Ibsen's, and thus skew the public understanding of Ibsen's artistic individuality and stature. The Frank McGuinness version of Ghosts at the Duchess Theater in London this year (2010)was a dispiriting example of this now widespread practice. McGuinness's idiosyncratic departures from Ibsen's text (including an obsession with the world 'filth' absent from the original) compromised the clear dialectical power of the play. This now standard practice reflects an actual indifference to artistic integrity, with the result that Ibsen rarely is presented in the English speaking theater except in severely reductive terms.
The scale and complexity of Ibsen’s imagination, it is true, make conscientious translation daunting. Adaptors, brashly undaunted, convert the plays into the colloquial idiom, attitudes and agendas of the present day with no consciousness of damaging a carefully constructed work of art. Entering Ibsen's way of imagining the world requires recognizing the essential strangeness of his art, not rendering it reassuringly familiar. The meticulous metaphoric procedure of his visual and verbal artistry should reveal the unsettling nature of his dramatic imagination. This is its value for us. Its strange compulsions are not our own, forcing our imaginations to explore beyond the categories in which they are comfortable.
The critically acclaimed production of Pillars of the Community at the Royal National Theater in London in 2006 offered a good example of this process. A shrinking of intentions was evident from the beginning. The stage set ignored Ibsen's specifications for a rear glass wall that allows for a mutual charade of propriety performed between the Bernick room's inhabitants and the promenading townsfolk. This insists, along with the title of the play, that Pillars of the Community is a drama about a whole society trapped in false consciousness: a condition mirroring that in the auditorium. It is not Karsten Bernick’s ‘villainy’ that is under attack in the play but a whole community’s self-proclamation of ‘virtue’; of which Bernick is only a leading example. A character, Lona Hessel, invades this pharisaic scene from the New World, shockingly arriving with a circus and its indecorous music. ‘Lona’ is a short form of ‘Abelone’ from the Greek ‘Apollonia’ (‘the divine, one who belongs to the god Apollo’). An Apollonian figure arriving with a Dionysiac circus and rowdy music to open a cycle of plays, already infiltrates into Ibsen’s realist method dimensions which should alert us to his wider poetic agenda. The purpose for this community of Lona’s intrusion is the Apollonian injunction, "Know Thyself!" The action of the play is the multi-leveled operation of this command. The Royal National Theater version omitted the circus entrance entirely, thereby eliminating Ibsen's demonstration of a freer, more natural counterworld, deriving from our Hellenic heritage, to the morally repressive society on stage. The stage set eliminated all sense of the Bernick' family's enforced charade of 'virtue' before the unforgiving gaze of the community. Pillars of Society, as the first play of twelve plays, introduces its large-scale dialectical 'agenda' and audacious metaphoric procedure that will continue throughout the Realist Cycle.(2)
Both the production and Samuel Adamson’s ‘version’ did not just ‘adapt’ the text but entered into open combat with it. The subversive circus presence, we noted, was eliminated, and, due to the absence of the rear glass wall, so was Lona's symbolic action of boldly drawing back the curtains to open the community to light and life. Passages from a presumably unrewarded 'literal’ translation were cut; passages not by Ibsen were inserted; the mise-en-scène specified by Ibsen was generally ignored; and the production ended, not with Ibsen’s clear notation of ensemble harmony, clearing weather and the new generation (Johan and Dina) given a clear passage to the New World, but with a pensive Lona standing, sola, amid impressive lightning, thunder, and a torrential downpour; the young lovers apparently doomed. The play, that Ibsen intended to be an affirmation of the huge task opening up in the series that was to follow, instead was made to suggest tragic closure. Ibsen, the production seemed to insist, could not possibly intend a happy ending!
Among the ‘improvements’ to Ibsen's text wrought by Adamson was the interposing of this brightly Brechtian exchange:
Rørlund: And you really expect benefits for us? From trains?
Dina: We could go for railway trips on Sundays.
Marta: Ssh (to Rørlund) Weekdays
Mrs Rummel: Might butter be cheaper if we have a railway, Mr.Bernick?
Bernick: Mrs Rummel, it might be. You’ll be richer for certain….
Insertions of such fussy extraneous details belong to a tradition of 'anecdotal realism' that reveals a complete inability to understand Ibsen's spare, dialectical procedure. This, like an Occam's Razor, pares dramatic art down to its essential elements; a rigor typical of the aesthetic principles of Modernism. The itch to 'improve' Ibsen's texts with little idiosyncratic touches dear to the adaptor's tastes is like wishing to add decorative details to a building by Mies van der Rohe: or like the practice of 19th century actor-managers towards Shakespeare; it assumes the adaptor's imagination happily supplements Ibsen's. George Bernard Shaw once deplored that if Sir Henry Irving's presented himself on the stage in as mutilated a condition as he presented Shakespeare's King Lear, a shriek of horror would go up from the entire audience. Irving, he wrote, "does not merely cut plays: he disembowels them." (3) By contrast, Ibsen’s texts in the 1890’s were conscientiously translated, interpreted and performed by those who, along with Shaw, were determined to reform the theater. Shaw, William Archer and other champions of Ibsen and the 'New Theatre', whatever their differing philosophical, political or social agendas, united in their reproach of the profession’s indifference to the aesthetic integrity of a drama’s text. Shakespeare, for the most part, no longer is subjected to these injuries. The same scruples should apply to Ibsen.
What creates a barrier more impenetrable than the original Dano-Norwegian to appreciating Ibsen's art is the received idea that the intention of that art is to render a realistic facsimile of everyday life rather than establishing an objective aesthetic discipline that raises our perceptions to the greatest acuity and discrimination. Ibsen commentary is apt to treat the plays as psychoanalytic case histories of real people in real trouble, or as moral edification, discussing fictional events and characters as if they were realities in the world outside the theater. A dramatist creates characters whose specific situations and motives necessarily will be conveyed in words and actions that also function in the real world. Within the controlled aesthetic structure of a drama, however, scenes, words and actions have a different signifying function - and consequence - than they have in everyday life. Within the carefully delimited performative stage space each designated word, phrase, pause, gesture, intonation is a calculated move by the dramatist to realize the overall aesthetic intention and needs to be interpreted as such.(4) Dramatis personae have no say in the matter. Psychoanalytic speculation or moralizing censure, though a gratifying hobby, is a misapplied ingenuity too frequently visited upon dramatic texts. The translator must scrupulously focus on the dramatist's aesthetic decisions, with each 'note’ in the composition, and only these, accounted for.
The carefully constructed elements of scene, characters, action and dialogue are devised by Ibsen to evoke dimensions beyond conventional realism, inviting us to unfamiliar ways of seeing. His dramatic world is not the world we ordinarily inhabit. Ibsen did not faithfully reproduce the everyday reality of Norwegian life: he invented a Norway responsive to unsettling archetypal perspectives. To inhabit this world we must be prepared to venture beyond familiar assumptions about reality. The Ibsen translator, therefore, needs more than fluency in the original language to understand the cultural and intellectual terms in which Ibsen imagined his world. An alertness to their occult and unsettling perspectives is essential together with sensitivity to the structure and texture of the plays as intricate works of dramatic art and The poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, moved by a production of The Wild Duck in 1906, wrote how Ibsen was revealed to him as “a new poet whom we shall approach by many roads now that I know one of them. And again someone misunderstood in the midst of fame, someone quite different from what one hears.” (5)
And continues to hear. Seeing Ibsen's artistry means unlearning a consensus of commentary of over a century. Influenced by this commentary translators find much in his artistry irrelevant. An obstinate critical tradition insists Ibsen’s realist drama consists primarily of ‘problem plays’ - a form of Cultural Counseling Service on the social and psychological disorders of nineteenth century middle-class life.(6) The overwhelming preponderance, especially in the United States, of productions of A Doll House and Hedda Gabler over his other, equally as accomplished plays, suggest he is seen primarily as representative of the ‘progressive’ agenda of modern culture rather than as a consummate artist whose plays have survived in the theater because they are aesthetically compelling. Ibsen's art aspires to adequacy of consciousness, not to cultural correctness.
English-speaking audiences experience a less challenging Ibsen than do Norwegians who confront texts expressing an earlier phase of their language and culture, where their intrinsic strangeness is not erased. Reviewers who commend the easy accessibility of contemporary 'versions' of the plays assume easy accessibility is an essential feature of Ibsen’s art. That art, however, reflects a different vision of reality than ours. Ibsen went to heroic lengths to liberate his imagination from provincialism. He spent the greatest part of his creative career outside Norway in Italy and Germany and, I have claimed, linked his art to the most adequate and far ranging account of the human condition available in the philosophy of Hegel. In his imaginative response to this, Ibsen devised a multilayered, contrapuntal textuality in which a ‘supertext’ of cultural reference infiltrates the everyday text of realistic discourse, making him a pioneer of Modernist literature.
To translate these multilayered texts requires conveying its codes, resonances and evocations as well as its 'ordinary life’ significations. Ibsen's imaginatively rendered world reclaimed the cultural and spiritual accumulations of our heritage within the events and discourse of modernity. This theme is sounded early in St. John's Night (Sancthansnatten) in 1853 and themes and imagery of that play reappear, transformed, thirty years later in The Wild Duck. (7) Ibsen himself suggested the range and depth of learning required of an adequate modern literature. While at work on A Doll House, a play considered by many totally addressing "the problems of the present", he nevertheless wrote to a young writer, John Paulson: “You ought to make a thorough study of the history of civilization, of literature and of art… An extensive knowledge of history is indispensable to a modern author, for without it he is incapable of judging his age, his contemporaries and their motives except in the most incomplete and superficial manner.” (8)
Like Hegel, Ibsen reveals how the texture of modern life is saturated with perspectives infiltrated from the past. The archetypal dimensions of plays like Ghosts or The Wild Duck can be subliminally experienced by us because their cultural sources have been assimilated consciously and unconsciously throughout our lives, haunting us like the ghosts “as numerous as the grains of sand” that Helene Alving speaks of in Ghosts. (The Norwegian title Gengangere - those that go/walk again among us - more powefully conveys the idea of the risen dead). Out of this interplay emerges the unique density of Ibsen's realism where, in a series of epiphanies, a particular detail is illumined by universal implication. The archetypal is incarnated as a substantial contemporary world while the contemporary world in turn expands into archetypal significance. Both realistic text and archetypal supertext are essential for an adequate account of our humanity. Severed from its cultural memory, the contemporary world would not be fully human. The heritage of culture and history shapes our everyday lives and our global conflicts whether we are conscious of this or not. From the very beginning of his career Ibsen insisted that the mythic, historical and cultural pasts are buried within our consciousnesses and that it is the purpose of the poet to drag these to the surface from their sea depths “waking to conscious life that which lay dreaming and fermenting within the people..”.(9)
Metaphoric text and scenography of The Wild Duck:
The idea that a dramatic art as richly and humanly rendered as Ibsen’s is infused with archetypal and universal perspectives will incur protest from those who ‘know’ Ibsen was a social realist, a reformer or a psychoanalyst of fascinating characters and of ‘problem plays’. In The Ibsen Cycle (1975) I claimed that the twelve plays from Pillars of Society to When We Dead Awaken formed a single, tripartite cycle paralleling a sequence of dialectical ‘dramas’ of Consciousness (Spirit) set out in G.W.F. Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit. The Wild Duck, I claimed, inaugurated the second stage of the Cycle, following the second stage of Hegel’s sequence ‘ Spirit in Self-Estrangement’. Hegel’s sequence opens with one extraordinarily extensive historical/spiritual ‘gestalt’ that re-enacts (a) the human spirit’s loss of (Hellenic) freedom, (b) the Christian myth of the Fall, (c) the emergence of feudalism culminating (d) in the reign of the Sun King, Louis XIV. This single travail of the spirit emphasizes a painful duality or division between (i) an ‘unhappy consciousness’ of loss of freedom in this world and (ii) the spirit’s retreat, in compensation, to an ‘other’ world (jenseits) of Faith and mysticism. This condition of consciousness analyzed by Hegel is dualistic at all levels: cosmic, social and psychological. It divides into a world of unequal classes, presided over by a lord and master of this realm. Its imagination moves between the fallen reality it must inhabit and a fantasy world its imagination feeds upon. Hegel shows how this condition of dualism evolves, finally, into the post-feudal order of a sun king and his court presiding over a lower world of vassals. This sequence forms the longest and most intricate phase of spiritual evolution in the Phenomenology. It finds its parallel, I claim, in this most richly and intricately detailed of Ibsen’s plays, The Wild Duck. Ibsen’s conversion of this journey of our collective psyche into the intimate and humanly affecting world of The Wild Duck is a creative act of transformation as exhilarating as anything in literature. Not only does the play owe a debt to Hegel, it reveals awareness of "the history of civilization, of literature and of art… An extensive knowledge of history... indispensable to a modern author."
Through a dialogue of factual description of the past and present Ibsen infiltrates his poetic metaphors into the play.. A huge vertical landscape gradually emerges from the text: from the height of Høydal to the depths of the sea. Høydahl with its gradually depleting forests recollects the lost natural world of the dispossessed bear hunter, Old Ekdal Below these heights is the human community and beneath that the watery realm and "depths of the sea" with all the “devil’s mess’ that flourishes there to which the wild duck, wounded, dived to die. The vertical aspect of this landscape is repeatedically domestically in the Ekdal household; from the attic with its mysterious denizens and fallen family to the lower depths where Relling and his 'demonic' companion create the ‘devil’s mess’ of their squalid lifestyle. The hunter's lost natural world, too, is replicated in miniature in the Ekdal attic with its wild duck and domestic pigeons and rabbits: a devolution from free to unfree repeated in the human generations who regress from the old hunter, through his totally domesticated son to Hedvig whose approaching blindness makes her the least free. The pervasive dualism emphasized in Hegel’s account is notably present in the play's staging: in both the Werle and Ekdal settings through the emphatic division between foreground and background spaces. The foreground space is of work, the background of pleasure or escapist fantasy. This vertical and dualistic stage space, plausible for a realistic drama, is at the same time a metaphoric space for the expanding perspectives of the action. The play can be acted and staged as a convincing account of everyday life while simultaneously embodying a universal drama. In translation, the metaphoric dimension is as integral as the realism.
The counterpoint of realistic and archetypal texts:
A Son is summoned to descend to his Father’s feast where he discovers his mission; to set right the situation of his father’s victims, the legally disgraced and socially fallen Ekdals, by bringing Truth that will set them free. The Son discovers this family is under the influence of a Deceiver; a doctor who lives a dissipated life below the Ekdal apartment with a ‘demonic’ ex-student of theology. The Redeemer and the Deceiver have clashed before, up at Høydal. They now resume their quarrel, which leads to a human tragedy. This Deceiver in many ways serves the interests of merchant Werle; by keeping the Ekdals happy in their "fall" he also keeps them in non-rebellious vassalage, reconciled to alienated reality. Merchant Werle is the godlike figure in the world of the play: controlling his subjects and arranging their past, present and future. (Gregers tells Hjalmar “My father’s been a kind of Providence to you”.) The merchant controls their past by (possibly) ensnaring Old Ekdal leading to his imprisonment and disgrace, and then deceitfully foisting his pregnant mistress onto Ekdal’s son, Hjalmar. Werle’s payments sustain the family’s present circumstances, and his deed of gift to Hedvig determines their future. He is, indeed, the Providence in the play.
From this ‘archetypal’ perspective, the play reveals a richly evocative pattern of references, phrases and images. Already a suggestive archetypal pattern emerges of Father, Son, Salvation, and diabolic deception (with theological undertones). Gregers is not Christ, and Relling is not the devil: they are the unwitting avatars through whom we can glimpse archetypal shadows. The story seems a gloss on Galatians, IV “But when the fullness of time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of woman, made under the law, to redeem them that were under the law.” Christian archetypes are evoked through the absorbing human drama’s meticulously detailed domestic setting.
The fusion of these two dimensions of the play, the universal and the particular, the cosmic and the domestic, where each is contained within the other, accounts for its power over our imaginations. Rainer Maria Rilke, in a telling Christian reference, saw “something great, deep, essential. Last Judgment” (10) behind the human drama.
The fact that the Father has a Son comes as a surprise to one of the speakers in the opening dialogue of the play:
JENSEN:I never knew before that Merchant Werle had a son. (Aldrig vidste jeg før, at grosserer Werle havde nogen søn.)
We learn this Son always kept him himself away up at the Høydal works until this moment when he descends, to discover his messianic purpose. Reading 'bi-focally', hints of an archetypal Christian dimension already begin to appear in the text and these will be amplified as the play progresses.
Imagery from the Christian world then continues in the action and the visual and verbal texture of The Wild Duck from the entrance of the ‘fallen’ character of Old Ekdal at the beginning of the play to the final duologue of Gregers and Relling at the end. Hjalmar Ekdal’s tragicomic situation, wishing to be given each day his daily bread but unable to forgive those who trespass against him, who is led into temptation by Relling and disastrously delivered from evil by Gregers, seems an irreverent evocation of the paternoster.
Numerous places in the text recall the Christian story. There most likely is a pun in the very title of the play, Vildanden. The Norwegian for 'duck'`(‘and') and for spirit ('ånd') are typographically almost identical. In Nynorsk, in the definite form, they are identical, though pronounced differently, where a shift of tone changes the word's identity. The pun permits a trinity of Father, Son and Spirit (or Duck!) and where ‘vildanden’ may also pun as 'free spirit’. Even without the pun, the metaphor fits. The bird inhabited a region where as a free spirit (vildånden) it once flew but is now reconciled to its loss of the natural world. Birds function as symbols of the spirit in a number of Ibsen’s plays: e.g. Love’s Comedy, Brand, Peer Gynt. Ibsen's wordplay is an underrated aspect of his art.
Each of the Cycle plays has its‘ supertext’ of cultural sources giving each its distinct imagery. The Wild Duck is uniquely rich in echoes, imagery and direct quotations from Scripture. Gregers, who complains of being one who has to "carry the Cross" of his identity (når en har det kors på sig), insists his destiny (bestemmelse) is to be "the thirteenth man at the table" (At vaere den trettende mand tilbords) as at a perpetual Last Supper. When Gregers reproaches Hedvig for not sacrificing the duck he says "I can tell by looking at your it is not fulfilled (det ikke er fuldbragt) from the 'consummatum est' phrase of Christ on the Cross. Hjalmar employs the phrase from Galatians IV : " But soon the fullness of time will come" (Men nu kommer snart tidens fylde ). He complains of drinking a bitter drink (den beske drik) like Christ in Gethsemane; and, like Joseph in some morality plays, he suspects he is a cuckold. Gina, not given to metaphor, nevertheless comes out with the strange expression: “that blessed wild duck; there's been more than enough crucifying over her” (den velsignede vildanden, ja. Den gjøres der da krusifikser nok for. ) Old Ekdal describes the depths to which the wild duck dived as “all the devil's mess found below” (alt det fandenskab som dernede finds). In Act V. Hjalmar Ekdal, recovering from their orgiastic night out calls Relling "a fiendish tempter" (skaendige forfører ) and accuses him and Molvik of being "two scum filled with every vice" ( to avskum, så rige på alle laster ). Relling's location below the Ekdals, his role as a deceiver and long time opponent of Gregers, his dissolute nature, all suggest aspects of the conventional devil. Old Ekdal’s name (Oak dale) suggests pagan Man; his fall from innocence and disgrace evokes post-lapsarian punishment. The servant, Petterson, related how Ekdal was sentenced to hard labor or the penitentiary (bodsfaengslet).
We will find the seemingly ordinary in Ibsen’s art transfigured all through the play, once we grasp its procedure. Ibsen called his method ‘galskap’ (craziness) and the correspondence between the realist text of the play and its supertextual reverberations is far from solemn. There is the sardonic pairing, in Relling and his 'demonisk' companion, Molvik, of the traditional medieval duo of physician and theologian, ministering to body and soul; and the diabolic connotations of their orgiastic lifestyle that so appalled Hjalmar on his one visit to their realm below. There is (a) the Christian theme of communal sharing of meals in a play where such feasting is so central to the action; (b) the mystery surrounding the duck in its inner sanctum, disclosed with near reverence to Gregers;. (c) the animals as background to the humble Ekdal family recalling well-known Christian iconography; (d) the sacrificial death of Hedvig and (e) the image of her being carried off stage like the deposition from the Cross. The Hegelian underpinning to the play means that detecting these correspondences is not arbitrary ingenuity but can be located in rational intentions on the poet’s part.
This claim for Ibsen’s contrapuntal art will puzzle readers of translations of the plays where unsettling imagery usually is eliminated. Three examples of this process can serve as demonstration. They come from versions of The Wild Duck: one taken from the Oxford Ibsen translation by James Walter McFarlane (1960) (12) and two more recent, one American and one British - by Robert Brustein ( 1997) (11) and by David Eldridge (2005) (13) McFarlane’s text is a translation whereas Brustein’s and Eldridge’s are versions or adaptations. Each conveys some one instance or other of Ibsen’s imagery but then fails to connect it to the metaphoric verbal correspondences that make the single instance part of a carefully constructed pattern where the visual imagery, also, continually is infiltrating into the realistic scene perspectives from Christian myth:
Gregers: Father's been a kind of Providence for you. (Far har nok naesten vaeret som et slagsforsyn for dig, han)
McFarlane: My father seems almost to have acted the part of Providence for you.
Eldridge: My father does seem to have brought you some luck
Brustein: My father seems to have proven himself a real provider for you.
Gregers "when one must carry the Cross of being called Gregers" (når en har det kors på sig, at hede Gregers)
McFarlane But when you are burdened with a name like ‘Gregers”…
Brustein: Once you’re doomed to live with the name Gregers Werle.
Eldridge: The name Gregers Werle is a cross I have to bear.
Gregers: “I was expecting for certain that when I came through that door I’d be greeted with a transfiguring light shining from both husband and wife…” (så skulde der slå mig imøde et forklarelsens lys bade fra mand og fra husfru).
McFarlane: …I should be greeted by the light of radiant understanding on the faces of both husband and wife alike
Brustein: I expected..to see a husband and wife transfigured and radiant.
Eldridge: “I thought when I came through the door then I’d feel enlightened…”
Gregers: "I can tell by looking at your it is not fulfilled (det ikke er fuldbragt)
McFarlane: I can see from your face nothing’s been done.
Brustein: You haven’t done it yet..
Eldridge: it’s not been done…
Hjalmar “But soon the fullness of time will come” (Men nu kommer snart tidens fylde).
McFarlane: But soon we shall know what time in its fullness will bring, I should think.
Brustein: The day will come when…
Eldrige: “But things will change soon.”
Gina “that blessed wild duck; there's been enough crucifying over her. [Or, enough crucifictions have been made for her]” (den velsignede vildanden, ja. Den gjøres der da krusifikser nok for.)
McFarlane: That blessed wild duck! All the carrying-on there is about that bird.
Eldridge: That duck, you make such a fuss of it.
Brustein: That blessed wild duck! What a fuss you make over her.
Hjalmar (of Relling) “fiendish tempter" (skaendige forfører)
McFarlane: A shameless rake.
Brustein: You’re a bastard…you shameless seducer.
Eldridge …you bloody scoundrel
Ekdal: “all the devil's mess found below” (alt det fandenskab som dernede finds)
McFarlane: …all the other mess you find down there.
Brustein all the garbage down there
Eldridge some seaweed and whatever else they can find…
Relling: Oh, the devil believe it.. (Å fan’ tro det) (Untranslatable, but the diabolic reference should be kept.)
McFarlane: The devil it is.
Brustein Oh, fuck you
Eldrige: Damn you
Relling; This quack Savior (qvaksalver)
McFarlane: This quack here.
Brustein: This quack
Eldridge: (omitted).
None of these examples fails to convey the literal meaning or emotion; what each omits is the counterpoint woven into the text by the sequence of allusions Ibsen sustains. The translators appear anxious to bring Ibsen close to our mode of discourse rather than bringing us closer to Ibsen’s. They supply Ibsen’s characters with idioms, not in the original, that they think they would use in the contemporary world, resulting in dialogue reassuringly familiar but unrelated to the world Ibsen has imagined for them. As long as the expression suitable to the emotion, the actual verbal form - the imagery - seems unimportant.
There always is a temptation to discuss fictional characters and actions as if they existed in the real world, as independent agents subject to psychoanalysis, moral judgment and even speculation on their lives before and after they appear on the page or stage. Ibsen’s characters and situations are rendered so tangibly and deeply that audiences are not tempted to look beyond their vivid particularity for universal perspectives. The major dramatist will create characters and situations that are ‘realistically’ so compelling that their archetypal perspectives can be overlooked: but these are important dimensions to the total achievement.
While one perspective of The Wild Duck is the huge travail of the Christian spirit in the world, another is the deeply particular and delicate realism that, for example, can deliciously render the predicament of Hjamar Ekdal reluctantly retouching prints at the dinner table, agonizingly tempted by the door his father has cunningly left open to the loft but, aware, also of Gina,in the kitchen, keeping an eye on him; listening to the old man puttering about within and then shamefully foisting the work on Hedvig as soon as the coast is clear. Or the following scene where Gregers subtly probes the secret imaginative realm he shares with his sister Hedvig; of “the depths of the sea” where “time has stood still” and where a mysterious, sunken world waits to be reclaimed.
Ibsen's metaphors are carefully infiltrated into the language, events and objects of everyday existence where they open up alternative perspectives on the action. It is the audience, not the dramatis personae, who are to register these. Such a responsive audience was perhaps a project for the future. A note to the Realist Cycle’s ‘Epilogue’, When We Dead Awaken runs: “In this country it is only the mountains that give an echo, not the people.” (14) From one view Ibsen’s plays are persuasively realistic, made up of the characters and objects of our familiar world. Looked at steadily however, the plays’ imagery transforms into something quite different – and huger: like the effect of Gestalt imagery or the work of M.C. Escher in which contradictory perspectives or entities can be signified by the same image.
It is true that theater audiences can take in only so much complexity at a performance. Even when confronted by an original text, e.g. of T. S. Eliot's The Family Re-union they will reconstruct it in their imaginations in terms simpler than the dramatist intended. But this does not justify offering versions or adaptations that substitutes for the difficult play something more consumer-friendly. A complex poetic vision is bound to stretch dramatic form beyond an audience’s comfort level. Eliot was conscious of this, famously writing to Ezra Pound: “IF you can keep the bloody audience’s attention engaged, then you can perform any monkey tricks you like when they aren’t lookin, and it is what you do behind the audience’s back, so to speak, tht makes your play IMMORTAL for a while.” (15) The Family Re-union’s textual difficulties, similar to those of an Ibsen play, are essential to the conscientious intention and labor of the poet.
Ibsen ‘s strategy behind his ‘realistic’ method requires the reader or viewer to see alternative layers, or perspectives, archetypal presences from the past, behind the modern realistic events presented. From his very earliest critical writings Ibsen insisted on this nature of modern consciousness: that it was a continuum between the present and our total past. This past was still alive, with “its memories …within us fermenting quietly and uncertainly until the poet came along and put them into words.” (16) This, Ibsen insisted, includes forces from the pagan past that “continued to live in the consciousness and faith of the people and there they have continued to live until our own day.” (17) He never relinquished this vision and devised a revolutionary dramatic method for realizing it in the modern realist plays. Ibsen portrays modern consciousness as multilayered. This, I believe, is ‘the Ibsen Secret’ that makes his realist method so compelling.
Being baffled by a play is a better response than settling for a coherent but reductive explanation. As with listening to a great symphony, you are aware, watching or reading an Ibsen play, of more elements than you immediately can take in. I believe Ibsen found in The Phenomenology of Spirit a way of organizing and liberating his imaginative world and of expanding the possibilities of his art. This does not mean reducing the plays to dramatized Hegel. There are many sources and influences on Ibsen's poetic imagination, apart from Hegelian philosophy and interpreteters will be occupied for long discovering these. Nor do the plays expound some Hegelian ‘doctrine’. (Hegel himself was explicit that his philosophy does not attempt ‘edification’). It is possible to claim plausible intentions behind the structure and texture of the plays without converting them into Rorschach blots for games of free association. Reading and seeing his plays creatively is to be liberated into his imaginative project, finding surprises, new insights at every turn. For translators there lie supremely difficult challenges that will tax our creative ingenuity. While translating him we should try to make ourselves Ibsen’s contemporaries and not force him to become ours.
NOTES
1 T.S Eliot, ‘Euripides and Professor Murray’ The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London Methuen 1922) 75
2. For an account of Ibsen's large-scale project, see my study, The Ibsen Cycle: The Design of the Plays from Pillars of Society to When We Dead Awaken. (University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania University Press, 1992)
3. Georrge Bernard Shaw, Our Theatres in the Nineties (London: John Constable and Co., 1932) 197-98
4. Deconstructive criticism denies the validity of such a separation: but Jurgen Habermas, contra Jaques Derrida, argues persuasively for rigorously maintaining the distinction between the aesthetic (performative) and the illocutionary functions of language. 'On Leveling the Genre Distinction Between Philosophy and Literature', The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Twelve Lectures, (Cambridge, Massachusetts; The MIT Press, 1990) pp.185-210)
5.The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke ed. and trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York:Vintage 1989) 101
6. Cf. Joan Templeton ‘Advocacy and Ambivalence in Ibsen’s Drama’ Ibsen Studies, Vol VII. No.1 2007 pp.43-60.
7. Brian Johnston, To The Third Empire; Ibsen’s Early Drama, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1980) 61-63
8. Ibsen, Letters and Speeches ed. Evert Sprinchron, (New York: Hill & Wang 1964) p.181
9. Ibsen, ‘The Heroic Ballad and its Significance for Literature’ (1857) James Walter McFarlane. The Oxford Ibsen, (London: Oxford University Press, 1960) I. 678
cf. Brian Johnston, To The Third Empire; Ibsen’s Early Drama (Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press, 1980) pp.18-25
10. Selected Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, 1902-1926 trans. R.F.C. Hull (London: Quartet Books, 1988) 92
11] The Wild Duck. Translated and Edited by James Walter McFarlane. The Oxford Ibsen, (London: Oxford University Press 1960) VI.131-242
12. The Wild Duck; In a New Adaptation by Robert Brustein (Chicago: Ivan R Dee 1997]
13 Henrik Ibsen: The Wild Duck: In A New Version by David Eldridge (London: Methuen 2005)
14 Cf. The Oxford Ibsen, James Walter McFarlane. The Oxford Ibsen, (London: Oxford University Press,1977) VIII. 355
15. Lyndall Gordon: T.S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life, (New York: WW.Norton 1998) p 289
16. The Oxford Ibsen. I.672 [cf. Brian Johnston,To The Third Empire, Ibsen's Early Drama (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press 1980) pp.3-27
17. Ibid.:I. 676-77
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