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Love's Comedy & Peer Gynt
Introduction by Brian Johnston

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Peer Gynt

THE CHOICE OF RHYMED AND UNRHYMED VERSE
In translating Love's Comedy, I felt it important to follow Ibsen's own rhyme patterns throughout. The play inhabits a single, restricted and uniform social setting within a shared linguistic circumference. Each character served to sustain this uniform medium; there were no dimensions of reality outside this mannered and uniform milieu. Peer Gynt, on the other hand, is an extremely varied text, with shifts in meter and rhyme patterns, with extensive and global changes of scene and, above all, of 'dimensions' of reality, from peasant realism, to wild natural settings, to supernatural realms of fantasy and fairy tale, to cynical entrepreneurial opportunism (in Act IV) to an extravagant Arabian setting, to an insane asylum in Cairo, and so on. Each of these dimensions of realty has its own speech pattern, in own 'tone' and it's this variety of texture that the translator must try to recreate. Whereas Love's Comedy is a drama of verbal confrontation where hearts are broken under the polished surface of polite discourse, as in a novel by Jane Austen; Peer Gynt is a more 'Byronic' drama of violent transitions, of huge upheavals and of disruptions of any attempt at a uniform discourse. The language of the play never settles into a style of politeness or social conformity or of any established norm of reality. .Not only was there no need, therefore, to sustain a uniform poetic method; there was every inducement to find, in translation, an equivalent for the linguistic variety of the original.

One of the major divisions of consciousness in Peer Gynt is that of the 'real' world in all its variety from peasant earthiness to Arabian exoticism; and, totally different, that of the world of fantasy, the supernatural. Ibsen's play employs rhyme throughout. For the original audience, more familiar with the folklore traditions he is drawing upon, the transitions from reality to folktale fantasy would be easily apparent and would not need any 'signaling'. I decided that for a modern audience, more distanced than Ibsen's public from traditions of folklore and legend, it would be helpful to keep these fantastic sequences, (and the equally as bizarre Cairo madhouse scene) in rhyme in contrast to the blank verse of the rest: suggesting an area of the imagination deriving from the fairy tales and folk tales of Peer's childhood which, in a form of recidivism, continually erupts into Peer's adult consciousness. . Peer's mother, Åse, describes how she and Peer would console each other with this legendary past:

…we would retreat into fairy tales,
You know, princes and trolls and all kinds of beasts…

and it seems natural to think these exist as an imaginative reservoir within Peer's mind - or a 'dimension' into which he is prone to drift. It could act as a subtle signal to the audience that these sequences are or a different order of experience than the 'real life' sequences. Therefore, I let the rhymed passages first appear in Act II Sc. IV where Peer, "wild, distraught" after the encounter with the three herd girls, is about to enter his own Unconscious in the troll sequence; he actually falls unconscious at the conclusion of this long speech in which, unlike his earlier daydreaming (in Act I Sc. ii), he exhibits an inability to separate reality from fantasy. In later sections, where he struggles to combat this tendency to fantasy (e.g. III.i.) I make his language slide in and out of rhyme, to express his vacillating condition.

Surreal fantasy is the condition of the inmates of the Cairo madhouse at the conclusion of Act IV, where Ibsen's own meter and rhyme scheme radically change; the speeches of Huhu, the Fellah and Hussein are virtuoso set pieces where the rhymes suggest a controlling, insane, hermetically sealed (solipsist) condition of the imagination: the speeches need to be reeled off maniacally, somewhat like Lucky's speech in Waiting for Godot. The imaginative power of Act V, Peer's Homecoming, which to my mind is perhaps the finest imaginative sequence in modern drama, gains its poetic richness from the continual intersection of realistic and fantastic (rhymed) sequences. The continual reversion to rhymed fantasy, I hope, creates an 'eerie' aspect to these sequences, as a continually present, menacing dimension that always threatens totally to take over Peer's consciousness. The image, in Act V., of the disillusioned old man summoning layer after layer of his past identity for a devastating re-collection of dispersed identities, is an existential metaphor of ultimate non-identity that looks forward to Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape.

It is the multi-dimensionality and huge poetic range of Peer Gynt - of conscious and unconscious, realistic and fantastic, humdrum and insane, flippant and soul-searching, cynically superficial and humanly profound levels - that distinguishes this play's poetry from that of Love's Comedy. It is the difference, almost, between Classic and Romantic styles - except that Ibsen's most Romantic love poetry is found within the almost neo-classical restraints of Love's Comedy while Peer Gynt, though it employs so many of the metaphors of Romantic poetry: the majestic natural settings, the outlaw rebel-hero, the journey into the grotesque, is more a parody, even a negation, than an endorsement, of the rhetoric of Romanticism.

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