Adapting Translation for the Stage

Geraldine Brodie, Emma Cole

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781138218871
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315436791
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Translating & Interpreting

Translating for performance is a difficult – and hotly contested – activity.

Adapting Translation for the Stage presents a sustained dialogue between scholars, actors, directors, writers, and those working across these boundaries, exploring common themes and issues encountered when writing, staging, and researching translated works. It is organised into four parts, each reflecting on a theatrical genre where translation is regularly practised:

• The Role of Translation in Rewriting Naturalist Theatre
• Adapting Classical Drama at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century
• Translocating Political Activism in Contemporary Theatre
• Modernist Narratives of Translation in Performance

A range of case studies from the National Theatre's Medea to The Gate Theatre's Dances of Death and Emily Mann's The House of Bernarda Alba shed new light on the creative processes inherent in translating for the theatre, destabilising the literal/performable binary to suggest that adaptation and translation can – and do – coexist on stage.

Chronicling the many possible intersections between translation theory and practice, Adapting Translation for the Stage offers a unique exploration of the processes of translating, adapting, and relocating work for the theatre.

Section 1
The role of translation in rewriting naturalist theatre

Chapter 1
The revolution of the human spirit, or ‘there must be trolls in what I write’¹

May-Brit Akerholt

In his ground-breaking and highly influential series of lectures, published as Main Currents of Nineteenth Century Literature, the Danish scholar and writer Georg Brandes urged artists to deal with their own society and explore the problems and trends of their contemporary world. When Henrik Ibsen had read the first volume, he wrote a letter to the author, saying: ‘A more dangerous book could never fall into the hands of a pregnant writer. It is one of those books which set a yawning gulf between yesterday and today’ (1972: 110).

Ibsen always believed that one’s environment ‘has a great influence on the forms in which the imagination creates’ (1870: np). In a speech to students he claimed: ‘What a writer experiences, his contemporaries experience with him’ (1874b: np). To translate his drama, you have to have an understanding of where it springs from and the rules it both was built on and shattered.²

In my career as translator and dramaturg I have entered into the worlds of Ibsen through research as well as practice. As an academic and lecturer I have explored how to unlock the original works and recreate them in a new linguistic habit in a different cultural environment. I have acted as dramaturg on most of the first productions of my own translations, thus been part of the artistic team which has found ways to express the spirit of the original text, its poetic and dramatic core, in a new language and environment, and in a borrowed but fitting dress.

This chapter serves to introduce the following four chapters on the translation and adaptation of naturalistic drama from the mid-nineteenth century, and provide an assessment of the translatorial and dramaturgical issues involved in staging the text and subtext of Ibsen’s drama in particular. In his discussion, Howard Brenton maintains that we can take the question of naturalism back to Shakespeare and forward to Genet, and that the aim of all writers is to make theatre ‘real’. This was Ibsen’s aim, too, as he said in many letters and articles; although to him, this meant challenging current traditions. While exploring the different forms of naturalism practiced by Ibsen and Chekhov, partly due to differences of age and culture, Philip Ross Bullock points to interesting similarities in their works, such as strong and complex female characters being given prominent roles, and middle-class families under financial and social pressure. He also discusses how scenes in some of Chekhov’s plays echo scenes in certain works by Ibsen in his argument about ways in which contemporary sources influence naturalist drama.

In Ibsen’s time, to reveal the characters on stage in an authentic, bourgeois living room, with all its homely and intimate touches, was an innovative, even daring concept. But many critics failed to realise how his designs were part of portraying a wider society with complex issues, reflecting the realism of the world it portrayed rather than an artificial society whose characters were mouthpieces rather than human beings. Similarly, as Bullock points out, Chekhov’s orchard symbolizes social and psychological aspects of contemporary life. Ibsen’s plays opened up a new form of theatre, a naturalism which stripped the characters of their privacy and included the audience in the drama. And although productions often push the idea of a main character, such as Nora, Hedda, or Mrs Alving, each of Ibsen’s plays is an ensemble piece, each character has a specific and important role in the way the action is brought alive on stage.³

Ibsen’s poem A Rhyming Letter reflects the dawn of this reform, if not a revolution, in the art world from the middle of the nineteenth century:

I turn and stare toward the faint light of day.
But a voice from below comes whispering to me.
Words said midway between unsound sleep and nightmare:
We are sailing with a corpse in the cargo!

(1875: np)

The much-quoted last line refers to all the heavy things of the past stopping Norway from facing the faint light of day. A new hero is emerging; the intellect is taking over from the perpetual heroic figures of the theatre: love and poverty, or rather, abundance versus indigence. Now human thought, with all its sufferings and pleasures as it struggles to understand the physical world in relation to the inner world, becomes the protagonist of contemporary life. It opened the way for the development of later movements. In fine arts, Munch’s The Scream (1893) hung in space like inner angst taking concrete form; a painting which both reflected and influenced the development of a move away from realism towards expressionism in the theatre. As well, the rise of photography alleviated writers’ need to reproduce naturalistically, and Schönberg’s atonalism began to influence new directions in music.

The way Ibsen’s plays broke the glass ceiling of the conventions of melodrama and la pièce bien faite was not to the liking of many of his contemporaries: ‘There wasn’t a single declamatory phrase, not a drop of blood was shed, not even a single tear fell. Not for an instant was the tragic sword lifted, not to mention the melodramatic slaughter-axe’, said an early critic of A Doll’s House (Bentley 1946: 91). And throughout the twentieth century, British translators and directors failed to interpret the original plays’ dramaturgy and theatricality and continued to turn his plays into drawing-room drama, thus removing them from the very qualities that broke the mould of his contemporary theatre. Peter Brook points to the fact that the ‘liveliest of theatres turns deadly when its coarse vigour goes […] And Brecht is destroyed by deadly slaves’ (1972: 86). He could have included English Ibsen translations.

Michael Meyer claims that A Doll’s House ‘presents fewer problems to the translator than any other of Ibsen’s plays […] It is simply and directly written, and for nearly all the time, the characters say what they mean, instead of talking at a tangent to their real meaning’ (1980: 105). This portrays a surprising ignorance of the meticulous care Ibsen took in constructing his dramatic language, and the level of complexity and expressivity which makes this play – indeed, his whole canon – both difficult and challenging to translate.

What is often ignored both in translations and productions is the way Ibsen creates a dramatic language for Nora that subtly undermines her doll-image; in a word here and there, a suggestion of another level, and often unconsciously on the part of the characters. The first scene establishes the relationship between the couple, and cleverly points to certain aspects of their characterisation. From the beginning, Nora’s language challenges the initial image an audience may get of her in this first scene, and Torvald’s language strengthens his, and this has an effect on the unfolding drama. Nora’s language conveys a subtext that hints at an underlying strength, or resolve, incompatible with the image Torvald has of her. If this underlying sense of resistance fails to be present from the beginning, the action may be interpreted as that of a doll-wife suddenly turning feminist; a criticism often levelled at the play and/or productions of it. The idyll the Helmers believe is built on a strong foundation, is an allegorisation of their lives together, constantly undermined by the dialogue, as well as the irony of the play’s title: ‘A Doll-home’ (Et dukkehjem); a neologism which has been mistranslated as A Doll’s House since its first English version.⁴

But dialogue is only one part of dramatisation. Ibsen is extremely accomplished in inventing a theatrical language in which the visual and the verbal complement each other. There are no stage directions or other indications that Nora behaves like a child or ‘doll’ in the first scene. She ‘hums contentedly’ and sneak-eats the special treat she has bought for herself. But her actions and reactions change once Torvald comes out of his office. According to the stage directions she is now constantly active, she shines with expectancy, she sulks, she moves close to her husband, turns away from him, shows him parcels, hides something from him; her movements, choreographed as a kind of secret dance, combine with dialogue to reveal both her state of mind and the nature of their relationship.

The Helmers are playing a well-established, intimate game for which they have specific rules. The first scene between them establishes the nature of this game; an adult flirting game, yet with an almost nursery-rhyme quality and lilting, playful rhythm, enhanced by the repetition in the structure of Torvald’s opening lines.

HELMER: (From his study) Can I hear a skylark chirping out there?

NORA: (As she opens some of the parcels) Yes you can.

HELMER: Can I hear a squirrel rustling out there?

NORA: Yes!

HELMER: When did the squirrel come home?

NORA: Just now. (Puts the bag of macaroons in her pocket and wipes her mouth)

(Ibsen 1999a: 17–18)

However, Nora’s impatient replies ‘Yes!’ and ‘Just now’ may suggest she wants to get on with it, stop wasting time.

In the first production of my translation, the director and I made sure of marking the rhythm, as well as enhancing the secrecy of Nora putting the bag of macaroons in her pocket by the swift gesture with which she wipes her mouth before straightening up and asking Torvald to come in; everything emphasising that there is deception as well as intimacy in this relationship.⁵ I also made up a new word, ‘playbird’ for Torvald’s pet word for Nora, which is a version of another of Ibsen’s neologisms, ‘spillefugl’. ‘Fugl’ means simply bird, but the verb ‘spille’ is polysemous – depending on the context, it can mean ‘play’, ‘act, perform’, ‘pretend’, ‘gamble’, and in Ibsen’s time, ‘waste’ was still a valid meaning. Although ‘playbird’ loses some of the meanings, it still made the actors conscious of how just one word strengthened Torvald’s ambiguous attitude to Nora: one of simultaneous pride and reproach, emphasized later when he reprimands her for being ‘frivolous’, another word with a flirting undertone. It gave the actors an ironic subtext to play with, while not showing an awareness of it; it gave Torvald ways to offer the word to Nora, and Nora ways to receive it. Choices made by other translators for these two words, such as ‘featherbrain […] scatterbrain’ (Ibsen [Watts] 1965b: 148); ‘spendthrift […] scatterbrains’ (Ibsen [Fjelde] 1965a: 44); ‘squander-bird […] spendthrift’ (Ibsen [Meyer] 1980: 24); ‘Madam Extravagant […] Scatterbrain!’ (Ibsen [Ruddall] 1999b: 12–13) show how they have ignored Ibsen’s dramatic use of them, merely making Torvald’s attitude one of contempt. Ruddall undermines any ambiguity ‘Madam Extravagant’ might have evoked by following it with ‘scatterbrain’. In a production, Nora would have to respond, visually and/or verbally, to Torvald’s insults, whether by accepting or ignoring them.

Judith Beniston, in this section, provides a different argument concerning aspects of mistranslations in discussing how dissimilar traditions of professional titles in the medical profession in German and English may lead to a lack of ‘finer hierarchical distinctions’, as well as a change in tone in the original dialogue. This again, she argues, may cause a misreading of the character and the particular situation to which they respond.

All the elements of drama and performance – the actor’s voice and idiosyncrasies, the implications of what a character is saying, and to whom he or she is saying it, the effect it has on the other characters – can only come together in the rehearsal room. That is where the subtext can become part of the performance – this complexity of thought behind the actual words, this otherness that adds dimension to the words, that elusive something that makes a play more than the simple telling of a story. I learnt one lesson the hard way during the rehearsals of Ghosts.⁶ In a scene between Mrs Alving (played by Julia Blake) and Osvald (Robert Menzies), Blake was standing in an upstage corner of the rehearsal room, with Menzies facing the audience with his back to her:

MRS ALVING: Osvald – you are thinking of leaving me!

OSVALD: Hmm – (sighs heavily) I’m not thinking of anything. I can’t think of anything! (In a low voice) I’m doing my best not to.

We rehearsed the scene again and again, and each time Menzies kept his back to Blake. Finally he turned to the director Neil Armfield and said, ‘I want to contact my mother. But the line doesn’t allow me to’. I checked the original and I realized the actor’s instinct was right; I had overlooked an ambiguity in the original line, which suggests he avoids thinking, while also implying he won’t leave her. My version remained a statement, with no resonance beyond the words’ lexical sense, with no intention or dramatic purpose embedded in it. I suggested that Robert should try ‘I wouldn’t do that’. With this small change, he turned impulsively to her, and a moment was established between mother and son (Ibsen 1999c: 122). The impetus for the Gestus was now planted in the text. So access to the original text is an important reason for the translator acting as a production’s dramaturg.

Tom Littler points to a similar interconnection between text and production in his chapter about directing Brenton’s translation of Strindberg’s Dance of Death. He, too, believes that the act of translation should consider all aspects of the production, including the actors’ voices and characteristics.

Like Littler, I believe that keeping the voices and performance styles of actors (as well as the production concept and design) in your head can greatly assist the translator in making choices. The language becomes anchored in a specificity whose ultimate result is universality – perhaps because there is an authenticity which cannot otherwise be achieved? When working on the translation of Ghosts, Armfield suggested to me and my co-writer, playwright Louis Nowra, that we should keep in mind the idiosyncrasies of Robert Menzies, pointing out that this actor was capable of putting a wealth of emotions into asking for a glass of water. This, combined with Osvald’s at ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Foreword
• Introduction
• SECTION 1 The role of translation in rewriting naturalist theatre
• SECTION 2 Adapting classical drama at the turn of the twenty-first century
• SECTION 3 Translocating political activism in contemporary theatre
• SECTION 4 Modernist narratives of translation in performance
• Afterword
• Index