Bygmester Solness

“I consider it most important that the dialogue in the translations be kept as close to ordinary, everyday speech as possible. All turns of speech and inflections that belong only in books must be very carefully avoided in plays, especially in plays like mine, which aim at making the reader or spectator feel that during the reading or performance he is actually experiencing a piece of real life.”

– Ibsen in a letter to American translator Rasmus B. Anderson, September 14, 1882.

Ibsen’s advice seems simple enough. In practice, however, translation is a far-from-simple process. Idiom, rhythm, and tone are just a few of the obstacles any translator faces. Over the past century, translators and adapters from different countries and different eras have attempted to capture the “ordinary, everyday speech” of Ibsen’s realistic plays. Inevitably, differences in time and place have stamped the translations; and that stamp can either deny or grant an audience access into Ibsen’s work.

We remain indebted to William Archer for his pioneering efforts in translating Ibsen. The Master Builder was first published in Norwegian in December 1892. Within two weeks, Archer, along with his collaborator Edmund Goose, translated the play into English. Other foreigners quickly followed suit, and by the end of 1893, The Master Builder had been translated into French, German, Italian, and Russian. Archer’s almost immediate translation, however, allowed England one of the play’s first foreign performances; in February 1893, The Master Builder went up at The Trafalgar Square Theatre in London.

Unfortunately, Archer’s great enthusiasm for Ibsen didn’t match the quality of his translations. As Robert Brustein, the adaptor and co-director of the American Repertory Theater’s The Master Builder, says, Archer’s high-Victorian style was ill-suited for translating the nuances and colloquialisms of Ibsen’s language: “Archer brought all the Victorian starchiness and stiffness that was affecting the plays of the era to his translation of Ibsen. Ibsen’s prose is actually quite supple. In Norway, there had been a distinction between landsmaal and riksmaal; landsmaal was the language of the people, riksmaal was the more literary language, derived from Danish. Although Ibsen wrote in riksmaal, he incorporated some landsmaal into his writing. As Dante did with The Inferno, Ibsen revolutionized Scandinavian literature by loosening up the language and using colloquialisms.”More than a century later, one struggles to find any fluidity in Archer’s prosaic translations. Archer’s stilted language sounds flat and boring in the mouths of most actors. This is partly a problem of historical distance; spoken language changes relatively quickly, and many dramatic translations are outdated within a generation. But the reactions to the first performance of The Master Builder at Trafalgar Square suggest that Archer’s translations were equally disappointing a century ago. The newspapers lambasted the play, and many critics responded in particular to the language of the play. The Evening News complained: “A feast of dull dialogue and acute dementia . . . the most dreary and purposeless drivel we have ever heard in an English theatre.” And The England echoed: “Same old dullness prevails as was the feature of his previous prosy pratings.” Despite its negative reception, Archer’s collection of Ibsen’s plays was accepted as the standard English translation. By the middle of the twentieth century, however, actors and audiences could no longer tolerate Archer’s archaic translations. The passage of time had made Archer’s translations even more obsolete and uncomfortable in the mouths of actors. Not surprisingly, one of the first to retranslate Ibsen, Eva Le Gallienne, was an actress. Having appeared as Hilde Wangel in 1924, Le Gallienne deplored the stodgy Victorianism of Archer’s translations. In 1950, Random House published her Six Plays by Henrik Ibsen, which included The Master Builder. Besides removing the Victorian veneer, Le Gallienne, who had emigrated from England to America in 1915, wrote one of the first specifically American translations. (John Arctander was the first American to translate the play in 1893.) In 1965, Rolf Fjelde, a native-born American of Norwegian descent, published his complete volume of Ibsen’s plays. Although more careful than Le Gallienne not to veer far from Ibsen’s original, Fjelde sometimes found it necessary to avoid literal translation in order to find equivalents in the background of American culture. Until recently, Le Gallienne and Fjelde remained the only two major American translators of Ibsen. In 1986, Nicholas Rudall wrote a translation of The Master Builder for performance at the University of Chicago. The translation shortens many of the sentences to make the play more speakable and to bring forth a rapid, light, humorous tone.

But not only Americans have tackled Archer’s legacy. In the 1960s, a number of important British translations appeared. James McFarlane served as the chief translator and editor for the Oxford edition of Ibsen’s plays. Almost simultaneous with McFarlane’s work, Michael Meyer, the famous Ibsen biographer, published his complete collection of Ibsen’s plays. Like the American translators, Meyer was eager to restore Ibsen’s colloquialisms to the plays. He aimed to retain Halvard Solness’s gruff speech and his lines of awkward eloquence with Hilde. But Meyer’s translations present problems for contemporary American audiences for two reasons. Like most British translations, the Anglicisms in Meyer’s translations sound somewhat stuffy and aristocratic to many Americans. Also, Meyer only uses words that were current in England when Ibsen wrote his play. Although this may be more historically accurate, such a translation distances the actors from the language they speak.

Robert Brustein’s adaptation of The Master Builder attempts both to contemporize and to Americanize Ibsen’s language. Brustein, who has adapted plays by Chekhov, Ibsen, Pirandello, and Strindberg, believes that plays must be continually retranslated: “Every age has to bring its own idiosyncrasies to adaptation of a work. When you’re adapting, you have to imagine how the actor would say a line, how a line would sit in the mouth of an actor. If you’re writing for specific actors, all the better. You have to create a style that would not be out of place in the mouth of a contemporary person. There must be a connection between the actor and the audience.” In Brustein’s adaptation, the sentences are relatively short, losing the dry, soporific quality of Archer and gaining a tempo and rhythm that is familiar to contemporary American ears. Part of Brustein’s goal as an adaptor is to excavate the subtextual poem in Ibsen’s play: “I don’t think Ibsen was a realist; I think he was always a poet. I found buried in The Master Builder the same poem that I did in Ghosts, which is that this is a haunted house; I found a ghost motif in this play–the ghosts of the twins who died in the fire, ghosts of lost ideals, lost love. As an adaptor, I’ve added a few things to reflect this poem. For example, the rocking chairs that are on stage at the end of the second act slowly and inexplicably begin to rock–these are the remains of the children. Kate (Whoriskey, Bob’s co-director) has a marvelous notion for a house that is charred; the fire has somehow left its ashes everywhere. These ashes will be falling like rain throughout the entire third act. The flowers that Mrs. Solness waters are dead–gray, scraggly, dead plants with no leaves–and what comes out of her watering can are ashes.”

Brustein refers to his work as an “adaptation,” and there is a difference between translation and adaptation. Generally, a translation is written by someone fluent in the original language. An adaptation like Brustein’s is often completed with the help of a native speaker. Adaptors give themselves the liberty of straying a bit further from the literal translation. But the line between translation and adaptation is often fuzzy. Any translation is itself an interpretation, marked by its author’s time, place, and idiosyncrasies. As Brustein says: “There is an old saying: traduttóre traditore–the translator is a traitor. The best a translator can do is to try to remain faithful to the spirit of the text; and one way to do that is to violate the letter, because the letter doesn’t always carry the spirit into another language.” This inevitable interpretation can be exciting, for it offers a fresh perspective on a play–a perspective achieved only through foreign eyes and ears.

Ryan McKittrick is a first-year dramaturgy student at the A.R.T./MXAT Institute for Advanced Theater Training.