“General” Front & Back - the Royal Exchange Theatre

Henrik Ibsen
Peer & Åase from the
1962 Old Vic production
Avoid
anachronisms
Michael believes that
anachronisms are
destructive and has
“made it a rule never
to use any word that
would not have been
current English at
the time the play in
question was
written; apart from
the intrinsic
vulgarity of
anachronisms, any
attempt to update
dialogue will date
within a decade.”
Being confined to
“the 95% or 97% of
words which are
common to both
1899 and 1999” is
not too difficult a
task for the
Michael
Meyer
outlines the
key points for
a good
translation:
Know the
language
An obvious point,
but there is a fashion
for theatre companies
to commission
distinguished playwrights
to create versions of foreign
plays, working from a literal
translation. As Michael Meyer points
out, there can be flaws to this
approach:
“There are quite a lot of people who think you
can get someone bilingual to do a literal
translation and then kick it around, but that’s no
good. I know that because the first Ibsen I ever
translated, over forty years ago in 1955, was Little Eyolf
for BBC radio. I knew Swedish but I didn’t know
Norwegian and I got a bilingual lady to be my intermediary.
Although she was completely bilingual she couldn’t read a play.
Some years later, by the time I had learned Norwegian, I had to
revise the translation for publication and I had to alter almost every
line because she had missed the point entirely! With a literal translation of
someone like Ibsen, where there are very subtle nuances, all you get is an
approximation of the text.”
Be faithful to the play
translator since the
English language has
changed very little in the
course of the century. In
contrast, Michael
believes, in the one
hundred years since
Ibsen was writing, “the
Norwegian language has
changed as much as
English has in two
hundred years.” This
means that in the original
Norwegian, the language
of the plays can sound
extremely dated.
Norwegian actors like
Espen Skjønberg (who
plays the Button Moulder)
approaching Ibsen in
English often feel relieved
“to be acting Ibsen in a
language which doesn’t feel
old-fashioned!”
Translation Tips
The translation used in the Royal Exchange Theatre
production is by Michael Meyer, the
distinguished translator and biographer of
Ibsen and Strindberg. For director
Braham Murray, there was no doubt
about which translation to use:
“Michael Meyer did this translation
back in 1962 for Michael Elliott, a
former director of this
Michael believes that it is an advantage for a translator not to be a famous
playwright. “The most difficult thing, if the translator is a creative writer himself, is to
keep himself out of it, to resist leaving his thumbprint. Gogol once observed that
the ideal translation should be like a new window pane. One should not be aware
that it exists.”
Choose the dramatic medium with care
company. He is the best
translator of Ibsen. There
wasn’t much competition
really.”
With Peer Gynt, written in a subtle, rhymed verse, translators must choose
whether to use verse or prose. If they are using verse, what sort of verse
form is most suitable? Before approaching Peer Gynt, Michael had
confronted these same choices when tackling Ibsen’s Brand:
“The first decision I made was that one obviously can’t translate it
into rhymed verse because rhyme in English is death to any dialogue
except farce. I tried prose and it just didn’t work. The difficulty was,
and it is the same with Peer Gynt, that you move between the
sublime and the slightly frivolous. You have got to have a medium in
which you can move from one to the other without seeming
incongruous. I tried it in blank verse for a page or so, and that did
not work either. Then I remembered T.S. Eliot who is a poet and
playwright I much admire. I remembered the medium he had used in
The Family Reunion: a kind of free verse. He said he did not want the
audience to realise it was listening to verse. If they are conscious
that they are listening to poetry then the dialogue becomes a bit
like opera - they know it is not really happening. He used a free
verse, not always easily distinguishable from prose, but in
which one could be high-flown without seeming
incongruous. That is what I tried to do in both Brand
and Peer Gynt.”
Contemporary illustration of Ibsen
Q uotations are taken from Michael
Meyer’s memoirs, Not Prince
Hamlet (1989) and from a 1999
interview with the translator.