A matter of time

Translating the spirit of Ibsen

by Bill Rodriguez

What a sensible idea. It makes you wonder why foreign plays aren't done this way more often: Instead of restricting yourself to one version of a much translated play, look at several and arrive at your own version of the story.

That's exactly how the current production at Brown University Theatre, Henrik Ibsen's Ghosts, has been handled. Good-bye tunnel vision of a single translator's point of view, hello panoramic perspective. Or so goes the theory.

Of course, care must be taken to prevent the play from becoming a patchwork quilt of disparate tones and prose styles. That was the job of the director, Ed Shea. He's on leave as a company member at Trinity Repertory Company, where he performed in a 1994 production of Moliere's The Miser that was also assembled eclectically, under Richard Jenkins' direction. Shea, 40, will begin studying at Brown full-time in the fall, going for his BA.

Shea went for a multi-translation approach because he was dissatisfied with every version of the play that he read. "I looked at a few of them and none of them really jumped out at me. They were all translated by English writers and so they were all Anglicized, with English expressions and characters sounding Dickensian and Shavian," he said.

Shea recruited Joel Tompkins, a Brown senior with an academic concentration in comparative literature. His primary language of study is Swedish, which is close enough to Ibsen's Norwegian for him to go to the primary text with a glossary and get a good sense of the original intent in tricky passages.

Tompkins sounded quite forgiving of the fjord-wide divergences among translations. "It's always amazed me about translation how debate shapes the words," he said. "Obviously, every translation comes pretty close to contain the meaning, but the sense of the text, the political sense, the literary sense, is shaped by the time. There's nothing about 19th-century Anglicanisms that necessarily say what Ibsen was writing more accurately, in my opinion, than what we've been coming up with."

As their core version they used a 1911 interpretation by M. Farquarson Sharp, because it is in public domain. Shea would now and then refer to four other translations he had familiarized himself with, which ranged in date from 1911 to 1968 and in style from slavishly literal to florid. But Tompkins -- who is credited as adapter in the program -- had the most informed word in rehearsals, playing Ibsen's surrogate. Tompkins was also there, said the director, to help the actors express things more succinctly.

Sitting next to Shea in a classroom below Leeds Theatre, where the play was in rehearsal, Tompkins said that the translations' variety intrigued him. "It's interesting. It makes me see the texts almost as inconsistent. Because one passage they'll seem very brash, very modern, very casual. And in another they'll be so stilted."

He noted that the language of morality was perhaps the most varied, shifting from translator to translator. "There are so many references to fallen men and fallen women, temptation, sin, sluts and whores," Tompkins said. He gave as an example the old carpenter Engstrand. "He uses so many religious curses that are so much more severe, not only now in Scandinavian languages but then."

To convey Engstrand's dialogue as "harsh and simple" as did Ibsen, Tompkins said that they took a reference he made to "the Devil's rain" and changed it to "the Devil's piss." Shea is quite comfortable taking such liberties with the text. "The surprise is how much of this has come out of improv. I wasn't really prepared for the amount that the actors were going to bring to it themselves. They are the glue that brings all of these pieces together," he said.

Between having a choice of translation to draw from for a scene and the freedom, within limits, to improvise, have the Ghosts rehearsals spoiled the actors for working with a rigid text? "No, because at a certain point you want to go back to the rigid text anyway. If whatever text you've chosen, whether this free-floating text or not, you still need to go back to that as an actor," said Annie McNamara, who plays the central role of Mrs. Alving. She is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Brown, focusing on dramatic fiction. "But now when I go into a rehearsal process that has a rigid text, it could make me remember to do the improvisation on my own or find out if there are other translations."

What about the potential problem, with this approach, of Americanizing the characters too much? It's one thing to adjust a role for your audience, so they can relate to it, but Mrs. Alving was not, after all, a Modern Mom.

"It's a big problem that we've been talking about all along. We brought it up in rehearsal the other day: `Why are we having 19th-century dress and altering the translation?' " Tompkins said. "I don't see any incongruence there. I've never seen us as approaching this as a modernization. Any time idioms have come up that bring up too much 1990s speech, they've been cut, because they don't feel right.

"I've been seeing it more as trying to place the language in a non-time. In a time that comes across for its simplicity and truthfulness but is not hidden behind the tricks of these English translations. I don't know if they more accurately portray a 19th-century woman than this will."

McNamara, as a 20th-century woman, remarked on how women today are still controlled and structured, which can bridge the on-stage sensibility with that off-stage. "Perhaps it's not by conventional society telling them they need to get married but by every piece of media. If you turn on any TV it feels like that's the corset. There it is, pulling you in -- it doesn't matter what year it is. Until you're not doing that, you are still a 19th-century woman, no matter who you think you are."

And that's the ultimate matter for the actors to convey to us, a tough task no matter how many translators have come between them and Ibsen.

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