Synopsis The Selected Works of Henrik Ibsen by : Henrik Ibsen
The eleven volumes of this edition contain all, save one, of the dramas which Henrik Ibsen himself admitted to the canon of his works. The one exception is his earliest, and very immature, tragedy, Catilina, first published in 1850, and republished in 1875. This play is interesting in the light reflected from the poet’s later achievements, but has little or no inherent value. A great part of its interest lies in the very crudities of its style, which it would be a thankless task to reproduce in translation. Moreover, the poet impaired even its biographical value by largely rewriting it before its republication. He did not make it, or attempt to make it, a better play, but he in some measure corrected its juvenility of expression. Which version, then, should a translator choose? To go back to the original would seem a deliberate disregard of the poet’s wishes; while, on the other hand, the retouched version is clearly of far inferior interest. It seemed advisable, therefore, to leave the play alone, so far as this edition was concerned. Still more clearly did it appear unnecessary to include The Warrior’s Barrow and Olaf Liliekrans, two early plays which were never admitted to any edition prepared by the poet himself. They were included in a Supplementary Volume of the Norwegian collected edition, issued in 1902, when Ibsen’s life-work was over. They have even less intrinsic value than Catilina, and ought certainly to be kept apart from the works by which he desired to be remembered. A fourth youthful production, St. John’s Night, remains to this day in manuscript. Not even German piety has dragged it to light. With two exceptions, the plays appear in their chronological order. The exceptions are Love’s Comedy, which ought by rights to come between The Vikings and The Pretenders, and Emperor and Galilean, which ought to followThe League of Youth instead of preceding it. The reasons of convenience which prompted these departures from the exact order are pretty obvious. It seemed highly desirable to bring the two Saga Plays, if I may so call them, into one volume; while as for Emperor and Galilean, it could not have been placed between The League of Youth and Pillars of Society save by separating its two parts, and assigning Caesar’s Apostasy to Volume V., The Emperor Julian to Volume VI. For the translations of all the plays in this edition, except Love’s Comedy and Brand, I am ultimately responsible, in the sense that I have exercised an unrestricted right of revision. This means, of course, that, in plays originally translated by others, the merits of the English version belong for the most part to the original translator, while the faults may have been introduced, and must have been sanctioned, by me. The revision, whether fortunate or otherwise, has in all cases been very thorough. In their unrevised form, these translations have met with a good deal of praise and with some blame. I trust that the revision has rendered them more praiseworthy, but I can scarcely hope that it has met all the objections of those critics who have found them blameworthy. For, in some cases at any rate these objections proceeded from theories of the translator’s function widely divergent from my own—theories of which nothing, probably, could disabuse the critic’s mind, save a little experience of the difficulties of translating (as distinct from adapting) dramatic prose. Ibsen is at once extremely easy and extremely difficult to translate. It is extremely easy, in his prose plays, to realise his meaning; it is often extremely difficult to convey it in natural, colloquial, and yet not too colloquial, English. He is especially fond of laying barbed-wire entanglements for the translator’s feet, in the shape of recurrent phrases for which it is absolutely impossible to find an equivalent that will fit in all the different contexts. But this is only one of many classes of obstacles which encountered us on almost every page. I think, indeed, that my collaborators and I may take it as no small compliment that some of our critics have apparently not realised the difficulties of our task, or divined the laborious hours which have often gone to the turning of a single phrase. And, in not a few cases, the difficulties have proved sheer impossibilities. I will cite only one instance. Writing of The Master Builder, a very competent, and indeed generous, critic finds in it “a curious example of perhaps inevitable inadequacy.... ‘Duty! Duty! Duty!’ Hilda once exclaims in a scornful outburst. ‘What a short, sharp, stinging word!’ The epithets do not seem specially apt. But in the original she cries out ‘Pligt! Pligt! Pligt!’ and the very word stings and snaps.” I submit that in this criticism there is one superfluous word—to wit, the “perhaps” which qualifies “inevitable.” For the term used by Hilda, and for the idea in her mind, there is only one possible English equivalent: “Duty.” The actress can speak it so as more or less to justify Hilda’s feeling towards it; and, for the rest, the audience must “piece out our imperfections with their thoughts” and assume that the Norwegian word has rather more of a sting in its sound. It might be possible, no doubt, to adapt Hilda’s phrase to the English word, and say, “It sounds like the swish of a whip lash,” or something to that effect. But this is a sort of freedom which, rightly or wrongly, I hold inadmissible. Once grant the right of adaptation, even in small particulars, and it would be impossible to say where it should stop. The versions here presented (of the prose plays, at any rate) are translations, not paraphrases. If we have ever dropped into paraphrase, it is a dereliction of principle; and I do not remember an instance. For stage purposes, no doubt, a little paring of rough edges is here and there allowable; but even that, I think, should seldom go beyond the omission of lines which manifestly lose their force in translation, or are incomprehensible without a footnote.
