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Translation is hard
Says Una Ellis-Fermor
Ibsen is worth it
Penguin Classics: Hedda Gabler and Other Plays – Hedda Gabler / The Pillars of the Community / The Wild Duck
by Henrik Ibsen translated by Una Ellis-Fermor
Penguin 1950
Penguin Classics – how well we know thee. A purring culmination of comfortable erudition and a shared triumph over ignorance. And yet, the weak glue and acid paper of the 1970s renders the seemingly solid a-crumble in our hands; just as so much of our mitwelt threatens to crumble under closer inspection, be that in person or on stage.
Ibsen I will leave largely aside save to say that despite having had a very handsome Ibsen paperback of my own knocking around for years, and even worse numerous opportunities to see a staging, I never read nor saw – and that was my loss because there's a certain tight, painful quality to Ibsen that puts your teeth on edge that's right up my street (so thank you Joe for turning me Norwegian).
As for Una Ellis-Fermor: It's a name that seems familiar, one of those ACL figures from the 30s 40s 50s, yet upon investigation it appears that she is a relatively obscure academic and translator (more obscure than I imagined, that is), who wrote about drama and of course translated Ibsen for Penguin. And she has written a rather interesting introduction to this edition from the point of view of the translator:
"This is an attempt to translate into the English of today three plays written in Norwegian at the end of the nineteenth century." –
This of course is a problem that challenges the translator – the chronic. Do you translate into nowspeech, neutral speech, or chronically correct speech (the latter end requiring personal mental time travel)? Personally, I would say the text and the context of the translation itself will give you the answer. Another issue: "English which sounds natural to the modern reader and without so using the ephemeral as to put the translation itself out of date in ten years." One translation regret I have for a certain book is consciously refraining from using above a certain amount of the more modern sports jargon, which since publication has become well-established enough that it now feels it might have been the better choice – yet if in five years that jargon is itself replaced, maybe I will have made the right choice after all.
PREDICTION: In ten years', physical books will be restricted to exquisite art editions and zero circulation poetry chap books for a tiny cultural 'elite'. The overwhelming mass of readership will be restricted to e-devices which can be live updated by machine learning to keep up with an accelerating euphemistic treadmill. The word 'proton' is banned in 2028, leading to the wiping of Star Trek: Voyager from streaming services.
"This is primarily a reader's translation." –
As opposed to a performer's translation, I suppose. Come to think of it, I wonder how one would translate one set of poetry for reading, and the same set for performing.
"Stage dialogue [...] is more difficult in translation than original writing; and the superb ease and power with which Ibsen does it in his own language is at once a stimulus and a responsibility." –
Indeed, very tricky. When you have to say more with less.
"He was never, after the early years, content to contemplate the world as it is with the strange Shakespearian balance of eager affection, sympathy and non-critical detachment. His sympathies threw him headlong into criticism." –
"His concern here is with the function of truth in life." –
Sounds very uncomfortable.
"Beside the pattern given to the dialogue by this relation of speakers to speech, there is, in most mature plays of Ibsen, a running pattern of words that recur as imagery might do in poetic drama. It is very seldom that this recurrence can be reproduced. The sequences 'fag', 'fagmenneske', 'fagskriften', etc. can never be fully preserved without endangering the naturalness of the dialogue, but great loss is inflicted on every play by a translation that must perforce abandon some of them." –
I take it fag = Fach? Tricky, tricky. One has to find a way in these cases but of course in a play you would have much less room to manoeuvre ("Ah, the Journal of Technical & Interdisciplinary Studies, Tesman").
"Structure, characterisation and dialogue such as this are the despair of the translator, and perhaps the best justification for a translation is the hope that a proportion of its readers will think Ibsen worth the trouble of learning his language." –
I have caught myself thinking in the past Why not just learn the language to read it? – after all, learning a language well enough to read it is closer than you might think. But of course, everyone has things to do that don't necessarily include 'just' learning a language, even though they could, which is where translators come in. And as a translator, everything I translate will have its own approach but the same ambition: to be as good as the original. Which, logically, would make learning x superfluous. So it would simply be a case of individual readers x time taken to learn a language to calculate how many working hours translators save, or generate.
"Some of the specific problems that trouble a translator arise at those points where one language is more precise than the other." –
Quite a few words in German cover a category whereas English must specify a type. That does make it sometimes rather important to know what specifically is intended by x. Ellis-Fermor points out that Norwegians tutoyer. How dost thou make that work without adding footnotes, she asks? "If we have to choose between the run of the dialogue and the accurate presentation of one of its component sentences, the interests of the dialogue as a whole must win." Indeed, someone once said of an aircraft: Looks good, flies good. This is not the only issue Norwegian shares with German for the translator into English: "There are, moreover, in modern Norwegian as in modern German, several words which from time to time do the work of particles. To translate these into separate English words would overweight them." Well tough, innit. I find the key is to translate as many words as necessary.
And speaking of as many words as necessary, if you ever pick up this edition, it's worth reading the whole of Una Ellis-Fermor's smart and informative introduction. As for myself, I need to read Hedda Gabler.
MISS TESMAN. Yes, she certainly did have a tremendous lot of luggage...
© Bryn Roberts 2023
Published 19 June 2023
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