Brecht: Our Contemporary?: Un/Timely Translation and the Politics of Transmission

In 1964, John Willett (1917–2002) published the first collection in English of Brecht’s theoretical and programmatic essays; Brecht on Theatre appeared in advance of the German publication in 1967 of Brecht’s collected (but not complete) works in twenty volumes, edited by his collaborator Elisabeth Hauptmann.¹ Even after the publication of the definitive German edition of Brecht’s works in thirty volumes (1988–98) and partial translation in Brecht on Film and Radio (2000) and Brecht on Art and Politics (2003), Brecht on Theatre continues to determine the meaning of Brechtian theory in the Anglo-American world, especially in the United States.² In contrast to the plays, which have been translated by several writers in the United States, from Eric Bentley to Ralph Manheim (the latter collaborating with Willett in Britain), but remain only intermittently in print, the first edition of Brecht on Theatre maintains its hold on the market largely because of the US publisher’s reluctance to retire the old edition, even after the British publication of the revised third edition listed above, but also because scholars cite the old edition as if it were the sole source of Brechtian theory, despite its provisional selection and flawed translation of some key terms, most notoriously the substitution of “alienation” for Verfremdung (by which Brecht meant the critical estrangement of alienation).³

To deepen the understanding of Brecht’s legacy, we need therefore to bring into focus the labor of translation and its often hidden impact on theatre theory, history, and biography, including Stephen Parker’s biography. Although the history of Brecht reception may be familiar to specialists, the labor of translation and other factors shaping transmission are often overlooked. Brecht’s uneven dissemination in English has many causes, including the still potent legacy of cold war hostility not only to Communist Party members, but also to alleged communists like Brecht, the neglect of translation in Anglo-American culture at large, and the concentration of publishing conglomerates that has exacerbated the scarcity of new translations. Contrasting English-speaking responses to Brecht with the more intensive reception elsewhere provides a more complex matrix within which to evaluate the biography and the critical collections of Brecht’s and Eisler’s critical comments that are under review here.

The contrast emerges strongly when we compare the Anglo-American realm with those countries especially in Europe where dissident leftist culture filled the space between US capitalism and Soviet communism in the years after World War II. In Italy, the authority earned by the Communist Party for its resistance against fascism and the commitment of bilingual theatre director Giorgio Strehler and publisher Einaudi facilitated Strehler’s staging of German leftist theatre as early as 1946. This environment also set the stage for Strehler’s production of Brecht’s most militant work, The Measures Taken, in 1954, before his landmark production at the Piccolo Teatro di Milano of The Threepenny Opera, which Brecht saw in 1955, as Stephen Parker notes in his biography (591).⁴ The reception in France was likewise vigorous. Writers and theatre-makers associated with the progressive journal Théâtre populaire—Roland Barthes, Bernard Dort, Geraldine Serreau, Jean Vilar, and others—may not have noticed Brecht’s first visit to Paris for the International Writers Congress for the Defense of Culture hosted by the Popular Front government in 1935. They nonetheless found in Brecht and the Berliner Ensemble, which visited Paris in 1954 and 1955 (Parker 583...