Strindberg's Secondary Text

Strindberg's Secondary Text EGIL TORNQVIST Some fifty years ago Roman Ingarden launched his important distinction, with regard to drama, between Haupttext (primary text) and Nebelltext (secondary text). I By primary text Ingarden means everything in a play that is verbalized on the stage, i.e., the dialogue; by secondary text that which is verbalized only in the drama text, i.e., the stage and acting directions. To the reader, the secondary text usually covers a fairly small amount of the total play text; Bernard Shaw and Eugene O'Neill are the well-known exceptions to this rule. To the spectator, the situation is the reverse. As appears from Fischer-Lichte's classification scheme, the verbalized (spoken) elements in a stage performance constitute merely one semiotic code out of a total of fourteen.' The reader's primary text here, in fact, becomes the spectator's "secondary" one; in this sense the term "secondary text" may seem a misnomer. But this terminological inaccuracy is easily compensated for by the need to retain the same terms for related phenomena, so as to make drama text and performance text comparable. Whereas to Ingarden the secondary text seems to comprise primarily the stage and acting directions - he does not distinguish between the two - I shall here use the term in a wider sense, as inclusive not only of these categories 'but of ten others as well. In this wider sense the term secondary text will comprise everything in a drama text that is not enunciated on the stage, that is: ]. Name of author/pseudonym. 2. Year and place of publication. 3. Play title. 4. Subtitlelgenre indication. 5. Motto. 6. Preface/postscript. Strindberg's Secondary Text 7. List of drama/is personae. 8. Divisional markers (act. scene, etc.). 9. Cue designations (speech headings). 10. Indication of historical and/or geographical setting. I I. Stage directions. 12. Acting directions. Only in the second half of this list do we deal with verbal signs that in the performance text are transposed into visual - and possibly also aural - signs. Number 8 is a marker indicating curtain or black-outllights; number 9 is a marker indicating who is speaking. Since categories I through 8 would merely appear in the theatre program, if at all, it is meaningful to distinguish between three kinds of recipients: the reader; the spectator with a theatre program (or some other kind of preknowledge about the play text); the spectator without a theatre program/preknowledge . The distinction between primary text and secondary text has a certain affinity to the distinction between the author's and the characters' points-ofview in narrative texts. The secondary text would then correspond to the viewpoint of the objective, omniscient author-narrator, the primary text to those of the subjective dramatis personae. As we all know, directors, scenographers and actors frequently depart from the secondary text provided by the playwright. Occasionally this is true also of translators. The question then arises: What do they depart from? How significant is Strindberg's secondary text? In the following I shall try to indicate that there is more involved here than may at first sight appear, and that any transposition of a Strindbergian drama - whether a purely verbal one (translation) or an audio-visual one (stage production) - should take this into account. The polysemic nature of many play titles is evident - and difficult to retain in translation. While the Swedish Fordringsiigare leaves it suggestively open whether we are to deal with one or more creditors, the English translator must choose between Creditors and The Creditor.' His choice may have very definite consequences for directors of the play. Similarly, it is certainly of significance whether we render Dodsdansen (The Dance oj Death) as Totentanz - the traditional Gennan version - or as Der Todestanz. as Danse de Mort or as Danse Macabre. Occasionally a title has been directly related to the reference frame of the target language - as when BrOil och brOil (There are Crimes and Crimes, Crime and Crime, Crimes and Crimes) in Danish received the Kierkegaardian title Sky/dig - ikke sky/dig (Guilty - Not GUilty). How difficult it can be to trace a translated title back to its original source may be illustrated by...