Silesian into Scots: Gerhart Hauptmann's The Weavers

Silesian into Scots: Gerhart Hauptmann's The Weavers BILL FINDLA Y It is commonplace in British theatre to find translations described as "translated by," "adapted by," "in a version by," or "from the original by." Such credits can be appropriately descriptive but they are also often used in an interchangeable and inexact manner. This is a reflection of the pragmatic attitude toward theatre-making that is characteristic of British theatre, where, so far as translation is concerned, the finished script is more imponant than preoccupations about the process of achieving it. It is a reflection, too, of the reality that there are relatively few playwrights who are fluent in a given foreign language, so theatres often supply a literal translation from which the commissioned writer fashions a perfonnance script. The word "translation" therefore tends to be used in a relaxed and semantically loose manner in British theatre. Little has been written from the practitioner's perspective about "translating " a play by means of a literal English translation. My discussion will therefore offer some insights into the process with reference to my experience of preparing a Scots dialect version of Gerhart Hauptmann's The Weavers for Dundee Repertory Theatre (staged in Dundee and Glasgow in November 1997). My discussion will also implicitly address the assumption some hold that the stage translator, in contrast with the academic translator, has little use for contextual and critical research. For me, these can play an important role in shaping one's motivation in embarking on a "translation" and, as regards language choices, one's method of approach. l. MOTIVATION My decision to render The Weavers into Scots dialect was influenced by my belief that standard English translations of classic plays often misrepresent the non-standard linguistic nature of many such plays, whether written in whole Modern Drama, 41 (1998) 90 Gerhart Hauptmann's The Weavers 91 or part in dial~ct or vernacular speech. [ The Weavers is a prime example of this, for Hauptmann originally wrote the play in Silesian dialect. The Weavers, subtitled A Play ofthe t 840s, is based on a real uprising that took place in 1844 when handloom weavers in Silesia rose up in protest at the destitution and exploitation they were suffering. Fifty years later, when Hauptmann wrote the play, the weavers' plight was again appalling and had become a national issue. In choosing to write about the 1844 weavers' crisis, Hauptmann clearly had contemporary happenings in mind. Because he was writing in a period of political repression, fuelled by fear of the rise of socialism , he had to address present injustice under the guise of the past. In addition to studying what had happened in [844, he travelled to Silesia on two factfinding visits to see the weavers' distress first hand and to interview eye witnesses . As Hauptmann knew from his upbringing there, the weavers spoke in a distinctive dialect. It therefore sat with the documentary impulse underlying the play to use authentic dialect speech. Writing in the people's language also sat with Hauptmann 's aims to convey (non-doctrinaire) socialist ideals and a pioneering naturalist aesthetic. (The Weavers is considered by theatre historians to be the first socialist play and a founding work of naturalist theatre.) As he latersaid of his ambitions in writing The Weavers: (T]he social·drama. even if at first an empty schema, was in the air as a postulate. To call illO life was, at that lime, a prize challenge which. if solved. was the equivalent of making one the initiator of a new epoch. ... I could write The Weavers ... because ... I knew the folk dialect. ~ would. I decided. introduce it into [serious] literature. ... J wanted to return to dialect its dignity.1 Hauptmann held that dialect was an equal form of artistic expression 10 High German and that "[a dialect-speaking] barber or a scrubwoman ... might as fittingly be the protagonist of a tragedy as Lady Macbeth or King Lear.,,' His use of Silesian dialect in The Weavers, then, was not incidental colouring but crucial to the work's raisons d' elre. Howev.er, Hauptmann's linguistic intentions were compromised due to political circumstances surrounding the play's production. The planned...