Semper Fidelis

Semper Fidelis

The essence of a dramatic text lies in its language. Each language creates a particular affective relationship with what its sounds evoke. The hope that this peculiar encounter of sound and sense can be reincarnated in another language is always utopian. The effort must be made, however, if we are to have entry into minds and worlds beyond our own culture. Unfortunately, current practice in the theatre asks few questions about the specificity of a text, since playwrights and directors undertake so-called translations of languages they don't know. Even someone with a working knowledge of a foreign tongue must realize that, when one translates a playwright, what is being translated is not the language in abstract, but speech artistically wrought by a creative artist. Working on a translation, it is essential to inquire into the precise connotation of a word or phrase as it is used by that playwright in that context.

For instance, in Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, when Voinitsky complains that Yelena's faithfulness to her husband is fal'shivy, to render this in English as "false" is to choose what was once called a faux ami, a deceptively similar though actually imprecise counterpart. The word appears in Chekhov's writing only in such phrases as fal'shivaya moneta, fal'shivye bilety (counterfeit money), and therefore what is meant here is something like "phoney," "bogus," or "fake." In Ivanov, Count Shabelsky likes to tease the converted Jewess Anna with anti-Semitic slurs. So when we hear the count railing at Anna's piano technique, "You've got no more ear for music than a farshirovannaya ryba," earlier translators have rendered this as "stuffed fish" or "stuffed trout." The reference, however, is not taxidermic, but culinary.²⁶ Anna is being rebuked for having no more ear than a gefilte fish.

English, with its brimming word-hoard from both Latin and Germanic sources, is rich in synonyms. It is tempting for a translator to show off his vocabulary by varying the way he translates a word repeated in the original. To do so chips away at the cement that keeps a play cohesive. Verbal leitmotifs are meant to strike the audience's ear at regular intervals, making it alert to ironies. A commonplace uttered in the first act may return to resonate with fresh significance later on. In Uncle Vanya, Astrov complains that when people can't understand him, they call him "strange" or "peculiar" (stranny); later, Yelena uses that very word to describe him, thereby revealing that she herself doesn't understand him.

The translator's duty to preserve these recurrences of verbal motifs was insisted on by George Bernard Shaw, who wrote to the German translator of his plays:

The way in which you translate every word just as it comes and then forget it and translate it some other way when it begins (or should begin) to make the audience laugh, is enough to whiten the hair on an author's head. Have you ever read Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing? In it a man calls a constable an ass, and throughout the rest of the play the constable can think of nothing but this insult and keeps on saying "But forget not, masters, that I am an ass." Now if you translated Much Ado, you would make the man call the constable a Schaffkopf. On the next page he would be a Narr, then a Maul, then a Thier, and perhaps the very last time an Esel.²⁷

This was such a salient principle for Shaw that he hammered it home the following month:

I tell you again and again most earnestly and seriously, that unless you repeat the words that I have repeated, you will throw away all the best stage effects and make the play unpopular with the actors. . . . Half the art of dialogue consists in the echoing of words—the tossing back & forwards of phrases from one to another like a cricket ball.²⁸

Chekhov, in his last...