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Blizintsy/Dvojniki Twins/Doubles Hapgood/Hapgood TOBY SILVERMAN ZINMAN Tom Stoppard's play, Hapgood, is full of twins: British and Russian, real and imaginary, overt and covert, nominative and designative (i.e., Joe and joe), psychological and biological. In the duplicitous world of theatre, where actors double - and triple - themselves, twinning is crucial. In the duplicitous world of espionage, where agents double - and triple - themselves, twinning is crucial. The plot turns - and turns again - on two sets of twins who are double agents, on twin sets ofsecret infonnation, on twin scenes. Butone important set of twins the audience/readers of the play may not know about, no matter how attentive to the plot's complications they are, is Elizabeth Hapgood's historical twin (and thus a "sleeper" of quite another variety), Isabel Aorence Hapgood, who lived from 1850 to 1928. We all know that Stoppard has a huge stash ofrecherche information, and we are all familiar with the sly and witty use he can make of it. Thus, it is not unreasonable to assume that, having chosen an historical namesake for hismain character, Stoppard intended resonance. The facts are these: Isabel Aorence Hapgood was born in Boston and attended Miss Porter's School in Connecticut where she learned French and Latin. Her talent for languages was so extraordinary that, during the next ten years, after lessons in German, she taught herself all the Germanic languages, and then, after lessons in Italian, she taught herself all the Romance languages."Eventually she conquered all the languages ofeontinental Europe, and Russia with its dialects, old Church Slavonic, and the various branches of Slavonic of Eastern Europe.") She began her career as a literary translator from the Dutch and the Polish as well as from the French (Victor Hugo, Abbe Joseph Roux, Ernest Renan, and Baron Pierre de Coubertin), from the Spanish (Armando Palacio Valdes), and from the Italian (Edmondo de Amicis). "She was best known, however, for her faithful translations of Russia's greatest writers. Through Miss Hapgood Hapgood/Hapgood 313 Russian literature fIrSt became available directly to the English-reading world .... "2 She translated Tolstoy, Gogol, and a collection of epic Russian songs (for which "Professor Francis James Child, of Harvard University, whom she helped on his famous Book ofBallads, furnished the Preface"'); later she went on to translate Gorky, Leskov, Bunin, and a sixteen-volume edition ofTurgenev's novels and stories. She wrote A Survey ofRussian Literature (1902), and for many years WIote reviews and editorials for American magazines and newspapers, serving for twenty-two years as foreign correspondent for the Nation, the "connecting link between the literatures of America and Europe.". There is an extra-literary component in her .work as well; her Russian Rambles, an account of her first two-year journey through Russia, which included a stay at Tolstoy's estate yasnaya Polyana, "tried to correct mistaken ideas about Russia (such as the strictness of the censorship) at that time prevalent in America"'; her second visit was cut short by the Revolution in 1917. She was unmarried. As the icing on this biographical cake, I offer the fact that Isabel Aorence was a twin, and, even better, not an identical one. Her brother, Asa Gustavus. went to M.LT. and then was engaged in the manufacture of paper," a not inappropriate companion occupation to his twin's production ofbooks. Now for the resonance: The two Hapgoods, history's and Stoppard's, both women, both unmarried, both brilliant, both international figures serving as conduits between peoples, governments, cultures: all ofthis, despite - or perhaps because of- its tidiness, is not the sort of connection Stoppard likes best. More to the point, it seems to me, is translation. I would suggest that translation itself is a variety of twinning - not identical, of course, but with a necessary inclination toward duplication. Much of Hapgood depends on language translation, most obviously between Russian and English, and English and Russian. The convenient footnotes which translate the Russian in a key intimate scene between Hapgood and Kerner near the end ofthe play are, ofcourse, available to the reader but not the spectator, so the audience has to do its own translating, if not authentically, at...

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