The Mercurian : : A Theatrical Translation Review Volume 6, Number 4 (Fall 2017) Editor: Adam Versényi Editorial Assistant: Sarah Booker ISSN: 2160-3316 The Mercurian is named for Mercury who, if he had known it, was/is the patron god of theatrical translators, those intrepid souls possessed of eloquence, feats of skill, messengers not between the gods but between cultures, traders in images, nimble and dexterous linguistic thieves. Like the metal mercury, theatrical translators are capable of absorbing other metals, forming amalgams. As in ancient chemistry, the mercurian is one of the five elementary “principles” of which all material substances are compounded, otherwise known as “spirit”. The theatrical translator is sprightly, lively, potentially volatile, sometimes inconstant, witty, an ideal guide or conductor on the road. The Mercurian publishes translations of plays and performance pieces from any language into English. The Mercurian also welcomes theoretical pieces about theatrical translation, rants, manifestos, and position papers pertaining to translation for the theatre, as well as production histories of theatrical translations. Submissions should be sent to: Adam Versényi at [email protected] or by snail mail: Adam Versényi, Department of Dramatic Art, CB# 3230, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3230. For translations of plays or performance pieces, unless the material is in the public domain, please send proof of permission to translate from the playwright or original creator of the piece. Since one of the primary objects of The Mercurian is to move translated pieces into production, no translations of plays or performance pieces will be published unless the translator can certify that he/she has had an opportunity to hear the translation performed in either a reading or another production-oriented venue. All material published in The Mercurian is protected by international copyright law. Inquiries related to production or reproduction should be directed to the translator of the piece in question. The Mercurian, Vol. 6, No. 4 (Fall 2017) 1 The Mercurian Volume 6, Number 4 (Fall 2017) Table of Contents Editor’s Note 3 Hikemann 5 By Ernst Toller Translated by Peter Wortsman Gustav Adolf: Stage Play in Five Acts 50 By August Strindberg Translated by Wendy Weckwerth The First Stone 186 Written and translated by Miriam Yahil-Wax In Review: The Oberon Anthology of Contemporary Greek Plays 200 Edited by L. Kitsopoulou, N. Rapi, Y. Mavritsakis, A. Dimou, Ch. Giannou Reviewed by Maria Mytilinaki Kennedy In Review: Selected Serbian Plays 205 Edited by Branko Mikasinovich and Dejan Stojanović Reviewed by Paula Gordon The Mercurian, Vol. 6, No. 4 (Fall 2017) 2 Editor’s Note Temperatures are dropping here in North Carolina after an unusually warm autumn, signaling the time to publish the Fall 2017 issue of The Mercurian: A Theatrical Translation Review. The issue begins with Peter Wortsman’s translation of German Expressionist Ernst Toller’s Hinkemann. As Wortsman describes in his introduction, Toller wrote the play between 1921-1922 while serving a prison sentence for his role as a leader, and president for six days, of the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic. Wortsman’s translation brings us the black comedy and poetry of Toller’s dramaturgy as it portrays the trials and tribulations of a wounded WWI veteran who becomes a carnival geek in order to support his pregnant wife. Hinkemann is followed by Wendy Weckwerth’s translation of August Strindberg’s longest play, Gustav Adolf. The translation is part of Weckwerth’s long-term project to translate all of Strindberg’s history plays. While history plays comprise nearly a third of Strindberg’s sixty or so plays, and display many of the innovative techniques found in his better-known works, Strindberg’s history plays are largely unexplored. With the publication of Gustav Adolph, The Mercurian is pleased to begin to fill that gap in our knowledge of Strindberg’s dramaturgy. The first issue of The Mercurian, published in 2007, contained an article by Hannah Amit-Kochavi entitled “Performing Arabic Plays on the Israeli Hebrew Stage (1945-2006).” With the publication of Miriam Yahil-Wax’s translation of her own play, The First Stone, we continue that conversation. The play, portraying how the killing of Arab women in the name of “family honor” permeates all aspects of society, was written in Hebrew and then translated into Arabic by Masud Hamdan. Performed by the Israeli-Arab actor Salwa Nakara, The First Stone toured throughout Israel and abroad, and was presented before Jewish and Arab audiences alike. We publish it here in English for the first time. Continuing our efforts to promote theatrical translation in a variety of ways, this issue concludes with book reviews of two recently published collections of plays in translation. Maria Mytilinaki Kennedy reviews The Oberon Anthology of Contemporary Greek Plays, and Paula Gordon reviews Selected Serbian Plays. Both volumes are part of the small, but ever-growing, number of collections of theatrical translations published in recent years. By reviewing them here The Mercurian hopes to foster more publications of this kind. Back issues of The Mercurian can be found at: https://the-mercurian.com/. As the theatre is nothing without its audience, The Mercurian welcomes your comments, questions, complaints, and critiques. Deadline for submissions for consideration for Volume 7, No. 1 (Spring 2018) will be February 1, 2018. --Adam Versényi The Mercurian, Vol. 6, No. 4 (Fall 2017) 3 Advisory Board Neil Blackadder, Knox College Catherine Coray, hotINK at the LARK/New York University Richard Davis, George Mason University/Theater of the First Amendment Jean Graham-Jones, The Graduate Center, The City University of New York David Johnston, Queen’s University, Belfast, N. Ireland Kirsten Nigro, The University of Texas-El Paso Caridad Svich, Playwright/Translator Paul Walsh, Yale School of Drama The Mercurian, Vol. 6, No. 4 (Fall 2017) 4 Hinkemann By Ernst Toller Translated by Peter Wortsman The Imagination Unmanned: Reviving Ernst Toller’s Tragedy Hinkemann in English Translation There are certain merciless works of dramatic art that dispense with cultural niceties and strike the spectator/reader where it hurts most, leaving you staggering and gasping for air. Such was the case for me some three and a half decades ago when, in a seminar on modern German drama at New York University, I first read in the original German the script of Ernst Toller’s tragedy, Hinkemann, a play I have never, before or since, seen performed, but which immediately leapt off the page and staged itself in the pit of my unconscious, begging to be translated and revived. My radical notion of literature and theater at the time, which age has since tempered a bit but not fundamentally altered, insisted that the only words worth speaking were those that absolutely needed to be written. All else was useless chatter. I should explain that I had then just recently returned from a year in Vienna and Eastern Europe, on a fellowship from the Thomas J. Watson Foundation, digging up the unhappy history that had sent my parents running for their lives from their native Vienna, and interviewing survivors of the concentration camps. The interviews now comprise “The Peter Wortsman Collection of Oral History” at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C., and inspired my own stage play The Tattooed Man Tells All, slated for production in spring 2018. A crisis of conscience and artistic faith compelled me to inquire of my respondents if they knew of any poems written, songs sung, or stories told in the camps, on the virtual threshold of death. Was all art, I wondered, a superfluous pursuit, mere costume jewelry conceived to camouflage the unsightly truth? Or was it rather an essential element, second only to water and oxygen, a sine qua non of human survival, or to shift metaphors, the equivalent of a cow’s second stomach, enabling us to digest and process grim reality? Most of the survivors I talked to said they were too busy caging food and staving off attack to waste a breath on poetry. But someone referred me to the late Aleksander Kuliwiewicz (1918-1982), then living in Krakow, Poland, who, as an underground camp troubadour at Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp, had memorized hundreds of poems and songs entrusted to him for safe-keeping, and devoted the rest of his life to the reanimation of their disembodied voices. I subsequently brought Alex to Moe Asch at Folkways Records, and produced and annotated an album of his Songs From the Depths of Hell, 1979, subsequently reissued by Smithsonian Folkways. But back to Hinkemann. I have long believed that there are two distinct types of writer in the German language literary tradition. There are those I call “The Stalwarts,” like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Bertolt Brecht, poetic and dramatic prodigies who embraced certainty, or at least pretended to do so, with the bookshelves of libraries and the floorboards of stages buckling under their formidable output. And then there are The Mercurian, Vol. 6, No. 4 (Fall 2017) 5 those I dub “The Tremblers,” like playwright and prose master Heinrich von Kleist, poet Friedrich Hölderlin, and such modern-day miners of the unconscious as Franz Kafka and Robert Walser, to name only a few, who embraced doubt, deliberately stumbling down uncharted paths, and often paid the psychic price in sickness or suicide. Ernst Toller definitely belongs to the latter literary contingent. Conceived in the German theatrical tradition of Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz’s Die Soldaten (The Soldiers) and Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck, Toller’s devastating tragedy Hinkemann is a painfully poetic plaidoyer for the overlooked vision and voice of the victim. It was written in the years 1921-1922, in the German prison Niederschönenfeld, where Toller, himself a physically and psychologically wounded veteran of World War I turned anarchist revolutionary, was serving time for his role as a leader, and president for six days, of the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic.