Fr 1090 Aspects of Modern German Literature in Translation

FR 1090 ASPECTS OF MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE IN TRANSLATION

Brecht, Life of Galileo: its genesis.

1933 BB emigrates to Denmark after Nazi take-over. First thoughts of writing about Galileo

1938 BB completes studies of historical material on Galileo (see your BB hand-out )

Nov 1938 First draft finished in 3 weeks. Working title: The Earth Moves

Nov 38- Mar 1939 Rewrites the play. New title: Leben des Galilei (Life of Galileo)

9.9.43 Premiere of Leben des Galilei in Zürich

Dec-Feb 1944 Works with Charles Laughton in Hollywood on English language version (viz Methuen cover)

Aug 1945 work resumed after atom bombs dropped on Japan. BB & CL make changes. Result: a less optimistic version.

30.7.47 English language premiere in Beverley Hills, CA.

1953/54 English version translated & published in German

Nov 1955- Mar 1957 BB directs Berliner Ensemble production of Leben des Galilei

14.8.56 BB dies before Leben des Galilei performed.

The Methuen version of Life of Galileo is a translation of the 1953/54 German edition, which is an amalgam of the original 1939 German version & the 1945-47 English version.

Differences between TWO main versions

A (1938) is pre-atom-bomb version, written before splitting of atom and creation of A bomb

B (1945-47) post Atom-bomb

A is more “Brechtian” i.e. GG represented more critically, as naive scientist, abdicating all responsibility for application of science, a coward, who easily gives in to Inquisition. Scene 14 is radically revised in 2nd version (B). Here didactics emerge more directly. GG develops into a self-critical, responsible, crusading scientist. More the mouthpiece of author. This presentation of an ultimately more positive role model, someone we are eventually encouraged to identify with, learn with, is untypical of BB’s technique. Usually we learn against the main characters, not with them. sjl.Gal1&2.doc 14/11/00

FR 1090 ASPECTS OF MODERN GER M A N LITERATURE IN TRANSLATION

In November 2005 there was a Birmingham Rep production of Brecht’s Life of Galileo.

What follows is an article by the playwright David Edgar relating to his particular translation of the play which is the basis of Brum Rep version, + two reviews of that production. The highlighted sections are what struck me (SL) as particularly interesting about the article and the italicised sections are my additional off-the-cuff comments.

Wednesday October 26, 2005 The Guardian www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/ story/0,11710,1600679,00.html

The Italian job

Two of the Britain's greatest playwrights - Howard Brenton and David Hare - have reinterpreted Brecht's Galileo. Now a third, David Edgar, is taking his turn. He explains how they are all different.

When the Birmingham Repertory Theatre asked me to "translate" Bertolt Brecht's The Life of Galileo, I was in two minds about it. There are many Brecht plays hardly ever done in Britain that would be great to have a crack at. The Life of Galileo is performed a lot because its perceived humanism and ambiguity have made it the Brecht play for people who don't like Brecht. I had some doubts about being a non- German speaker working from a literal translation (hence the quote marks). And the two most recent British translations are by writers I know, admire, and am sometimes compared to. All in all, I try to avoid ploughing furrows last visited by Howard Brenton and David Hare.

In fact, it is these characteristics that have made this such a stimulating job. I knew that it would provide a route into Brecht's mind - there are three versions of the play, the second a translation worked on by Brecht himself. But I hadn't realised what an insight it would prove, not just into the minds of the previous translators, but into the changing times in which they worked.

Superficially, Galileo is a perverse play for Brenton and Hare to have worked on. In 1972 - as a very fledgling playwright - I joined them and four others to co-write a play about the Ulster troubles, called England's Ireland, which proved a kind of manifesto for a movement that specifically rejected the dramatic strategy of political playwrights like John Arden, Edward Bond, and, indeed, Brecht himself, many of whose plays are set long ago and (often) far away. We took the view that if you wanted to address contemporary political issues, the place to set them was here and now.

The advantage of writing in the present tense is that you can contribute directly to current political debates. The disadvantage - for their future life - is that the plays date. (I would guess that Howard Brenton's most produced work is Bloody Poetry, a play set in the early 19th century). Very occasionally, you get the best of both worlds, when the specific signification of a play can change, as happened with Arthur Miller's The Crucible, which, although written as an allegory of the anti- communist hysteria of the 1950s, found itself reapplied to analogous phenomena all over the world. A play such as David Hare's The Absence of War, based on the 1992 general election, retained its subject but changed its feel when revived at Birmingham two years ago. A confrontation between principle and pragmatism had become an elegy for a period in which such a debate could take place. Brecht's Galileo - a play about a man who revolutionised science by the application of reason, but recanted his beliefs to save his skin - changed its meaning through the three versions Brecht worked on, and has continued to mutate ever since.

The first version of the play, written in 16 days in November 1938 and premiered in war-surrounded Zurich in 1943, is the most obviously Brechtian, in that the analogy between scientific rationalism and Marxism is most direct. Galileo's recantation is seen not as a betrayal of reason but as a wily move to keep himself alive in order to carry on researching and writing. At the climax of the play, Galileo tells a former pupil that by recanting he failed science, but then reveals that he has hidden a secretly compiled copy of an entirely new book, which the former pupil can smuggle into Germany.

=> self criticism: I betrayed science by not standing up for rationalism (but because secret book is then revealed, recanting doesn’t really matter; truth wins anyway)

The second version was put together - in English - for, and largely by, Charles Laughton, for production in Los Angeles and New York in 1947. Shorter and crisper than the first version, the climactic scene is different in two crucial respects. First, Laughton suggested (and Brecht accepted) that the existence of Galileo's secret book should be revealed before his speech of self-abnegation (so instead of the hidden book outbidding the self-criticism, the self-criticism trumps the hidden book). But the content of Galileo's speech has changed as well. In the first version, he says he has betrayed science by not standing up for rationalism, the principle that fact should always outweigh opinion. In the Laughton version, the principle Galileo fails to defend is the responsibility of the scientist to improve the human condition. The reason for this change was that American scientists had, in the interim, invented the atom bomb.

SL’s comment: Laughton version [one on the DVD screened] has BOTH Galileo’s self-criticism (for his failure to defend the responsibility of the scientist to improve the human condition) AND the survival of the truth in the form of the secret book: self- criticism. The version is based on the notion that science is no longer infallible, no longer the panacea (post atom bomb) Brecht may also have already sensed that the Communism he was about to experience directly on his return to East Germany didn't do everything it said on the tin. SL: Communism (i.e. Stalinism in the Communist German Democratic Republic) is not all it’s cracked up to be (i.e. not necessarily the practical manifestation of the principles of rationality, the values of dialectical materialism (see later!)

By 1980, when Howard Brenton translated the play for John Dexter's production at the National Theatre, the analogy between Catholicism and communism (and between Galileo and Brecht) was accepted wisdom. Brenton's full translation of Brecht's final German text both expresses and confronts this thesis. Teeming with Breughelesque vernacular, Galileo's rich, muscular slang is a metaphor for his intellectual and bodily appetites. If the Catholic Church is orthodox communism, then - in Brenton - Galileo's dissidence is directed at its puritanism as well as its purity.

Superficially, David Hare's 1994 translation (performed by Richard Griffiths in Jonathan Kent's Almeida production) confirms the old canard that he is McCartney to Brenton's Lennon. Hare drops the Brechtian scene titles and substantially cuts down the text: the problematic last scene, in which Galileo's former pupil sneaks the secretly copied book across the border, is reduced to six spoken words. But the most striking thing is not the loss of words but their repetition. The elegance of Hare's version results from its music: on one page, variants of the word "free" occur six times in two short lines. If Brenton's Galileo has (as I would guess) the largest number of individual words in any translation, Hare's probably has the fewest, but organised in the largest number of sentences: breaking up Brecht's, changing commas to exclamation marks and full stops to question marks, punctuated by staccato "hows", "whos" and "whys".

These differences are partly about Hare and Brenton being different writers (though they have written two plays together, in which it's hard to see the joins). But it's principally about the times in which they wrote them. In Brecht's [and Laughton’s] hands, a play celebrating scientific rationality [per se] changed [after the dropping of the A-Bomb] into a play calling for social responsibility. Brenton's Galileo was written at one of the hottest moments in the cold war, when the newly elected Reagan and Thatcher administrations moved perilously close to the nuclear trigger. Brenton felt the need to counter Galileo's pessimism about his battle with the authorities with the optimism of his intelligence, clear-sightedness and lust for life (hence Brenton's insistence on the production playing the whole of the last scene, in which Galileo's book is smuggled "across a border to us, in the future"). For Hare, working on the play after the fall of communism, Galileo's recantation is at the heart of a moral debate about how individuals should behave. Brenton dramatises a battle; Hare orchestrates an argument.

Brenton’s energetic elemental Galileo revives Brecht’s original utopianism. He counters Galileo's pessimism (about his battle with the authorities) with the optimism [smuggling the book “across a border to us, in the future”] deriving from his intelligence, clear-sightedness and lust for life (i.e. a combination of intellect and instinct (“thinking is one of the greatest pleasures of the human race”). His version of G offers a challenge to the puritanism of BOTH the Catholic Church AND orthodox Communism ( i.e. Stalinism), but from a rationalist/Marxist perspective. Hare: (post Cold-War) sees Galileo's recantation as at the heart of a moral debate about individual freedom & their social responsibility to defend individual freedom

It would be nice to feel, with their two translations propped up either side of the Zurich and Laughton versions, the John Willett classic, and Deborah Gearing's literal one, that a new translation could teem like Brenton's and gleam like Hare's. Working on it, I learned to formulate a line in my head first, and only then (and if in doubt) check the others, a strategy that developed into a bizarre kind of literary parlour game. Would Brenton get "slime" as the substance an oyster throws around invasive grit? Would Hare get "tenure" to describe a permanent university post? Would either get that the characteristics of a substance are best described as "properties" and "trial period" is better rendered as "probation"?

DAVID EDGAR’S READING OF THE PLAY:

But, like all the others, the character of my translation is informed, not by the thesaurus, but by the times. Nobody now believes that the Renaissance science fired an arrow that flew unerringly through the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution straight into the bullseye of communism. Since 1994, science's self-doubt has grown in direct proportion to its apparently boundless potential to increase the choices, if not always improve the lot, of humankind. But the biggest change in the past decade is that organised, traditional religion is now clearly on a roll, providing sustenance and certainty to people who have lost confidence in earthly solutions to human problems (including scientific ones). Hare and Brenton have both written plays about religious faith (Hare's 1992 Racing Demon, Brenton's current Paul). My own Playing With Fire is about a contemporary Britain in which - in direct opposition to a belief at the heart of Galileo - religious certitude appears more attractive than political doubt.

Most of my predecessors have sought to soften Brecht's easy caricature of his reactionary clerics; now, giving the church a case is not just a matter of shoring up the opposition. The limits of Galileo's rationalism (not least in his personal relationships) seem clearer and starker than ever, in an age when the case for faith is trumpeted not just from cathedrals, temples and mosques but from Downing Street and the White House. So, yes, the church's arguments must have stature, and the audience should be borne along by arguments for faith in the mouths of monks and peasants. But it's more important than ever to note that, in the mouths of inquisitors, the same arguments are used to justify forcing Galileo to declare that the Earth stands still.

· David Edgar's translation of The Life of Galileo is at Birmingham Repertory Theatre from Friday until November 12. Box office: 0121-236 4455. Two reviews of the November 2005 Birmingham Rep production of Brecht’s Life of Galileo The Life of Galileo Birmingham Rep Alfred Hickling Saturday November 5, 2005 The Guardian www.guardian.co.uk/arts/ reviews/story/0,11712,1634835,00.html The Life of Galileo is one of those plays whose meaning shifts significantly over time. Brecht himself wrote three versions of it, all markedly different from each other. Howard Brenton prepared a translation at the height of the cold war which was overflowing and argumentative, while David Hare's, coming after the collapse of communism, was spare and despairing. Now David Edgar brings us a version against the background of militant holy war which feels eloquent and elegiac.

The key to the play is the manner in which Galileo publicly recants his belief that the earth revolves around the sun, under pressure from the Catholic Church. Either he comes across as a wily pragmatist or a pathetic broken reed, but Edgar's version is essentially the tragedy of a man apprised of information the authorities do not want to hear. When Timothy West's hoarse, despondent, Galileo quietly renounces everything he knows to be true, there seems to be a distinct, chilling echo of Dr Kelly before his fateful walk into the woods.

West gives a complex, intriguing performance, preferring to act as the production's still point rather than its centre of energy. He carries the role like a beast of burden, shuffling around like a man bearing the weight of a new, universal order on his shoulders. Bravely, he draws us to the heart of the scientist's dilemma through quiet reflection rather than noisy rhetoric, which pays huge dividends in terms of humanity, though it is not always the most efficient means of embracing the Rep's vast open spaces.

Director Jonathan Church's opulent Renaissance pageant [?] ensures that there is plenty of brocade and banners swirling about him, however, aided by a stirring musical commentary by Matthew Scott, and an exceptional supporting performance from John Woodvine's smooth Grand Inquisitor. Alistair Campbell in a cardinal's cape? [Rory Bremner?]Brecht's powers of suggestion remain as pertinent as ever.

· Until November 12. Box office: 0121-236 4455. FR 1090 ASPECTS OF MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE IN TRANSLATION Brecht, Life of Galileo

Wednesday October 26, 2005 The Guardian www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/ story/0,11710,1600679,00.html

The Italian job

Two of the Britain's greatest playwrights - Howard Brenton and David Hare - have reinterpreted Brecht's Galileo. Now a third, David Edgar, is taking his turn. He explains how they are all different.

When the Birmingham Repertory Theatre asked me to "translate" Bertolt Brecht's The Life of Galileo, I was in two minds about it. There are many Brecht plays hardly ever done in Britain that would be great to have a crack at. Galileo is done a lot because its perceived humanism and ambiguity have made it the Brecht play for people who don't like Brecht. I had some doubts about being a non-German speaker working from a literal translation (hence the quote marks). And the two most recent British translations are by writers I know, admire, and am sometimes compared to. All in all, I try to avoid ploughing furrows last visited by Howard Brenton and David Hare.

In fact, it is these characteristics that have made this such a stimulating job. I knew that it would provide a route into Brecht's mind - there are three versions of the play, the second a translation worked on by Brecht himself. But I hadn't realised what an insight it would prove, not just into the minds of the previous translators, but into the changing times in which they worked.

Superficially, Galileo is a perverse play for Brenton and Hare to have worked on. In 1972 - as a very fledgling playwright - I joined them and four others to co-write a play about the Ulster troubles, called England's Ireland, which proved a kind of manifesto for a movement that specifically rejected the dramatic strategy of political playwrights like John Arden, Edward Bond, and, indeed, Brecht himself, many of whose plays are set long ago and (often) far away. We took the view that if you wanted to address contemporary political issues, the place to set them was here and now.

The advantage of writing in the present tense is that you can contribute directly to current political debates. The disadvantage - for their future life - is that the plays date. (I would guess that Howard Brenton's most produced work is Bloody Poetry, a play set in the early 19th century). Very occasionally, you get the best of both worlds, when the specific signification of a play can change, as happened with Arthur Miller's The Crucible, which, although written as an allegory of the anti- communist hysteria of the 1950s, found itself reapplied to analogous phenomena all over the world. A play such as David Hare's The Absence of War, based on the 1992 general election, retained its subject but changed its feel when revived at Birmingham two years ago. A confrontation between principle and pragmatism had become an elegy for a period in which such a debate could take place. Brecht's Galileo - a play about a man who revolutionised science by the application of reason, but recanted his beliefs to save his skin - changed its meaning through the three versions Brecht worked on, and has continued to mutate ever since.

The first version of the play, written in 16 days in November 1938 and premiered in war- surrounded Zurich in 1943, is the most obviously Brechtian, in that the analogy between scientific rationalism and Marxism is most direct. Galileo's recantation is seen not as a betrayal of reason but as a wily move to keep himself alive in order to carry on researching and writing. At the climax of the play, Galileo tells a former pupil that by recanting he failed science, but then reveals that he has hidden a secretly compiled copy of an entirely new book, which the former pupil can smuggle into Germany.

=> self criticism: I betrayed science by not standing up for rationalism (but because the secret book is then revealed, recanting doesn’t really matter; truth wins anyway)

The second version was put together - in English - for, and largely by, Charles Laughton, for production in Los Angeles and New York in 1947. Shorter and crisper than the first version, the climactic scene is different in two crucial respects. First, Laughton suggested (and Brecht accepted) that the existence of Galileo's secret book should be revealed before his speech of self-abnegation (so instead of the hidden book outbidding the self-criticism, the self-criticism trumps the hidden book). But the content of Galileo's speech has changed as well. In the first version, he says he has betrayed science by not standing up for rationalism, the principle that fact should always outweigh opinion. In the Laughton version, the principle Galileo fails to defend is the responsibility of the scientist to improve the human condition. The reason for this change was that American scientists had, in the interim, invented the atom bomb.

 The Charles Laughton version has BOTH self-criticism (for failure to defend the responsibility of the scientist to improve the human condition) AND the survival of the truth in the form of the secret book  The self criticism is based on notion that science is no longer infallible, no longer the panacea (post atom bomb)

Brecht may also have already sensed that the Communism he was about to experience directly on his return to East Germany didn't do everything it said on the tin. Communism (i.e. Stalinism in GDR) is not all it’s cracked up to be (i.e. not necessarily the practical manifestation of the principles of rationality, the values of dialectical materialism (see later!)

By 1980, when Howard Brenton translated the play for John Dexter's production at the National Theatre, the analogy between Catholicism and communism (and between Galileo and Brecht) was accepted wisdom. Brenton's full translation of Brecht's final German text both expresses and confronts this thesis. Teeming with Breughelesque vernacular, Galileo's rich, muscular slang is a metaphor for his intellectual and bodily appetites. If the Catholic Church is orthodox communism, then - in Brenton - Galileo's dissidence is directed at its puritanism as well as its purity.

Superficially, David Hare's 1994 translation (performed by Richard Griffiths in Jonathan Kent's Almeida production) confirms the old canard that he is McCartney to Brenton's Lennon. Hare drops the Brechtian scene titles and substantially cuts down the text: the problematic last scene, in which Galileo's former pupil sneaks the secretly copied book across the border, is reduced to six spoken words. But the most striking thing is not the loss of words but their repetition. The elegance of Hare's version results from its music: on one page, variants of the word "free" occur six times in two short lines. If Brenton's Galileo has (as I would guess) the largest number of individual words in any translation, Hare's probably has the fewest, but organised in the largest number of sentences: breaking up Brecht's, changing commas to exclamation marks and full stops to question marks, punctuated by staccato "hows", "whos" and "whys".

These differences are partly about Hare and Brenton being different writers (though they have written two plays together, in which it's hard to see the joins). But it's principally about the times in which they wrote them. In Brecht's [and Laughton’s] hands, a play celebrating scientific rationality [per se] changed [after the dropping of the A-Bomb] into a play calling for social responsibility. Brenton's Galileo was written at one of the hottest moments in the cold war, when the newly elected Reagan and Thatcher administrations moved perilously close to the nuclear trigger. Brenton felt the need to counter Galileo's pessimism about his battle with the authorities with the optimism of his intelligence, clear-sightedness and lust for life (hence Brenton's insistence on the production playing the whole of the last scene, in which Galileo's book is smuggled "across a border to us, in the future"). For Hare, working on the play after the fall of communism, Galileo's recantation is at the heart of a moral debate about how individuals should behave. Brenton dramatises a battle; Hare orchestrates an argument.

Brenton’s energetic elemental Galileo revives Brecht’s original utopianism. He counters Galileo's pessimism (about his battle with the authorities) with the optimism [smuggling the book “across a border to us, in the future”] deriving from his intelligence, clear-sightedness and lust for life (i.e. a combination of intellect and instinct (“thinking is one of the greatest pleasures of the human race”). Brenton’s version of G offers a challenge to the puritanism of BOTH the Catholic Church AND orthodox Communism ( i.e. Stalinism), but from a rationalist/Marxist perspective

David Hare reads the play differently: His is a more post cold-war reading: For him Galileo's recantation is at the heart of a moral debate about individual freedom & their social responsibility to defend individual freedom

It would be nice to feel, with their two translations propped up either side of the Zurich and Laughton versions, the John Willett classic, and Deborah Gearing's literal one, that a new translation could teem like Brenton's and gleam like Hare's. Working on it, I learned to formulate a line in my head first, and only then (and if in doubt) check the others, a strategy that developed into a bizarre kind of literary parlour game. Would Brenton get "slime" as the substance an oyster throws around invasive grit? Would Hare get "tenure" to describe a permanent university post? Would either get that the characteristics of a substance are best described as "properties" and "trial period" is better rendered as "probation"?

DAVID EDGAR’S OWN READING OF LIFE OF GALILEO:

But, like all the others, the character of my translation is informed, not by the Thesaurus, but by the times. Nobody now believes that Renaissance science fired an arrow that flew unerringly through the enlightenment and the industrial revolution straight into the bulls-eye of communism. Since 1994, science's self-doubt has grown in direct proportion to its apparently boundless potential to increase the choices, if not always improve the lot, of humankind. But the biggest change in the past decade is that organised, traditional religion is now clearly on a roll, providing sustenance and certainty to people who have lost confidence in earthly solutions to human problems (including scientific ones). Hare and Brenton have both written plays about religious faith (Hare's 1992 Racing Demon, Brenton's current Paul). My own Playing with Fire is about a contemporary Britain in which - in direct opposition to a belief at the heart of Galileo - religious certitude appears more attractive than political doubt.

Most of my predecessors have sought to soften Brecht's easy caricature of his reactionary clerics; now, giving the church a case is not just a matter of shoring up the opposition. The limits of Galileo's rationalism (not least in his personal relationships) seem clearer and starker than ever, in an age when the case for faith is trumpeted not just from cathedrals, temples and mosques but from Downing Street and the White House. So, yes, the church's arguments must have stature, and the audience should be borne along by arguments for faith in the mouths of monks and peasants. But it's more important than ever to note that, in the mouths of inquisitors, the same arguments are used to justify forcing Galileo to declare that the Earth stands still. David Edgar's translation of The Life of Galileo is at Birmingham Repertory Theatre from Friday until November 12. Box office: 0121-236 4455.