TRR : TRANSLATI OPJS OF -:DDA GABWR IHAR PAPER P: sented to The Faculty f the Graduate School of . the Univers: y of Wisconsin-La Crosse In Par1 sl Fulrillment sf the Requil nents for the Degree =ience in Teaching by 2. Nelson ?r 18, 1972 - UNIVERSITY OF \ :SCONSiN-LA CROSSE " :/ "4 GRADTJl B COLLEGE Candidate: Lois G. I recormend acceptar e of this seminar paper to the Graduate College in artial fulfillment of' this candidate 1 s requiren nts for the deqree Master of' Science in Teaching. The candidate has completed his oral seminar reF rt. Date Seminar Paper Advisor This seminar paper i ,'P 5 9 4/ 1 f,,/ a /L~L" @+---. /,, < ! Date ABSTRACT 'Lthe three translatic s of Henrik Ibsents Hedda Gabler done by \Villiam Archer in 1891, Eva LeGallienne in 1928, and Michael Meyer in 1960, re .ealed significant verbal differ- ences. There were differ nces owing to the change in lang- -- uage with time, differenc is in English and American usage, differences in the way Fr ~nchexpressions were used to in- dicate sophistication, ar I differences in the ways of in- dicating de,grees of intin icy between the chzracters. The survey revealed ;hat while some words had become obsolete with time, other i had gained in usage. There was evidence of word differer :es because of the usz9e of Englan4 and of Aiierica that fnvo! red cot only word designations but also a political referenc 3 to a national cabinet member, Certain French expressior s were seeri to have become more familiar with the passaqc of time, others less. The ways of indicating deqrees of intimacy between the character f s varied, Each of the tra~3lators had adopted his own way of' 11 rendering into English t2 3 PTorwesian formal acd informal "you.. The differences werc surveyed in the light of each translator's statement o: purpose. Each of the translators was well qualified for h: 3 task. The purpose of this gaper is to discuss some significarit uer3ab differences between three English translations of Henrik Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, The three translations are those of William Archer in 1891, Eva LeGallienne in 1928, and Michael Meyer in 1960, All of the translators had excsllent qualifications for the task, tiYilliatn Archer, though barn %n Scotland in 1856, grew up in Horway, and was theref ore bilingual in English and Norwegian, He spent his adult life in England where he was promrinent in literary society as a drama critic and translatore1 He also wrote a few plays. 2 Archer stated that since Ibsen was the first writer of modern realistic plays whose works had beeo completely and faithfully rendered into English, he had had no precedent to guide him, but he had attempted "to strike a golden mean between clumsy literalness and licentious paraphrase," choos- ing "when the occasion arose, to subordinate fluency to fidelity, tt 3 While Archer's translation had been made mainly with a reading public in mind, the second translator, Eva LeGa.12.i- llichael Peyer, Ibsen: A Bio~ra~h(Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, I~c.4p. 441. 2f1~rcher,IVilliam A.," Enc clo~aediaSrita~nica - (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Brf tm~ica,Inc, + , 19 9 '~dilliam Archer, trans., Eosmersholm: The Lady From the - _I__. -Sea: Hedda Gabler: --Henriir ~bT(~ewXork: Charles Scrib- nerfs Sms, n, d,), pp. x-xii. 2 anne, had prima~ilythe actor and vlewing public in mind. Although LeGallienne praised the service that Archer had performed, she said that she found his translation wanting for her purposes as an acltress, as being "too gentile [sicf " and "Victorian" in flavor?. She also asserted that Archer sometimes "translated the Norweqian idioms so literally that I %hey frequently entirely failed to convey Ibsenrs thought," and that "they presented a series of stumbling blocks to the 4 reader's mind and were tongue-twisters to the actor. 11 4 LeGallienne, too, wals well qualified to undertake the task of translation, She knew the Dano-Norwegian language of Ibsen, Riksmaal, becaube she had spent holidays and summers in h9r childhood years in Copenhagen with her maternal grand- mo$her, and so was able to go back to the original of Ibsen when she made her trans1a;tion. Born in London, she began her acting caree: at the age of twelve, and before she was eighteen, she emigrated to America in further pursuit of it. Although her formal education ended by the time she was fif- teen, she gained stature in America both as an actress and as a director, 5 Like bcth Archer and, LeGallienne, the turd translator, NLickiael Iiiieyer, was also able to go back to Ibsenrs ori~inal 4Eva LeGalXienne, trans,, Six Plays b_g: Henrik Ibsen (New York: The Modern Library, w7),=. viii-ix. I '~va LeGallienne, At 31 (New York: Longman's, Green and CO., 1934). pp. 15-30, Norwegian text. Well known for his translations from the Scafidinavian languages, Nichael Meyer was born in London in 1921, and now lives part of the time in both London and Swe- den, where he is a lecturer at Upsala University. Like Archer, Ideyer has written plays; and like LeGallienne, he translated -Hedda for a stage performance, David Ross having commissioned him to translate it for Anne Meacham's performance in New Pork City, 6 Meyer stated that hils intent2on was not to modernize Ibsen's dialogue, but to to "translate it into a language common to the period in ch his plays are set, and to the present. I have, howeve etained certain turns of phrase - which &ook Victorian on printed page but have proved effective in the theatre n spoken by an actor in nine- teenth-century costullze in a nineteenth-century room, XI? Sfnce the translatidns were written at intervals of . t-Mrty 30 forty years apart, one would expect that there would be some differences betweec then owing to changes in the language with time, Three examples may be given here to suggest some of the differences that resulted (and others will cone up later while other kinds of differences are 6tdichael ideyer, trans., Pillars of Society, -The Villd Duck-3 Hedda Gabler, Little ~vmaardenCity, New York: Doubleday & Co,, 1- p. 277. and preliminary remarks, n. p, '~ichaelMeyer, trans,, -The Lady From the Sea, Master Builder, -John Gabriel Borkman, --Wen iie Dead Awaken (Garden City, He1,~ Yorx: Doubleday & Company, ~n~l~ao),p.375. being discussed). In Archer and MGallienne, Tesrnan said, when he arrived home on a warn day carrying an armful of books, "I1rn positively perspiring" (A-290, L-376). IGeyer 8 changed the line to "I 1m positively sweatingtt (M-313 1, using the forthrisht word, "sweating," that would have in- dicated a lack of gentility before the post World War I1 trend to shy away from euphemisms. Thus, the 1933 Shorter Oxford English Dictionary notes as its first entry for the verb, "sweat," voided in refined speech in the ordina-ry physical senses. rt 9 Another word that became obsolete with time was "steam- boat," which, in Archer, Berta used to refer to the boat that brought Hedda and Tesmar~home (A-244). As, a matter of fact, steam propulsion in boats was already on its way out in Europe about the time Archer was writing, but because of the depression it was still used in inland waterways in the United' States when LeGallienne mote. lo So LeGallienne still used a similar word, "steamer" (L-3a). But by the time Meyer wrote, the word ilvo-tlld have seemed ' inco~gruous and he used instead the all-inclusive word, "boat" (M-278). 'Subsequent citations of the translation of Hedda Gabler by Archer, LeGallienne, and Neger are to those editions specified in footnotes 3, 4, and 6, respectively, and will be given in the text of this paper, using the form employed here. 9The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1933), -- 10tl~hip," Chambers Ericyclopaedia (London: Intsrnationsl Learning Sys tems Corporation Limited, 1966 3. 5 Pdleger did approximately the sam. thing when he opted for "bag" (M-280) to refer to Tesmants portm man tea^,'^ in Archer (A-247), or llsuitcase," in LeGallienne (L-346). Web-- sterts Seventh -New Colle~dateDictionary designates a "port- manteau" as "a traveling bag; esp. a large gladstone bag. 11 ll LeGalliennets modernization to "suitcase" was in keepin? with the rest of her translation. But by the 1960ts, what is meant by the word is, according to Nebster I, a "traveling bag; esp. one that is rigid, flat and rectaniplar,'' which designation mould not have approximated either the item used in Archerts 18901s or in Meyer's 1960's. It was with the advent of post World iyar I1 air travel that the rigid and weighty suitcase gave way to a lisht-weight bag made of cloth. That the choice of a word to refer to that article vaza a delicate one is well i~dicatedby the article in the 'I>ietionar:~.-of Cortemporar.~American Usaae (1957) on "baggage; luggage 'I "Bai3aqge used to be the Paerican word, luqgaqe the &glish. But in recent years luqcta~ehas come into currency in America too, Airplanes and trains have luqaaae racks and what used to be the trunk of an automobile is now aften called the luggage compartment. In almost all com- binations, however, it remains baggage; baggage room, agent, baagage check, bag~ga~eg, Ee would be a bold man who, west of the Eudson, darsd to refer to it as the luggage "~cbscerfs Seventh -New Collegiate Dictionar (Springfield, Massachusetts: G. & C, Ttarrfam Company, --Ti-+19 3 VZ.