Ibsen in Translation

Georg Brandes writes somewhere:

It is, as a rule, a curse for an author to be born in a small country. It is easier for a third-rate talent who commands a world language to win general renown than it is for a mind of the highest type dependent on translations.¹

Ibsen had, in this respect, a great disadvantage, compared to, for instance, Shakespeare, Molière and Goethe (not that these writers in any sense can be called "third-rate" talents), who worked within large cultural language groups. In order to reach an international public it didn’t only help to write good books, he also had to make sure that he was translated. He had to find the right translators of the right languages and hope that they could open the right doors for him.

William Archer, Ibsen’s foremost intermediary into the English market, has pointed to another factor: "In respect of language, Ibsen stands at a unique disadvantage. Never before has a poet of world-wide fame appealed to his world-wide audience so exclusively in translations."² There’s no doubt whatsoever about the full truth of this. The group of people who have read Ibsen or seen a play by Ibsen in the theatre in a non-Norwegian language is much, much, much larger than the group who have made Ibsen’s acquaintance in the original language.

A lot of strange things can happen when a literary text is transferred to another language. Torvald Helmer’s line "Nora, Nora, you are a woman!"³ became "Nora, Nora, you are so ignorant!" in a Chinese translation. In The Wild Duck, flute, the instrument, became "cream" in an English translation; perhaps because the translator used a Norwegian nynorsk or new-Norwegian dictionary?⁴ But more important than such linguistic misinterpretations, are the differences between languages when it comes to tonal and stylistic differences, sociolect, and similar, more comprehensive factors. The text becomes, essentially, something else. Ibsen becomes someone else. In that sense there is an Ibsen in each language area. He exists in 76 variants and has different positions and functions in the literary traditions within the different language areas.

Let’s follow Ibsen a little distance along the Babylonian road. We know that Ibsen’s breakthrough on a world basis can be dated to around 1889. But what happened on the way there?

During the 1850s and 1860s, Ibsen was only well-known in the Nordic countries. In 1857, a drama from his hand crossed the borders for the first time. The Feast at Solhaug was performed at The Royal Theatre in Stockholm, premiering on the 4^th of November 1857. The play was translated by the Swedish author and dramaturg Fredrik August Dahlgren with the title "Gästabudet på Solhaug". The translation was never published. So we don’t know the shape and form of Ibsen’s entrée into the Swedish language in any detail.

Four years later the same play was put on at Casino Theatre in Copenhagen, and so Ibsen was played on Danish soil for the first time, but not in translation, mind you. The Danes had no problem with Ibsen’s original language. From 1866, Ibsen’s authorship is also positioned within the Danish one, as all his books from then on became published in Copenhagen. It was only quite a long time after Ibsen’s death that they began to translate his work to Danish. But these two productions didn’t leave any noticeable marks. It was only with the publication of Brand in 1866 that Ibsen became a trendsetting author in the Nordic countries.

And the way success in one market often produces a ripple-effect in another market, Brand became Ibsen’s spearhead out of the Nordic region and into Germany. In February 1872, Peter Friedrich Siebold’s German translation of Brand was published in Kassel, with Theodor Kay as publisher. This is when the snowball begins to roll in earnest. Brand was published in several German translations (four different ones in the course of nine years). During 1876 The Pretenders and The League of Youth came out in Germany, followed by The Vikings at Helgeland in 1876, and Lady Inger in 1877, and in 1878, The Pillars of Society, which also had a fantastic success on German and Austrian stages in the subsequent theatre season. Thus the German editions formed the basis for translations to languages such as Polish, Dutch, Italian, Czech and Hungarian. Later, English was added and partly French and Russian, but in the first round, German was Ibsen’s stepping stone into the world.

The other continental-European country where Ibsen gained entry was Poland. In 1875, a book by the Polish-Swedish Wawrzyniec Engeström with the title Henryk Ibsen. Poeta norwegski came out in Warsaw. Large parts of the book were merely a loose translation of a chapter about Ibsen in a German book⁵, but in addition it contained some poems by Ibsen translated to Polish by Engeström. The first drama in Polish translation came five years later, when A Doll’s House was printed in a newspaper where the readers, through a sub-heading, were informed that this was a Swedish play in three acts!

Edmund Gosse introduced Ibsen to English readers for the first time in March 1872, when he reviewed Ibsen’s Poems in the periodical The Spectator. In the Spring of 1873, Gosse translated Love’s Comedy, but he couldn’t find a publisher who wanted to print it. The first published English translation of an Ibsen play was therefore Catherine Ray’s version of the monster-work Emperor and Galilean, which came out in London in 1876. No one can claim that this edition became popular reading. Most widely spread of the English translations are those of William Archer, first with the five-volume edition Ibsen’s Prose Dramas (1890-91), with Archer as the main translator and Walter Scott as the publisher, after that comes the twelve-volume edition The Collected Works of Henrik Ibsen (1906-12) with Archer as the editor and William Heinemann as the publisher. Ibsen can thank William Archer more than anyone for gradually being translated to Japanese and Chinese.

Before the end of the 1870s, Ibsen had conquered two new languages. In April 1878, The Pillars of Society had its premiere at a theatre in Prague. Richard Veselý was responsible for the translation. The following year, the play was published as a book, but then in Gustav Eim’s Czech translation. That these had their basis in the German editions, is clear from the names of some of the characters. In German translations of The Pillars of Society, the teacher, Rørlund, the ship builder, Aune and the two merchants, Vigeland and Sandstad, had been germanised to Lundt, Auner, Wigland and Sandstadt. In the Czech translations, you can find identical names for these characters. In Finland, Ibsen reception and traditions have always been bilingual. In 1878, two things happened: The Vikings at Helgeland was performed at the Nya Teatern (The New Theatre) in Helsingfors — in Swedish, notably, but the same play also came out as a book, in a Finnish translation by C. Edv. Törmänen.

Throughout the 1880s, it is Ibsen’s new ‘social-critical’ plays which constitute the engine in his conquering raids into other languages. In October 1880, the Dutch could make their acquaintance with Ibsen when The Pillars of Society was performed in Amsterdam. It is not known who translated the play. Neither was the translation ever published. The first Dutch book version came three years later, it was An Enemy of the People in Ida Donker’s translation (apparently directly from Norwegian).

In Russia, Ibsen was introduced on multilingual levels. He was first played in Polish, then in Finnish, then in February 1884 for the first time in Russian, when A Doll’s House was produced on stage in St. Petersburg. Later, many travelling theatre troupes from Germany visited Russian towns with German Ibsen productions. Historically, the most important Russian Ibsen versions were translated by the married couple Peter Emanuel and Anna Hansen, he Danish, she Russian. Such a constellation is not all that untypical in an Ibsen context. The strangest variant is perhaps Polish-Latvian Moritz Prozor who, in collaboration with his wife, who was Swedish, for many decades had exclusive rights to French Ibsen translations. None of them had French as their mother tongue. Maybe this was damaging for Ibsen’s reception in France. Ibsen was not terribly enthusiastic over translations which were the result of a collaboration between two or more people.⁶ In Prozor’s translations — the first published edition was Ghosts and A Doll’s House, which came out in Paris in 1889 — only the male translator was credited. Perhaps he consciously played down his wife’s contribution out of consideration to Ibsen’s preferences.

The history of Ibsen translations is also a history of mysteries and secrets. When was Ibsen translated to Italian for the first time? Not easy to establish. The Italian newspaper Gazetta d’Italia announced, on the 26^th of December 1884, that they had a new translation of A Doll’s House by Alfredo Mazza. The newspaper printed an introduction, but the translation itself was long in coming — actually it has never appeared! Neither has anyone ever seen a version in manuscript form. Did Alfredo Mazza translate the play, or did he just promise to do it? Was the translation knocked back by the newspaper? But why has it been impossible to locate it?⁷

So the first successful introduction of Ibsen in Italy was the production of A Doll’s House in Pietro Galletti’s translation in Torino, 15^th February 1889. The translation was published as a book in 1894. Galletti had translated the play via the German version.

The last two languages I shall mention before I let the histories of literature and theatre speak for themselves, are Latvian and Hungarian. In October 1889 Ibsen could make a note that his plays now appeared in Latvian translation. The Pillars of Society was performed in Riga, translated by Mārcis Zīraks who also played the lead role as Rørlund. That same month Ibsen appeared for the first time in the Hungarian language when A Doll’s House in Gyula Reviczky’s translation premiered at the Hungarian National Theatre (Nemzeti Szinház) in Budapest. On the 20^th of April 1891, this production was revived as a gala performance in honour of Ibsen, who had arrived from Munich (via Vienna) to be present. His visits to Vienna and Budapest became a grandiose farewell tour for Ibsen. He was royally celebrated. He had become a superstar. Well over two months later, he headed home to Norway — and he never returned to the European continent.

Why did it take off for Ibsen from 1889 onwards, one may well ask. Obviously, in itself it was more than favourable to have reached 12 languages on top of Danish-Norwegian, especially with German, English, Russian and French among them. However, in addition we can point to a few single factors. Firstly: Ibsen’s drama was the lodestar of progressive, trendsetting theatre ensembles such as Théâtre Libre in Paris, Freie Bühne in Berlin and The Independent Theatre in London. In many ways, it was these theatres which made him the father of modern theatre. Secondly: Ibsen’s breakthrough in England was a strong one; then as now the key to a world-wide success. The production of A Doll’s House at Novelty Theatre in London in June 1889, directed by Charles Charrington and with Janet Achurch as Nora, serves as an illustration. First it had a great success in London, and then it toured to Australia, New Zealand, Egypt, India and USA. Ibsen’s breakthrough on the world market followed in the steps of this production. Two other English key events were the previously mentioned five-volume edition Ibsen’s Prose Dramas (1890-91) and George Bernard Shaw’s The Quintessence of Ibsenism which came out in 1891. No matter how much Shaw’s account has socialist tendencies, his book strongly marked the reception of Ibsen both in England and gradually in the whole of Asia.

To date, Ibsen has been translated to 76 languages in all. But we won’t discount that this figure could be higher. Send us an email if you know of a language which is missing in our summary below. Included are languages Ibsen has been published in and/or languages he is staged in. Dialects are not included.

Afrikaans, Albanian, Arabian, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Assamese
Bengali, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Buryat
Catalans, Chinese, Croatian, Czech
Danish, Dutch
English, Esperanto, Estonian
Faroese, Finnish, French, Frisian
Gaelic, Georgian, German, Greek, Gujarati
Hebrew, Hindu, Hungarian
Icelandic, Indonesian, Inuktitut, Irish, Italian
Japanese
Kannada (Karnataka), Kashmiri, Korean, Kurdish
Latvian, Lithuanian, Low-German
Malayalam, Malayan, Marathi, Mongolian
Nepalese, Norwegian nynorsk
Panjabi, Persian (Farsi), Polish, Portuguese
Romansh, Rumanian, Russian
Scotch-Gaelic, Serbian, Singhalese, Slovakian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish
Tamil, Tibetan, Tigrigna, Turkish, Tutonish
Ukrainian, Urdu
Vietnamese
Welsh, White Russian
Yiddish

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Notes

1. Georg Brandes, "Henrik Ibsen: Personal Reminiscences and Remarks on His Plays", in: The Century 93 (February 1917), p. 539.
2. William Archer on Ibsen. The Major Essays, 1889-1919, edited by Thomas Postlewait, Westport, Connecticut 1984, p. 53f.
3. Translator’s note: Every English translation I’ve checked has "Nora, Nora, just like a woman!", which is a little more dismissive than the original, which contains both reproach and a sense of pride ("Nora, Nora, du est en kvinde!").
4. In Norwegian bokmål, ‘fløte’ is ‘cream’, ‘fløyte’ is ‘flute’; in Norwegian nynorsk, ‘fløyte’ can mean both ‘cream’ and ‘flute’.
5. Adolf Strodtmann, Das geistige Leben in Dänemark. Streifzüge auf den Gebieten der Kunst, Literatur, Politik und Journalistik des skandinavischen Nordens, Berlin 1873. The Ibsen chapter is on pp. 223-258.
6. Cfr. Ibsen’s Letter to Victor Barrucand 6^th March 1891.
7. Cfr. Margherita Giardano Lokrantz, "Three unpublished letters by Henrik Ibsen about the first performances of Et dukkehjem in Italy", in: Ibsen Studies 2:1, Oslo 2002, pp. 59-74.

(Translated to English by May-Brit Akerholt.)