Ivanov and Oedipus show how hard it is to translate playsTom Stoppard's new version of Ivanov fails to achieve the accuracy of Frank McGuinness's OedipusFresh and vital: Ralph Fiennes in Frank McGuinness's version of Oedipus.
Photograph: Catherine AshmoreVeronica Lee Tuesday October 14 2008
I recently saw two plays, originally written in languages that I do not speak, that made me ponder the art of translation. They were Tom Stoppard's version of Ivanov, starring Kenneth Branagh, part of the Donmar's West End season and Frank McGuiness's Oedipus, starring Ralph Fiennes, at the National Theatre.
Whereas McGuinness's text sounds fresh and vital, giving clarity to Sophocles' work for a modern audience, I found myself thinking several times during Ivanov that a character wouldn't say that line or that something was jarringly out of time and place. For instance, where the literal translation has "There's no sense in my life without you", Stoppard has the besotted Sasha say to Ivanov, "Without you my life has no meaning" - a small but important difference that moves it dangerously in the direction of Hollywood chick flick.
He has concentrated on the play's comedy rather than its tragedy, and I laughed more than at other productions of Ivanov I had seen. But the result is to make Ivanov Stoppard-lite: he injects funnies into the text, however weak they are, as Ivanov's prankster uncle Shabelsky's line about his wife Anna's bad piano-playing shows. "I've known stuffed carp with more ear for music," he says - not a million miles from the literal translation, but a clunking line unworthy of Chekhov, or indeed of Stoppard himself.
In Oedipus, by contrast, the liberties McGuinness has taken with the text are there to serve the story. For example, the cocksureness of Oedipus before his fall is beautifully, economically told in one line: he describes himself not as the Thebans' leader, but tells them "Remember, I rule the roost here." Anyone new to the play will instantly understand what's going on.
I suspect that critics will like McGuinness's work, but they have been divided on Stoppard's efforts, with verdicts ranging from "intelligent" to "over-free". I tend to the latter view, though Stoppard has defended himself by saying "I have absolutely no compunction about altering plays for the occasion." But if he makes free with the original, doesn't that mean that Ivanov is another of his own plays, just based on Chekhov's story?
Neither playwright, as far as I know, speaks the original language of the text, neither the polyglot Stoppard nor the English and medieval studies graduate McGuinness. They worked, as is the custom, from literal translations provided by scholars (Helen Rappaport's Ivanov and Ciaran McGrogarty's Oedipus) and added their own interpretations and inventions.
I wonder, then, how much any translated play accurately reflects the original, and to what extent we see it only through the prism of the adapter's art. Does a translated play instantly become a new, discrete work? The multilingual scholar George Steiner says of literary translation, "To understand is to decipher. To hear significance is to translate." Which means (if I may take the liberty of translating) every member of the audience interprets a play anew each time it is performed. So maybe I shouldn't be too bothered about Stoppard's offences.
Source:
https://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/theatreblog/2008/oct/14/chekhov-stoppard-branagh