by Henrik Ibsen
in Him who holds all things at His command.
PEER [laughing abruptly]:
Unless you can solve riddles I am done for.
SOLVEIG: So tell me what they are, and let us see.
PEER: What cannot I tell? So, what was I made man for?
So where has Peer Gynt been since you and he
last met?
SOLVEIG: Where been?
PEER: Ay, with the birthmark of his destiny
stark on his forehead, as he first sprang out
of some divine thought?
Can you answer such questions? If you cannot,
I must now gravitate to where I belong
in the limbo of mists where there’s no guiding song.
SOLVEIG [smiling]:
Oh, that riddle is easy.
PEER: Then explain it to me.
Where has it been, my true self, all this time?
As though with ‘the father’s name
written in his forehead’?
SOLVEIG: In my faith, in my hope, and in my love you have been carried.
PEER [stepping back from her in his astonishment]:
I cannot believe what I hear.
Are you saying it is I whom you bear,
and have borne, within you, this many a long year?
SOLVEIG: That is what I am saying. And who might the father be?
It is the one who answers his mother’s plea
with full forgiveness.
PEER [as a gleam of light falls across him, cries out]:
Mother, wife, dear maiden,
keep me near your heart safe-hidden.
He clings to her and hides his face in her lap. There is a long silence. The sun rises in its full glory.
SOLVEIG [sings quietly]:
Sleep, my love, my own sweet child,
I shall rock thee free from guilt.
The child’s safe in its mother’s lap.
The livelong day they play and sleep.
The child’s at rest; his mother’s breast
protects him; and in God they’re blest.
The boy-child lay, close to my heart,
the livelong day. Now he is tired.
Sleep, my love, my own sweet child,
I have rocked thee free from guilt.
BUTTON MOULDER’S VOICE [from behind the cabin]:
Last crossroads, Peer? Our final meeting?
We’ll see. Till then, I shall say nothing.
SOLVEIG [singing more loudly in the clear light of day]:
I have borne thee freed from guilt.
Sleep my love, my own dear child.
Afterword
Translating and Recreating Ibsen: An Interview with Geoffrey Hill
Kenneth Haynes
KH: Brand (1866) and Peer Gynt (1867) have often been taken as a complementary or contrasting pair. The critic and translator James McFarlane, for instance, whom you drew on when you were first working on Ibsen, wrote that the ‘unbending, uncompromising, sternly self-disciplined Brand’ was succeeded by ‘the compliant, opportunistic, and self-indulgent Peer’; the one destroying illusion, the other living by it; one acting in a centripetal world, the other in a centrifugal one.1 In your versions the contrast between the two plays is immediately striking in language and style. The characters in your Brand speak verse that is dramatically credible, that consistently maintains some relation to a speaking voice, while ‘moving without incongruity between colloquialism and high poetry’.2 Peer Gynt, on the other hand, exuberantly abandons this constraint and takes up the widest range of slang, elevated, archaic, fantastic and lyric languages. I wonder whether one source for this difference might be the nature of the commissions, Brand for the stage, Peer Gynt for publication by Penguin.
GH: My version of Brand was commissioned by the National Theatre, and it was performed there in April 1978. I was working from the literal translation, with extensive commentary and annotation, by Inga-Stina Ewbank. It was performed with cuts, and the first publication of the translation, by Heinemann, had those cuts also. A restored translation appeared in 1981 (Minnesota), and a revised and further restored translation came out in 1996 (Penguin). In the current edition there are further revisions, aimed at bringing it even closer to the literal. With Peer Gynt, I also worked from a literal annotated version, in this case by Janet Garton; you served as editor for it during revision and preparation for press, so that there was a difference in my working methods from Brand.
Perhaps misleadingly, I recall as my actual points of departure for the two versions some precise technical observations and suggestions. At an early meeting with Sir Peter Hall in 1975, I spoke of the challenge of resisting the pull of the English pentameter in coming to terms with Brand’s tetrameter; he suggested that I try something even shorter than tetrameter. That was the true genesis of my version of Brand, along with Ibsen’s own remark that ‘I wanted a metre in which I could career where I would, as on horseback.’3
In the case of Peer Gynt, I was blocked for two years, unable to proceed because unable to know which form to use; a chance reading – in late 2013 – of the fourteeners in Yeats’ The Green Helmet provided a sudden sense of the possibilities of long lines for it. This was my initial point of departure; there is, I agree, a great variety of verse-forms in my Peer Gynt. I have faithfully attended to Garton’s notes wherever she has indicated a change in metre.
KH: Did Yeats’ subtitle, ‘An Heroic Farce’, for The Green Helmet help you to situate what you were doing, to get a sense in your mind’s ear or eye of how to proceed?
GH: I think it may well have done. A sense of sublime doggerel, I trust, informs the many scenes of farce.
KH: Your Brand uses slant rhymes in short lines, sometimes shorter than the tetrameter; your Peer Gynt uses slant rhymes in lines of highly variable length, some quite short, sometimes of considerable length. In the first draft of your version, Peer Gynt’s lines were sometimes longer even than Ibsen’s originals and included much internal rhyme and internal off-rhyme. I think that many of these lines have now been broken up, so that there are more short lines, and the rhymes and off-rhymes are made evident at the line-ending much more often.
GH: There was no perfect solution. Placing rhymes in the middle of lines risks obscuring the overall structure of the rhyming lines, which are sometimes quite elaborate – rhymes may be separated by half a dozen or more lines that are otherwise engaged. However, I have by no means abandoned internal rhyme altogether as a resource. For instance, where Ibsen uses a short line, it seemed to me possible to use internal rhyme as a kind of ‘snap’ effect, the verbal equivalent of the stage direction ‘snaps his fingers’. This effect is present in the opening scene, and elsewhere.
KH: Did the difference in commission also affect how you handled issues of stage performance in the two cases? Ibsen wrote both as closet dramas, I believe.
GH: In the case of Brand, I was commissioned by the National Theatre to make a version that would justify the use of the big Olivier auditorium and its range of stage machinery. Having worked closely with the admirable 1978 cast and having witnessed the obstacles that the scenery presented, I came to feel that no elaborate stage machinery is needed. Around 1980, Brand was performed in the Theatre Workshop auditorium at Leeds University, with a seating capacity of fifty or sixty. It was played on a stage that was essentially bare by staff and student actors. Ewbank, who came up from London to see it, said that she was more impressed by it than by the National Theatre presentation.
The more claustrophobic the setting, the better. It is crucial that the fatal ambiguity of Brand’s grandeur-grandiosity be perceived from his own words and actions, not from ice-fields and avalanches. I estimated in 1978 that the complex stage machinery added perhaps fifteen minutes to the production of a play which, in Ibsen’s original and even in my reduced version, far exceeds the ‘two hours’ traffic of our stage’. Cutting for performance is probably inevitable; drastic cutting, however, destroys the integrity of the w
ork.
Both plays have been called ‘non-theatrical’.4 Didn’t some critic write that Peer Gynt seems to anticipate the medium of film? The distinction between closet drama and drama for the stage does not seem to matter much while actually writing them; either way, one always has a picture in one’s head of some kind of human confrontation on the stage.
KH: In the preface to the 1996 edition of your Brand, you make a couple of remarks that I don’t think I fully understand. For instance, you object to Ibsen’s comment that he could as easily have written the play about a politician or a sculptor as about a priest.5
GH: Ibsen in that crass remark is betraying his own achievement. Such words reduce Brand, the character, to no more than the usual Romantic hero trapped in the usual dilemma. I have slightly heightened the Kierkegaardian streak in Brand to avoid this conflation.
KH: Would you give an example or explain more what you mean?
GH: Brand’s decisions that vitally affect the crisis of the play (his eye-for-an-eye refusal to offer communion to his dying mother, his decision to remain in the parish though he knows it will be the death of his son) are vocational choices that pertain to the priest alone. They are fundamentally different from the vocational choices of a sculptor or even a ‘visionary’ reforming activist. I don’t believe that Ibsen had a theological cast of mind. To find it in drama, you would have to consult George Buchanan’s Jephtha of the mid-sixteenth century (which I have read in Robert Garioch’s Lallans version of 1959); or perhaps Milton’s Samson Agonistes.
KH: You write in the 1996 preface: ‘That [Brand] is so uncompromising and yet so available, as foil or reactive agent, is a technical economy which may exact its own price: compromising both his proper availability, his power of priestly mediation, and his more contentious mediations of visionary certitude.’6 Do you mean that Brand is lent a spurious appeal through his contrast with venal characters like the dean and the mayor? That his dubious and grandiose vision is given too much credibility because we see him in his interactions with caricatured figures?
GH: Yes; though delivered somewhat pretentiously, I think that is what I meant. We ought to be careful, however, with the word ‘caricature’. Raymond Williams, for instance, complains that the dean, sexton, schoolmaster and mayor ‘seem at times to be developed for their own sake, as caricatures’.7 I demur: Ibsen is not thinking it would be good to throw in a few caricatures for light relief but is recognizing how grotesque such provincial pettiness can be in its power to maim.
KH: Yes, as you put it in an old interview, Brand is circumscribed by the ‘canting, provincial, sanctimonious, murderously self-righteous society’ in which he acts.8
GH: It is a complex problem of balance. Brand’s own sado-masochistic, self-aggrandizing and perhaps lunatic vision is to be set against that provincial context.
KH: At times you freely depart from the literal versions. Take the end of Brand, for instance. In Ewbank’s literal, it reads:
BRAND [shrinks under the approaching avalanche and calls out, upwards]:
Tell me, God, in the jaws of death; –
Can not a scrap of salvation
Come through man’s own will,
If it’s quantum satis …9
The avalanche buries him; the whole valley is filled.
A VOICE [calling through the rolls of thunder]:
He is deus caritatis!
Now your version:
BRAND [shrinking under the approaching avalanche and crying out]:
Tell
me, O God, even as Your heavens fall
on me: what makes retribution
flesh of our flesh? Why is salvation
rooted so blindly in Your Cross?
Why is man’s own proud will his curse?
Answer! What do we die to prove?
Answer!
The avalanche buries him. The whole valley is filled.
A VOICE [calling through the noise of thunder]:
He is the God of Love.
GH: Ibsen situates us, appropriately enough, between a rock and a hard place. To have this exchange of Latin commonplaces between the protagonist and the Almighty as the last word in this drama of human expenditure seems flippant, almost like flicking away a cigarette butt. Some may say this would be an entirely appropriate conclusion. What must be avoided, however, is the impression that Ibsen has by this time exhausted his own imagination and is too drained to do more than conclude with a cracker motto. We need to feel that even if Brand is finished, the dramatist’s inventiveness most certainly is not. There has to be something existential, desperate, in the voice. If someone says that I have perpetrated a psychological-dramatic howler in robbing Ibsen of his own meagreness of spirit at this point, that is something I must live with.
Working to my remit, that of making the unactable actable, I make further deviations from the literal. For example, at the beginning of Brand, Act Five, I introduce direct address, i.e., ‘sexton’ and ‘schoolmaster’, into the opening lines of the conversation for dramatic purposes, in order to establish stage identities immediately. I conflate or delete some of the sexton’s and the schoolmaster’s more stichomythic exchanges, again for the purpose of dramatic economy. I try to trim and condense stage-business where I can.
Furthermore, I heighten the lyric temper where it seems dramatically effective. In Act Three, Brand speaks in anguish to Agnes. In Ewbank’s translation:
BRAND: In agony and tears I secretly bit
The tongue with which I chastised …
And if I raised my arm to strike,
I longed for an embrace! …
Go, Agnes, see to the sleeper;
Sing him into bright dreams;
A child’s soul is clear and soft
Like a tarn in the light of the summer sun;
A mother can glide across it
Like the bird which is beautifully mirrored
In the deepest depth on its soundless flight.
In my version, I draw as much on Ewbank’s notes as on her literal. She says of this passage, for instance, that ‘Light, in every sense, is the main issue of the rest of this Act, right to the last line.’
BRAND: Everything that I speak
is spoken in agony.
I’m like a castaway
crying in vain among
the spars of a great wreck.
I could bite out my tongue
that must rage and chastise
and with its prophecies
strike terror where I crave
the touch of human love.
Watch over our child,
Agnes. In a radiant dream
his spirit lies so calm,
like water that is stilled,
like a mountain tarn
silent under the sun.
Sometimes his mother’s face
hovers over that hushed place,
is received, is given back,
as beautifully as a bird
hovers, and hovering, is mirror’d
in the depths of the lake.
KH: In both plays the main character is a man who consumes, devours a woman. Brand uses Agnes up, and the play is clear that this is what he is doing. Peer Gynt, on the other hand, to some extent seems to endorse Gynt’s vicarious redemption by Solveig’s lifelong sacrifice of her self to him.
GH: I agree with you about Brand, whose spiritual exploitation of Agnes is if anything worse than Gynt’s treatment of women. However, Solveig’s last words to Peer, the words that conclude the drama – ‘I have borne thee freed from guilt. / Sleep my love, my own dear child’ – I would hesitate to accept as the final statement of the play. The Button Moulder’s final words are interpolated between the two last couplets of Solveig’s song, and his words introduce a loaded ambiguity about the possibility of Gynt’s future redemption; it keeps us from merely accepting Solveig’s word as the happy resolution (happy, that is, for him). Still, it is a problem, I agree, one I imagine Ibsen inherited
from Goethe’s Faust.
KH: What in your version of Peer Gynt gives you the most technical satisfaction, if I can put it that way?
GH: The madhouse of Act Four, scene 13. There Ibsen steadily controls such a diversity of unstable, reiterative monomanias, partly through the astuteness of psychological characterization, partly through the variety of verse-form and language, such as ballad, Knittelvers, couplets, and so on.
KH: That makes an effective contrast with the world outside the madhouse. My impression is that the larger, cosmopolitan world that Gynt inhabits is often rather tedious, filled with nationalists, reformers or businessmen who are always repeating themselves in their variously stereotyped ways.
GH: The world’s variety turns out to be monotonous; for Gynt, everything, any experience, can be exchanged for anything else. But that very monotony and monomania can in themselves be highly varied. I must qualify the generalization. Gynt’s first soliloquy in Act Four, scene 5 is luminous in its realization of nature’s beauty and bounty. It seems to me that Ibsen in this passage makes Gynt – who is loud in his disdain for ‘Poetry’ throughout the play – reveal that he might well have been a poetic genius (greater perhaps that Ibsen himself) if his creative imagination had not been so warped and misdirected from childhood on.
KH: I thought we might conclude with a passage near the end. Garton calls it ‘one of the most moving and lyrical passages in the whole play, where Peer finally realizes how he has wasted his life’, adding that it ‘is a slow-moving passage, with dark vowels (gaa, det taagede graa) and enjambement which sustains the sense of regret’. It is a reminder how often you stay close to Ibsen’s lines as rendered by the literal. Here is the passage in Garton’s version:
GYNT: So unutterably poor a soul can return
back to nothingness in the misty grey.
You beautiful earth, don’t be angry
that I trampled your grass to no avail.
You beautiful sun, you have wasted
your splashes of light in an uninhabited cabin.
There was no-one inside to warm and console; –
the owner, they say, was never at home.
Beautiful sun and beautiful earth,