New translations of Henrik Ibsen's contemporary dramas into Russian

Abstract

In 2017–2018, the first two volumes of Ibsen's contemporary dramas, translated by the author of this article, were published by the AST publishing house. This was most timely, as previous translations dated from more than a century ago. Since then, the Russian language has changed drastically in terms of both syntax and vocabulary; as a result, spectators nowadays fail to feel as if the people on stage are speaking the way they do in everyday life — and this is the requirement for “new drama” that Ibsen himself considered extremely important. The old-fashionedness of the characters' speech, seen as doubly so because of the translation, affects the dynamics of the dialogue and impairs the ability of our contemporaries to perceive such highly important characteristics of Ibsen's language as distinctive speech characteristics of the characters and the use of various language registers — from colloquial language to officialese. Theatre directors naturally feel the need for new contemporary translations. One of the important goals of my new translation was to transmit the comic element in Ibsen, including in the play An Enemy of the People, where I broke with the long-standing Russian tradition of viewing Dr. Stockman only as a brave and uncompromising activist. The so-called keywords, that is, certain key concepts or remarks that might be repeated over twenty times in a play, all in various contexts, pose a special difficulty for the translator, as do Ibsen's own neologisms that usually tend to be both strongly emotion-laden and remarkably polysemic. The article treats in detail the translator's strategy, from posing the task (a full contemporary literary translation, both for reading and for staging, in which the characters would converse as naturally as in everyday life) to making specific decisions.