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The Seagull - Anton Chekhov (translated by Justin Alexander)

“I am writing a play. It’s a comedy. There are three women’s parts, six men’s, four acts, landscapes, a view over a lake; a great deal of conversation about literature, little action, tons of love.”

– Anton Chekhov

A few years ago I wrote a translation of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull. That translation is now available as a DRM-free Kindle e-book. This, of course, also means that it can be read on any iPad, Android, Windows PC, Mac, or Blackberry device using the free Kindle Reading Apps for those platforms. Or transferred to any other e-reader you might care to employ with a minimum of effort.

Buy Now!

The Seagull is the haunting tale of young love, lost dreams, and broken promise. Its unique cast of incomparable characters echoes dully in a perfect balance – each drawn and repulsed in equal measures through an enchanting and terrifying dance choreographed by Anton Chekhov, the master of Russian theater. It is that rare and precious jewel which perfectly reflects a slice of life, finding those moments which are simultaneously comic and tragic; mortal and divine; eternal and common.

This performance-tested translation captures both the comic and tragic elements of Chekhov’s stirring drama. Those wishing to find a text which is both faithful to the play’s original Russian and also capable of achieving lyric truth in English will not be disappointed: The characters speak Chekhov’s words in another tongue.

ABOUT THE TRANSLATION

Back in 2010 I also wrote a series of essays discussing the translation. If you didn’t read them back then, you might find them interesting now:

The Seagull – Proxy Translation

The Seagull – Quoting Hamlet

The Seagull – Jupiter is Angry

The Seagull – (Not So) Virgin Wood

And if you’re generally interesting my playwriting, you might also be interested in John and Abigail:

John and Abigail - Justin Alexander

 

Photo by Mark Vancleave

Back in 2009 I posted a series of essays on my work translating The Seagull by Anton Chekhov. This essay was written, but apparently I forgot to actually post it to the website. Whoops.

In Act III of The Seagull, Trigorin threatens to leave Arkadina for Nina. Arkadina, driven to desperation, succeeds in seducing Trigorin and convinces him to stay with her. (“He’s mine now,” she says to herself. And she’s right.) Trigorin then opens the small notebook that he keeps in his pocket and jots something down.

Аркадина. Как хочешь. Вместе, так вместе…

Пауза.

Тригорин записывает в книжку.

Что ты?

Тригорин. Утром слышал хорошее выражение: «Девичий бор»… Пригодится. (Потягивается.) Значит, ехать? Опять вагоны, станции, буфеты, отбивные котлеты, разговоры…

Which can be literally translated as:

Arkadina: As you wish. However, both together …

Pause.

Trigorin writes in the book.

What?

Trigorin: This morning heard the expression: “Virgin forest” … Handy. (Stretches.) So, go? Again, cars, stations, buffets, chops, talking …

The key phrase here is “Девичий бор” — “virgin forest”. It’s pretty easy to look at the juxtaposition of “I heard an expression” and “virgin forest” and leap straight to the common English phrase: “virgin wood”. And, indeed, a casual survey of translations of The Seagull reveals that virtually everyone goes for the easy solution.

But there is a problem here: Trigorin jots it down as something worth remembering; an oddity that must be recorded. Generations of English-speaking actors and their audiences have struggled with making sense out of Trigorin’s seeming unfamiliarity with a common phrase.

A quick search of Russian sources, on the other hand, reveals what I suspected: Unlike “virgin wood”, the phrase “Девичий бор” is virtually unknown outside of The Seagull. So one can immediately intuit that there is an important context for “Девичий бор” which is being lost when we translate it simply as “virgin wood”.

My next step was to pull open a Russian-to-English dictionary.

Девичий — maiden (girl’s, maidenly, virgin, maidenish, maiden-like)

бор — boron, chemical element; forest, thicket

I think we can safely discard the “boron” definition. But this may suggest that we should be wary of putting too much weight into the word “virgin” here. “Maiden” has a very different connotation to it.

Poking around the Russian Google for awhile, I dig into a few of the obscure non-Chekhovian uses of the phrase. One is a 1939 book called Montenegrin’s Tales (Черногорские сказки), which appears to be a collection of folklore by P. Stiyensky (Стийенский Р.). One of the stories has this phrase as the title, but I’ve been unable to find out any details about it.

Another reads: “Их было четверо, девичий бор, кружок, тайное общество, можно сказать. Учились в одной школе.” In English: “There were four in theдевичий бор; a circle, a secret society you might say. They studied together at school.” And the phrase is used again in the same work, once again to describe this small group of girls.

This is intriguing to me because it suggests that the use of the word “forest” or “grove” or “thicket” might be the metaphor in this phrase (rather than “maiden” or “virgin”). In other words, it is not the wood which is being described as virginal, but rather the maidens who are being described as like a forest — like a thicket of trees grouped together.

And, looking at the context of the scene, it begins to make sense why Trigorin would suddenly be struck by such a phrase: He has been beset in rapid succession by Nina and then Arkadina. He feels pulled this way and that by the women around him. They are a thicket penning him in.

I have now defined the parameters of the problem: I need a catchy turn of phrase which is (a) original rather than proverbial and (b) invokes the imagery of a covey of women.

What I eventually came up with was “girlish gaggle”. I was unhappy to lose the sense of “forest” or “trees” from the phrase, but I think it nevertheless strikes closer to home than “virgin wood”.

(EDIT: Intriguingly, a reference that has cropped up on Russian Google since I originally translated the script seems to suggest that Девичий бор might be a “paraphrasing” (typo?) of девичий вор — which can be translated as “maiden’s burr” or “girl thief”. I wish I had a better understanding of Russian to fully appreciate the argument being made, but if I accept it at face value then it raises the interesting possibility that I had it backwards: Is Trigorin actually referring to himself as a burr which catches upon women? There is invocation of both injury and clinging which I find intriguing.)

The Seagull – Jupiter is Angry

February 14th, 2009

Seagull - Dorn
Photo by Mark Vancleave

In Act I of the The Seagull, Arkadina has become upset with her son Kostya. This prompts Dorn, a family friend, to respond in this exchange:

Дорн. Юпитер, ты сердишься…
Аркадина. Я не Юпитер, а женщина.

Which can be literally translated:

Dorn: Jupiter, you’re angry…
Arkadina: I’m not Jupiter, I’m a woman.

Wait… what?

Translation isn’t an easy gig sometimes, and it’s perhaps unsurprising to find translators struggling with this line. However, I was somewhat surprised to discover how many of them — at the end of the day — get it wrong.

Let me spoil the ending here by explaining what this line is actually all about. Its source is a Latin proverb: Iuppiter iratus ergo nefas. Literally, “Jupiter is angry, therefore [he is] wrong.” Although less known in English, this old saying was apparently quite popular in Russia (appearing, for example, in the works of both Dostoyevsky and Lenin, among others). Here Chekhov is assuming that the audience will be familiar enough with the saying that they will know what Dorn is saying even though Arkadina cuts him off.

In the end, I translated this line as:

Dorn: Jupiter is angry, therefore–
Arkadina: I’m not Jupiter, I’m a woman.

This is basically a literal translation. The significant difference is adding the word “therefore” (which I hope is enough of a clue for modern audiences to realize that Dorn is offering up a maxim) and changing the ellipsis at the end of his line to a dash (Chekhov uses ellipsis to indicate both characters trailing off and characters being interrupted; in modern usage the dash is a clearer indication that Dorn is being cut off by Arkadina).

Now, translation is more of an art than a science. There are certainly other ways a translator could try to tackle this line. But the essential elements here are (a) Dorn starts to quote a maxim and (b) Arkadina cuts him off.

Elisaveta Fen, on the other hand, translates this exchange as:

Dorn: Jupiter! You are angry, therefore…
Arkadina: I’m not Jupiter, I’m a woman.

By sticking that exclamation point after “Jupiter!”, Fen turns it into an odd ephitet quite separate from the maxim that follows.

The Marian Fell translation (which is reproduced by Project Gutenberg without proper credit) has:

Dorn: Thou art angry, O Jove!
Arkadina: I am a woman, not Jove.

This, honestly, doesn’t even make sense. Dorn referring to Arakdina as “Jove” looks like a complete non sequitur.

George Calderon, one of the earliest translators of the play, gives us:

Dorn: (singing) “Great Jove, art angry yet”…
Arkadina: I’m not Jove, I’m a woman.

Having Dorn break out into song is not as much of a non sequitur as you might think if you’re not familiar with the play: Dorn frequently interjects snippets of song into conversation.

My point with all this is not to talk about how clever I am. (Well, not primarily anyway. I have an over-abundance of ego.) But I think it’s a notable example of the ways in which translations can (and do) go astray. I’ve met lots of people who have written off Chekhov or Tolstoy or Hugo or Dumas on the basis of bad translations, bad productions, or bad adaptations.

Of course, not everyone is going to like Chekhov, Tolstoy, Hugo, or Dumas (or the thousands of other foreign authors like them). But I think it’s worthwhile to remember that not all translations are created equal. If it turns out that you don’t like the works of a foreign author, it might be worth your while to give them a second chance in a different translation. And this is a maxim that extends beyond the classical.

The Seagull – Quoting Hamlet

February 10th, 2009

The Seagull - Kostya and Arkadina
Photo by Mark Vancleave

In Act I of Chekhov’s The Seagull, Arkadina and her son Konstantin quote from Hamlet:

Аркадина (сыну). Мой милый сын, когда же начало?
Треплев. Через минуту. Прошу терпения.
Аркадина (читает из «Гамлета»), «Мой сын! Ты очи обратил мне внутрь души, и я увидела ее в таких кровавых, в таких смертельных язвах — нет спасенья!»
Треплев (из «Гамлета»). «И для чего ж ты поддалась пороку, любви искала в бездне преступленья?»

Michael Leader gives a rough, literal translation of these lines as:

Arkadina (to her son). My dear son, when will it begin? [referring to Konstantin’s play]
Konstantin. In a few minutes. I ask you to be patient.
Arkadina (reading from Hamlet). ‘My son! You’ve turned my eyes into my soul and I have seen there such bloody and such deadly sores – there is no salvation!’
Konstantin (from Hamlet). ‘And why did you give give yourself to vice, and seek love in the abyss of crime?’

These are not the actual lines from Shakespeare, which read:

Queen O Hamlet, speak no more!
Thou turn’st my eyes into my very soul;
And there I see such black and grained spots
As will not leave their tinct.

Hamlet Nay, but to live
In the rank sweat of an enseamed bed,
Stew’d in corruption, honeying and making love
Over the nasty sty!

This is because Chekhov was pulling his quote from the Russian translation of Shakespeare by N.A. Polevoi.

This line creates some problems for English translators of The Seagull because Polevoi’s translation of these lines is not as harsh as Shakespeare’s original. Putting Shakespeare’s original lines in Konstantin’s mouth results in a much harsher portrayal of the relationship between Kostya and his mother than Chekhov probably intended.

More importantly, in my opinion, the original Russian can be taken as a sly reference back to Kostya’s critique of his mother’s “Theater” from earlier in the same scene — the context from Hamlet quite clearly references her relationship with Trigorin, but the context of the upcoming play results in the line also alluding to the “vices” and “crimes” of her false theater. The original quotation from Shakespeare, however, results in a complete non sequitur (which also adds to the harshness of what Kostya is saying).

CONSIDERATIONS

For me, there are several factors to take into consideration when attempting to provide a proper translation of these lines:

(1) The literary reference is part of a larger tapestry of literary references woven throughout the entire structure of the play. In an English translation, I think, this particular reference is even more important because it is one of the few references which will be directly recognizable as a quotation to modern audiences and, thus, capture some of what the original flavor of the references throughout the play would have been for Russian audiences.

(2) Arkadina quotes from Hamlet because it provides her with an opportunity to over-react (in a particularly and literally dramatic way) to her son’s light chastisement. Therefore, I think the line she chooses can be directly translated.

(3) By matching her quote-for-quote, Konstantin is also showing that he can play her game. Given Konstantin’s earlier comments about feeling humiliated in her social circles, this is imporant.

(4) But Konstantin is also using the line to call attention to the context of Hamlet — and thus make a sly dig at her relationship with Trigorin.

(5) And, as noted above, Konstantin is also using the line to comment on the “sins” of her “Theater”.

(6) The narrative relationship between the Kostya-Arkadina and Hamlet-Gertrude relationships is also heavily emphasized by many commentators, so it’s possible that Chekhov is using these quotations to set up a larger theme of the play as a whole. But since most commentators who attempt to highlight this narrative relationhip do so by using the Oedipal Complex interpretation of Hamlet — an interpretation which post-dates Chekhov’s life — it is doubtful to my mind that it is as strong as many commentators would suppose.

SOLUTIONS

In approaching these lines, I first considered several different approaches that have been attempted by other translators. These include:

(1) Laying all other considerations aside and using the original Shakespearean lines. (This was unsatisfactory to me for the reasons described above.)

(2) Re-translating the passage from the Russian back into English, producing a result more-or-less similar to Michael Leader’s effort quoted above. (This approach is problematic because they are no longer recognizably quoting from the play. Some translators have attempted to address this issue by removing the name of “Hamlet” — but at that point any remnant of reference to the original play is completely lost and the entire nature of the scene is fundamentally altered.)

(3) Using Gertrude’s line as it appears in Shakespeare, but then re-translating Kostya’s quote from the Russian back into English. (This allows the translator to blunt the harshness and non sequitur of Kostya’s response. The problem is that Kostya now looks like an idiot. Instead of playing his mother’s intellectual game of quotations and matching her blow-for-blow, Kostya instead appears to misquote the play. Instead of showing him as clever, this approach turns him into an unmitigated and out-classed bumpkin.)

None of these proved satisfactory to me and so I started experimenting with other approaches.

The first thing I played around with was the idea of selectively editing Kostya’s quote. For example, I tried dropping the very end of Hamlet’s line (“… over the nasty sty!”). This made the line slightly less vicious, but it ultimately failed to truly alleviate the problem and still came up short in capturing most of the dynamics in the original Russian.

Eventually I decided to go trolling through the entire scene from Hamlet to find a literal quotation that would work. I have subsequently found a few other translators who have done the same, but — as far as I know — none have chosen the same line:

Mother, for love of grace,
Lay not that flattering unction to your soul,
That not your trespass, but my madness speaks.

This satisfies the literary necessity for an accurate quotation (without which Konstantin’s tit-for-tat is thwarted since he’s failing to accurately quote the play); calls attention to the relationship with Trigorin; and can also be taken as a sly dig at her theatrical shortcomings.

It’s not a perfect solution. (I doubt a perfect solution exists.) But it seems to work well. (For me, anyway.)

The SeagullWhen I was first asked to return to my alma mater to direct a play as part of their 2008-2009 season, I started reading plays. And reading plays. And reading plays.

And the play I kept coming back to was The Seagull.

It was a play I had periodically considered producing on my own for several years. It was also an appropriate fit for the technical goals of the program (providing an installed set piece along with period props and costumes). And, given its history with Stanislavski’s acting methods, it was a perfect match with the acting workshops that were being planned as part of the rehearasal process.

So I stopped reading plays and I started reading translations. And reading translations. And reading translations. And reading translations.

This proved to be a much more frustrating process because I wasn’t finding a suitable translation. As a general rule, the translations I read fell into two broad categories:

First, there were the literal and accurate translations. These featured dialog which was as faithful as possible to the original meaning of Chekhov’s Russian. Unfortunately, these were mostly written by Russian scholars, not playwrights. As a result, the English was also stilted and unnatural — lacking the true rhythms of natural speech.

Second, there were the colloquial translations. These sought to make the language flow naturally. (Many of them were written by actual playwrights.) Unfortunately, they tended to achieve this effect by only roughly summarizing or even re-writing Chekhov’s lines.

In the end, I didn’t want to compromise in either direction: I wanted a faithful translation and I wanted natural language that wouldn’t impose an additional barrier to journeyman actors. Eventually I concluded that, if I couldn’t find it, then I would write it myself.

Of course, there was a slight hitch: I don’t actually speak or read Russian.

So I engaged in a process I lovingly refer to as “proxy translation”: I obtained as many different translations of the play as I could and started looking for the intersection. In the end, I worked from the original Russian text, a literal translation mediated through Google’s translation service, and more than fourteen other translations.

Many of the translations I was working from were proxy translations, as well.  Some clearly labeled themselves such — like Tom Stoppard’s excellent rendition of the play — while others could be identified through the clearly traceable lineage of certain passages.

I first encountered the art of proxy translation while watching my mother collaborate with John Lewin on a version of Faust that was being workshopped by Garland Wright at the Guthrie Theater. (This project eventually evolved into a full adaptation of the Faust legend into an original play.)

(John Lewin, by the way, was a true master of the art. His proxy translation of Oedipus Rex — which, sadly, has never been published — remains the finest rendition of they play I have ever seen or read.)

It should be noted that proxy translations are sometimes referred to as “adaptations”. While I agree that such translations are distinctly different from those rendered directly from the mother tongue (hence my coining of the term “proxy translation”), I think the use of “adaptation” in this sense is poor terminology. “Adaptation”, in the context of playwrighting and screenwriting, is a term of art and its use here is usually a distortion of what’s actualy being done. Tennessee Williams adapted The Seagull when he re-wrote it as Trigorin’s Notebook. But that’s not what I was doing.

Perhaps the best way to explain the work I did is by example. Here’s a line from the play in the original Russian:

Вы, рутинеры, захватили первенство в искусстве и считаете законным и настоящим лишь то, что делаете вы сами, а остальное вы гнетете и душите! Не признаю я вас! Не признаю ни тебя, ни его!

Tom Stoppard translates this line as: “You hacks and mediocrities have grabbed all the best places for yourselves and you think the kind of art you do is the only kind that counts — anything else you stifle or stamp out. Well, I’m not taken in by any of you! — not by him and not by you either!”

On the other hand, Elisaveta Fen translates it as: “It’s conventional, hide-bound people like you who have grabbed the best places in the arts today, who regard as genuine and legitimate only what you do yourselves. Everything else you have to smother and suppress! I refuse to accept you at your own valuation! I refuse to accept you or him!”

So I look at these and twelve other translations like them, and then I look at my literal translation which reads (in somewhat broken English): “You routiniers have captured the championship positions in art and consider legitimate only that which you do yourself; everything else you yoke and supress! I do not recognize you! I recognize you nor him!”

In this literal translation, I notice two things: First, the odd word “routinier”. Second, the use of the word “yoke”.

So I start with the word “routinier”. I head over to a dictionary and find a definition: “A person who adheres to a routine; especially a competent but uninspired conductor.” The root of the word is clearly similar to that of “routine”, and with a little bit of research I find that similar words are popular expressions throughout continental Europe (particularly eastern Europe). In fact, the Russian word is “rutinier” — it’s literally the same word. But the word is, obviously, not popularly known in English. “Hack” is probably an adequate translation, but what it lacks is that particular sense that they are hacks specifically because they just keep repeating the same things over and over again.

Then I turn my attention to the phrase “yoke and suppress”. This phrase has been various translated as “crush and smother” (Frayn), “smother and suppress” (Fen), “stifle or stamp out” (Stoppard), “sit on and crush” (Hingley), and the like. But in all of these I feel that something is being lost from the sense of “yoke” — the idea of “chaining” or “tying up” other types of work is clear; but there’s also something terrible and evocative about the image of taking young, creative artists and yoking them to your own bankrupt artistic forms (like a great playwright forced to waste his talents on a trite sitcom).

It should also be noted that, although the word is literally translated as “yoke”, in Russian it does carry a specific connotation of “choking” — which is where words like “smother” are coming from in the other translations. The point here is that Chekhov has chosen a word with a rich meaning that simply has no clear analogue in English.

What I eventually rendered out of this conceptual gestalt was this line:

You slaves of routine have seized the premiere positions in the arts, and you only sanction what you do yourselves! Everything else you enslave or suppress! But I don’t acknowledge you! I don’t acknowledge you and I don’t acknowledge him!

The idea of “enslave” is not a precise fit for “yoke”, but it seems to capture the richer sense of Chekhov’s meaning. I lose some sense of the art being “choked”, but I think at least some of that sense of that destruction is still captured in the word “suppress”.

This use of the word “enslave” also resonates strongly with the phrase “slaves of routine”, which I’ve used earlier in the same passage in an effort to capture the meaning of “routinier”.(Before taking this route I actually attempted several versions of the line in which I just used the word “routinier” to achieve a completely literal and accurate translation. Unfortunately, no one had the slightest idea what Kostya was talking about.)

Now, take that same process, repeat it a few hundred times, and you end up with a script.

Of course, this is a rather extreme example featuring two difficult semantic puzzles that needed to be solved. Most of the time the process was the much easier one of simply trying to figure out how to get a particular passage to flow naturally and beautifully off of the tongue.

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