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.)

When 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.

I’ve got things set-up now so that I can do regular updates without breaking my mind or the website. Now all I need is the time to do it.

What have I been up to? Well, in addition to the new house that I mentioned awhile back (and which triggered the sporadic nature of recent updates), I’ve had several major projects on my platter.

THE SEAGULL

I did a proxy translation of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull and have been directing it at South High School (my alma mater). The show opens next week with a preview on the 26th. It’s high school theater, but it’s very good high school theater.

THE FLICKERING WALL

I am also appearing in The Flickering Wall, an original play written specifically for the Illusion Theater. It’s a really fascinating installation piece in which the audience moves through the backstage spaces of what was once a Masonic temple and is now one of the premiere theaters of the Twin Cities.

Between these two projects, I’ve been doing back-to-back rehearsals for most of the past two months. It’s been exciting, but also exhausting.

PTOLUS – IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

One of the perks of finishing the moving and renovation process is that we’ve been able to meet for more regular game sessions in the ongoing campaign I’ve been DMing. Before the disruption to the website, I’d been posting the early campaign journals. I’ll be getting more of those campaign journals up soon, along with various snippets of commentary and analysis.

DREAM MACHINE PRODUCTIONS

I have several 3rd Edition products in development.

Many people have been asking me about the current status of Legends & Labyrinths. Development is progressing, but the long and the short of it is that it will be done when it’s done. The truth is I’m probably being too much of a perfectionist with it.

Response to Spells of Light and Darkness and City Supplement 3: Anyoc have been strong. For now I’m taking that as an indication that the 3rd Edition market is still extant. It’ll be interesting to see how that progresses over the next several months, particularly with so many publishers pulling down their 3rd Edition material.

THE ALEXANDRIAN

I’ve actually been backlogging a lot of material for the website during this technological furlough. If you come back tomorrow, you’ll get to see some of it…

(I’m such a tease.)

Boom de yada!

Sorry the website hasn’t been getting the proper TLC. My attention has been almost wholly consumed — albeit divided — between (a) working on my new house and (b) the production of The Seagull I’m directing at South High School in Minneapolis.

South High is my alma mater, and under the guidance of Louise Bormann it has had a consistently excellent theater department. I feel very honored to be serving as a guest director. For The Seagull I started by producing a completely original proxy translation of the play, and am now embroiled in the actual directing of the play — which also includes developing in-depth acting workshops for the actors.

I keep expecting to be able to get a few days ahead in my prep work for the project and, thus, find the time to work on other projects. But that hasn’t actually happened yet.

And I’m still stuck working off my laptop… which is a perfectly nice computer, but has only a fraction of the software I use to keep this website properly up to date.

Soon, however, I’m hoping to have things back to normal.

Thanks for your patience.

October 23rd thru 26th – 7:00 pm
South High’s Skybox Theater
3131 19th Ave. South
Minneapolis, MN
Reservations: 612-719-1994

Just a quick reminder that John and Abigail re-opens tonight for a limited four-night engagement at the South High Skybox Theater. If you can’t make the show because you aren’t in Minneapolis, but you do happen to be in Boston on October 25th, you can attend a re-enactment of the wedding of John and Abigail Adams at the Adams National Historical Park. It sounds fascinating, and I wish that I could make it.

Cast – Crew
Poster – Production Photos

Buy the Script!