From a re-imagining of The Wild Duck to differing interpretations of The Master Builder, Ibsen’s plays are challenging source material. The New Penguin Ibsen aims to get to grips with the originals

In a letter written in 1872, the dramatist Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) fretted about how well his plays might fare outside of Norway. Putting a drama into other languages, he argued, was “not simply a matter of translating the meaning but also, to a certain extent, of re-creating the style and the images and ultimately adapting the entire form of expression to the structure and demands of the language into which one is translating.”

At that time, the fear was largely theoretical because Ibsen’s early work had not travelled much further than Sweden. But the great social and psychological dramas he wrote later – such as Hedda Gabler, An Enemy of the People, The Wild Duck, A Doll’s House and The Master Builder – are now staged and studied around the world.

And, in Britain, two contrasting approaches to Ibsen translation have appeared this month. Sydney’s Belvoir St Theatre Company has recently visited the Barbican, performing its radical re-imagining of The Wild Duck, the five acts thinned into a single 80-minute stretch, played within a modernist glass set. This coincides with the publication of the first volume of the New Penguin Ibsen, a four-book project – backed by the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs – that contains the first English translations based on a 2005 Scandinavian historical-critical edition of the plays, featuring revised texts.

The Belvoir and Penguin approaches – theatrical practitioners trying to rethink the plays for both modern audiences, and academics aiming to represent the dramatist’s intentions – encapsulate the recurrent conflict in the presentation of foreign drama. Even when the treatment is less experimental than the Australian staging, theatre companies prefer to use versions by playwrights (such as Christopher Hampton, Mike Poulton and David Eldridge) while publishers with an eye on college bookshops turn to translators who are specialists in the source language: the Penguin project uses the university-linked Barbara J Haveland and Anne-Marie Stanton-Ife. More.

See: The Guardian

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