The collected works of Henrik Ibsen (Heinemann Volume 1)/Preface
The eleven volumes of this edition contain all, save one, of the dramas which Henrik Ibsen himself admitted to the canon of his works. The one exception is his earliest, and very immature, tragedy, Catilina, first published in 1850, and republished in 1875. This play is interesting in the light reflected from the poet's later achievements, but has little or no inherent value. A great part of its interest lies in the very crudities of its style, which it would be a thankless task to reproduce in translation. Moreover, the poet impaired even its biographical value by largely rewriting it before its republication. He did not make it, or attempt to make it, a better play, but he in some measure corrected its juvenility of expression. Which version, then, should a translator choose? To go back to the original would sees a deliberate disregard of the poet’s wishes; while, on the other hand, the retouched version is clearly of far inferior interest. It seemed advisable, therefore, to leave the play alone, so far as this edition was concerned. Still more clearly did it appear unnecessary to include The Warrior’s Barrow and Olaf Liliekrans, two early plays which were never admitted to any edition prepared by the poet himself. They were included in a Supplementary Volume of the Norwegian collected edition, issued in 1902, when Ibsen’s life-work was over. They have even less intrinsic value than Catilina, and ought certainly to be kept apart from the works by which he desired to be remembered. A fourth youthful production, St. John’s Night, remains to this day in manuscript. Not even German piety has dragged it to light.
With two exceptions, the plays appear in their chronological order. The exceptions are Love’s Comedy, which ought by rights to come between The Vikings and The Pretenders, and Emperor and Galilean, which ought to follow The League of Youth instead of preceding it. The reasons of convenience which prompted these departures from the exact order are pretty obvious. It seemed highly desirable to bring the two Saga Plays, if I may so call them, into one volume; while as for Emperor and Galilean, it could not have been placed between The League of Youth and Pillars of Society save by separating its two parts, and assigning Caesar's Apostasy to Volume V., The Emperor Julian to Volume VI.
For the translations of all the plays in this edition, except Love’s Comedy and Brand, I am ultimately responsible, in the sense that I have exercised an unrestricted right of revision. This means, of course, that, in plays originally translated by others, the merits of the English version belong for the most part to the original translator, while the faults may have been introduced, and must have been sanctioned, by me. The revision, whether fortunate or otherwise, has in all cases been very thorough.
In their unrevised form, these translations have met with a good deal of praise and with some blame. I trust that the revision has rendered them more praiseworthy, but I can scarcely hope that it has met all the objections of those critics who have found them blameworthy. For, in some cases at any rate these objections proceeded from theories of the translator’s function widely divergent from my own—theories of which nothing, probably, could disabuse the critic’s mind, save a little experience of the difficulties of translating (as distinct from adapting) dramatic prose. Ibsen is at once extremely easy and extremely difficult to translate. It is extremely easy, in his prose plays, to realise his meaning; it is often extremely difficult to convey it in natural, colloquial, and yet not too colloquial, English. He is especially fond of laying barbed-wire entanglements for the translator’s feet, in the shape of recurrent phrases for which it is absolutely impossible to find an equivalent that will fit in all the different contexts. But this is only one of many classes of obstacles which encountered us on almost every page. I think, indeed, that my collaborators and I may take it as no small compliment that some of our critics have apparently not realised the difficulties of our task, or divined the laborious hours which have often gone to the turning of a single phrase. And, in not a few cases, the difficulties have proved sheer impossibilities. I will cite only one instance. Writing of The Master Builder, a very competent, and indeed generous, critic finds in it "a curious example of perhaps inevitable inadequacy… ‘Duty! Duty! Duty!’ Hilda once exclaims in a scornful outburst. ‘What a short, sharp, stinging word!’ The epithets do not sees specially apt. But in the original she cries out ‘Pligt! Pligt! Pligt!’ and the very word stings and snaps.” I submit that in this criticism there is one superfluous word—to wit, the “perhaps” which qualifies "inevitable." For the term used by Hilda, and for the idea in her mind, there is only one possible English equivalent: “Duty.” The actress can speak it so as more or less to justify Hilda’s feeling towards it; and, for the rest, the audience must “piece out our imperfections with their thoughts” and assume that the Norwegian word has rather more of a sting in its sound. It might be possible, no doubt, to adapt Hilda’s phrase to the English word, and say, “It sounds like the swish of a whip-lash,” or something to that effect. But this is a sort of freedom which, rightly or wrongly, I hold inadmissible. Once grant the right of adaptation, even in small particulars, and it would be impossible to say where it should stop. The versions here presented (of the prose plays, at any rate) are translations, not paraphrases. If we have ever dropped into paraphrase, it is a dereliction of principle; and I do not remember an instance. For stage purposes, no doubt, a little paring of rough edges is here and there allowable; but even that, I think, should seldom go beyond the omission of lines which manifestly lose their force in translation, or are incomprehensible without a footnote.
In the Introductions to previous editions I have always confined myself to the statement of biographical and historic facts, holding criticism no part of my business. Now that Henrik Ibsen has passed away, and his works have taken a practically uncontested place in world-literature, this reticence seemed no longer imposed upon me. I have consequently made a few critical remarks on each play, chiefly directed towards tracing the course of the poet’'s technical development. Nevertheless, the Introductions are still mainly biographical, and full advantage has been taken of the stores of new information contained in Ibsen’s Letters, and in the books and articles about him that have appeared since his death. I have prefixed to Lady Inger of Östråt a sketch of the poet’s life down to the date of that play; so that the Introductions, read in sequence, will be found to form a pretty full record of a career which, save for frequent changes of domicile, and the issuing of play after play, was singularly uneventful.
The Introductions to Love’s Comedy and Brand, as well as the translations, are entirely the work of Professor Herford.
A point of typography perhaps deserves remark. The Norwegian (and German) method of indicating emphasis by spacing the letters of a word, thus, has been adopted in this edition. It is preferable for various reasons to the use of italics. In dramatic work, for one thing, emphases have sometimes to be indicated so frequently that the peppering of the page with italics would produce a very ugly effect. But a more important point is this: the italic fount suggests a stronger emphasis than the author, as a rule, intends. The spacing of a word, especially if it be short, will often escape the eye which does not look very closely; and this is as it should be. Spacing, as Ibsen employs it, does not generally indicate any obtrusive stress, but is merely a guide to the reader in case a doubt should arise in his mind as to which of two words is intended to be the more emphatic. When such a doubt occurs, the reader, by looking closely at the text, will often find in the spacing an indi-cation which may at first have escaped him. In almost all cases, a spaced word in the translation represents a spaced word in the original. I have very seldom used spacing to indicate an emphasis peculiar to the English phraseology. The system was first introduced in 1897, in the translation of John Gabriel Borkman. It has no longer even the disadvantage of unfamiliarity, since it has been adopted by Mr. Bernard Shaw in his printed plays, and, I believe, by other dramatists.
Just thirty years have passed since I first put pen to paper in a translation of Ibsen. In October 1877, Pillars of Society reached me hot from the press; and, having devoured it, I dashed off a translation of it in less than a week. It has since cost me five or six times as much work in revision as it originally did in translation. The manuscript was punctually returned to me by more than one publisher; and something like ten years elapsed before it slowly dawned on me that the translating and editing of Ibsen’s works was to be one of the chief labours, as it has certainly been one of the greatest privileges, of my life. Since 1887 or thereabouts, not many months have passed in which a considerable portion of my time has not been devoted to acting, in one form or another, as intermediary between Ibsen and the English-speaking public. The larger part of the work, in actual bulk, I have myself done; but I have had invaluable aid from many quarters, and not merely from those fellow workers who are named in the following pages as the original translators of certain of the plays. These “helpers and servers,” as Solness would say, are too many to be individually mentioned; but to all of them, and chiefly to one who has devoted to the service of Ibsen a good deal of the hard-won leisure of Indian official life, I hereby convey my heartfelt thanks.
The task is now ended. Though it has involved not a little sheer drudgery, it has, on the whole, been of absorbing interest. And I should have been ungrateful indeed had I shrunk from drudgery in the cause of an author who had meant so much to me. I have experienced no other literary emotion at all comparable to the eagerness with which, ever since 1877, I awaited each new play of Ibsen’s, or the excitement with which I tore off the wrapper of the postal packets in which the little paper-covered books arrived from Copenhagen. People who are old enough to remember the appearance of the monthly parts of David Copperfield or Pendennis may have some inkling of my sensations; but they were all the intenser as they recurred at intervals, not of one month, but of two years. And it was not Ibsen the man of ideas or doctrines that meant so much to me; it was Ibsen the pure poet, the creator of men and women, the searcher of hearts, the weaver of strange webs of destiny. I can only trust that, by diligence in seeking for the best interpretation of his thoughts, I have paid some part of my debt to that great spirit, and to the glorious country that gave him birth.
William Archer.