In the late summer of 1830, Alexander Pushkin traveled to Boldino, a town four hundred miles east of Moscow, to settle the business of coming into legal ownership of the family estate which would complete the dowry he needed to marry his betrothed, Natalia Goncharova. Due to an outbreak of cholera, Pushkin was unable to return to the capital as soon as he had hoped: the roads were blocked by quarantine checkpoints or altogether closed by a cordon sanitaire. During three months of what turned out to be the legendarily productive “Boldino autumn,” Pushkin wrote the final chapters of Eugene Onegin as well as a number of other works, including The Tales of Belkin (considered the birth-site of all Russian fiction), and four short verse plays known collectively as “The Little Tragedies,” one of which is Feast During the Plague.
This short play draws on Scottish writer John Wilson’s lengthy drama The City of the Plague, from an 1816 collection of the same title. Wilson, who served for many years as chair of Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, was a poet in his youth and was friendly with William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, Thomas de Quincey, and Sir Walter Scott. He also wrote voluminous criticism, stories, and novels, primarily for Blackwood’s, a well-known conservative miscellany that often published the British Romantics. So, the original of Feast During the Plague is itself a translation of sorts, from English into Russian; a not uncommon example of a translation, or a very free imitation (and a severe abridgment) that became an acknowledged classic in its new context, outliving its source.
I translated Pushkin’s play in the spring of 1999 to serve as a libretto for an operetta by the émigré Russian composer Sergei Dreznin. I edited and even composed parts of the translation at his piano as he played and sang the melodies I was to accommodate. I saw the operetta performed only once in New York City, staged by Garik Chernyakhovsky (1944-2015), a legendary and much-beloved Moscow theater director who had recently emigrated to New York. I believe it was later performed in Vienna and perhaps elsewhere in Europe.
The peculiar musical circumstances necessitated that I keep close to Pushkin’s iambic blank verse in the speeches as well as the meter and rhyme of the two songs. Two decades later, finding some charm in this earnest early effort and resisting the retrospective urge to move away from the formal approach, I have made only small corrections and, partly thanks to poet Steven Zultanski’s suggestions, a few minor improvements.
- Matvei Yankelevich
The entire translator's note can be found at the beginning of the post, before the play.
Vladimir Vertlib’s play on the current refugee crisis ÜBERALL NIRGENDS lauert die Zukunft ("The Future Lurks Everywhere and Nowhere") was first performed in April 2016 to sold-out houses in Salzburg and Hallein, Austria. In this drama, Vertlib connects the plight of the displaced Jews at the end of World War II with the refugee crisis that is unfolding in Europe. Himself a migrant, Vertlib followed his parents from country to country for ten years; what is happening now has had a deep emotional impact on him.
He volunteered from September 2015 to February 2016, at the height of the crisis, to assist the waves of refugees that came over the border into Salzburg, only to continue their journey to Germany and other Northern European countries. Besides publishing a diary of his experiences at the border in the anthology Europa im Wort. Eine literarische Seismographie in sechzehn Aufzeichnungen, he also wrote a novel based on his volunteer experience called Viktor hilft, and this drama, in which refugees themselves, among other professional actors, portray their plight on stage.
In the play, David, a survivor of the Holocaust who currently lives in Israel, comes back to an unnamed city somewhere in Germany or Austria. He is looking for the displaced persons’ camp where his lover Hanna died of starvation shortly after the war. He had promised her he would bring her bones home to Palestine and arrives in the city to fulfill this promise. David is disoriented because he encounters the displaced persons of today in the very camp where he and Hanna were waiting for placement. Refugees from Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan enter into a dialogue with David, with the lyrical voice of the dead Hanna coming in over the loudspeakers. Other players in the drama are the mayor of the town; the head of a right-wing political movement, based on PEGIDA (Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes), which is opposed to these newcomers in society and perceives them as a threat; busybody volunteers who are looking out more for themselves than their protégées; and the general population, which wants to benefit from cheap undocumented labor.
The play addresses highly relevant topics that are under current discussion not only in Europe but also in the United States, and it examines questions relating to national memory and individual and collective guilt. It suggests a way forward to resolving long-held animosities between groups of peoples, and illuminates the human qualities that we share and that can help us find peace with the past.
- Julie Winter
Ancient Greek | Drama | Greece
September, 2018The choral odes in The Bacchae are remarkable because they give us access to the experience of collective ecstatic worship. The chorus consists of “Bacchants,” adherents of the cult of Dionysus, from Asia Minor (now western Turkey). Studying religion is often frustrating because, though we can look at scripture and rituals, what we really want is the experience of being a devotee of a particular religion. These odes provide what is, I think, the closest one can get to feeling Dionysiac worship as an insider.
- Aaron Poochigian
Attention NYC Readers!
Aaron Poochigian's translation of The Bacchae, excerpted here, will be performed by SITI Company on October 3-7 as part of the Brooklyn Academy of Music's 2018 Next Wave Festival. For more information and tickets, see BAM.
Drama | Haiti | Haitian Creole
September, 2017*
“Everywhere and always there could be a young Antigone who says no. A King Creon who doesn’t want to hear advice.”
Antigone in Haiti, trans. Edith Gold
Felix Morisseau-Leroy wrote Antigòn in the late 1940s and early ’50s, a period just following the United States’ occupation of Haiti (1914-1934) and just prior to the rise of the Duvalier regime (1957). Haiti at the time of Antigòn’s composition was grappling with both immediate and centuries-long colonial legacies and also with its legacy as the first sovereign nation to emerge from a slave uprising. Morisseau-Leroy brought Antigone into Creole and into the Haitian national context to process the struggles and potentials of these legacies. The Greek gods become the Haitian loa, a pantheon of deities whose “horses” are “ridden,” and who each bring out (god in man, man in god) various potentials. The exacting rhetorical jostle of Antigone yields in Antigòn to sudden incantation--men and gods calling up power through rhythm as well as rhetoric to achieve their aims. True to its source, the play maintains a correspondence between familial and societal dysfunction, while casting Antigone as the figure of uncompromising revolution and absolute fidelity. It is noteworthy that, in an effort to raise political and philosophical questions about oppression and its overcoming in Haiti, Morisseau-Leroy chose to adopt a canonical Western text rather than disavowing Western reference points along with his abandonment of the French. As Moira Fradinger says, “The Greek Antigone thus became a Haitian ancestor–not because she was born in Haiti, but because she could speak the language of the radical difference that gave birth to Haiti.” Antigòn was first performed in 1953 in Port-au-Prince. In 1959, newly in exile during the Duvalier regime’s ascendance, Morisseau-Leroy staged a performance at the Théâtre des Nations, Paris, an event that made him a key figure of the Haitian Renaissance.
Antigòn posed some challenges to us as translators. Because Morisseau-Leroy wrote Antigòn before Creole was made an official language, the text’s orthography and vocabulary is not entirely consistent with Creole dictionaries and grammars. Additionally, our primary text was a 1970 reprint based on a photocopy of a 1954 typescript; spelling was not always consistent or trustworthy. After we drafted our translation, we found Edith Gold’s English translation, titled Antigone in Haiti. We know that it was published in Pétion-Ville, Haiti, but we have not determined the year. We noticed differences between the Gold translation and our reprint of the 1954 script. Our epigraph, for instance, appears in the prologue to the Gold translation but not the prologue to our Creole text. We had read about a 1963 English translation by Mary Dorkonou, which was commissioned by Morisseau-Leroy for a performance in Ghana, where he lived out part of his exile as “National Organizer of Drama and Literature,” but we have not located a copy of the Dorkonou version. It looks as if Antigòn has a rich textual history, replete with variants spurred by new stagings and new translations. Ultimately, we hope to produce an edition of Antigòn that gathers these variants for performance as well as study. Our translation of Antigòn is partly motivated by our desire to see more of his work in circulation. More than that, we stand with scholars of Morisseau-Leroy and Caribbean literature in our belief that Antigòn is a unique work of political theatre.
– Blake Bronson-Bartlett and Robert Fernandez
The Word Exchange: U.S./Mexico Playwright Exchange Program was created by the Lark Play Development Center in collaboration with Mexico’s Fund for Culture and Arts (FONCA). The Lark annually hosts playwrights from Mexico and pairs them with American playwrights for a ten-day translation and development residency designed to create stage-worthy translations of new works from Mexico; it also introduces the writers to New York’s theater scene, industry leaders, and the Lark community. Public readings of these works are presented each November, followed by a closing night Celebración. In 2009, the Lark launched a reciprocal program where U.S. writers develop Spanish translations of their work with artists in Mexico City.
The Sadness of the Limes is the story of Rite Pool, a bitter formerly successful comedian, who is now tired and depressed from a life that isn't funny anymore. He spends his life talking to parking meters and thinks repeatedly about quitting comedy, but an unexpected encounter with his former sidekick, the happy innocent Izzy Dedley, makes him think that there is still hope on a laughing track. The comic duo plan a comeback at their favorite gig joint, the Three Trapped Tigers, but Rite Pool's own legs run away from him and decide to steal the show.
The Word Exchange: U.S./Mexico Playwright Exchange Program was created by the Lark Play Development Center in collaboration with Mexico’s Fund for Culture and Arts (FONCA). The Lark annually hosts playwrights from Mexico and pairs them with American playwrights for a ten-day translation and development residency designed to create stage-worthy translations of new works from Mexico; it also introduces the writers to New York’s theater scene, industry leaders, and the Lark community. Public readings of these works are presented each November, followed by a closing night Celebración. In 2009, the Lark launched a reciprocal program where U.S. writers develop Spanish translations of their work with artists in Mexico City.
A poetic, chaotic, and moving tale of evolution and adaptation in the modern world, Events with Life’s Leftovers follows the residents of an apartment building as they celebrate insomnia, and life’s beginnings and endings.
The Kings (Los Reyes) was published in 1949. It was the first time Julio Cortázar published under his own name. Aside from this text, Cortázar wrote four other short plays that were collected and published in 1995 as Goodbye, Robinson, and other short pieces (Adios, Robinson, y otras piezas breves). One of the plays included in that volume Nothing Goes to Pehuajó (Nada a Pehuajó) had first been published as a single text in the year of his death. This adaptation/translation of The Kings was originally commissioned by The Art Party, Inc. in New York City, and developed with The Internationalists Around the World in the 24 Hours Festival.
(Caridad Svich)
You’re going to read a Swedish play. Heavy. You’re thinking Ingmar Bergman, deep symbolism, whispers and cries, anguish, suicide, maybe some blonde sex in the sauna. Think again. The world of Sofia Fredén is more closely related to Larry David’s. Bergman’s characters are silent and closed. Sofia’s are open and naïve. They wear their psychology on the outside. They say what they feel. They are refreshingly selfish when you consider their context: a chilly, grey, and silent country where the motto, until quite recently, was “Duty above all else.” White Baby is a political comedy about a group of people who can’t seem to make place in their lives for a child. Most of it you’ll understand. But you probably won’t recognize similarities between the character Eva and Mona Sahlin, the present leader of Sweden’s social democratic party. You’ll listen to the scene in the postal service centre unaware that Post Offices have been completely phased out in Sweden and you’ll think it more absurd than we would when a character at the social service office asks to have his welfare check forwarded to Africa. Sweden and the U.S. are a bit different. We can’t help that. I am a great fan of Ms. Fredén and her work. White Baby is the fourth play of hers that I’ve translated. The earliest of rough drafts was workshopped at a theatre I ran about eight years ago. Three years ago Sofia and I took a version to a playwright’s colony in a nunnery in Winnipeg where she worked on it some more. Sofia has written about a dozen other plays while White Baby was in progress, so it had to wait until less than a year ago to get finished. It opened February 2007 at Göteborg Stadsteater.
(Edward Buffalo Bromberg)
I first encountered Bernard Da Costa's Boomerang when I played the role of The Teacher in a staged reading for New Jersey Repertory Company. I had serious problems with the translation, the wording of which felt awkward and unnatural to an English-speaking actor. Even in that form, however, the response was most gratifying—lots of laughter—and the entire audience stayed afterward for the post-show discussion, and seemed genuinely fascinated by these two troubled, passionate people.
When Bernard wrote to me, asking for my impressions of the play, I told him that I would love to attempt a new translation, and he gave me his blessing. As I worked on it, I found that both Isabelle and Pierre were wonderfully articulate, smart, fiercely defiant people—both among the Walking Wounded of the world—yet both refusing (against all reason) to surrender their dreams. What the audience had responded to, I felt, was this phoenix-like quality in both. Whatever their faults (and they are capable of terrible cruelty, and probably incapable of any intimate relationship with another human being), they cannot or will not abandon their unattainable goals. They certainly lack Don Quixote's nobility of mind, yet they are, in their own ways, akin to him. Their hopeless, blindered optimism makes them unsuited to the Real World, but they and their kind are part of what makes our world so endlessly fascinating.
(Kathleen Huber)
Drama | French | Guadeloupe
February, 2008Playwright José Pliya, born in Benin, now running the National Theatre of Guadeloupe, bases his play loosely on the biography of Elisabeth Nietzsche, sister of the eminent German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Given a State funeral by Chancellor Adolf Hitler, Elisabeth Nietzsche embodied, while perverting their sense, the superman qualities Nietzsche extolled in his famous essay, Thus Spake Zarathustra. Her heightened narcissism and incestuous love allowed her to spurn the world, refusing to acknowledge the worth of all those defined as “other.” By sketching in a flashback Elisabeth Nietzsche's astounding trajectory, José Pilya suggests the connections between colonization, racism, anti-Semitism, and fascist ideology.
It is 1935. Elisabeth Nietzsche is 87 years old and Hitler has already begun his project to “purify” Germany by eliminating the Jewish population.
Flashback to 1886: We are in Paraguay. Elisabeth Nietzsche and her inept and self-pitying husband Bernard Föster have established, with the blessings of the German Empire and several German investors, the colony of New Germany (Nueva Germania). In this first part of the play, comprised of six scenes, German capitalists enthusiastically celebrate the philosophical and commercial rationale for the colonization effort, while more intimate encounters develop the tension between the ambitious and hard-driving Elisabeth, her husband, and the men they must deal with: the wealthy converted German Jewish banker Fritz Klingbeil, who opposes colonization as exploitative of German settlers; Cirilio Solindade, the Paraguayan landholder who seeks full payment for the lands that the Fösters cannot manage to cultivate; and, Friedrich Nietzsche, who is never seen yet always present. The object of Elisabeth's thwarted love, Nietzsche, at least as she dreams him, fuels her desire for power as well as her monstrous ability to create false truths by acts of will.
Part II (eight scenes): It is the last decade of the 19th century. The widowed Elisabeth has returned to Germany , abandoning her commitment to New Germany to care for her now deranged brother. She drives away the chief rivals for his attention, her mother and the writer Lou Andréas Salomé, and subverts the work of his best friends, Peter Gast and Franz Overbeck, by re-orienting their studies of Nietzsche's thought. Klingbeil, ironically in thrall to Elisabeth, aids her by lending his money and talent to the construction of the Nietzsche myth that Elisabeth has imagined. Slipping into madness herself, Elisabeth can no longer distinguish between her banker fiancé, her adored brother, and the exalted Zarathustra whose words she echoes.
(Judith G. Miller)
The Brooklyn Rail welcomes you to our web-exclusive section InTranslation, where we feature unpublished translations of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and dramatic writing. Published since April 2007, InTranslation is a venue for outstanding work in translation and a resource for translators, authors, editors, and publishers seeking to collaborate.
We seek exceptional unpublished English translations from all languages.
Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry: Manuscripts of no longer than 20 pages (double-spaced).
Plays: Manuscripts of no longer than 30 pages (in left-justified format).