Austria | Drama (excerpt) | German
November, 2019I prepared this translation for a student production I directed at Knox College in October 2018, which allowed me to refine the text during the rehearsal process. I had previously translated three other plays by this acclaimed Austrian playwright, who is known for a stylized approach to language and a storytelling technique that often presents a significant challenge to audience-members. Before Sunrise—which premiered in Basel, Switzerland in 2017—is based on Gerhart Hauptmann’s groundbreaking 1889 Naturalist play of the same title, Vor Sonnenaufgang. Palmetshofer retained much of the story told by Hauptmann, and dramatized his updated version in a more straightforward manner than is characteristic of his plays. Palmetshofer’s 2007 play hamlet is dead. no gravity, for instance, also revolves around events happening within a family; but those events are told in retrospect, requiring the audience to piece together the story from fragments.
This scene is the last of several between two men who were close friends as university students, but have evolved in contrasting directions. The play takes place in the house of Hoffmann, who has taken over his in-laws’ business, and is now running for the local council on a conservative platform; Loth has sought him out in order to write about him for a left-wing journal, and has begun a relationship with Hoffmann’s sister Helene.
Palmetshofer’s plays typically feature dialogue in which the characters leave many sentences unfinished, and monologues in which single sentences can go on for half a page at a time. The lacunae in the dialogue often pose a challenge to me as the translator since I have to guess how each unfinished sentence might have continued; being able to confer directly with Ewald has been invaluable. And of course, English syntax frequently doesn’t allow me to simply keep the same word order as in the German. For the most part, there were fewer such difficulties with Before Sunrise than in the other plays I’ve translated by Palmetshofer. But the shape of the sentences in the original departs from standard usage, and it was important for me to carry that over into the English. For example, in this excerpt, Loth says: “what’s up with that, Thomas? / tell me / is it a habit? / a reflex? / to assume the worst of others / but of yourself of course / somehow / not at all.” In part, such lines reflect the way people actually talk, yet Palmetshofer aims less to capture the rhythms of everyday speech than to create a kind of musicality in the theatrical language. By laying out his dialogue in short lines like verse, and (extensively in this case) incorporating dashes to indicate silence, Palmetshofer formats the text like a score.
In a note he wrote for our production of Before Sunrise at Knox, Palmetshofer wrote: “I believe theatre’s task is to pose questions and to open up a space in which both thoughts and feelings are generated.” Even in this unusually conventional family drama, he pursues that aim by means of carefully crafted language, and I’ve striven to retain that flavor and texture in the English version.
- Neil Blackadder
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