To take a normal, contemporary bourgeois situation, imagine I am in a shop waiting at the front of a line at a cash register to buy, let’s say, a book, and a man steps in front of me, apparently planning to approach the cashier before I do. The man’s action provokes an emotional response in me—but, to complicate things, let’s say that I don’t know whether the man is intentionally breaking into the line in front of me because he doesn’t respect the rules, or whether perhaps he hasn’t noticed the line, has recently arrived from a different sort of society in which things are done differently, or has interpreted the situation in some other way that’s unknown to me. I would like to stop the man, and I also have a variety of reactions to what’s happening that I feel the need to somehow express, so I search for the appropriate words to say. I might say, “Hey! Don’t do that!” I might say, “Sir, I’m not sure you realize that we’re standing in a line.” I might say, “Pardon me, I was here first.” The possibilities are limitless, but in searching for the appropriate words, obviously I’m also searching for an appropriate identity for myself. Which words are appropriate to the person I am, or appropriate to the person I think I am, or appropriate to the person I want to become right now, or to the person I wish I were, or to the person I enjoy pretending I am?
The position of the translator bears quite a bit of similarity to the position of a person searching for appropriate words in the course of his own life. If the translator is translating a line of dialogue from a play, he is choosing appropriate words for a particular character in a particular situation, and so obviously he needs to have some sort of interpretation of the character and of the situation as well as of the words used in the original language by the original author. The original author, of course, has placed his character’s line of dialogue within the framework of a particular tone—sarcastic, for example, sincere, insincere, snide, unaffected, or something more mysterious and unique—and the translator may want to imitate that, but still, a knowledge of life is needed in order to comprehend what tone the original author might possibly have been getting at. A bilingual nine year old might know many English synonyms for every Norwegian word ever used by Henrik Ibsen, and he might even have a good knowledge of Norwegian grammar and English grammar, but I doubt if he would do a very good translation of Master Builder Solness, for example, because his insight into the characters and situations portrayed by Ibsen would probably not be adequate.
To acknowledge that a good translator must draw on his knowledge of life, and not just of the dictionary, when he approaches each new sentence, however, seems to open up some disturbing areas of freedom for the translator.
The history of this particular translation and adaptation goes like this. I’ve been writing plays since 1967, and since around 1977 I’ve also worked as an actor. In the year 1971, the director André Gregory became the first person working in the professional theater to say that he liked my plays, and he hired me to do a fascinating job. He wanted me to adapt a play by Henrik Ibsen, Peer Gynt. This was thrilling to me, partly because I’d always adored Ibsen. André’s company of actors had been working on Peer Gynt for a very long time, but the complete text of the play (originally presented by Ibsen as a book to be read rather than a script to be performed) was a vast epic, and it seemed that it could perhaps be cut. I watched the company’s rehearsals for six months, and it was a joyful experience, but I couldn’t figure out any way to cut or otherwise change Ibsen’s text. I suggested writing a play of my own for the company instead, and I wrote a play for them called Our Late Night, which was the first play of mine to be publicly performed, opening at The Public Theater in New York in January of 1975.
A dozen or so years later, I found myself playing the part of Vanya in André’s version of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. (The translation was by David Mamet.) We rehearsed the play over the course of three or four years, without ever doing it for a paying audience, and finally Louis Malle made a film of our work called Vanya on 42nd Street. About a year or so after the film was released, I said to André, “Why don’t you do a play by the playwright I like, Ibsen?” He said, “Yes, that’s a good idea, but I want to pick the play.” And he chose Master Builder Solness.
Because of the circumstances in which I was brought up, I’ve always been a somewhat arrogant person. From an early age, I went to schools that avoided at all costs any form of instruction that might damage the “self-esteem” of the students. So yes, I was aware that Master Builder Solness was written in Norwegian, but, as I knew a bit of German and had even spent enough time in Norway to know how Norwegian was pronounced, I felt I was pretty well qualified to translate the play, and I even knew exactly how I wanted to go about it. So, I went to the Norwegian consulate in New York and got hold of a Norwegian text of the play. And then I made a large photocopy of the text on very large sheets of paper. André’s friend Elinor Fuchs found us a wonderful scholar of Scandinavian literature who taught in Rochester. Her name was Sandra Saari, and at my request she wrote English synonyms for all the words in the text—a few synonyms for each word, if possible—in very small handwriting next to the Norwegian words on the very large sheets of paper. Sandra, André and I then talked through the text, with Sandra explaining all sorts of interesting things—for example, that a given Norwegian word, unlike its English synonym, was always used to mean X and never to mean Y, or that a certain word was an archaic word used in Norse mythology and was not an everyday modern word, or that a certain word was used by most people to mean A but was often used by Ibsen to mean B. I then proceeded to turn the large sheets of paper into an English text. This took me a couple of years. Finally, I met with a kindly academic expert who checked my translation line by line, so that at least I knew that I’d understood the literal meaning of each of Ibsen’s lines, even if I’d translated some of them in an idiosyncratic way.
The purpose of the translation was to provide a text that a group of actors under André Gregory’s direction could perform. In other words, I was trying to write something that would be the basis for a wonderful production that people today or in the future would see, while at the same time I attempted to give an honest account of Ibsen’s play, written in the past. When I presented André with my text in 1997, each line expressed more or less what Ibsen’s equivalent line had expressed, though, in the writing of each line, my hope was always to use words that could be believably spoken by people today (without ever using the sort of slang that would permanently affix the line to a particular time and place) and also to write words that when spoken by a character would strike someone today as psychologically plausible.
A translation of the play Ibsen completed in 1892 into dialogue that would sound to a contemporary audience like believable contemporary speech would have to be to a certain extent false to the feeling and atmosphere of the original text. Contemporary speech carries with it associations unknown to Ibsen and assumptions unknown to Ibsen, and it inevitably uses words that had no exact equivalents in Ibsen’s time.
Now, one very exciting fact about writing for the theater is that a playwright can hope that his plays, because they will be reinterpreted by actors, directors, and even translators, can retain for audiences living in different times and places the full power that may be locked within them. A playwright can hope that even after he’s dead, an audience may watch his play in some country he never visited, in a language he never knew, and if it’s done well enough, they’ll be so involved in the characters and the story that they’ll forget that the play was originally written in a different time and place. The price the playwright pays for this wonderful hope is that the play that the audience will see, if he’s lucky enough to have this rare and remarkable post-death experience, will be to one degree or another not exactly what he originally imagined. And yet this is true to some extent of all productions of a play, and it’s a source of pleasure for the playwright more often than uneasiness, because it’s usually a great delight for a writer to see his words interpreted in an unexpected way by other artists, and indeed the wise playwright has written words that are not complete in themselves but call for an actor’s contribution.
My own situation as translator of Master Builder Solness was perhaps a somewhat special case, because of my particular arrogance, and because of my particular ignorance. My ignorance of the Norwegian language and my ignorance about Norwegian literature, combined with my ignorance about life and behavior in Norway in 1892, meant that I couldn’t possibly capture the exact nuance and mood of each of Ibsen’s lines. I was like a painter who had set up his easel on a high hill overlooking a valley where an intriguing group of people were having a picnic, but it was as if I, as the painter, instead of painting the valley as a whole, with a few people indistinctly seen at the bottom of the frame, had decided to do a large, detailed portrait simply of the picnic, showing in detail the particular expressions on the faces of the people, the drops of wine on the necks of the bottles, and the crumbs of bread spilling on to the grass—details that inevitably had to be made up. In other words, from the moment I took on the task of translating Master Builder Solness, it was inevitable that I’d be involving myself in some sort of collaboration with Henrik Ibsen. And consciously or unconsciously, I guess this was really what I had wanted all along.
This statement is neither a defiant boast that mocks the potential concerns of sincere Ibsen scholars, nor is it the abject confession of a repentant criminal who knows that what he’s done was wrong. I don’t yet know how bad I should feel about what I’ve done. I know that Stravinsky’s Pulcinella Suite has always been one of my favorite pieces of music. It’s an instrumental work that Stravinsky took from a ballet he’d written in which he reinterpreted and recombined music that had been written by one or more eighteenth-century Italian composers (when Stravinsky wrote his ballet, all the music was thought to have been written by Pergolesi, though scholars today don’t think it was). And what I did was much less extreme than what Stravinsky did. You could almost—almost—say that it had more in common with something like re-scoring one of Bach’s organ works for full orchestra, as Arnold Schoenberg did, or playing harpsichord music on a piano. It wasn’t as extreme as what Stravinsky did, but all the same, I know I wouldn’t want anyone to do it to me. If I heard that another writer was “collaborating” on one of my plays, I’d be extremely upset. And yet, without implicitly accepting the fact that there would be a collaboration between me and Ibsen, André and I couldn’t and wouldn’t have embarked on the project of doing Ibsen’s play, a project that ultimately took fifteen years and resulted not in a theatrical presentation of the play (at least not so far) but in a film.
At any rate, once the idea of “collaboration” between Ibsen and me was accepted, it was probably inevitable that the role of the living collaborator would grow, while the role of the dead collaborator would not.
I had originally imagined that I would simply deliver my translation to André and that I would not be involved in the project beyond that, but, partly because I found I had an overwhelming desire to do it, André decided that I ought to play the part of Solness, and so that’s what happened. We started work on the play in 1997. The younger members of the cast changed between 1997 and 2012, when we made the film, but Julie Hagerty (Mrs. Solness), Larry Pine (Dr. Herdal), and I worked on the play with André during all those years. Each of us did many other things in each of those years, and there were years that had more Ibsen in them than others, but we never stopped seizing three weeks here and a month there to devote to Master Builder Solness, and even when we were not together, we kept working on the play in the workshops of our unconscious minds, which is an essential part of André’s method. (It does work, the proof being that when we would meet after a long interval we would find that we could easily do certain sections of the play that had seemed horribly difficult or impossible when we’d last been together.) From very early on, we all thought that what we were doing might work very well as a film. So much of the play was made up of scenes involving intimately shared thoughts, scenes that seemed to cry out for close-ups.
As the years passed, I became aware that I had spent quite a large section of my life on this play. And that awareness couldn’t help adding to my feeling that I knew the play awfully well and perhaps had the right to make some changes in the text.
Now, it’s an interesting fact about Ibsen that he wrote in a marvelously economical style, using as few words as possible to say what he had to say, and yet he loved to repeat what he had said, using repetition almost the way composers of music do. I had realized early on that I couldn’t imitate Ibsen’s economy of words, because when I tried to use only the small number of words that Ibsen used, the characters sounded crude and at times not very bright, and Ibsen himself even seemed a bit wooden or lacking in grace. In writing his original line, Ibsen could select a small number of Norwegian words that would perfectly combine the tone he wanted with the meaning he wanted. If I was clever enough to be able to find a small number of English words that would match the original meaning, they certainly wouldn’t also capture the right tone. I’m not claiming that no writer in English could possibly have used the same number of words that Ibsen used while still displaying the full intelligence and emotional range of Ibsen and his characters—I’m just saying that I was dubious about whether such a great master of writing lived among us, and I’m saying that I knew I was not that master. So I used more words than Ibsen used, and this meant that my text would have taken four hours or so to perform. That fact in itself meant that it was probably always a likelihood that one day I’d begin to make some cuts in the text. As for the strange, circular, somewhat vertigo-inducing repetitions characteristic of Ibsen, they were of course fascinating and in a way mesmerizing, but also, to us, as we rehearsed the play, they were in a certain way maddening or even unbearable. The way in which he would approach a fact or a story through a hint, then through another hint from a different angle, and then another hint again, must have had a certain extraordinary suspense-inducing power when his plays were originally performed, but for us, particularly in my excessively long translation, the repetitions often seemed to represent an obsessive habit that begged to be restrained.
The issue of the ending of the play had also always loomed as a problem for us. Oddly, the more we rehearsed, the quieter and less “theatrical” our way of doing the play became. In any case, the type of theater André and I liked to do was on a very small scale. (For example, we had done my play The Designated Mourner for an audience of forty people a night.) In Ibsen’s time, plays were done on large stages of a kind we would never have wanted to use (and I must say, would never have been invited to use). But the crucial stage direction at the very end of the play calls for a body to fall from a great height through a large group of trees. We always knew that this stage direction represented a puzzle to which we would have to find a solution.
And let’s be brutally frank. There were certain things in the original text that did not grow on me over the years. I never could accept that when Solness argued out loud with God on top of the church tower in Hilde’s hometown, his voice could sound like the playing of harps. And there were passages that for me remained not alive—dead zones through which I impatiently had to pass before returning to the story that had so deeply fascinated me. If I myself felt uninterested in these passages after we’d tried for years to do our best for them, should we really just mindlessly go ahead and present them to an audience?
Of course I’m aware of the fact that throughout the centuries gangsters and petty criminals, corrupt officials and collaborators with evil regimes, have explained their actions to themselves by saying, I know it isn’t good to do what I’m doing, but I’m not doing it because I enjoy doing it, I’m doing it for the sake of people I care about—my children, my elderly parents, my fellow citizens, etc. So, when I heard myself thinking to myself, I’m going to change this passage for the sake of the audience, I knew that I was doing something that might possibly be wrong, and yet it really is a terrible thing to ask people to come into a room where a play will be done, and then to make that whole room full of people sit through minutes in which they receive little or nothing of value to them, minutes that are giving little or nothing to actually anyone in the room, neither the people watching the play, nor the people performing the play. In our case, who would it be serving, really, if those lifeless minutes distanced the audience from the play, forced them to become less interested in the play, less involved in the play, less enchanted by Ibsen’s story, less admiring of Ibsen himself? If Ibsen had come back to life and joined us in our rehearsal room, would he not have wanted something to be done about the moments in the play that were falling flat?
So I made small changes in the play, and then eventually I made a very substantial change in the play by putting Solness on his deathbed from the very beginning and explicitly defining everything that happens after Hilde’s knock on the door as a dream Solness dreams before he dies. André had always felt that the play was about a man’s confrontation with himself as he approaches death. This made that explicit.
Master Builder Solness is a dream, whether you call it a dream or you don’t call it a dream, and it seemed better to call it a dream. (Of course, my hope is that people watching this version of Master Builder Solness will know that the story of Hilde is a dream, but that they’ll quickly forget about it as they continue to follow the story. I’ve added nothing “dream-like” to Ibsen’s text.) Was Master Builder Solness ever intended to be credible as a realistic drama, a story that takes place in the real world? I wonder. In the real world, do certain architects decide that instead of building houses, they want to build palaces that stand firmly in the middle of the sky? There is a story, of course there is, but the shape of the play is not the shape of the story, it’s the shape of a dream, a dream in which apparently every element in Halvard Solness’s life is included and examined, a dream in which moral and quasi-philosophical questions take on a palpable, almost bodily life of their own and wrestle with all the many human beings who move through the dream. And, as is natural in a dream, all of these moral and quasi-philosophical questions are layered on top of one another faster than they can be answered or even fully explored, while at the same time the developments in Solness’s life, the “story” of the crazily proliferating events unfolding in the various rooms of his tormented house, are flying inexorably forward at a terrifying speed, somehow entirely out of rhythm with all the feverish speculations that are rushing through his mind about his journey in the world and his own impending death.
In other words, Master Builder Solness is not a clever theatrical machine whose central purpose is to ensnare and entertain an audience for a couple of hours. It is clearly a reverie in which an anguished author worries aloud to himself, through the medium of a play, about everything in the world that he finds most baffling and confounding. He isn’t kidding! And so the play isn’t constructed the way plays are normally constructed. It doesn’t mold itself to the form of the events it describes but bulges out to encompass abstract thoughts that are thrown into the air by the things that happen. It doesn’t seek in the usual way to compel our curiosity and attention by involving us in a plot that develops logically step by step. It doesn’t seek in the usual way to enlist our sympathy for the central character, so that we identify with his struggles and yearn for a good outcome for him in all his endeavors. By the time Ibsen wrote this particular play, he was beyond all that.
In other words, as a drama, Master Builder Solness is terribly odd and hard to explain. As a dream, it actually makes perfect sense.
This is particularly true when we consider the subject of Hilde Wangel—the heart of the play. And of course one can interpret Hilde as a real person—for example, as an obsessed pre-teenager who seduces an older man, follows him, and murders him, or, alternatively, as the victim of an incident of sexual abuse who finally takes revenge on the man who abused her. But these interpretations of the character of Hilde would not lead an audience into the particular forest of subjects into which Ibsen wanted us to walk and wander. Master Builder Solness is not really a story about a man who committed one fateful act, kissing an underaged girl, or a story about a man who had a fateful experience, meeting a strange girl who was determined to kiss him. Hide certainly behaves in many ways like a real person, and the play certainly tells the very involving story of a love triangle, in which a man falls in love with a stranger and considers the possibility of running away with her and leaving his wife—but at the same time Hilde functions in the play as a supernatural figure and as a manifestation of Halvard Solness’s mind. And while some people have seen Hilde as a dark spirit—a malevolent creature who first tried to kill Solness when she was twelve years old (before she had ever even met him, actually) and who finally comes to his own home to finish the job—André always saw Hilde much more as a spirit of light, a good angel, a benevolent figure whose main reason for coming to earth was simply to help Halvard Solness to die—perhaps even to help him to die with some of the issues in his life resolved. And certainly, whether he resolves any of the issues in his life or not, he most definitely faces them and ponders them inside of his dream, and he struggles to see if he can resolve them. The play itself faces these issues and ponders them—but it doesn’t resolve them. And Solness’s death is in a way an expression of the fact that, in the time available in the dream, the time available in Solness’s life, the time available in the play, they could not be resolved. Solness, having climbed the tower, could not possibly come down, leave his wife, and take Hilde as a lover, nor could he reject Hilde and stay with his wife, and so falling off the tower, death, was the only option possible for him. Nor could Ibsen resolve all the moral and philosophical questions raised by the play, which is one reason why the play is so very disturbing and has never been Ibsen’s most popular play.
Strangely, seeing Master Builder Solness as a dream also helps us to recognize the elements in this nineteenth-century play that have a striking significance for our own time.
In the world I personally live in—let’s say, the apparently sophisticated circles of New York City in 2014—the story of Hilde leading Solness to his death might seem melodramatic. The story of an older man infatuated with a girl of twenty-two might seem predictable. Neither a fear of heights nor a tendency to get dizzy would expose a person in my world to mockery or contempt, and no one I know would find the issue of whether a person was able to climb up a tower to be an important measure of someone’s character.
But in the world of our deepest thoughts, in the world of our dreams, the symbols, the images, and the obsessions of Ibsen’s play are potent and real. No matter what we’re thinking about during the day, when we fall asleep at night, we may very well find ourselves climbing up a tower, and it may very well be an absolutely terrifying experience. Master Builder Solness is a dream about the possibility of spiritual transformation. And Halvard Solness, the vain, destructive, dangerous male, desperate because power seems to be slipping from his grasp—the out-of-control giant whose quest for dominance threatens the existence of everything and everyone around him—is quintessentially the figure who today, in our world, needs to be spiritually transformed.
In Master Builder Solness, Ibsen and Solness plunge with both feet into the male fantasy of being saved and redeemed by the love of a young girl. Indeed, the story that’s told is, more precisely, the fantasy in which an older man is saved not just by a young girl, but by a young girl who falls in love with him after a sexual episode between them—an episode that has occurred when he was an adult and she was a child. And when Hilde and Solness discuss “the Vikings,” the episode is indirectly alluded to by both characters as a “violation.”
And yet few writers of either sex have gone farther than Henrik Ibsen (author of A Doll’s House) in escaping from fantasies and painting a harshly truthful portrait of the monstrous male and the Male Principle (the principle of the conqueror, the despoiler, the maker of war, the destroyer of Nature, a Principle that in practice can generously enlist both sexes), and never more so than in Master Builder Solness.
Of course the dream is about death, but the imminence of death leads the dream in a direction we couldn’t have predicted. Halvard Solness resents younger people. Their health and strength are a reminder that his own health and strength are gradually declining, and that unlike those lucky younger people, who can spend their days in carefree enjoyment of the pleasures of life, he will very soon be pitilessly forced off the edge of the planet, down into death. But in his panic, he has a very surprising reaction, because he cries out in his dream not only to be rescued from unhappiness but also to be changed. He cries out for one last chance to escape from the cage of his own nastiness, the cage of the grasping and heartless self.
The play could be seen as perhaps illogical and self-contradictory. It seems to mock Aline for her belief that “obligation,” our duty to others, ought to be the unquestioned bedrock of all of our lives. It begs us to consider the possibility that rather than cleaving to obligation and misery, we ought to reach for ecstasy. And yet one can’t watch the play without feeling that Aline is the one truly admirable person whom we see portrayed, that is to say, apart from Dr. Herdal, whom we come to know much less well, but who also seems more guided by obligation than by any Nietzschean drive toward joy. The play questions the value of domestic life and suggests that we ought to seek “the impossible,” and that the only structures that can truly contain human happiness are “palaces that stand firmly in the middle of the sky”—yet it refuses to define those palaces or that “impossible,” and Solness’s search for the transcendent leads only to death. But a dream exists so that it can think about things. It doesn’t need to reach conclusions, and when it contradicts itself, it’s doing exactly what it has to do, because this is precisely how thinking proceeds.
I decided to change the title of the play a bit, finally, because I couldn’t defend the claim that what I’d done was a pure translation. André suggested the title A Master Builder.
And then Jonathan Demme watched some of our work on André’s production-that-was-never-produced, and he said, “Let’s film this.” A few extra twists turned the text you’re now holding into a screenplay, and the madly burning inspiration of that joyful mad scientist of film, Jonathan Demme, turned André’s creation into a movie.
What you have in your hands now is the text of a play, suitable for being performed by anyone who has the nerve to try it. My probably “impossible” hope—my palace standing firmly in the middle of the sky—is that Ibsen will eventually accept this text as his own work and that he’ll ultimately tell me that he’s pleased by it.
April 2014
New York City