This completely uncopyrighted idea was brought on by my reading yesterday of the Swedish playwright's The Father in two different translations. The reading originated as a labour of labour - I have to introduce the play to a class next term - but quickly turned into one of enjoyment, though never quite approaching the state of love. This was a big improvement on my previous reading, conducted in December, which left me flat, itself having constituted great progress from the first time I ever read the play. That first reading coincided with the first time I ever taught any Strindberg, Miss Julie for 'A' level in the early nineties. I was using a Methuen edition which bundled together The Father, Miss Julie and The Ghost Sonata. Miss Julie seemed to me a wonderful play, and very enjoyable to teach, and I read the other two plays looking for equal delights - which I didn't really find, well not in The Father anyway. It stuck me as so monomaniacal in its misogyny as to be preposterous. And I felt something similar in December, reading the same Methuen edition, with Michael Meyer as translator - the play was approachable in its simplicity, yet forbiddingly simple for all that. There was an extraordinary sense of direction and intensity in terms of the drama, but this seemed to replace any of the rich complexity you'd normally expect of a writer exploring his characters with some attempt at understanding.
Yesterday I read the Meyer translation again, but this time hand in hand with a newer version from Mike Poulton, the edition the bookseller provided for our students. Jumping from one text to another on a scene by scene basis (Meyer divides the 3 Acts into small scenes, I assume following Strindberg's own divisions since he does not do anything similar with Miss Julie or The Ghost Sonata) I found created a small kind of magic. Poulton's is a somewhat more idiomatic translation and more obviously playable on stage and the stiffness of the Meyer translation seemed to evaporate. At the same time I got a sense of the greater accuracy of the Meyer translation in terms of the literal content of the drama. I felt like I knew what Strindberg wanted on stage down to the moments of sly humour in the piece, assuming that Strindberg had a sense of humour, that is. An illusion, of course, my feeling of inwardness with the mightily crazy August, but effective enough for me to warm to the play and, for the first time, feel its power.
There's an odd but effective kind of comfort in reading these dramas. No matter how bad one's life might be it can hardly approach the transcendent rottenness of that of old Strindberg.
2 comments:
Demented, you people. Forbidding Nordic misogynists and insane Greek dramatists. It's as if your department is trying to give the impression that most women are highly abnormal people. :)
As far as I understand matters, which is not much at all, it's our ladies who made the original choices of the plays. I sometimes wonder if some kind of agenda was operating but I haven't got a clue what it might have been.
But there's something distinctly bracing about teaching old Strindberg. Normally you tend to suggest that the writers under consideration in clas knew a thing or two. With August I find it's best to establish just how completely raving he was before you get down to the brass tacks of the harridans he puts on stage. Gosh, the chap really did have problems.
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