Geoffrey Hill's 'verse translation' of Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt was the last non-critical work to be published in his lifetime. The Penguin Classics volume publishes it alongside Hill's version of Brand, commissioned by the National Theatre and performed in April 1978. The volume also contains an interview with Kenneth Haynes on issues around recreating Ibsen.
to make the kill. The brute is up!
He reveals in the interview that the internal rhyme throughout his version attempts 'a kind of "snap" effect, the verbal equivalent of the stage direction "snaps his fingers"' (p. 344). With Brand, the difficulty was resisting the inveterate English pull of iambic pentameter in rendering its tetrameter, resolved by using even shorter lines in an attempt to recapture what Ibsen referred to in a remark to C.H. Herford (who translated the play in 1894): 'I wanted a metre in which I could career on horseback' (cited p. 344).
In the preface to the 1996 Penguin edition to Brand, Hill was careful to disavow the title of translator; the work was 'a version for the stage of a poetic drama, or a dramatic poem, which was perhaps not intended for the stage' (Hill, Brand [London: Penguin, 1996, third edn], p. vii). Nevertheless, Hill had made detailed study of the verse translations by Herford and F.E. Garrett, which he thought sounded like Carlyle, and confirmed his fears that it could come across like six thousand lines of Hiawatha (see Inga-Stina Ewbank, 'Translating Ibsen for the English Stage', Tijdschrift voor Skandinavistiek, Vol. 19, No. 1 , pp. 62-63). He worked closely with Inga-Stina Ewbank, who sent him piecemeal the most literal translation of the Norwegian, with ample annotations conveying connotations, effects of rhythm, and rhyme. With Peer Gynt his process was similar, working from a literal translation with annotations by Jane Garton. What seems remarkable in the undertaking of both versions, 1978 and 2016, is that the 'problems' of recreating the work are technical rather than merely dramaturgical or questions of adaption; if 'versions' they are, the process of translation is integral to them. Ewbank wrote in a 1998 article 'Translating Ibsen for the English Stage' that Hill's Brand fit, more than 'faithful' translations by Michael Meyer and James Kirkup, Ibsen's ideas on translation: the need to re-create and transpose ('omdigte') the style and images of the original, and to adapt the expression to 'the structure and demands' ('struktur og behov') of the language into which one is translating (Ewbank, pp. 65-66).
a Christian too – has led astray the fairest daughter of our king!
A TROLL CHILD: Please, may I gash his finger?
SECOND CHILD: I want to hack his hair!
TROLL MAIDEN: I'd love to bite him in the thigh, right here, or just there. . .
EN TROLDUNGE : Maa jeg skjære ham i Fingren?
EN ANDEN TROLDUNGE: Maa jeg rive ham i Haaret?
EN TROLDJOMFRU: Hu, hej; lad mig bide ham i Laaret!
Whip off your own, for it seems you can clap it on again.
A caterwauling phantom among the winds of the west.
will be riven by me, you'll see, no matter how strong it's become.
Yes, yes, and despite your shaking at me that crooked arm.
Indeed I can quite understand why you're so angry, old friend.
And yet, as you know, you'll be brought to your knees at the end.
it's a tree long past its best, a pine with cracked bark that I mourn.
I find I invent fables for fables I can't remember.
The fourteeners accommodate Peer's daydream garrulity, the rhythm sustains his illusions; instead of seeking effects in rhyme, Hill intentionally dampens the potential of the couplet. (Compare Hill's sense of what the couplet can achieve, in the opposite direction, in his essay 'Jonathan Swift: The Poetry of "Reaction"', Collected Critical Writings, ed. by Kenneth Haynes [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008], pp. 71-88.) Where elsewhere, for instance the trolls baying for Peer's blood, the energy is harnessed by displacing the long line over two speakers, here the technical achievements are subtle: 'giants' as a relatively unproblematic transferred sense to convey the enormity of the pines cannot but expose the radically metaphorical potential of language in this world of Boygs, trolls, and sinister Button Moulders. 'Giants' as a figurative word to mean trees absolves Peer of his 'lies' – language itself is the grand fable from which fables are invented.
While I was writing Brand I had standing on my desk an empty beer glass with a scorpion in it. From time to time the creature became sickly; then I used to throw a piece of soft fruit to it, which it would then furiously attack and empty its poison into; then it grew well again. Is there not something similar to that about us poets?
Yet such saeva indignatio is ultimately of less importance to Hill than the technical aspects of rendering the play in English, a matter ultimately of recognising that Brand is '"uncompromising" yet compromised', thus rejecting the Romantic-daemonic reading, as well as the converse option of treating it as a lofty tragic morality play. What remains, in Hill's view, is 'tragic farce', the same term he seems to accept when Kenneth Haynes puts it to him that Yeats's 'heroic farce' could situate Peer Gynt, replying: 'a sense of sublime doggerel, I trust, informs the many scenes of farce' (p. 344). There is more than a whiff of Hill's personal investment in Peer Gynt's anti-Sidnean association of poetry with 'damned lies' (in a scene which takes place in the vertiginous Rondane mountains, an indictment of the Romantic sublime). If Hill could imagine, as he does in late revisions to Hymns to Our Lady of Chartres, 'Peer Gynt [skittering] sled- | drunk through my door, scattering the six cats | from their dishes of liver and cold cuts' in order to be the poet's 'confidante' (Broken Hierarchies, p. 165), there is nevertheless a limit to seeing this verse translation as a 'personal' reading of Ibsen's original. The move away from Brand's inflexibility in Hill's poetry, stylistically speaking, an attraction in the later work to shape-shifting, loquaciousness and continual discovery of 'Pastures new' – what he calls in the poem 'Nachwort' '—Urge to unmake | all wrought finalities, become a babbler | in the crowd's face' (Broken Hierarchies, p. 601) – is ultimately subsidiary to those questions of poetic technique that animate and vex both 'verse translations'. Peer Gynt is quite unlike Hill's other verse: that is to say, I see nothing characteristically Hillian about it as such, and that is very much to his credit. What sort of life should this translation have, beyond text? Hill mentions in the interview that some critic suggested the play anticipated the medium of film. In Educating Rita, wasn't the entirety of Julie Walters's character's response to an essay question about difficulties of staging the play, 'Do it on the radio'?
Karl O'Hanlon recently completed his PhD in English at the University of York, on style and faith in Geoffrey Hill. His first poetry pamphlet, And Now They Range, is published by Guillemot Press.