Maschinenstürmer

Featured Translator: Nicholas Johnson

Nicholas Johnson is Assistant Professor of Drama at TCD and a performer, director, and writer. He recently co-edited the special “performance issue” of the Journal of Beckett Studies (23.1, 2014). His research appears in The Plays of Samuel Beckett (Methuen, 2013), Theatre Research International, Journal of Art Historiography and Forum Modernes Theater. He has translated/directed works by Ernst Toller (2008/2014), Franz Kafka (2009), and Max Frisch (2010); as adaptor/director, recent projects include The Brothers Karamazov (2014) and various works by Samuel Beckett. He is co-director of the Beckett Summer School and artistic director of Painted Filly Theatre.

On Translating Ernst Toller’s Die Maschinenstürmer

The translation of drama intended for performance will always be judged on the first hearing, rather than being carefully assessed by repeated reading. Because the mode of reception for drama is as event, rather than as object, the translation of drama is inherently different from prose or poetry, though both verse and prose might be contained within a play (as with Ernst Toller’s Die Maschinenstürmer). While the reception of all literature is both embodied and bounded in time, theatre is unique in that one must appear at a particular place and time in order to experience it, and for most viewers (those who attend only once) this is the sole opportunity for communication of the thought. A translator must think not only about service to an author’s original concept and language, but also about service to the present audience, with whom the implicit contract of a ticket has been drawn up. Though an audience might later have access to a published script, “re-reading” of drama is not immediately possible, so the validity of a translation in theatre should partly be judged on how easily it can be received live. This means that all translation of drama is also adaptation, since one must consider the cultural and intellectual context in which the live event will appear, and alterations will frequently be required from the original that would not seem justifiable in print, but seem required for the ephemeral event to be legible in the local context.

Ernst Toller is a fascinating figure of world drama whose legacy has been complicated — and ultimately unduly minimized — first by anti-Jewish sentiment in Germany of the mid-1930s, then by anti-German sentiment in the US and UK of the late 1930s, and finally by anti-Communist sentiment in the Anglophone world after World War II. Born in 1893 in Samotschin, at that time in the province of Posen but today in Poland, Toller fought for

the German Empire at the front lines of World War I for thirteen months. Radicalized by his experience and observations in the war, he co-organized and then was briefly head of state of the Bavarian Soviet Republic in Munich. He began to write seriously when imprisoned for five years for his role in that revolution, and Die Maschinenstürmer was his third play completed in Niederschönenfeld prison. On his release, he sought refuge from an increasingly threatening German state by going first to London and then to New York, to seek a living in the theatre. Having failed to do so, when he heard in 1939 that his mother and sister had been taken to the concentration camps, he committed suicide in the Mayflower Hotel in New York City. Usually classified as a German Expressionist because of his early works Die Wandlung (1919) and Masse Mensch (1920), Toller also produced remarkable poetry (most famously Das Schwalbenbuch, 1922-23) and a notable autobiography (Eine Jugend in Deutschland, 1933). An edition of his plays in English was published during his lifetime as Seven Plays, and there are still occasional productions of the original English translation by Ashley Dukes entitled The Machine-Wreckers, most notably one directed by Katie Mitchell at the National Theatre in London in 1995.

In 2008, working first with Masse Mensch, I began a long-term project to translate the dramatic works of Ernst Toller into playable versions that could be received and understood by contemporary audiences. The necessary precondition for such a project, and one reason for its lengthy time scale, is the opportunity to produce the drafts with live actors before finalizing a printed text. For me, much value of a dramatic translation rests on the question of whether it has actually been staged, and many of the published translations of Toller were not originally created for that purpose and are no longer suited to it. Toller’s overshadowed legacy has partly also been the victim of intensely poetic and literary translations from England of the 1920s and 30s which are easily passed over as “dated” or “polemic” or simply “non-dramatic.” That the author went out of copyright in 2009 makes the task immensely easier, since the freedom to alter the text more substantially for performance makes fidelity to the present audience easier. The goal for me is to create a “living thought” out of these plays, so that audiences can access both the radical politics and radical philosophy put forward in Toller’s writing, and then dialectically reflect on the significance of this offering themselves.

The 2008 project on Masse Mensch was developed first with a large ensemble of students at Trinity College, and was then toured in a bilingual workshop version to one of Europe’s major theatres (and an institution that knows Toller well), the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxembourg-Platz in Berlin. Knowing that a similar opportunity to direct an ensemble production with second-year drama students at the Samuel Beckett Theatre in Dublin was arising in 2014, since mid-2013 I have been developing the translation of

Die Maschinenstürmer. The translation printed below this short essay is the prologue to the play, taken from the second stage (or “faithful version”) of the draft translations that I have developed. Reflecting on these two projects, it is possible to generalize an optimal approach for dramatic translation. My process of creating a complete and publishable translation of The Machinewreckers will take five steps, creating five main drafts: 1. The transcribed German, which has the translator as an audience. The transcription process forces close reading in the original language and creates a document with good formatting, lineation, and spacing for the rehearsal script.

2. The “faithful” English, which has actors and designers as an audience. This draft seeks to communicate Toller’s intent with a particular line, and is what is printed in this journal. Much literary translation would stop at this point.

3. The “rehearsal adaptation,” produced by the director/playwright in collaboration with actors and dramaturgy staff. This draft reflects more aggressive changes and cuts that consider cultural context and the constraint of time. Adjustments made at this point help the actors to play lines and the audience to understand them, and this script is taken into rehearsal.

4. The “run draft” or adaptation version post-rehearsal, produced as an accurate depiction of what was actually said or done on stage, more of a recording of what transpired than the more aspirational adaptation.

5. The “playable translation,” in which the information gained through rehearsal and performance process is fed back into the “faithful” translation, to determine which lines have migrated based on rehearsal and performance, and which cases of this were meaningful, as opposed to accidental or culturally too specific.

There are a few emblematic moments of what follows that explain how this process produces new information. First, in the stage directions that precede the Lord Chancellor’s first line, Toller suggests that he is at a “Pult,” which would be a sort of lectern common to the Reichstag or another Parliamentary body. An audience in the UK or Ireland that is familiar with the House of Lords, however, will know that the Lord Chancellor sits on the traditional “woolsack,” and if producing the play in these islands with England still as its location, this has special resonance with the content of the play, which concerns the Luddite uprising of the Nottingham weavers circa 1815. This resonance is missed in the original German, but the choice to use “woolsack” was made by both the original translator and by me. Though it is in the stage directions and may not seem important to audience reception, in fact it is vital for the set designer to consider.

The second choice that marks my approach is how to handle Toller’s verse. Frequently I have selected alliteration and nested consonant endings over any sense of ending rhyme, and while I have been sensitive to meter, I have not been strict. I have also honoured Toller’s original repetitions in the way that the earlier translators of this have not. If the texture of the verse that prompted Ashley Dukes’s original translation, first published by Ernest Benn in 1923 and then anthologized in Seven Plays in 1935, was romantic poetry, the “deep source” for me has been Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, particularly the “Moloch” section whose subject integrates well with the topic of this play. A three-part example of one of these repetitions at the opening of the Prologue should reveal the difference in approach.

Toller’s original German: Sie kennen alle, meine Lords, die Taten der Zerstörung. Die Arbeitsmänner haben sich verbündet, Gewalt gebraucht, Revolten angezettelt. Wer aber lehrte sie ein solches Tun? Wer untergrub das Wohl des Landes? — Die Politik der »großen Männer«! Die Politik der Räuberkriege! Die Politik der großen Helden, Von denen Ihre Bücher zeugen, Die Politik, die Fluch ward für das lebende Geschlecht!—

Ashley Dukes’s 1923 translation, revised and reprinted 1935: All of you know, my lords, why we are met. The working weavers are confederate Against their masters; they have used duress And plan destruction. But whose policy Taught them the trade of havoc, whose the hand That undermined the welfare of the realm? It was the policy of the robber wars, The myth of heroes from your history books, That grew to be the curse of living men!

My own 2013-14 translation:

You all know, my Lords, the deeds of the destroyers. The workingmen have joined forces To wield violence and instigate rebellion. Who taught them how to do this? Who undermined the welfare of the land? — The politics of the great men! The politics of the robber wars! The politics of great heroes told of in your books, The politics that cursed all living souls!—

This should reveal how the quest of this stage of translation is to offer maximal information to actors and designers about what Toller originally wrote while preserving his own punchy Telegrammstil, and then allow the scene to develop in rehearsal to find out how “playable” it is. Readers of this stage of the translation who attend the production of Machinewreckers may be surprised how differently this section of text will be handled in its on-stage rendition by the whole ensemble.

Bibliography

Davies, Cecil. The Plays of Ernst Toller: A Revaluation. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic

Publishers, 1996. Toller, Ernst. I Was a German: The Autobiography of Ernst Toller. Trans. Edward Crankshaw. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1934. ———. The Machine-Wreckers: A Drama of the English Luddites in a Prologue and Five

Acts. Trans. Ashley Dukes. In Seven Plays. Frome and London: Butler and Tanner, 1935.

———. Die Maschinenstürmer. In Gesammelte Werke 2: Dramen und Gedichte aus dem

Gefängnis, 1918-1924. 3rd Edition. Eds. Wolfgang Frühwald and John M. Spalek.

München/Wien: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1995.

Vorspiel

Ernst Toller

Westminsterpalast. Sitzungssaal des englischen Oberhauses. Das Vorspiel kann mit einfachen Mitteln vor dem Vorhang dargestellt werden. In der Mitte ein Pult, an dem der Lordkanzler sitzt. Rechts und links Stühle für LORD BYRON und LORD CASTLEREAGH. In der ersten Reihe des Zuschauerraums andere Lords. Der Darsteller JIMMYS könnte in LORD BYRONS Maske auftreten, der Darsteller URES in der Maske des LORD CASTLEREAGH.

LORDKANZLER

Bill der Regierung: Zum Tode verurteilt, wer übt Zerstörung der Maschinen. Die Bill mit großer Mehrheit in erster Lesung angenommen. Wir treten in die zweite und die dritte Lesung ein. Lord Byron hat das Wort.

LORD BYRON

Sie kennen alle, meine Lords, die Taten der Zerstörung. Die Arbeitsmänner haben sich verbündet, Gewalt gebraucht, Revolten angezettelt. Wer aber lehrte sie ein solches Tun? Wer untergrub das Wohl des Landes? — Die Politik der »großen Männer«! Die Politik der Räuberkriege! Die Politik der großen Helden, Von denen Ihre Bücher zeugen, Die Politik, die Fluch ward für das lebende Geschlecht!— O, können Sie sich wundern, meine Lords, Wenn in den Zeiten, da Betrug und Wucher, Diebstahl, Gier Wie ekler Schimmel unsere hohen Klassen angepelzt, Das Werkvolk angesichts des ungeheuerlichen Elends Die Bürgerpflicht vergißt und sich mit Schuld belädt? Vergleichbar nur mit jener Schuld, die Abgeordnete In Parlamenten Tag um Tag begehen. Was aber ist der Unterschied? Der hochgestellte Missetäter kennt die Mittel, Um zu durchschlüpfen Maschen des Gesetzes. Der Arbeiter allein büßt für Vergehen,