Ibsen's Language: Literary Text and Theatrical Context

Abstract

This is not a paper on the problems of translating Ibsen, although the questions I wish to raise have come out of the experience of being involved, as a translator, in two recent London productions of Ibsen plays.' 'I do but ask; my call is not to answer', Ibsen wrote in his verse letter to Brandes while he was working on Pillars of the Community; and I should like to think that this exploration could be carried out in something of the same spirit, which I take to be one not of evasiveness, or reprehensible vagueness, but of concern for asking the right questions. For it seems to me, when it comes to considering Ibsen's texts, and in particular the part played by his language in the dramatic effect and significance of those texts, that we have tended not to ask enough questions, or to ask the wrong ones, or to press too readily for easy answers. The qualities of Ibsen's prose, his personal handling of the general characteristics of the Danish-Norwegian language he wrote in, are not easily open to analysis, and especially not to analysis carried out with the expectation of finding what criticism of the last forty or so years has taught us to look for in 'poetic' drama: semantic ambiguities, complexities of syntax and, above all, 'the kind of volatility or ductility of Shakespeare's or Racine's metaphors'.2 Unlike Strindberg, Ibsen had nothing Shakespearian about his verbal imagination, if by that we mean the associative power of thinking in images. If that is what we look for we shall find Ibsen's language flat, thin, lifeless, vague, and all the other adjectives which Scrutiny used to bestow on it and which have recently cropped up again in two books presenting Ibsen as a prosaic and pretentious writer with a spurious 'poetic' reputation.3 It seems that it is necessary to point out, with an Ibsenite obviousness, that there are other kinds of verbal imagination as well. My contention is that Ibsen's kind, his sense and use of language, is one very much at the service of the theatrical context and governed by it. (Incidentally, I think there is more of that quality in the infinite variety of Shakespeare's dramatic language than the image-centred approach has paid attention to.)