Complete Works of Henrik Ibsen (336 page)

THE SISTER OF MERCY.
[Gives a shriek, stretches out her arms towards them and cries.]
Irene! [Stands silent a moment, then makes the sign of the cross before her in the air, and says.

Pax vobiscum!
[MAIA’s triumphant song sounds from still farther down below.]

Henrik Ibsen lived on the Venstøp farm in Gjerpen, outside of Skien, for eight of years of his childhood, from 1835 to 1843. Venstøp was founded as an Ibsen museum in 1958.

IT was early in his professional career as a statesman-journalist that Garrett fell under the spell of Ibsen. His health was already undermined, but his amazing energy and power of rapid work remained; and the translation of
Brand,
on which he was long more or less at work, was actually accomplished with almost incredible rapidity in the year 1894. Many passages were marked for revision in his own copy, but only a relatively small number of corrections or improvements were actually made in manuscript. They have all been embodied in this re-issue. In 1895 he went to South Africa as editor of the
Cape Times,
but was compelled to return in 1899 with wrecked health. As soon as he was able to do anything, he gave such strength as he had to South Africa, where his main interest centred to the end of his life, but Ibsen still retained his hold on him, and he amused some of the many hours in which speaking or moving meant instant danger by pencilling tentative translations between the lines and on the margins of his copy of Ibsen’s
Digte.
As these translations were gradually elaborated he sent many of them, one by one, to the
Westminster Gazette,
where they appeared, from May to September, in 1903. Others he dictated in their provisionally completed form to Mrs. Garrett, but never published; and some were left to be picked out with more or less security from the various suggested renderings of the manuscript notes. In two instances, only, the editors have had to supply or modify a word or two on their own responsibility. Had Garrett lived he might have further modified any or all of his versions, for some of those already printed were revised and improved from time to time in manuscript. All these
Poems
are now collected and arranged in the first section of this volume. In every case a note is added to explain the condition in which the poem was left by the translator, and the reader is very particularly requested to remember that those which are taken from the manuscript notes only were never passed for publication by the translator himself.

In many cases they would certainly have been recast or perhaps altogether rejected, in their present form, had he lived to complete his work. For though he would occasionally accept the compulsion of haste, as in the case of his rendering of
Brand,
he was habitually and by ingrained character a scrupulous literary craftsman, who felt no pains to be too great to bestow on the perfecting of his work.

Ibsen’s volume of
Digte
included Songs from the Dramas — Margeret’s “Cradle Song” from the
Pretenders
and Solveig’s songs from
Peer Gynt,
for example. All of these, and a song from the early play,
Gildet paa Solhaug,
were amongst the poems translated by Garrett. Einar’s song has its place in his version of
Brand
.

The rest are thrown together, in the second section of this volume, which also contains a rendering of the great scene of Aase’s death, from the third Act of
Peer Gynt,
that remains to show what we might have possessed had Garrett been able to carry out his hope of adding a complete version of that marvellous drama to his rendering of
Brand.

I may perhaps be allowed to add a few words giving my own impression of Garrett’s characteristics as a translator. I was not acquainted with him during the first period of his work on Ibsen, but his translation of
Brand
impressed me greatly. It is no part of my task to compare it with Professor Herford’s fine version, which appeared about the same time, but Ibsen is certainly to be congratulated on the rare good fortune of having had two such interpreters of one of his greatest dramas. Later on I was arrested by the appearance in the
Westminster Gazette
of the poem
Gone
(VII, in our arrangement). I had tried my own hand at a prose translation, for a special purpose, and knew what Garrett’s work meant. A little later, after his marriage, Mrs. Garrett brought us into correspondence, and he did me the honour of submitting his translations of
On the Fells
and
‘Terje Vigen,
now first published, to my criticism and suggestion. His associates in the journalistic work of his life know that he had a genius for collaboration, and in my correspondence with him, and the single memorable interview which my own engagements and his state of health allowed, I found him to be a man of rarest gift for understanding and accepting suggestions. He not only professed to desire (which is common), but enthusiastically welcomed (which is rare indeed) the most searching and even, if I may say so, the most unconscionable criticism. He desired no phrase, however splendid and however dear to its coiner, to Be spared if it missed or perverted a significant point in the original. By theory and in practice he was a free translator, striving to catch the spirit, not to transliterate the words of his author, but the spirit must be reverenced as sacred. More than once it was with a sense of genuine compunction that I suggested to him a significant aspect of a line which I thought his rendering — though of unusual force and splendour in its diction — had failed to catch. Instead of feeling an instinctive chill of disappointment he was fired by a kind of exultation at the sense of having got a new insight into his author, and at the hope of doing something still better than he had yet achieved: the sacrifice of his toil was as nothing; the sense of a finer vision everything.

I am permitted further to borrow in this place from a note which I wrote at Mrs. Garrett’s request for insertion in Mr. E. T.

Cook’s Memoir.

“Garrett’s translation of
Brand
is, so far as the noblest and most vital portions of that great drama are concerned, a truly inspired piece of work. The ‘pity and terror’ of the poem had entered into him and were part and parcel of his whole sense of human life. The central heart-beat of Brand was to him an ‘exchange of pulses’ with the universal throb of human passion and aspiration. It was one with the tragedy of victory in defeat, and defeat in victory, of which every heroic soul is in its turn the protagonist. It possessed him.

There is a great passage in the first Act in which Agnes, after she and Einar have been interrupted in their sport by Brand, is wooed back by her lover to the light-hearted joy which the seer’s visions and appeals had dissipated. She hardly hears his words, but in awed abstraction of mind asks him did he not see ‘how the man
grew
as he spoke.’ The reader of Garrett’s translation, no less than of the original, knows well what she means. For he has already felt, once and again, a spiritual elevation and expansion entering into Brand’s discourse which is as palpable as a physical phenomenon.

“Garrett professed no fine Norse scholarship. But there is something more vital to a translator than sensitiveness to philological minutiæ. It is sensitiveness to the author’s moods and insight into his experience. To have an instinctive sense of what the author means is better than pedantic scrupulosity as to what he says. But evidently Garrett underestimated the delicacy of his own feeling for the language.

He relied much on the judgment of his friends, and was generous in his acknowledgments, but no one could have turned out such work as his without a sound, if not a technical, knowledge of the idiom from which he was translating. In any case his mastery of English admits of no question. His resources seem to be almost boundless. He evidently believed that effective rhyme and rhythm could be and must be secured without any sacrifice of sense or phrasing. The English language always had the turn of expression that was not the best compromise between the two requirements, but the alliance by which each reached its maximum of realization.

“In the great passages between Agnes and Brand this ideal is infallibly embodied in Garrett’s work. In the long passages in which we feel the almost unendurable jar between Brand’s ideals and the commonplaces of his two principal foils — the Sheriff and the Dean — the translator himself evidently feels less secure, and is less firm in his tread. Here ‘inspiration’ can hardly be thought of and resourceful skill is all that seems possible. And here, though Garrett is perpetually delighting the student of the original by his felicity and strength, his results have less of the sustained and sustaining quality than when the tension is higher. A discerning critic on reading his
Brand
would already have marked him out as the man chosen by the gods to translate Ibsen’s lyrics.”

And it is Ibsen’s lyrics, as rendered by Garrett, the most novel and distinctive feature of this volume, that now demand some more special treatment. From time to time Garrett prefaced his translations with extracts from a certain lecture on Ibsen’s
Poems
, which I had myself published some time before, and he accompanied these quotations by words of more than generous acknowledgment and appreciation, which it would be out of place to reproduce here.

But where the references or quotations appear to give the requisite information or suggestion which Garrett himself thought valuable they have been allowed to stand at the head of the several poems.

What follows here is an attempt to deal with the collection as a whole and to indicate the principle on which the poems have been arranged.

I have added a few historical notes to some of the poems, based upon information derived from Passarge’s German edition of Ibsen, Allen’s
History of Denmark
, and other easily accessible works.

These notes make no pretension to first-hand knowledge.

Brandes once said that some of the
Poems,
notably the one which appears as No. VII in our arrangement, proved that at some point in the battle of life Ibsen had had a lyrical Pegasus shot under him.

The poems I and II, which we have placed at the opening of this collection, give Ibsen’s own caustic version of the same facts. In the first he implies that he opened his career with the usual stock in trade of the youthful bard — vanity, ambition and sentimentality.

And in the second he tells us how he conceived his task when he had come to close grips with life, and had defined his own relation to the world in which he lived. There is a poem, not one of those translated by Garrett, in which he tells how one sultry night he was sitting on shipboard “with the stars and silence for company.”

Through the half-open swing glass he could see the uneasy sleepers below, and averting his eye from the weary turmoil he looked out into the fresh night. Eastward the faint dawn was already dimming the stars. Then some one below seemed to cry, between an uneasy sleep and a nightmare, “I’m sure we’re sailing with a corpse on board.” Ibsen had seen the stars and the dawn, he had felt the fresh sea breeze, and to the last his Muse struggled to give lyric utterance to his sense of the beauty and worth of life, but yet it was more and more the cutting away of dead matter, ridding the ship of life of the corpse she carried, which he came to feel as his special mission. The trolls, sprites and kelpies, which are to us quaint and pleasing fancies, stand to the Norseman, and most of all to Ibsen, for those dark unhumanized passions and those haunting obsessions above which life must be raised and against which it must be defended. The deliberate self-shaping alike of the individual and of society towards the higher issues is a fight against these trolls; and the poet who probes the unconscious motives and impulses of others has turned an awful searchlight upon his own soul, and called himself to the bar of judgment.

Those of Ibsen’s poems which Garrett translated, now one and now another as accident and fancy dictated — poems which Ibsen himself had never cared to throw into systematic order — may be taken in our arrangement as roughly illustrating at once the lyric power which was never wholly crushed out of Ibsen, and the general trend of his mind towards that other task of troll-fighting and working off of dead tissue; always, however, with the underlying sense of vitality. In a word we have sought to illustrate the movement from
Building Plans
to
What is Life?
But it must be distinctly understood that this is not a chronological arrangement. The two moods alternate throughout Ibsen’s life, and to prevent any misapprehension on this point we have given, the date of the composition, or (if that is unknown) of the publication of each poem, on the authority of Halvorsen.