would seem, but to render them phrase by phrase. No, nothing; but even so problems arise. There are phrases and words which resist all translation. The ever-recurring "Monsieur " you must leave, or leave out. You'll be wise to leave it out wherever you can. Few English actors can achieve its pronunciation, and unkind critics have broken their firstnight nerve for the attempt. Then, a play's whole intention may hang upon a phrase. Is it too much to say of a whole class of French plays that they have never yet been duly translated into English because neither the translators-nor the censorship could discover and agree upon an exact intellectual and emotional and social equivalent for "Je suis cocu"? When the translated husband exclaims that he has been "betrayed" by his friend, the whole affair shifts to another plane, its values are changed, and its moral—or if you like, its immoral-fabric falls to the ground. In the jerry-building that ensues, suggestiveness and its indecency are taken often enough for a substitute, and it is a poor exchange. This difficulty, it may be remarked, has only arisen since the eighteenth century; "cuckold" flourished till then. There are signs of an escape from it. To many a passage one cannot, for quite extraneous reasons, hope to give the value of its original. Take this, from Jules Romain's "Doctor Knock." The translation (I apologize) is my own. The doctor is speaking: "You cannot, of course, expect a family to set anyone. aside for regular and constant treatment unless their income is at least 12,000 francs. That would not be reasonable. No, these things must be properly regulated. I sift people into four categories. To begin with, for families of 12 to 20 thousand francs income I provide a simple treatment—the very simplest-involving, say, one visit a week and fifty francs worth of medicine in the course of a month. And so on till we reach the first category and full treatment, for incomes of 50,000 francs and over-which will include four visits a week at least and about 300 francs a month spent on such things as X rays, radium, massage, analyses and the usual drugs." Half the humour of that must pass us by if the francs in their thousands do not immediately picture for us the very sort of people who are mulcted of them by the enthusiastic doctor. No audience will be full of quick calculators into pounds sterling, especially in these days of an eccentric exchange. Some plays may even gain by a certain strangeness of habit. Time has begun to impose this to the full for us upon Ibsen's social dramas. The people he wrote of were never familiar to us in externals, but attempts to make them "Norwegian were futile. The important thing about Hedda Gabler was that, as Grant Allen said, one took her down to dinner twice a week. When, therefore, we found her in her drawing-room of an afternoon suggesting to her guests "Won't you gentlemen go in and take a glass of cold punch? --whether memories of Mr. Pickwick and Captain Boldwig started at the phrase, I can't say, but it was irresistibly funny. Nor did the trouble end there. Two minutes later we have Tesman with his Hedda, dear, cannot I give you a little glass of cold punch ?" And five minutes later yet says Hedda to Mrs. Elvsted—and, oh, how skilfully she had to say it to keep her English audience from giggling "But now, my dearest Thea, now you must drink up a good glass of punch." And there was no escape. Punch, and cold punch it had to be if Ibsen said so. William Archer was rightfrom the most practical point of view-in his stern refusal to have any tampering with the text.* For Ibsen puts not a thing in his plays-one may say almost literally, not a detail, however small-that he does not mean to make particular use of. Once play him false, and muddle upon muddle's head may accumulate. Here are plays indeed, whose integrity of content must be kept, whatever else the translator may lose of them. But now that we see them as pre-war, pre-motor-car, pre-telephone, pre-electric light, they are removed from us in time, place and circumstance almost equally, and they take on a new congruity, in which their purely dramatic qualities will have full scope. No more need to try and make them accountably "Norwegian "; the English world of 1890 is now as near and as far. But can change of time make the strangeness of Tchekov's plays less strange to us? Here I believe we do reach the untranslatable. Strip the environment from Ibsen and the play's hard core will remain. Start stripping it from Tchekov and one becomes * Nowadays, oddly enough, there would be no difficulty. One could translate it cocktail." 66 a Peer Gynt with his onion. And, to make comparison with this other and earlier Ibsen, how much do we not lose of the first act of Peer Gynt itself if its atmosphere of folk-lore is unfamiliar to us! With Tchekov, if ever, the use of a much-abused word is justified; he is a master of atmosphere. One may say of his plays they are all atmosphere, and it will be something more than a phrase. For what verbal translation will effect, one might almost as well leave them in their original Russian. What are English actors and an English audience to make of "The Cherry Orchard"? For four acts the stage will be filled with fantastic figures saying commonplace things. So far from fulfilling, this directly contradicts and betrays Tchekov's intention, which is to show to his audience familiar figures, who mirror in the haphazard conversation his allusive art makes poignant, the fantastic tragedies of their souls. 66 It may well be the case of Tchekov that has brought Stanislawsky, his matchless interpreter, to shaking his head and saying: Plays cannot be translated, and there is an end of it." And setting, as he sets up, a standard of simple perfection, one must agree with him. But translations there will be, and dramatic art, since it uses humanity for its medium, is imperfection personified. Wherefore we shall go on doing the best we can; and, on the whole, as it is the purpose of this paper to demonstrate, if we will but admit that, perfection being unattainable, we must seek for each separate play the likeliest compromise, it is the best thing we can do. And rare exceptions will but prove the rule that dramatic translation is a matter of makeshift, serving only to remind us of |