Ask not if its taste be sour or sweet;
The main matter is, and you mustn’t forget it,
It’s all of it home-brewed.
Much more difficult is the interpretation of the Boyg,[[17]] that vague, shapeless, ubiquitous, inevitable, invulnerable Thing which Peer encounters in the following scene (Act II. Sc. 7). Ibsen found it in the folk-tale, and was attracted, no doubt, by the sheer uncanniness and eerieness of the idea. Neither can one doubt, however, that in his own mind he attributed to the monster some symbolic signification. Dr. Brandes would have us see in it the Spirit of Compromise—the same evil spirit which is assailed in Brand. The Swedish critic, Vasenius, interprets it as Peer Gynt’s own consciousness of his inability to take a decisive step—to go through an obstacle in place of skirting round it. Herr Passarge reads in it a symbol of the mass of mankind, perpetuum immobile, opposing its sheer force of inertia to every forward movement.[[18]] This would make it nearly equivalent to “the compact majority” of An Enemy of the People; or, looking at it from a slightly different angle, we might see in the scene an illustration in action of that despairing cry of Schiller’s Talbot: “Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.” The truth probably is that the poet vaguely intended this vague monster to be as elusive in its symbolism as in its physical constitution. But when, in Act IV. Sc. 12, he formally identifies the Boyg with the Sphinx, we may surely conclude that one of the interpretations present to his mind was metaphysical. In this aspect, the Boyg would typify the riddle of existence, with which we grapple in vain, and which we have to “get round” as best we can.
The fourth act contains a good many special allusions, in addition to the general, and somewhat crude, satire in the opening scene on the characteristics of different nationalities, with particular reference to their conduct in the Dano-German crisis. Peer’s dreams of African colonisation (Act IV. Sc. 5) are said to refer to certain projects which Ole Bull had about this time been ventilating. But it is especially in the madhouse scene (Act IV. Sc. 13) that satiric sallies abound. “The Fellah with the royal mummy on his back,” says Henrik Jæger,[[19]] “is—like Trumpeterstråle—a cut at the Swedes, the mummy being Charles the Twelfth. Like the Fellah, it is implied, the Swedes are extremely proud of their ‘Hero-king,’ and yet during the Dano-German war they showed not the smallest sign of having anything in common with him, unless it were that they, like him, ‘kept still and completely dead.’ In the delusion of the minister Hussein, who imagines himself a pen, there is a general reference to the futile address- and note-mongering which went on in Norwegian-Swedish officialdom during the Dano-German War, and a more special one to an eminent Swedish statesman [Grev Manderström], who, during the war, had been extremely proud of his official notes, and had imagined that by means of them he might exercise a decisive influence on the course of events.”
Most prominent and unmistakable of all the satiric passages, however, is the attack on the language-reformers in the personage of Huhu. In the list of characters, Huhu is set down as a “Målstræver from Zanzibar.” Now the Målstrævers are a party which desires to substitute a language compounded from the various local dialects, for the Norwegian of the townsfolk and of literature. This they call Danish, and declare to be practically a foreign tongue to the peasants, who form the backbone of the Norwegian nation. Ibsen’s satire, it must be said, has had little or no effect on the movement, which has gone on slowly but steadily, and has of late years met with official and legislative recognition. There is a large and increasing literature in the “Mål”; it is taught in schools and it is spoken in the Storthing. Where the movement may end it is hard to say. It must seem to a foreigner, as it seemed to Ibsen, retrograde and obscurantist; but there is doubtless some genuine impulse behind it which the foreigner cannot appreciate.
The principles which have guided us in the following transcript demand a few words of explanation. Peer Gynt is written from first to last in rhymed verse. Six or eight different measures are employed in the various scenes, and the rhymes are exceedingly rich and complex. The frequency of final light syllables in Norwegian implies an exceptional abundance of double rhymes, and Ibsen has taken full advantage of this peculiarity. In the short first scene of the second act, for example, twenty-five out of the forty lines end in double rhymes, and there are three double-rhymed triplets. The tintinnabulation of these double rhymes, then, gives to most of the scenes a metrical character which it might puzzle Mr. Swinburne himself to reproduce in English. Moreover, the ordinary objections to rhymed translations seemed to apply with exceptional force in the case of Peer Gynt. The characteristic quality of its style is its vernacular ease and simplicity. It would have been heart-breaking work (apart from its extreme difficulty) to substitute for this racy terseness the conventional graces of English poetic diction, padding here and perverting there. To a prose translation, on the other hand, the objections seemed even greater. It is possible to give in prose some faint adumbration of epic dignity; but we had here no epic to deal with. We found (though the statement may at first seem paradoxical) that the same vernacular simplicity of style which forbade a translation in rhyme, was no less hostile to a translation in prose. The characteristic quality of the poet’s achievement lay precisely in his having, by the aid of rhythm and rhyme, transfigured the most easy and natural dialogue, without the least sacrifice of its naturalness. Entirely to eliminate these graces of form would have been to reduce the poem to prose indeed. It seemed little better than casting a silver statue into the crucible and asking the world to divine from the ingot something of the sculptor’s power. A prose translation, in short, could not but strip Fantasy of its pinions, rob Satire of its barbs. The poet himself, moreover, expressly declared that he would rather let Peer Gynt remain untranslated than see it rendered in prose. After a good deal of reflection and experiment, we finally suggested to him a middle course between prose and rhyme: a translation as nearly as possible in the metres of the original, but with the rhymes suppressed. To this compromise he assented, and the following pages are the result.
We had no precedent—within our knowledge, at any rate—to guide us, and were forced to lay down our own laws. Even at the risk of falling between two stools, we proposed to ourselves a dual purpose. We sought to produce a translation which should convey to the general reader some faint conception of the movement and colour, the wit and pathos, of the original, and at the same time a transcript which should serve the student as a “crib” to the Norwegian text. This, then, the reader must be good enough to bear in mind: that the following version is designed to facilitate, not to supersede, the study of the original. But, apart from our desire to provide a “crib” to Peer Gynt, we felt that, in taking the liberty of suppressing the rhymes, we abjured our right to any other liberty whatsoever. A rhymed paraphrase of a great poem may have a beauty of its own; an unrhymed version must be no paraphrase, but a faithful transcript, else “the ripple of laughing rhyme” has been sacrificed in vain. Our fundamental principle then, has been to represent the original line for line; and to this principle we have adhered with the utmost fidelity. There are probably not fifty cases in the whole poem in which a word has been transferred from one line to another, and then only some pronoun or auxiliary verb. It is needless to say that in adhering to this principle we have often had to resist temptation. Many cases presented themselves in which greater clearness, grace, and vigour might easily have been attained by transferring a word or phrase from this line to that, or even altering the sequence of a whole group of lines. In no case have we yielded to such temptation, feeling that, our rule once relaxed, we should insensibly but inevitably lapse into mere paraphrase. Temptation beset us with especial force in the less vital passages of the poem. In these places it would have been easy to give our rendering some approach to grace and point by disregarding inversions and other defects of expression, justified in the original by the wit and spirit of the rhymes, but of course deprived in our transcript of any such excuse. Here, as elsewhere, we were proof against temptation; it is for our readers to decide whether our constancy was heroic or pedantic.
It would be folly to pretend either that we have reproduced every word of the original, or that we have avoided all necessity for “padding.” The chief drawback of our line-for-line principle is that it has debarred us from eking out the deficiency of one line with the superfluity of the next. We trust, however, that few essential ideas, or even words, of the original will be found quite unaccounted for; while with regard to padding, we have tried, where we found it absolutely forced upon us, to use only such mechanical parts of speech as introduced no new idea into the context. We have found by experiment that the fact of writing in measure has frequently enabled us to keep much closer to the original than would have been possible in prose. This is not in reality so strange as it may at first sight appear. A prose translation of verse can avoid paraphrase only at the cost of grotesque inelegance; whereas in rendering metre into metre, we are working under the same laws which govern the original, and are therefore enabled in many cases to adopt identical forms of expression, which would be quite inadmissible in prose.
Thirty out of the thirty-eight scenes into which the five acts are divided are written almost entirely in an irregular measure of four accents, evidently designed to give the greatest possible variety and suppleness to the dialogue. The four accents constitute almost the only assignable law of this measure, the feet being of any length, from two to four syllables, and of all possible denominations—iambics, trochees, dactyls, anapæsts, amphibrachs. The effect is at first rather baffling to the unaccustomed ear; but when one gets into the swing of the rub-a-dub rhythm, if we may venture to call it so, the feeling of ruggedness vanishes, and the verse is found to be capable of poignantly pathetic, as well as of buoyantly humorous, expression.