Trinity Journal of Literary Translation
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163
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