Two: Target texts
73
We all know how a theatre performance can be spoilt by a tempo lacking in nuances because of wrong timing and absence of pauses. It is often during the silence between speeches or within one and the same speech that we intensely experience what goes on between and within the characters. The punctuation helps to indicate this subeext. Few translators seem to realize this.
My examination of how Spoksonaten has been rendered in English has led to a rather disapppoinring resulr.ln all fairness it must he said that this picture is somewhat one-sided. \Xlben diSCUSSIng problems related to translation, it is natural to concentrate on striking discrepancies between the source text and the target texts, discrepancies which Indicate insurmountable difficulties or unsatisfactory solutions. It goes without saying that the fifteen translations also comprise many imaginative solutions, some of which have been indicated here. Translators naturally often influence each other. Many renderings can be explained this way. There IS nothing surprising in the fact that a translator studies earlier translations of the same text. What is surprising, at least In this case, is that this seems to have been done to a very limited extent. Thus an earher translator has sometimes offered a better solution than alarer one. The desire to diverge from earlier target texts in order to create a translator's profile for oneself may lead to dubIOUS results. A new translation does not inevitably mean a better translation - as the publishers' blurbs would have us believe. Critics rarely comment at any length on how plays 111 target languages have been translated. Nor do they pay more than passing attention to this subject when reviewing stage or screen performances." The reason is, of course, that they feel incompetent to do so, when they lack a knowledge of the source language which is usually the case when they are confronted with a minor language like Swedish. Those who translate from such languages find themselves III a position different from those translating from major ones like English, french or German. Unlike the latter, those who translate from minor languages can take great liberties with the text and get away with it. In this sense Strindberg lS much more vulnerable than Wilde, Maeterlinck or Schnitzler.