Another translation comparison! This one, by David Isaacson, is of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, and it’s a good one — not, for the most part, focused on how the Russian is rendered, but on what makes Chekhov work in English. Some snippets:
I can think of no other drama that has so many interpreters. Big name playwrights (David Mamet! Heidi Schreck! Conor McPherson! Annie Baker!) are eager to try their hand at it. Correct me if I’m wrong, dear reader, but I don’t think that’s generally the case with other playwrights presented in translation. Companies doing Moliere’s Tartuffe are usually content to go with the Richard Wilbur or Ranjit Bolt versions. Since playwright Amy Herzog started adapting Henrik Ibsen a few years ago, directors have coalesced on her versions of An Enemy of the People and A Doll’s House. So my query really should be phrased: With so many published English versions of Uncle Vanya available, why so many freakin’ translations and adaptations?
The American Players Theater’s Nate Burger says
“The reason people think they don’t like Chekhov is because they haven’t experienced Chekhov through someone else’s lens that makes it contemporary or makes it approachable. And so I was, like, I bet I can do that.”
Burger proposes that what draws people to adapt Uncle Vanya is the lack of approachability in previous incarnations. I think it’s the opposite: Playwrights are not overcoming some innate textual difficulty; rather they are reveling in the sensation that Chekhov is our soul brother. In fact, Annie Baker says, “If you just literally translate exactly what [Chekhov] wrote, it sounds super contemporary.” It’s that inherent sense of contemporaneity that makes modern playwrights’ palms start to itch with the need to open their inkpads and put their stamps on the proceedings. […]
The reason I haven’t rushed out to see any of these current Vanyas is that back in January 2025, I saw a production of from The New Theatre Project that was so completely satisfying, I probably won’t have the urge to see another for quite some time. The cast were all outstanding. (In the photo above, that’s Rae Gray as Yelena and Larry Grimm as Vanya.) It was an intimate staging, performed in a corner of a small titanium-parts factory in Chicago. There were scenes lit entirely by candlelight.
Chris Jones, the Chicago Tribune’s chief theater critic, gave it a lukewarm review, however. And one line from that review sparked my curiosity and has stuck with me ever since:
“Part of the issue is the Annie Baker translation, which is not my favorite, perhaps because Baker and Chekhov are too similar; the best Chekhov translations tend to be more counterintuitive efforts from maverick writers.”
It was a surprising notion, one I viewed with suspicion; I had always taken it as a given that a foreign-language work would be best-served by a translator/adaptor who was temperamentally and artistically simpatico with the original author. But I found Jones’ premise to be intriguing, so I decided I’d compare a bunch of Vanya translations, and figure out which I preferred. […]
What’s my criteria? What do I want — as an audience member — from my Chekhov? I desire the conversational; text in a simple vernacular; text that speaks to me. I want the translator to (as Baker says in her preface) “create a version that sounds to our contemporary American ears the way the play sounded to Russian ears during the play’s first productions in the provinces in 1898.”
For my little survey, I left out all the older, more “literary” translations that Columbus hates. I looked at Jean-Claude van Itallie’s (1980), David Mamet’s (1989), Brian Friel’s (1998), Columbus’s (2002), Baker’s (2014), one co-translated by Richard Nelson, Richard Pevear, and Larissa Volokhonsky (2018), Conor McPherson’s (2020), and Heidi Schreck’s recent script for Lincoln Center (2024).
Brian Friel is best known for his play Translations, in which visiting English translators make a hash out of the native Irish language. Ironically, Friel makes a hash of his “translation” here; he extemporizes on Chekhov’s work, cutting lines and making up dialogue out of whole cloth. And Conor McPherson does the same. Do they think they’re better playwrights than Chekhov? Is it an Irish playwright thing? Admittedly, both their printed texts calls themselves “versions” of the play… so at least there is truth in advertising. Let us shove these “versions” aside, and speak of them no more.
In general, I like Isaacson’s judgments (I agree that “Look at his success with women! Don Juan never had it so good!” is better than “And what success with women! No Don Juan ever had such complete success!”); here’s the bit that deals with Russian:
Nelson said in an interview that there is a single word that will tell you what kind of Uncle Vanya you are getting.
There’s one word in Uncle Vanya that in a sense makes the whole play untranslatable, and it’s a word that’s used maybe six or seven times in the play. Ástrov at one point says something like, “You come into a country and the people here are all…” and then the word, chudak… And then at the very end of the play he says, “You know, I think we’re all chudaki.” Now, that word is so important, and it’s been translated so many different ways: creep or crackpot or old fart! But the original Russian word is not a criticism or a judgment. And it’s a very common word. We couldn’t really find the right word to do all that. So the word we chose is misfit. So, “We are all misfits.” And that goes to the very heart of what the play is all about, what these people are feeling and what they’re trying to sort out about their lives. I think that shows you how complicated it is to translate Chekhov, when you can go from one translation that says, “We’re all creeps,” to another that concludes, “We’re all misfits.” Two different plays.
Who is Nelson taking aim at here? Annie Baker, who renders the word as “creeps.”
Yeah, “creeps” doesn’t work for me. Anyway, click through and see what you think; thanks, Steve!
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