Three Sisters
ANTON
CHEKHOV
Three Sisters
TRANSLATED BY PAUL SCHMIDT
TCG TRANSLATIONS
1992
Copyright © 1992 by Paul Schmidt
Three Sisters is published by Theatre Communications Group, Inc., 520 Eighth Avenue, 24th Floor, New York, NY 10018-4156.
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Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich, 1860–1904
[Tri sestry. English]
Three sisters / Anton Chekhov; translated by Paul Schmidt.—1st ed.
(TCG Translations 3)
Translation of: Tri sestry.
I. Schmidt, Paul 1934– II. Title. III. Series.
PG3456.C44T8S35 1992
| 891.72’3—dc20 92–11369 |
CIP
Cover design and watercolor copyright © 1992 by Barry Moser
Design and composition by The Sarabande Press
Color separations provided by EMR Systems Communication
First Edition, September 1992
Third Printing, January 2010
eISBN 978-1-55936-681-6
CONTENTS
Introduction by Paul Schmidt
I knew this book needed an introduction when someone asked me, with a sigh, why make yet another English translation of Chekhov’s Three Sisters? But this is another American translation, not another English translation.
I believe it’s crucial to make the distinction. We tend to think we and the Britons share a common tongue, but in the theatre, where language as it is spoken is paramount, it’s always clear that we speak two different dialects, mutually understandable, true, but each with its own accents, idioms and emotive speech rhythms. For a long time we relied on British translations of Chekhov, and so we tended to think he spoke the language of Shaw and Galsworthy, and we tended to equate his characters with theirs. What Chekhov created belongs in fact to a very different world.
I believe, too, that most theatre texts need continual retranslating. While the language of the original remains fixed in time, the language of every audience changes enough in forty or fifty years to make a new translation necessary. And faster even than language, theatrical sensibilities change. The “skies of gray” that Gershwin found in Chekhov productions in the Twenties have cleared a little; the “moody Russian soul” our parents went to Chekhov to observe turns out to be remarkably like our own. And we in America no longer admire the autumnal melancholy, the wistful nostalgia for gentility that so many English productions have laid upon Chekhov’s plays.
A particular reason for me to translate the play is that I am a playwright and actor who happens to be a Russian scholar. Most of the published translations of Chekhov are done either by native Russians, whose English is often awkward and stilted, or by Russian scholars, whose English is often formal and unidiomatic. The others are “versions” or “adaptations” done by playwrights who know no Russian; they work either by comparing existing translations, or by hiring a Russian to help them. Inevitably their sense of what Chekhov actually wrote is extremely attenuated. And when they are playwrights with a strong dramatic language of their own, Chekhov’s style and nuance are usually subordinated to theirs.
Three Sisters was written in 1900. The central question for us today is, what kind of existence can it have after almost a hundred years, in a theatre that is radically different from the one that gave it birth? That was in fact the real stimulus for this translation. The Wooster Group, a theatre company whose work I very much admire, asked me to make it for them. Their intention was to take this “classic” text, and try to stage it without any reference to the century-old tradition of Stanislavskian acting that still hangs about it like a worn-out coat.
That made sense to me. Chekhov’s plays have been so linked with Stanislavsky’s ideas that they are too often seen merely as vehicles for actors; we regularly speak of so-and-so’s Vanya, what’s-her-name’s Arkadina. And actors in fact generally prefer The Seagull and Uncle Vanya, where long speeches and emotional scenes give them a chance to show off, to Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard, where the actor’s role is subordinate to the extraordinary dramaturgy that Chekhov invents. I first worked on the text of Three Sisters over thirty years ago, with Randall Jarrell; it was a translation commissioned by The Actors Studio, and directed on Broadway by Lee Strasberg. That production was long talked of as the great American attempt to immortalize Method acting, to conquer Stanislavsky on his own ground. And as I remember the production, it was indeed all about acting, the creation of emotions; the grand musical structure of the play was hardly apparent. But the precise intention of the Wooster Group was to articulate Chekhov’s musical structure, and to make that the focus of their production. I found the idea exciting, and agreed to join them to play the role of Chebutykin. We have now played the piece, under the title Brace Up!, for almost three years in ten different cities throughout the world.
Another reason that compelled me to this translation was the experience over many years of having American actors ask me to explain certain curious expressions, certain odd foreign behaviors indulged in by Chekhov’s characters. Especially, over and over, I was asked to explain the mysterious workings of the samovar they had inevitably to confront onstage. Now, when reading Chekhov’s plays I have always been struck by the absolute ordinariness of his language, and by the humdrum everyday actions of his characters. His entire art is the creation of extraordinary human depths out of the surface banalities of everyday life. And it usually turned out that the curious expressions, the oddness and foreignness, the mysteries of the text that bothered my actor friends, were oddities of the translation they were reading. Over the years, unfortunately, these oddities were passed along in versions of the plays done by people who couldn’t read Russian, because, as far as they could tell, that’s the way Chekhov’s characters talked. But with the exception of those few characters whose speech is marked by rural dialecticisms or by comic locutions, Chekhov’s characters speak quite ordinary Russian. Even after a hundred years, it seems remarkably simple, colloquial and accessible. And Chekhov himself was well aware of this need for a natural style. In a letter to a novice playwright, Chekhov advises him to “avoid unnecessary filler words, you don’t need them in a play—for instance, the word ‘that’ in the sentence