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In Sweden, a countess is the wife or widow of a count. His daughter is no more a countess than is the daughter of an English earl. Her title is that of “Froeken,” which corresponds exactly to the German “Fraeulein” and the English “Miss.” Once it was reserved for the young women of the nobility. By an agitation which shook all Sweden with mingled fury and mirth, it became extended to all unmarried women.

The French form of Miss Julia’s Christian name is, on the other hand, in keeping with the author’s intention, aiming at an expression of the foreign sympathies and manners which began to characterize the Swedish nobility in the eighteenth century, and which continued to assert themselves almost to the end of the nineteenth. But in English that form would not have the same significance, and nothing in the play makes its use imperative. The valet, on the other hand, would most appropriately be named Jean both in England and here, and for that reason I have retained this form of his name.

Almost every one translating from the Scandinavian languages insists on creating a difficulty out of the fact that the three northern nations–like the Germans and the French–still use the second person singular of the personal pronoun to indicate a closer degree of familiarity. But to translate the Swedish “du” with the English “thou” is as erroneous as it is awkward. Tytler laid down his “Principles of Translation” in 1791–and a majority of translators are still unaware of their existence. Yet it ought to seem self-evident to every thinking mind that idiomatic equivalence, not verbal identity, must form the basis of a good and faithful translation. When an English mother uses “you” to her child, she establishes thereby the only rational equivalent for the “du” used under similar circumstances by her Swedish sister.

Nobody familiar with the English language as it actually springs from the lips of living men and women can doubt that it offers ways of expressing varying shades of intimacy no less effective than any found in the Swedish tongue. Let me give an illustration from the play immediately under discussion. Returning to the stage after the ballet scene, Jean says to Miss Julia: “I love you–can you doubt it?” And her reply, literally, is: “You?–Say thou!” I have merely made him say: “Can you doubt it, Miss Julia?” and her answer: “Miss?–Call me Julia!” As that is just what would happen under similar circumstances among English-speaking people, I contend that not a whit of the author’s meaning or spirit has been lost in this translation.

If ever a play was written for the stage, it is this one. And on the stage there is nothing to take the place of the notes and introductory explanations that so frequently encumber the printed volume. On the stage all explanations must lie within the play itself, and so they should in the book also, I believe. The translator is either an artist or a man unfit for his work. As an artist he must have a courage that cannot even be cowed by his reverence for the work of a great creative genius. If, mistakenly, he revere the letter of that work instead of its spirit, then he will reduce his own task to mere literary carpentry, and from his pen will spring not a living form, like the one he has been set to transplant, but only a death mask!

AUTHOR’S PREFACE

Like almost all other art, that of the stage has long seemed to me a sort of Biblia Pauperum, or a Bible in pictures for those who cannot read what is written or printed. And in the same way the playwright has seemed to me a lay preacher spreading the thoughts of his time in a form so popular that the middle classes, from which theatrical audiences are mainly drawn, can know what is being talked about without troubling their brains too much. For this reason the theatre has always served as a grammar-school to young people, women, and those who have acquired a little knowledge, all of whom retain the capacity for deceiving themselves and being deceived–which means again that they are susceptible to illusions produced by the suggestions of the author. And for the same reason I have had a feeling that, in our time, when the rudimentary, incomplete thought processes operating through our fancy seem to be developing into reflection, research, and analysis, the theatre might stand on the verge of being abandoned as a decaying form, for the enjoyment of which we lack the requisite conditions. The prolonged theatrical crisis now prevailing throughout Europe speaks in favour of such a supposition, as well as the fact that, in the civilised countries producing the greatest thinkers of the age, namely, England and Germany, the drama is as dead as are most of the other fine arts.