BY JOSH COHEN

In print | April 5, 2007

It is tempting to accredit the impact of a play like Frank Wedekind’s “Spring Awakening” to its timelessness. After all, beneath the drama’s fin-de-siecle surface teems the drama of adolescence — that alternately torturous and rhapsodic series of experiences that spares no poor soul. But it is a risky, if not damned, endeavor to attempt to extract a masterpiece’s timelessness in order to display it to an audience.

It is better to let the essence of the thing speak for itself, which may only be possible if the surface, form and context of the play are kept basically intact — even if the play is being presented some 100 years after it was first performed. Anyone who has seen a contemporary interpretation of Shakespeare that uses three iBooks for the three chests in “The Merchant of Venice” can make this point. This is why it was such a relief to see the cast of “Spring Awakening” in corsets and high socks. It was also why an old-school German matron’s non-response response to her daughter’s questions about sex could be simultaneously ominous and hilarious. The fact that no mother would be so devastatingly prudish today quickly gave way to the timeless absurdity buried in the dialogue.

It is a fine distinction to make, but one which Jonathan Franzen ‘81, who translated this version of the play, clearly understands: the word is the thing. This doesn’t mean, he said, that a translator should reproduce the most literal version possible of an original, but rather that he should understand that his loyalty to the text consists of making the text alive in the target language. Sitting outside the Science Center, Franzen said, “I realized, as I was translating the play, that actors were actually going to have to say these things on stage. I needed to make it speakable in English.”

The play was archaic in German already, he said, and yet it was never his intention to produce a translation that was academic and uninformed by his own creative spirit. The goal, he said, “was to produce the richness of the experience,” implying that a translator must be loyal to his own subjectivity as much as to the objectivity of the text. Franzen was a German major, but the play was commissioned by a friend, Professor Lee Devin, in 1986, five years after Franzen had graduated. By then, Franzen was living the young writer’s dream: making no money, but continuing to write, regardless. “I remember getting paid something like $50 for the translation,” he said, “but I think it was actually more like $350. Either way, that works out to something like 50 cents an hour.” Twenty-one years later, Franzen’s translation of “Spring Awakening” will be published in the fall. You can be sure, though, that this older and more famous Franzen’s commissions have come to exceed that of the former lowly translator’s. What else has changed? For one, said Franzen, he no longer believes in the “inconsequential wordplay” that is sprinkled throughout his younger self’s translation.

However, it is practically a formality that a translator will justify his translation not by discussing his own interpretation but by elucidating everyone else’s failure. To be fair, I asked Franzen what he thought were the failings of previous translations, but in the talkback later that night he laughingly lamented the failure of his relatively few predecessors in translating “Spring Awakening.” This may be less revealing of arrogance than of a self-doubt and self-consciousness endemic to the writer’s life and exaggerated in the translator’s plight. After all, who has the right to translate? Franzen was luckier than most; he was sought out by a professor whom, he said, he felt indebted to, and he was still freshly removed from the sense of entitlement I imagine is borne of the experience of completing a somewhat obscure major at Swarthmore. Sure enough, his understanding of the play’s complexities is not in the dramatic arc, or even the ideas (which are often intentionally trite), but in the language itself. Among aspects of the text he felt he has succeeded in honoring where others haven’t are “bizarre punctuation” and “the variety of tones.”

“I’ve never known anyone to have their mind changed by a piece of theater,” Franzen said towards the end of our conversation. Indeed, those who try to “interpret” Shakespeare into a modern setting often have an agenda that dissipates on stage. He leaned in to explain that surviving the humor of the play was central to his agenda: less translation.

“Humor,” he said, “is the hardest thing to translate.” Those that ignore Wedekind’s quirkiness do so because they want to “impose [their own] tendentious writing” on the play. It’s true: without the humor, the play loses its tragedy, and it becomes an awful lot like a sitcom. But I’m suspicious about Franzen’s claim that the 26-year-old Wedekind wrote “Spring Awakening” to “make fun of young people.” Some of Melchior’s speeches did, in fact, sound to me like they were bordering on the preemptive self-mockery favored by the likes of Tom Stoppard, as if sincerity were given an asterisk at the expense of the audience’s full empathy with a character.

Thankfully, Director K. Elizabeth Stevens’s directorial translation of Franzen’s literary translation saved this aspect of the English text from itself. In the talkback, Stevens expressed her love for the play through her understanding that the play leaves you “unsure whether to laugh or cry.” As adults, we see ourselves in these 14-year-olds. And, suddenly, we realize it’s quite the other way around: they’re making fun of us. There is nothing more timeless than that cruel, cruel irony.

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