Transcripts

MARIANNE COMBS: Robert Bly is quick to explain that Henrik Ibsen's play, Peer Gynt, isn't really a play at all. It's a six-hour-long poem.

ROBERT BLY: He never intended it in a way to be a play. It was just, I am famous now, so I'll do anything I want to, and I'll call it a play.

MARIANNE COMBS: The main character in Peer Gynt is a poet and a braggart who runs off with someone else's bride, gets drunk with trolls, and generally behaves badly.

ROBERT BLY: He does horrible things throughout the play, and yet you end up loving him very much. Now, how can that be? That's the big mystery of Peer Gynt.

MARIANNE COMBS: Gynt eventually comes to terms with his actions, although it's not clear if he finds redemption. Ibsen wrote the piece in Italy in 1867, looking back with a critical eye at his Norwegian homeland. Many people are more familiar with Edvard Grieg's music, composed to accompany the work. Robert Bly's translation of the poem for the stage is one of only a couple that keep the rhyming meter.

ROBERT BLY: All their speeches are intended to be rhymed. And so in a rhyme, you say half of it in the first line, and half and the second line. And you get a feeling of completion when the bloom, bloom comes in like that. But it's all high-spirited. It's not meant to be taken terribly seriously. And that's a big shock to people who think of Ibsen as a sober guy.

MARIANNE COMBS: Many people associate Henrik Ibsen with his works Hedda Gabler and A Doll's House, dark dramas filled with death and despair. Bly says, in contrast, the language in Peer Gynt is high-spirited, even loony. Bly reads an excerpt from his translation in which Peer Gynt recounts his highly unethical adventures making money as a trader.

ROBERT BLY: I sold Negro slaves in South Carolina, and boatloads of idols in mainland China.

Good Lord. I must say, I'm a bit shocked. Well, my line of work, I'll say it aloud, wasn't as I thought it would make one proud.

Often, I felt it myself in that very way. You'll have to end it, I'd hear myself say. But of course, it's easier to have found a business than to close it down.

Thousands worked for me. To me, an enjoyment. But I became concerned about unemployment.

MARIANNE COMBS: In the Guthrie Theater's production of Peer Gynt, British actor Mark Rylance plays the lead role. Rylance actually proposed the idea of producing Peer Gynt with a new translation by Robert Bly. He'd met Bly back in 1999, and read a couple of scenes from the play that Bly had worked on.

MARK RYLANCE: I always wanted with this project also to just celebrate something about Robert, and create a big piece where the community, maybe a lot of people who haven't been to his readings or aren't aware of the incredible work he's done, my hope was always to be some part of sharing that with more people.

MARIANNE COMBS: Rylance says Bly's translation is a pleasure to perform, but Robert Bly has no illusions of his translation becoming the definitive English version of Peer Gynt for all time.

ROBERT BLY: You have to attach to the heart, really, not to the head. And so certain heart language will be used for 20 years, and then it'll pass away. And if you're translating after that's passed away, you need to feel where the heart words are now, and what really touches people and try to move in that way. So sort of irritating to the translators. They do a good work, and then 40 years later, everyone throws it out and starts over again.

MARIANNE COMBS: Bly says translators like himself will come and go, but it's the playwright, Henrik Ibsen, who will remain in the reader or the playgoers memory. He says he'll feel he's done Peer Gynt justice if audiences leave the Guthrie Theater infected by the high spirits of the play. Peer Gynt officially opens this weekend and runs through March 2. Marianne Combs, Minnesota Public Radio News, Minneapolis.