Rochelle Townsend’s ‘Uncle Vanya’

In my introduction to these four posts about the ‘mystery’ Misses and Misters who feature in my biography of George Calderon and the world of Edwardian Anglo-Russian cultural relations, I said that after Michael Pursglove’s magnificent post about the ‘mysterious’ Mrs R.S. Townsend I would appraise her translation of Uncle Vanya, which was successfully staged by the Incorporated Stage Society (ISS) at the Aldwych Theatre on 10-11 May 1914. The ‘mystery’, incidentally, of why the foremost advocate of Chekhov’s plays in Britain, George Calderon, never attended this production, can probably be explained by the fact that he was busy working for Ballets Russes on its latest visit to London.

A copy of Rochelle Townsend’s translation has survived in ISS’s archive at the V&A’s Theatre Museum; which is a miracle in itself. The typescript is still fresh and clean, and it bears annotations in at least three different hands. My guess is that two of these belong to stage staff, as the annotations concern the sound track of the play (‘Guitar’, ‘Wrattle’ [sic], ‘Cricket’ [the insect] etc) and very minor changes to characters’ words significant for cues. But by far the greatest number of annotations are to the part of Astrov, played by Herbert Grimwood. These are more complete, more literal and more English versions of a large number of Astrov’s lines. They must have been facilitated by someone with a good knowledge of Russian, and are presumably what Grimwood actually spoke from the stage, i.e. not Townsend’s words at all. So here you immediately have at least one creator — Grimwood — and possibly two, extra to Townsend.

For Rochelle Townsend (real name possibly Rakhil’ Slavyanskaya) did not have native English. She was a native Russian-speaker. As Michael Pursglove has described, we do not know when or where she acquired her English. But I see no evidence in this translation that she was bi-lingual in the strict sense of the word. It would have been plain wrong for her to be translating from her native language into one that she did not have a native command of, without the help of someone with native English. I think her English was very good, partly no doubt because she had been living with her anglophone husband since 1900. Her husband was ‘into’ theatre, as he staged amateur productions, but by 1912 they were separated. Nevertheless, someone anglophone collaborated with her on parts of the text of this script, as I shall amplify later. For the time being, let us note that it means there are at least four authors of the English text.

The most important other point to make about it is that according to my reckoning 100 lines of the original have been cut in translation. Simultaneously, a concerted effort is made throughout to compress by paraphrasing and conflating. You can get an idea of this by comparing Townsend’s script below with Constance Garnett’s ‘complete’ version of the same text (probably translated in 1921 for the Komisarjevsky production):

Rochelle Townsend’s translation, 1914

Constance Garnett’s translation, published 1923

Garnett always translates everything that is there — a policy of which most translators would approve today. Thus Vanya’s opening sentence really is meant to be as flowery and sarcastic as she has it. This has disappeared in Townsend’s version, although she has conveyed some of the tone with ‘the great man’ (not in the original) later on. Similarly, Garnett’s ‘You keep buzzing and buzzing away all day’ is far more expressive and accurate than Townsend’s flat ‘You are for ever tormenting people’; on the other hand, Townsend’s division of that sentence into two shortish ones makes it easier for an actor to deliver than Garnett’s retention of the original structure.

The vital and somewhat sensitive question is, why were so many cuts made? Townsend nearly always drops any Russian cultural reference that the English audience would not understand, for example a quote from Lomonosov, another from Gogol’, a reference to the painter Aivazovskii (but not one to a book by Batiushkov, whom no English person could be expected to know, and which unaccountably becomes ‘Batushka’s Encyclopaedia’). She, or her anglophone collaborator, probably thought such cultural baggage would distract the audience and be a hindrance to the ‘action’ — and in 1914 they were probably right. On the other hand, were so many marked pauses and significant stage directions (e.g. ‘nervily’, ‘in a tearful voice’, ‘Elena Andreevna embraces Sonia’) dropped through sheer carelessness, or in the same desire to maintain dramatic pace?

Where the cuts in speeches of the main characters are concerned, perhaps the same rationale was at work. Sets of Vanya’s or Astrov’s lines that recount past events or expatiate on them may have been dropped because they were seen as digressive — but by whom, Townsend herself, or her anglophone/theatrical collaborator? Equally, they may have been cut because the phenomenon of extended reminiscence and expatiation was regarded as un-English and boring. I also discern an effort throughout to ‘tone down’ the language from its Russian robustness, for example in Vanya’s wonderfully excoriating remarks about the Professor. Yet when Townsend renders the Professor’s On menia zagovorit! as ‘He’ll begin talking…’, is it because she has just overlooked the word menia, or because ‘He’ll talk me to death!’ is regarded as coarse? Why change the leitmotif word chudak (crank, nutter) to ‘commonplace person’? Why cut the line ‘In Russia a talented man cannot be without blemish’ from the middle of a long speech otherwise complete?

Rochelle Townsend’s version of Chekhov’s play acculturates the original to British theatrical and moral norms of the day. Theatrically, that was a clever and successful decision: the streamlining of the dialogue and the rigorous emphasis on ‘keeping the action moving’ paid off in a benign reception from Edwardian audiences. As I have written elsewhere, whereas George’s translations sought to reproduce the brevity and vigour of Chekhov’s Russian — and therefore succeeded in the Edwardian theatre and subsequently on radio — Garnett’s were very wordy. Townsend achieved ‘brevity and vigour’ by actually cutting text and simplifying expression.

The Townsend version was theatrically successful, but its acculturation to British moral norms drained the play of what I would call its ‘existential power’. After Vanya’s immortal line in Act 3 ‘Had I led a normal life I could have become a Schopenhauer or Dostoevskii’ , he exclaims: ‘I’ve completely lost it!’, but the Townsend version is merely clinical: ‘My mind is beginning to wander’. The act ends with him crying in despair: ‘Oh, what am I doing? What am I doing?’, but this translation reduces it to mere desperation at having almost committed homicide: ‘What have I done?’ Similarly, the Townsend version turns Sonya’s existential ‘I believe, I believe’ into the specific and rather Anglican ‘I believe in Heaven, I have faith’ — which must have gone a long way to persuading the audience that, in the words of one reviewer, Sonya was the play’s ‘central figure’.

Was Rochelle Townsend on the evidence of this script a good translator? I find it impossible to say because it is impossible to determine the exact extent of her input. Since her native language was Russian, professionally speaking she should never have been attempting to translate into English in the first place. But, like Constance Garnett, she got herself a good consultant/collaborator. For pages this translation reads pretty routinely, and there are many mistakes. Undoubtedly Townsend knew what the Russian meant in these places, but just could not express it herself in English. Her anglophone consultant seems to have been most interested in questions of dramatic effectiveness. Thus the last six pages of the third act read almost flawlessly. Authentic English expressions like ‘turned out neck and crop’ and ‘a miserable pittance’ suggest to me at least that the anglophone consultant took over. S/he also slimmed the dialogue here, but to dramatic advantage, and the combination, derived of course from Mrs Townsend’s original, has really done justice to the climactic scene of the play.

‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there’…

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS 

‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’ Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’  Michael Pursglove, East-West Review

‘It is bound to remain the definitive account.’ Laurence Senelick, Fletcher Professor of Drama, Tufts University

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.‘ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

LAURENCE BROCKLISS’s review in The London Magazine appears here.

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.