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Intermedial and Intercultural Transmission

Transmitting The Antiphon into Växelsången: A Song of Exchanges

Transmettre The Antiphon en suédois
Sanna Melin Schyllert

Résumés

Cet article explore la traduction suédoise, intitulée Växelsången, de la pièce de théâtre moderniste The Antiphon (1958) de Djuna Barnes. Alors que la critique anglophone trouvait la pièce impénétrable, l’adaptation suédoise fut saluée pour son accessibilité, ce qui donne à penser que les traducteurs ont pu clarifier et adapter le texte afin qu’il trouve écho, d’un point de vue culturel et émotionnel, auprès du public suédois. À travers une analyse comparative et un travail d’archives, portant également sur la correspondance entre Barnes et ses traducteurs, cet article montre comment les choix des traducteurs ont permis de rendre la complexité de la pièce accessible à de nouveaux publics. Il met en lumière le délicat équilibre entre fidélité et adaptation dans la traduction des textes modernistes. De fait, transmettre la nuance souhaitée implique souvent de remodeler un langage complexe afin de combler les fossés linguistiques et culturels.

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1The Modernist drama The Antiphon (1958) is one of Djuna Barnes’s more impenetrable works, so difficult that even T. S. Eliot – not known for being easy to read himself – had qualms about it, describing it as “a work of genius and unutterably absurd” (qtd in Herring 1995, 272). As Barnes’ editor at Faber and Faber, he was reluctant to let it go to press as he found the text far too complicated. There are a multitude of obscure allusions of unknown origin, archaic language and abstruse expressions, and the story and its characters are not easily understood without access to detailed background knowledge of Barnes’s family history. It took several years of editing and quite a bit of coaxing from external readers to get Eliot and Faber’s editorial board to give The Antiphon a chance. The abridged text was put in print in 1958 and, even after years of pruning, reviewers still marvelled at how “hard it is to read!” (Abel 1958, 121). Barnes never published a full-length work again.

  • 1 Some archival research on the correspondence between Dag Hammarskjöld and Barnes was conducted prev (...)

2However, for Swedish readers and theatre audiences, the text is not inaccessible. Reviews of its performance in translation in 1961 were “generally good” (Svensson 2005, 63) and described – in a letter from Gierow to Dag Hammarskjöld dated 20 February 1961 – as “heartening” for the translators (Gierow, Letters to Dag Hammarskjöld). The discrepancy between the reception of The Antiphon in English and Växelsången in Swedish suggests that the translation was accompanied by a number of clarifications or simplifications. In this study, I will look at how this change is paradoxically enabled by the translators’ wish to transmit “the same impression” as the original, as mentioned by Hammarskjöld in a letter to Gierow dated 23 December 1960 (Gierow, Letters to Dag Hammarskjöld). What was the process behind translating the text, and how did that translation make the text more accessible? I will attempt to answer these questions through a side-by-side study of the original and the translation, together with archival research into the letters between the American author and his Swedish translators.1

3This study aims to show that the Swedish translation of The Antiphon unveils the intricacies of rendering a Modernist work in another language. Unlike a translation that aims to stay as close as possible to the original text, Växelsången emphasises cultural nuances and emotional resonance to ensure that the message elicits the same response in the target language as it does in the source language. That translations today should generally favour adaptation over fidelity to the source results from the development of translation theory in the twentieth century that coincided with the distrust in the relationship between words (or signifiers) and the signified. In his 1923 essay “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers” (“The Task of the Translator”) Walter Benjamin countered the long-held view that translators should adhere to the linguistic composition of the original: “What precisely can fidelity actually contribute to the reproduction of meaning? Fidelity in translating the individual word can almost never fully render the meaning it has in the original” (Benjamin 1997, 160). Instead, Benjamin argued that the translator’s work consisted in transmitting an intention found in the original text.

  • 2 A note on editions: The play was first published in English in 1958 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in (...)

4The approach of transmitting an intention seems particularly vital for a theatre play, where the medium demands that the impact of words and imagery on the audience be immediate. A reading of the play at Harvard in 1956 “went off not too happily” (Caselli 2009, 216), according to Barnes: the actors had no clue what they were saying. Philip Herring, one of Barnes’s biographers, speculates that hearing the play out loud caused some edits to the text (Herring 1995, 275). It is perhaps not surprising, then, that the Swedish translation, undertaken with input from the actors and the director, did more than transmit Barnes’s intention; it was edited to render the play possible to perform. The process of advising the play’s Swedish translators also enabled Barnes to find errors in the published text, which endowed the play with greater potential for English-language readers, since it would now be possible to publish the text with corrections and notes based on Barnes’ correspondence with the translators.2 That correspondence has also allowed scholars to dive deeper into the play by way of Barnes’s explanations of the psychological workings of her characters (see for example Caselli 2009, 233 n. 106).

Writing The Antiphon

5Most texts about The Antiphon include some references to Barnes’s family history, as the story and themes are similar. Often discussed in conjunction with Ryder (1928), which also outlines a family history not unlike Barnes’s own, it is “a narrative that temptingly offers itself up as biographical and yet fails to work as a key to ‘disclose’ the text,” because, as Daniela Caselli argues in Improper Modernism, “Barnes’s œuvre relentlessly withstands literature as self-expression” (Caselli 2009, 194). The drama relates the reunion of an American family of three brothers and a sister, Miranda, with their English-born mother, Augusta, at Burley Hall. Reopened wounds bring to light a display of varied emotions – disdain on the part of the brothers, envy on the part of the mother – in response to the sister’s artistic gifts and bohemian life, as well as deeper traumas, including a history of sexual violence against her at the hands of the father. As Dori Laub argues in his essay on surviving the Holocaust, trauma survivors feel “an imperative need to tell and thus to come to know one’s story, unimpeded by ghosts from the past,” but at the same time “the imperative to tell the story [...] is inhabited by the impossibility of telling, and therefore, silence about the truth commonly prevails” (1995, 63-64). This tension seems embedded in Barnes’s writing generally, and in The Antiphon particularly.

6Writing The Antiphon took Barnes many years; according to Lynda Curry, who conducted a comparative study of various drafts of the play, Barnes began drafting it in 1937 and was still tinkering with it some twenty years later (1991, 286). Herring suggests that she started working “steadily” on the play in 1952, but possibly had a draft as early as in 1949 (1995, 273). The earliest complete drafts in the archives at the University of Maryland are dated 1954. Following the trail of the five rounds of major edits done to the text, as well as the correspondence between Barnes and her editor T. S. Eliot, Curry suggests that Barnes’s work was damaged by Eliot’s ruthless cuts as vital information about the characters and their relationships was lost: “Gaps appeared in the play that the uninitiated reader would be hard-pressed to fill” (Curry 1991, 297). She ultimately argues that a new edition should consider the reinsertion of some of the material excised by Eliot, reading his editorship as a silencing of Barnes’s original voice. Diane Warren similarly observes that the edits are in line with Eliot’s ideals of “impersonalisation and abstraction of experience in art” (Warren 2008, 11). Andrew Field too holds that the play could have been more intelligible had it not been so strictly edited: “the material which would give sense and clarity to the drama is there, in the discarded lines” (Field 1983, 225). Yet contrary to Curry, Field finds evidence in a letter to Muir that Barnes herself was consciously trying to make the text more obscure by excising lines, perhaps to try and avoid biographical readings.

7While Curry suggests that reintroducing excised lines would be a work of recovery, a counter-argument has been voiced by Julie Taylor, who asserts that “The Antiphon’s obscurities and opacities are powerfully connected to its theme” (2011, 125). In her monograph, she criticises Curry for presenting Eliot’s edits as harmful, even exploitative. Taylor argues on the one hand that Barnes had the possibility of rejecting the edits, and on the other that the play never was an unambiguous revelatory narrative, but rather sought to deal with traumatic experiences through dramatisation, where the activation of the emotions of the audience stands in for the original trauma. She warns against the reintroduction of previously excised lines, as “the desire for narrative clarity implied by the anxious emphasis on textual gaps ultimately obscures a nuanced understanding of the play’s engagement with the complexities of traumatic testimony” (Taylor 2012, 42). For Taylor, Barnes’s meticulously chosen silences – or gaps – can speak louder than her withdrawn words.

8Even after years of pruning, Eliot was less than enthusiastic about both the text and its author in a foreword produced for the publication of the play in book form. Having gotten the text down to a length he considered acceptable for publication, Eliot drafted a blurb that Barnes took as a direct insult. She wrote back to him on 9 January 1957 that she could not “recall seeing a ‘blurb’ (which I had always thought a means of promoting a book) so tailored to a jacket that so resembles a shroud” (qtd in Adkins 2023, 104). Eliot’s blurb called the text “tedious” and difficult to understand, and described the author as a “genius” but with “little talent” (qtd in Herring 1995, 276).

9Why did Eliot even bother to convince the editorial board at Faber and Faber to publish The Antiphon, and how did he do so? One key to this mystery is Edwin Muir (1887-1959), a networking poet, critic, and translator. Barnes asked Eliot to send the play to Muir to get an external opinion. He read it in 1955, and made suggestions for further edits, but was on the whole a reader that Barnes felt was on her side, which he indeed was. He wrote to Eliot that The Antiphon was “one of the greatest things that have been written in our time, and it would be a disaster if it were never to be known” (Muir 1974, 177). Muir visited Barnes in New York while he was at Harvard as Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry in 1955-1956 to discuss the play and his recommended edits. In a letter to Eliot, Muir says Barnes was “surprised but not greatly offended” by his suggestions (175). In light of the discussion around the obscurity of the text having been caused by edits, it is significant that the main reason Muir gives for his suggestions (most of which seem to have been deletions) is clarity. To Eliot, he writes: “I pencilled in brackets the passages which I thought should be left out, so that the line of action might be left comparatively clear” (176). It should be mentioned that these cuts are made before the edits of the fifth draft, which Curry terms “severe,” “abrupt and final” (Curry 1991, 297). The conversation regarding the proposed cuts went well enough for Faber and Faber to accept the play for publication in late 1956. Barnes’s indebtedness to Muir in promoting it is evidenced by her dedication in the 1961 Swedish translation, as well as in the 1962 English edition: “To the memory of Edwin Muir” (who had died in 1959). Muir was not only central in getting Eliot and the editorial board at Faber to move forward with publication, but he also appears to have praised the play generally far and wide, and specifically to a certain Swedish diplomat.

Reading The Antiphon

10The involvement of Edwin Muir appears to be the root reason behind the Swedish translation, and for it being undertaken by Dag Hammarskjöld, the Secretary General of the United Nations. At a ceremony in Cambridge in June 1958, where Muir received an honorary degree, he sang the merits of The Antiphon to Hammarskjöld, who was there to accept a similar award. Hammarskjöld was a member of The Swedish Academy of Letters, and was known to have literary interests. His posthumous monograph Vägmärken (1963) was translated into English by W. H. Auden as Markings (1966). Hammarskjöld himself described it as “a kind of ‘white book’ concerning my negotiations with myself – and with God” (Erling 1987, vi). Out of the work with The Antiphon grew a new hobby of translation; he told Gierow in a letter dated 21 June 1960 “that Antiphon warmed me up to such an extent that I suddenly exploded in a translation of Perse’s Chronique” (Hammarskjöld, Letters to Karl Ragnar Gierow). Hammarskjöld corresponded with the French author Saint-John Perse (Alexis Leger) and would render his Chronique (1960) into Swedish as Krönika (1960). Gierow commended his work in a letter dated 2 November 1960, praising his friend not only for completing the translation while trying to broker world peace, but for his “accessible” (Gierow, Letters to Dag Hammarskjöld) rendition of Perse. This could only be positive for the Swedish reception of Perse’s work, Gierow stated.

  • 3 While Field suggests Hammarskjöld was not yet familiar with Barnes’s work when he met Muir in 1958, (...)

11Having already read and been impressed with Nightwood, Hammarskjöld obtained a copy of The Antiphon in 1958.3 He wrote to Djuna Barnes shortly thereafter to express his “admiration [...] with the admission that I have still some way to go before feeling that I have grasped what the play has to give” (qtd in Grace 1987, 101). Barnes replied with a short note, and a year later, Hammarskjöld invited her to dine with himself and Karl Ragnar Gierow, the managing director of the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm. In December of 1958, Gierow had struck up a correspondence of his own with Barnes, and went to New York in April 1959 with the explicit intention of discussing the production of the play with her.

12This invitation was no random coincidence. Gierow and Hammarskjöld were old friends and had a longstanding correspondence in which Gierow discussed his work on various plays at length. Prior to their joint work on The Antiphon, their letters in the mid-1950s are to a great extent preoccupied with the production of More Stately Mansions, one of several Eugene O’Neill plays that O’Neill’s widow, Carlotta Monterey, allowed Gierow to edit for production in defiance of her husband’s will (Gelb and Gelb 1998, 105). Gierow visited Monterey in New York, dining with her and Hammarskjöld together on several occasions. When it came to visiting Djuna Barnes, it was thus an already established modus operandi for Gierow to enlist Hammarskjöld to help establish literary contacts across the pond. His friendship with Hammarskjöld facilitated Gierow’s contacts with both Barnes and Monterey.

13It is clear from the contact with Muir, and their previous collaboration on getting Eugene O’Neill’s play on the stage of the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm, that Gierow and Hammarskjöld enjoyed a productive friendship that catered to Hammarskjöld’s personal interests and Gierow’s professional ones. Initially, the Swedish poet Majken Johansson was offered the task of translating The Antiphon and began the work but could not finish it. Johansson, like Barnes, had a difficult childhood with experiences of abuse. She also struggled with alcoholism and suffered a major life crisis in 1956 after her partner committed suicide (Tenngart 2016, 143-152). Eventually, she had a spiritual awakening and joined the Salvation Army in 1958, the same year that she embarked on the translation of The Antiphon. According to Gierow’s first letter to Barnes dated 3 December 1958, Johansson had already delivered the first act, and was “well under way with the rest” (Gierow, Letters to Djuna Barnes). Less than a year later, Johansson resigned from the job and left Gierow with the rights to her unfinished draft, because she did not feel able to finish the work within the time allocated. Working on the play left her befuddled, and she wrote directly to Barnes for explanations. Johansson’s bewilderment also prompted Gierow to meet with Barnes personally to ask questions, as mentioned in a letter of 4 April 1959 (Gierow, Letters to Djuna Barnes). Eventually, Johansson relinquished the rights to the incomplete manuscript after advance payment, and left Gierow with a draft he did not feel he could use. Part of the reason seems to have been a concern that the text would not work on stage, since Gierow writes to Barnes in his letter of 4 April 1959 that Johansson’s translation “leaves [...] quite a few problems unsolved, particularly for the actors” (Gierow, Letters to Djuna Barnes). Significantly, Gierow and Hammarskjöld tinkered with their own manuscript in the last few weeks of dramatic rehearsals, and made changes based on suggestions from both the stage director, Olof Molander, and the actors in the play.

14It was certainly not as outlandish as it would seem at first sight for the two gentlemen to have taken over Johansson’s work. They both had poetic ambitions, but whereas the former kept his artistry in the cupboard for the most part, the latter had an established position as a writer in Swedish cultural life. Gierow published his first book of poems Solen lyser [The Sun is Shining] (1925) in his early twenties and continued producing volumes of both verse and drama throughout his life. The last, I daggkåpans mantelfåll [In the Fold of the Lady’s Mantle] (1983), was published posthumously. Gierow also produced translations, mostly of verse, which provided him with experience and confidence enough to tackle The Antiphon himself after Johansson’s resignation. He asked Hammarskjöld to be his “sparring partner,” to which the latter replied with enthusiasm in a letter dated 22 July 1959 (Hammarskjöld, Letters to Karl Ragnar Gierow).

15It is important to note that although Gierow was the driving force behind the translation, one often finds only Hammarskjöld’s name mentioned in critical material about the play. While misrepresentative, this is hardly surprising: Gierow had a hand in making sure that Hammarskjöld’s name was first on the published translation, and one cannot but assume that he understood the promotional impact the name would have. Hammarskjöld himself gestures at this in a reply to Barnes, who asks him if she is “to have the extraordinary honour” of his name on the book: “[A]ccording to Dr. Gierow’s wishes and in spite of the modesty of my contribution – we will both figure as translators on the book. I am most pleased to see this happen and it adds to my satisfaction if it gives you pleasure” (qtd in Grace 1987, 107-108). He would, however, try to renounce payment for it, suggesting in a letter to Gierow dated 21 June 1960 that his cut might be “added to whatever is paid to Djuna Barnes” (Hammarskjöld, Letters to Karl Ragnar Gierow). Gierow responds soon afterwards (in an undated letter presumably written in the summer of 1960) that it will not be much, and suggests that they use what there is to go out to dinner next time he is in New York (Gierow, Letters to Dag Hammarskjöld).

16As Gierow and Hammarskjöld embarked upon the translation, they were inevitably puzzled by various allusions, references, and word choices; as Hammarskjöld writes to Gierow in a 17 January 1962 letter, translating Barnes “involves a clarifying interpretation” (Hammarskjöld, Letters to Karl Ragnar Gierow). Johansson’s draft was scrapped, according to Gierow’s letter of 20 June 1960 (Gierow, Letters to Dag Hammarskjöld). An explanatory letter from Barnes to Johansson was kept for reference, and a copy of her four-page summary of the play survives in the Hammarskjöld collection. In the following section, I will look in greater detail at what confounded the translators – and how these issues were resolved.

Disentangling The Antiphon

17In a letter dated 28 August 1959, Gierow sent Hammarskjöld a copy of a document Barnes had originally sent to Majken Johansson, which is headed “Notes toward a definition of the Antiphon” on pages 1 and 4, and “Partial outline for the Antiphon” on pages 2 and 3 (Gierow, Letters to Dag Hammarskjöld). Gierow remarks in the accompanying letter that the heading is a play on the title of T. S. Eliot’s essay Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948), in which he argues that the most primary of cultural influences on a person is that of the family, a hypothesis that The Antiphon certainly investigates. Gierow further warns that the information Barnes gives in the outline does not necessarily elucidate, but that it can at the very least be used as a foundation for further questions they may need to ask her.

18In addition to an initial outline, Barnes’s letters contain various types of text comments, including discoveries of apparent errors in the original edition from 1958. Barnes’s comments therefore resulted in several differences between the Swedish translation and the 1958 original, as well as some amendments to the 1962 English edition. On 6 June 1960, she sent Gierow a “somewhat corrected copy” and assured him that she thought it improved (Barnes, Letters to Karl Ragnar Gierow). Some of the changes between the 1958 and 1962 editions may align with Lynda Curry’s argument that the play would have been more readable if the edits had been less intrusive, or perhaps less “abrupt” in the fifth draft, but the Swedish version also shows that extensive and even intrusive editing can provide ease for the reader, if it is done with clarity as the main goal, as Muir suggested in 1955.

19The letters between Gierow, Barnes, and Hammarskjöld also show that they discussed a number of things in person. In fact, Barnes professed to Hammarskjöld that she preferred to discuss the play rather than write an explanation:

It occurs to me that I may have given both you and Mr. Gierow the impression that I am unwilling to discuss The Antiphon. This is not so. I was distressed that Mr. Gierow did not want to question me personally about the play: that he wishes rather I write out what I meant. This is so much less satisfactory. However, when you yourself come to going over the Swedish translation, do please ask me anything you wish. (qtd in Grace 1987, 104)

20The letter not only evidences the fact that Barnes preferred to be interviewed rather than have to write her own “key” to the mysteries of the play; it also evokes the gratitude that she wanted to convey, as she clearly sets out her preferences in a most humble tone.

21Gierow and Hammarskjöld’s collaboration involved sending drafts back and forth across the Atlantic, making numerous revisions. The work was first drafted by Gierow, who would then send two copies of the bits he had written to Hammarskjöld. Hammarskjöld then commented, edited, embellished, and filled in the blanks, sending one copy back across the Atlantic to Gierow. Svensson has not been able to determine how many transatlantic trips the manuscript made, but concludes that the work was conducted in great detail judging from the bits of the typescript found in the Swedish archive (in comparison with the published version, this typescript is not final). The facsimile page that she produces in her article is scribbled over with handwritten notes in red and blue ink, suggestive of the extensive revisions the text underwent.

22The translators’ questions during the translation process led Barnes to discover inaccuracies in the original published text. One example is from the last scene, in which Jack says, inexplicably: “Do I carry the trefoil of the Cenci” (Barnes 1958, 202). Barnes realised the mistake, and let Gierow know that the line should have read: “Do I carry the ensign of the Medici?” (Barnes 1998, 223), which was corrected in the 1962 English edition (Barnes 1962). The continued 1962 text reads: “Am I my father that I should know what price the token price that cashing in the utmost treasure would exact?” (223). The Medici family crest is yellow with five red globes. Barnes explains in a letter to the translators that similar symbols were known to hang outside pawnshops. The meaning of the line, then, is: am I a pawnbroker/the patron of a pawnshop, who should know his father’s price, as the father gave up the destiny of his family as security to a pawnbroker. Even the corrected version needs some further explanation; as previously suggested, a new edition could well use a footnote here and there.

23Reading the two versions side by side, there are quite a few opportunities to compare and contrast wording that relates to the nether regions. In some cases, the translators chose more delicate wording in comparison to Barnes’s direct images: “That sphincter rose that barnacled the groin of her hatched purpose” (Barnes 2000, 11) became “denna stenros, hakad i ett ljumskveck, ur vilket hennes strävan sprang i dagen” (Barnes 1961b, 14). “Stenros” is a flower known as dog rose in English, and is not to my knowledge commonly used as a metaphor for the circular muscle to which Barnes is referring. This change could have rendered the meaning more obscure, but given the context it is quite possible to deduce. For a 1960s Stockholm theatre audience, the flower imagery was perhaps considered more appropriate and tasteful than the anatomical term.

24However, in other instances, the translators chose more direct or crass words where Barnes had obscure euphemisms: “Where now the stallion yard lay beating on the turf its whistling vent?” (Barnes 2000, 182) appears to be a more veiled image compared to “Var är den pes, som bultade i gräset sitt snabba utlopp?” (Barnes 1961b, 158). Stallion yard, while not the most obscure euphemism, is a less evocative concept than “pes,” a plain (though archaic) word for animal penis. These changes run in the opposite direction to those just explored, and were perhaps made for the sake of clarity. As the translation was made for stage production, it was in many cases aiming harder for clarity than Barnes was inclined to do. Another example is the line “There’s only one kind inch on any woman – between her tot and tail – There’s kindness!” (Barnes 2000, 141) where “tot” is translated as “bak” (behind) and “tail” as “buske” (bush) in the Swedish version (Barnes 1961b, 100). Here the metre has taken precedence over semantics, though a more faithful rendering would have switched the terms around to “buske och bak,” assuming that a woman’s tail is closest to her behind. Though “tot” is an archaic euphemism, it may be safe to assume that audiences would work out its meaning from the context.

  • 4 Translations of text from Swedish into English are my own unless otherwise stated. It should be not (...)

25The major differences between translation and original generally lie in allusions and imagery, as may be expected. There are numerous examples of the somewhat murky waters of Barnes’s associations, such as the line: “Then farewell this Benedictine shoe, that shod my mother’s foot, and her dismay” (Barnes 2000, 83). In a 28 September 1960 letter, Gierow asks her straightforwardly – not, as he says, for the purposes of translation but for the benefit of the production – what a “benedictine shoe” is (Gierow, Letters to Djuna Barnes). Barnes explains it is not to be taken literally, but that it refers to the religious environment that Augusta grew up in; she was, as it were, metaphorically standing in the shoes of the Order of Saint Benedict. Barnes also uses the term “its last veronica,” by which she refers to a basic pass of a cape in bullfighting. The bullfighting term refers to the Bible’s Veronica, who wiped Christ’s brow with a cloth as he passed by on his way to Golgotha. As a side note at the bottom of an explanatory letter dated 5 October 1960, Barnes scribbled that “someone” had queried which of the two she meant, the saint or the cape, to which she replied that “of course I meant the cape” (Barnes, Letters to Karl Ragnar Gierow). The translators, who had first used the words “en sista svetteduk” (Svensson 2005, 59), meaning “a last mop of the brow” – the term “svetteduk” literally means “sweat-cloth” but is only ever used with reference to the Veil of Veronica – in the final published version changed it to “som manteln vid tjurfäktarns dödsstöts-svep” (Barnes 1961b, 215), roughly meaning “like the bullfighter’s mantle at a deadly blow,” choosing to restrict and clarify the original wording.4 Similarly, when Dudley in Act One says: “Here’s fox-earth” (Barnes 2000, 31), it is not immediately clear to the modern reader that fox-earth is the same as a foxhole, which is another word for a shelter where soldiers can avoid enemy fire, but also fire back with the advantage of not being seen. The translation reads “här är en hund begravd” (Barnes 1961b, 34), a common expression that can be compared to the English idiom “I smell a rat.” The line, expressing suspicion on Dudley’s part, can be directly and simply understood by any audience in the Swedish version, but loses the allusion to war that Barnes achieves.

26Another example of a line that has simultaneously been rendered clearer and less rich in associations is the following: “It’s true the webbed commune / trawls up a wrack one term was absolute” (Barnes 2000, 10; Barnes 1998, 83). For one critic, the nature of the line in English conjures up “thirties Dylan Thomas” (Ferguson 1979, 269) and begs questions such as: what is the “webbed commune”? Which (if any) words have been deleted from what may originally have been a syntactically sensible sentence in order to fit it into the metre – in other words, is it the wrack that was absolute, or the term? The translation, on the other hand, is much less obscure: “Visst trålar samvaron i sina maskor / som vrakgods det som på sin tid var helt” (Barnes 1961b, 13). Translated back into English in simplified terms, this could read: “It’s true that togetherness catches in its net, like flotsam, that which used to be whole.” The translation turns many of the metaphors into similes, thereby clarifying the relationship between meaning and symbol. While it provides an explanation as to the meaning of the line, it also loses the complexity of the image of the “webbed commune,” which we may now understand as the tangled web of family relationships, activated by the fact that the family members are together in the same room after many years apart.

27In a letter to Gierow dated 6 June 1960, Barnes also elucidates a description in the third act that reads “flemish [sic] in the ways” (Barnes 2000, 195). It appears that she found a dictionary that carried the definition she was looking for, having been unable to expound upon it herself. The word as used by Barnes has little to do with the people of Belgium; instead, it refers to a “quivering” way of moving, like that of a Flemish hound that catches scent, as suggested in the same letter (Barnes, Letters to Karl Ragnar Gierow; qtd in Grace 1987, 106). The Swedish “i skälvan inför bytet” (Barnes 1961b, 211) is a literal rendering of Barnes’s image that could be translated back into English as “quivering in the face of the prey.”

28Another example of this kind, where the translation could be used in order to clarify – and restrict – the meaning of the original words, comes towards the end of the third act, when Miranda once again is trying to persuade her mother of Dudley and Elisha’s ruthlessness and guilt:

  • 5 The later edition changes “the cheaper bargain” to “a bargain” (Barnes 1998, 220).

I was in the panel once before
When you were all but small bread in the basket
Undertakers rock before a quand’ry.
I heard my brothers move through price of pine
To the cheaper bargain-burning on a shovel. (Barnes 2000, 198)5

29Firstly, it is by no means clear from the context what “panel” refers to – had Barnes written “jury” we would have been sure. The translation uses “skranket” (Barnes 1961b, 213), unequivocally a courtroom term. Next, the reader may ask why an undertaker would rock small bread in a basket, and before a quandary on top of that, given that we understand an undertaker to be someone who organises funeral services. The translation has “försäljarn” (Barnes 1961, 213) – i.e. a salesman – in its place, suggesting a slightly out-of-place image of a bread salesman trying to fork buns on people who have no wish to buy any. While it is an equally strange image to think of an undertaker offering bread, the funerary aspect is not out of place; the “pine” the brothers have been looking to buy is for a casket.

30The letters from Gierow show the significant input that the actors and director provided on the final version of the text, as it was being rehearsed at the same time as the translators worked on the final proofs for the publisher. This allowed Gierow and Hammarskjöld to fine-tune clunky sentences and word choices that had not become apparent until they were spoken on stage. An example can be found in a line by Elisha regarding Miranda: “[I]n a wink she makes nine points of law” (Barnes 1998, 99; Barnes 2000, 31). As recorded in an undated letter to Hammarskjöld (presumably written in December 1960), the actor who played Jack Blow/Jeremy, Olof Widgren, suggested the translation that stands in the Swedish edition: “ett knep att lura oss på pengar” (Barnes 1961b, 35), which literally means “a trick to get money from us” (Gierow, Letters to Dag Hammarskjöld). The English expression Barnes referred to was “possession is nine points of the law,” meaning that legal ownership is easier to maintain if one holds the goods in possession. The line, then, implies that Miranda will lay her hands on whatever valuables the brothers have with them. This would certainly have been unintelligible to a Swedish audience if the proverb had been directly translated.

31In spite of mounting evidence that Gierow and Hammarskjöld did restrict several Barnesian open-ended allusions, their wish to remain as faithful as possible to the original is nevertheless evidenced by a continuous stream of letters to the author, asking for her clarifications and opinions. Occasionally though, Barnes’s comments make the text even more obscure as she resists the sought-after restriction of meaning; her answers often highlight that “in this play, nothing is only literal [...] there is ambiguity,” as in a letter to Gierow of 5 October 1960 (Barnes, Letters to Karl Ragnar Gierow, emphasis in the original). In a letter to Hammarskjöld from the later stages of the translation dated 20 June 1960, after several rounds of questions and answers, Gierow confessed that he did not always find Barnes helpful: “One more illuminating piece of information and we risk being kept entirely in the dark” (Gierow, Letters to Dag Hammarskjöld). There are also examples of Barnes boomeranging the translators’ questions straight back to them. Upon an inquiry about a particular recurring line – “Who passes by this road so late” (Barnes 2000, 23; 117; 196) – and whether she had a specific reference in mind, Barnes’s reply was: “I recall this as a song sung by some character in a book, read to me when a child. [...]. The phonetic spelling of the word I remember would be something like ‘Maréchalane’ which means nothing I suspect [...]. If you can locate the song I should be glad to know” (Svensson 2005, 56). The line is from a traditional French children’s song called “Compagnons de la Marjolaine” (Marjolaine’s friends) and appears in chapter 22 of Dickens’ Little Dorrit, which may have been where Barnes encountered it. Lilla Dorrit, translated into Swedish for at least three separate editions by 1961, was well-known as both a novel and a play, but was not on the list of book titles in Hammarskjöld’s personal library.

Performing The Antiphon

32In the correspondence between Gierow, Hammarskjöld, and Barnes, there are not only discussions about the text of The Antiphon, but also exchanges regarding the production of the play. Gierow and Barnes also discuss the Provincetown Players, whom Gierow must have had a great interest in due to their connection with Eugene O’Neill. Barnes sent Gierow copies of playbills and other printed material from productions that involved O’Neill. Meryl Altman argues that it is significant to bear Barnes’s experience with the Provincetown Players in mind when conceiving of The Antiphon as a playable work. Barnes’s idea of modern drama was shaped in this theatre group, who wrote and performed for a small, niche “audience of like-minded Greenwich Villagers, people much like themselves” (Altman 1991, 273), who would not mind the intricacies, obscurities, and multifaceted allusions of The Antiphon. It is worth noting, however, that the group’s anti-commercial attitude contributed to its short life, as O’Neill and others disappeared to Broadway (Herring 1995, 119).

33Needless to say, the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm was not the avantgarde Provincetown Players. The translation of the text required a reworking by Gierow and Hammarskjöld in order for the stage director and actors to make sense of what was to be done, a reworking that was considered significant enough to warrant the published version of Växelsången to bear the word “interpretation” rather than translation on the cover. Judging from the correspondence, Barnes seemed to appreciate the fact that some wrinkles had been ironed out. Having answered a round of questions from Gierow on behalf of his actors, she admitted in a 5 October 1960 letter: “I know it is a very great deal to ask that reader or actor should remember at all times to look for the packed image, the ambiguous, the metaphorical, the over-tone and the under-tone, the implied as well as explicit” (Barnes, Letters to Karl Ragnar Gierow). What the Provincetown Players experience may have also instilled in Barnes was the communal effort of bringing a play to life. Post-premiere, she wrote a thank-you letter to Gierow on 7 March 1961, “for [...] telling me all about the reaction, to what I know [sic] consider our play, in Sweden” (Barnes, Letters to Karl Ragnar Gierow, emphasis in the original). To Hammarskjöld, she similarly expressed that “[t]he play is now our play” (qtd in Grace 1987, 113). The letter concludes with the declaration that Gierow, Hammarskjöld, and Muir have afforded her “one of the happiest hours of my life” (Barnes, Letters to Karl Ragnar Gierow). We can only speculate that the hour in question may have taken place upon reception of a telegram sent by Gierow at 8:30 p.m. on 17 February 1961 (the evening of the premiere) with three little words: “LOOKS LIKE SUCCESS” (Gierow, Letters to Djuna Barnes).

34Before the start of rehearsals, the stage director, Olof Molander, went over the manuscript with Gierow, and indicated some uncertainties that the latter was hesitant to raise with his sparring partner on the other side of the Atlantic, as suggested in a letter to Hammarskjöld dated 24 October 1960 (Gierow, Letters to Dag Hammarskjöld). However, a letter in December of the same year evinces that their publisher Norstedts had sent a new set of proofs with Gierow’s comments to New York. Hammarskjöld followed up with a long telegram, addressing each query line by line. Another set of proofs made a round trip to Hammarskjöld before printing.

  • 6 Though O’Neill’s play is much less obscure in style, and much better-known, it is analogous to The (...)

35According to Gierow (as suggested in a 31 January 1961 letter he sent to Barnes), the fifteen weeks it took the ensemble to get from the first reading to premiere was the longest rehearsal period in the history of the theatre (Gierow, Letters to Djuna Barnes). The only play he knew of that had come close was O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, which had had ten weeks of rehearsals before its opening night.6 While Barnes and O’Neill both explored the complexities of human psyche and emotions, their methods and thematic focuses diverged significantly. The Antiphon, marked by its Surrealist qualities and fragmented style, contrasts with the more structured, realistic portrayals of psychological conflicts and familial dynamics of Long Day’s Journey into Night.

36Even after an unprecedented number of rehearsals, Gierow was still not happy with Miranda and Augusta’s final duel nine days before the premiere, as expressed in a letter to Hammarskjöld dated 8 February 1961 (Gierow, Letters to Dag Hammarskjöld). Molander must have also had reservations, as around this time he asked for the premiere to be postponed – a request that was not approved, according to a letter Gierow sent Hammarskjöld on 10 February 1961 (Gierow, Letters to Dag Hammarskjöld). On 16 February, however, the day before the opening, Gierow wrote to Hammarskjöld that he was less fearful, and that the audience at the dress rehearsal had given him cause for optimism as they seemed absorbed by the play (Gierow, Letters to Dag Hammarskjöld).

37Once premiered, the play went on for ten performances before the set was taken down. Gierow was hoping against hope that Hammarskjöld would, at some point, have the time to travel to Sweden and see it, but he never managed – nor did Barnes. Gierow sent her a number of photographs of the set, the costume, and the action so that she would have some idea as to what it looked like, and she corresponded with him at least up until April 1961 about reviews and press clippings. Hammarskjöld, too, sent her translated excerpts from the Swedish press, and Barnes sent him, in return, the 1958 edition of Nightwood as well as the recently published Swedish translation of A Night Among the Horses (1929), Natt bland hästar (1961).

  • 7 Linde’s review is quoted in Andrew Field’s biography of Barnes with a certain degree of misundersta (...)

38Gierow read the reviews the morning after the play premiered, and he wrote a report to Barnes on 1 March 1961: “[T]he verdict? Not guilty” (Gierow, Letters to Djuna Barnes). He wrote that two major Stockholm papers (presumably Dagens Nyheter and Svenska Dagbladet) were “negative,” but that two others (possibly Aftonbladet and Expressen) were “deeply interested,” and a final one “overwhelmed and enthusiastic.” To Hammarskjöld, he wrote about Ebbe Linde’s review in Dagens Nyheter in particular, because of its hostility to both the translation and the production. The title of the review, “Imagistisk kaviarfest” (which might translate as “Imagist Caviar Feast”),7 was probably meant to be a deterrent for the readers of the paper. Indeed Linde makes no secret of the fact that he considers high Modernism to be hopelessly old-fashioned and distastefully elitist. Giving background information about Barnes and the play, he states in no uncertain terms that he is no admirer of her verse: “It is contrived, convoluted, and full of learned allusions in the worst imagist manner [...]. Complicated and obscure in the extreme” (Linde 1961a). He proposes that anyone who goes to see it should soften the blow by studying the text afterwards, which he hopes may shine a light on some of the obscurities. The final, damning words of his review are that the play is “a caviar feast for peasants – and one doesn’t really need to be a peasant to be disgusted by spoonful after spoonful of imagist caviar, continuously shoved down one’s throat, with no break, for an entire evening. Especially when that caviar is not entirely fresh” (Linde 1961a). The text as a whole is not just an indictment of the play and its producers, but of the whole previous generation of literary writers. Linde was deeply influenced by socialist ideals and worked for a number of years as an educator, which may account for his disapproval of a play that places elitist demands on its reader. In an article on his political beliefs, he once wrote: “the strictly thought out and clearly spoken word is the only really meaningful political action for a person of my nature” (qtd in Granqvist n. d., n. pag.). While the evidence overall suggests that Växelsången is less obscure than The Antiphon, Linde’s main criticism is that the performance is impossibly and inaccessibly Modernist.

39Linde followed up with another newspaper review about the translation in book form, which was no less critical: Gierow and Hammarskjöld were accused of turning the text into something even less satisfactory than the original, due to their ineptitude as translators; his reading suggested that Barnes’s “stomping alliterations and tightly fastened sentence structure” had been “weakened with no greater gains of clarity” (Linde 1961b). Gierow was so angered by the review that he promptly sat down to write a response to send to the newspaper. To Hammarskjöld, he sent a copy and asked for his opinion. Hammarskjöld replied that he should do as he saw fit, and he offered to put both names to the riposte if Gierow so wished. Having calmed down, Gierow wrote a few days later on 24 February 1961 that he had decided against a public response (Gierow, Letters to Dag Hammarskjöld).

40Linde, who worked as a translator himself, was deeply concerned with rendering works, particularly plays, in Swedish in a way that would make the text come alive and be of practical use. His own translations were “provocative”; they included “radical additions and changes” due to his “anti-authoritarian” (Granqvist n. d., n. pag.) ideals, as he did not believe in translations that value faithfulness to the original above the audience’s comprehension. Linde’s anarchic ideas would have gone far further in transforming The Antiphon than Gierow and Hammarskjöld did; the former proposed that the title Växelsången [“The Song of Exchanges” or “The Alternating Song”] should have been replaced by “Motstämman” [“The Counter Voice”] or “Underströmmen” [“The Undercurrent”] (Linde 1961b). In Linde’s eyes, the translators had failed to capture Barnes’s style, with specific reference to phrases where she had used a double entendre, while the translators had chosen to present only one of the two meanings. It is clear from the correspondence between Gierow and Hammarskjöld that such choices had been deliberate and intended to make the play less obscure. Linde’s preferred solution was to “largely rework” the text to find alternative constructions that lie further from the original but closer to the greater Swedish public.

41Rather than these more democratically inspired ideals of translation that Linde championed, Gierow and Hammarskjöld were focused on a transmission of Barnes’s text, as they wanted to make the same impression in Swedish as that which the original text would have done on an English listener or reader. With such a goal in mind, it is understandable that their text was not radically reworked to the point that Linde’s own translations were, but rather transmitted the intentions of the original text into the target language. Upon re-reading the full text, Hammarskjöld reflected in a letter dated 23 December 1960 that Växelsången, to his Swedish ear, seemed “softer” and “warmer” than the “sharply syncopated prosody” of the original (Hammarskjöld, Letters to Karl Ragnar Gierow). The goal of Växelsången, then, was not to make The Antiphon into a radically different type of play, but to preserve the feeling of Barnes’s content. Despite the intention to tread lightly and change as little as possible, the sense-checking exercise that went hand in hand with translation did restrict some aspects of Barnes’s style.

42The rendering of The Antiphon into Växelsången exemplifies the transformative power of translation in Modernist literature. Despite the challenges inherent in the original text, the translators managed to make the play accessible and comprehensible for at least part of their audience. This translation venture underscores the (Post)modern notion of translation as a form of transmission, in the sense that the translators tried to ensure that the text “gives the same impression in Swedish to a Swedish ear” – to quote from Hammarskjöld’s 23 December 1960 letter to Gierow (Hammarskjöld, Letters to Karl Ragnar Gierow) – as the original would have on an Anglophone ear. By doing so, the translators did more than just decode a difficult text; they enabled a dialogue between the original and its new audience. The interaction between Barnes and her Swedish translators as revealed through their correspondence provides valuable insights that further refine the play for present-day readers. This collaborative process enabled Barnes to excise errors from the 1962 English version, offering future readers a more comprehensive edition. The transmission of The Antiphon into Swedish demonstrates that even the most challenging literary works can find resonance across languages and cultures. It highlights the critical role translators play in the life of a text, but also the centrality of transforming it into a living piece of art on stage.

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Notes

1 Some archival research on the correspondence between Dag Hammarskjöld and Barnes was conducted previously by Sherrill E. Grace (1987) and Ingrid Svensson (2005). Svensson professed that while working on the Hammarskjöld archival collection, she was struck by his correspondence with Djuna Barnes as a particularly interesting artefact. It should be noted here that Hammarskjöld also corresponded with other authors, for example Alexis Leger known as Saint-John Perse, whose relationship with him has been outlined in a French-language article by Per-Axel Frielingsdorf, “Entre poésie et politique. La correspondance entre Dag Hammarskjöld et Alexis Léger” (“Between Poetry and Politics: Dag Hammarskjöld and Alexis Léger’s Correspondence,” 2009, my translation). Hammarskjöld’s interest in and passion for literature was such that he did not hesitate to take the time to advocate on behalf of even the most difficult of persona non grata Modernists of the postwar era, Ezra Pound. Marie-Noëlle Little has outlined their relationship in The Knight and the Troubadour: Dag Hammarskjöld and Ezra Pound (2011).

2 A note on editions: The play was first published in English in 1958 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the US, and Faber in the UK. Farrar, Straus and Giroux published a new version in 1962 as part of a Selected Works volume, subsequently published by Faber in the UK in 1980 and in paperback in 1998, in which some corrections were made that had been noted by Barnes during the course of the translation process. This version was reprinted (as part of Selected Works of Djuna Barnes) in 1998. US-based Green Integer re-published the 1958 version in 2000. This version is now out of print but sold digitally.

3 While Field suggests Hammarskjöld was not yet familiar with Barnes’s work when he met Muir in 1958, there is archival evidence that Hammarskjöld obtained a copy of Nightwood in October 1948 (Field 1983, 227-228; Svensson 2005, 61).

4 Translations of text from Swedish into English are my own unless otherwise stated. It should be noted that many of Hammarskjöld’s letters to Gierow are in English in the original, and have therefore not needed any linguistic mediation.

5 The later edition changes “the cheaper bargain” to “a bargain” (Barnes 1998, 220).

6 Though O’Neill’s play is much less obscure in style, and much better-known, it is analogous to The Antiphon in two other ways; they share the same subject matter of family disintegration, and both sparked Gierow’s interest. O’Neill and Barnes were friends and collaborators in the heyday of the Provincetown Players, and remained in contact in later years (Eisenhauer 2024, 1-12), but it is unlikely that Barnes had read the play before writing The Antiphon, since Long Day’s Journey into Night remained unpublished until 1956. It is noteworthy that it was Gierow who contacted O’Neill’s widow in 1954, initially through Hammarskjöld, to inquire about any unpublished plays (Ryan 1988, 108). Without Gierow’s initiative, Long Day’s Journey into Night may have stayed archived for longer.

7 Linde’s review is quoted in Andrew Field’s biography of Barnes with a certain degree of misunderstanding, both regarding Linde’s identity (mistaking him for the leading actress) and the overall tone of the review (which he understands to be witty): “The leading Swedish actress Ebbe Linde played Miranda and wittily referred to the play – as an Imagist caviar party” (Field 1983, 228).

8 All online sources last accessed 6 June 2025.

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Sanna Melin Schyllert, « Transmitting The Antiphon into Växelsången: A Song of Exchanges »Sillages critiques [En ligne], 38 | 2025, mis en ligne le 01 octobre 2025, consulté le 17 janvier 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/sillagescritiques/17438 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/150rw

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Sanna Melin Schyllert

University of York

Sanna Melin Schyllert (PhD 2017, University of Westminster) currently works in professional services at the University of York. She is the author of Sacrifice as a Narrative Strategy in May Sinclair, Mary Butts, and H.D. (Palgrave 2023) as well as of journal articles and book chapters about the works of H.D., May Sinclair, Mary Butts, and Kurt Vonnegut. Her research projects include a study of individuality and community in 1950s American fiction with Annika J. Lindskog, and subjective representations of motherhood in twentieth-century fiction.

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