[This is the final installment of “S. Y. Agnon’s A Simple Tale (Sipur Pashut).” I finish up my search for information about an English translation of Agnon’s novella and report on the play’s presentation in Baltimore, the production that initiated the search in the first place.
[That little fact is explained in Part 1, posted on 2 May, and I strongly recommend that readers just starting this account go back and read Parts 1 and 2 (posted on 5 May). Aside from that initiating incident, there are several more details about this chronicle that are explained in the earlier installments and Part 3 will make much more sense if you read them first.
[Part 3 covers the end of my search, including a report on the Baltimore performances of the Habima adaptation with many of the reviews of the production published in local papers and some more distant outlets. I’ve even reported on the publication of the English translation of the novella and the New York Times book review upon its release.]
I continued the report on the availability of A Simple Tale on 11 February: An hour and a half spent in the NYPL Main Branch (42nd Street and 5th Avenue) revealed that apparently no English translation of the story had ever been published here or in England, or any other English-speaking country.
I checked the Index Translationum, published by UNESCO as a list of all literature translated, and several bibliographies of Hebrew literature translated into English. The only recorded translation of A Simple Tale was the German translation noted in the 9 February memo. As far as I could tell, I’d exhausted all reasonable resources for locating a translation of the story.
The script version wasn’t mentioned in any index or bibliography, and probably had never been published. The only likely source for the adaptation was Habima in Tel Aviv. It was problematical whether they’d release their version if it had never been published.
I’d asked Helen in Tel Aviv to check on the availability of either the script (in any language) or an English translation of the story in Israel on the chance that a version of either may have been published there and not imported. I expect it to take a while to get the answer.
Further checking also revealed that the only available copy of the German translation (from which an English version might be adapted) was the non-circulating one at the NYPL Main Branch. I planned to check a little further to be sure; I had the numbers of Columbia University’s and Hebrew Union College’s libraries, and Goethe Haus. Bobst only had the original Hebrew version of the story as I indicated in the 9 February memo.
(It’s interesting to note that Agnon’s works had been translated into nearly every European language, including Swedish, Danish, and Portuguese. There were also versions of several of his stories in Korean, Vietnamese, and Turkish. No one seemed to have translated Sipur pashut into any language other than German. I hadn’t even located a Yiddish translation of it—which seemed counterintuitive since that would have been the common language of northern European Jews in pre-World War II Galicia.
([In fact, there was a Yiddish translation of Sipur pashut, published in 1958 (A Posheṭe mayse, New York: Der Kval). Translated from the Hebrew by Agnon’s good friend Eliezer Rubinstein (1926-89), of whose rendering, which the author felt preserved his writing style, Agnon said: “Anyone reading it would have thought that I had written it in Yiddish myself.”
([I didn’t find this translation until I used the then non-existent resource of the Internet. It’s doubtful, though, that a Yiddish version of the story would have been any more use in our quest than the German version was.
([In 2002, A Posheṭe mayse was adapted for the stage by Shmuel Atzmon and produced by Yiddishpiel, a Yiddish theater company in Tel Aviv.]
The German version was relatively recent, 1967, and is in modern German. This is distinguished from pre-WWII German documents and publications, which were written in Frakturschrift, a Gothic alphabet that’s very hard to read if you didn’t grow up with it. It is, however, 276 pages long, militating against either working on it in the library or photocopying it at $42 a copy at 1985 library prices.
On 13 February, I reported that calls to the libraries of the Goethe Haus and Hebrew Union College revealed that neither had a copy of any translation of the Agnon story. (Goethe Haus doesn’t handle translations into German, only German literature.) I subsequently visited Hebrew Union College library (1 W. 4th Street), but that just confirmed that they didn’t have either an English or German version of the story.
A call to the Israeli Consulate provided the name of an Israeli-based bookstore that just opened a branch in New York City: Steimatzky, 56 E. 11th Street (now closed). This was the best help the consulate could give me.
Steimatzky didn’t have any translations of Agnon, but they called another dealer, who didn’t have A Simple Tale, but provided the Israeli publisher of Agnon’s works, Schocken Books. Steimatzky said they’d contact Schocken’s New York office and let me know the availability (and cost) of ordering a translation of the story. I said I’d report the information they passed on to me.
I took out The Fiction of S. Y. Agnon by Baruch Hochman (Cornell University Press, 1970) from Bobst. (I was still an NYU grad student at this time—my work with Cynthia was an internship for her class—so I had access not only to Bobst, the NYU bookstore, and other NYU facilities, but also the Downtown Consortium, which included, among other schools, Hebrew Union College.)
The Hochman book includes an extensive discussion of A Simple Tale (which the author calls A Simple Story; pp. 94-111). It also indicates in the publication data that the “English translations from . . . Sipur pashut [A Simple Tale] were made by Baruch Hochman,” indicating that there were no others available in 1970. A note on page 200 confirms this.
Hochman remarks that the story
centers, not primarily on the manners of the shtetl [a Jewish village or small town in Eastern Europe] in transition, but on the inner experience of a young man unwittingly in conflict with both himself and his environment. It is essentially a study of repression, madness, and final adjustment within the bourgeois family, as we know it from turn-of-the-century European fiction.
Also:
A Simple Story seems to start out as a romantic tale of young lovers who are thwarted by their elders . . . . But it moves toward neither of its predictable endings. That is, it presses neither toward tragic devastation nor toward a comic resolution in which the will of the obstructive elders is overcome. Rather, it moves toward an ironic reconciliation of the hero with those elders and their values. Yet, though Hershel is treated ironically, we are somehow relieved when he “makes it” in conventional terms and “becomes a man.” We end by partially approving a reconciliation to a milieu which has been shown to be inimical to every value of youth, life, love, or, for that matter, authentic tradition. Still, we go on scoffing at that milieu.
I held onto the book for a while in case anyone was interested in having a look at it (since we didn’t seem to be able to lay our hands on the original story too readily.)
I planned a trip to Lincoln Center Friday, the 15th, or Saturday, the 16th (on an unrelated matter). While I was there, I saw what that resource had to say about Agnon, the script of A Simple Tale, and the performance(s) of the Habima in the summer of ʼ81. A report to Cynthia on that information followed on 16 February.
There was no evidence of any further performances of A Simple Tale after the Baltimore festival appearance. According to a Variety article dated 3 June 1981, Habima’s A Simple Tale played Toronto before Baltimore.
Variety had announced on 5 March 1980 that Habima planned a run at Broadway’s John Golden Theatre with A Simple Tale, its first visit to New York City since 1964. The run was to start in January 1981 and then move on to one-night stands in Washington, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Montreal. Shmuel Firstenberg, an Israeli impresario, was producing the tour and was going to offer three other attractions to compliment the Agnon adaptation.
For the proposed Broadway production of A Simple Tale, the author-narrator was to be on stage the whole play and make introductory comments on each scene. The producers decided that this made more sense than using a simultaneous translation through earphones, and a “prominent American actor” would appear as the narrator.
In Variety on 3 June 1981, Habima managing director Shmuel Omer explained that “a feasibility study on the back of a used envelop promptly discouraged the economics of [a Broadway] engagement.”
A Simple Tale was performed in Baltimore on 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 13, and 14 June 1981. The production was Habima’s first visit to the United States in 25 years and, according to United Press International, part of the first international theater festival in this country’s history. The Habima show was the opening performance of the festival, débuting on 6 June.
Edwin Wilson in the Wall Street Journal reported on 19 June 1981 that the Habima performance during the International Theatre Festival was given at the Baltimore School for the Arts in the neighborhood of Mount Vernon. He described one scene which moved him particularly:
The scene in which [Hirschel] loses his mind is undoubtedly one of the most theatrical mad scenes ever staged. As a demon stalks him, Hirschel topples over a two-story stack of boxes, swings an iron bed on wheels in a fierce arc and finally throws pillows filled with white feathers into the air. Suddenly a shower of feathers falls from above and the stage becomes a snow storm of feathers. Symbolically Hirschel is lost in the maelstrom of the family business [packing and selling chicken feathers].
Cynthia had extolled this same scene to me when she first broached the subject of seeking out this play. As readers will see, it was the theatrical highlight of the production, singled out in nearly all the reviews.
The Baltimore Sun’s R. H. Gardner recounted a conversation he had with an actor who played in My Fair Lady in Russia. The actor was explaining how “harrowing” it was playing before an audience that doesn’t understand the language of the performance.
“You deliver a line that customarily brings down the house, and they just sit there staring at you,” the actor said. Gardner wondered if, during his mad scene in A Simple Tale, actor Moshe Becker, “as he tore about with a shoe on his head, banging into props and scattering feathers until the stage looked as if it had been hit by a 6-inch snowfall . . . if he himself weren’t wondering, ‘Do they have the slightest idea why I’m behaving this way?’”
Gardner went on: “Such a thing can undermine an actor’s performance, but there was no indication that Moshe Becker let it affect his. Indeed,” the Sun reviewer added, “he and the rest of the company, all of whom were superb, carried on as if they were in their own theater in Tel Aviv instead of . . . before people who for the most part could not understand them.”
Nonetheless, Gardner felt, “Despite the language barrier, the play has been so well put together . . . that it can be followed, in broad outline if not minute detail, and its power and artistry should be evident to all.”
Though a “simple” story, the adapters and director have imbued it with various expressionistic devices that considerably deepen its emotional impact. The audience is taken inside the character’s head and allowed to experience with him strange sounds—notably cackling laughter, eerie music and, especially, a jarring chord, repeated at strategic moments to recall the insane relative, dwelling in rags somewhere in his mind.
The passage of time during the period his madness is developing is conveyed by the frequent crowing of a cock . . . . The whole production—from [Ziona Shemesh’s] two-level set, with its hanging human figures and dangling pillows, to Y[ossi] Mar-Chayim’s evocative music—has been imaginatively conceived, and the performances . . . are uniformly excellent.
As for the acting, the Sun writer lauded Lia Koenig and Eliezer Jung, who “seem right on key as the parents. [Yael Perl] has a hauntingly lovely quality as the orphan girl [Bluma] the hero loves but can’t marry, and Amiran Attis is nothing short of terrifying as the uncle [the “insane relative” mentioned above].”
Like so many of the other reviewers, however, Gardner was especially taken by the young actor who made his début as Hirschel in Tel Aviv: “Of course it is Mr. Becker’s virtuoso performance as the son that, through its energy and variety, manages to dazzle the audience throughout.”
In conclusion, Gardner recommended, “For all who take their theater seriously, [A Simple Tale] is, I should think, a must.”
“To see the Habimah National Theatre of Israel performing S. Y. Agnon's ‘A Simple Tale’ is to see the preservation of several traditions at once,” proclaimed the Washington Post’s James Lardner. He was invoking, first, the original Habima’s artistic guidance from Konstantin Stanislavsky, alluded to earlier from Lardner’s column (see Part 2), and, second, “the lost world of the shtetl, or Jewish ghetto . . . .”
Because the script isn’t translated, “a great deal of dialogue is spoken, and a verbally-minded theatergoer is bound to feel frustrated,” cautioned Lardner. “Even those casually acquainted with Hebrew, I am told, could find Agnon’s poetic language . . . difficult to follow.”
“The play was presumably chosen for export,” Lardner figured, “because the storytelling approaches the flavor of pantomime at times, and the action is always richly and vividly illustrated. (When Hirshel and [Mina] are married, for example, a net descends on them and wraps them in a stranglehold. When Hirshel goes mad, all the neatly arranged props and furniture go haywire, and the stage is covered with feathers.)”
The WaPo review-writer reported, “The power, technical skill and total coordination of the players come across—language barrier or no language barrier.” He concluded that “for anyone interested in modern Hebrew theater and literature, this is a rare opportunity. Nothing like it is likely to come our way again anytime soon.”
In the Wilmington, Delaware, Evening Journal, Philip F. Crosland felt, “‘A Simple Tale’ is an appropriate title. The plot is so simple that were it not for one electrifying scene in which the protagonist goes mad amid a blanket of falling feathers, it would hardly be noticed.”
Crosland also thought that “the play would have held this reviewer’s interest better had it been in English instead of Hebrew.” He asserted that “it becomes tedious to watch players communicating a play of little action in a strange (to me) language.”
“The action,” reported the review-writer, “moved rather stiffly until the dramatic and visual highlight, when Herschl’s mind snaps and he slashes pillows and other containers, flinging their contents about the stage, as an overhead container showers more feathers, creating a feathery screen through which the rampaging Herschl is observed obliquely.”
The Evening Journal’s reviewer observed, “The set was intentionally cluttered.” With “brown, black and somber tones” predominating, it set “a mood.” Crosland characterized the performances, “like the play,” as “competent but undistinguished.”
For UPI, Glenne Currie remarked that, though A Simple Tale “was played in Hebrew,” he found that “the story is less important than the production, which was magnificent.” Currie noted that “Habimah still shows its debt to Stanislavky’s Moscow Art Theater . . . . In fact Habimah probably is more representative of the common heritage than the present Moscow Arts.”
“It really is a simple tale,” affirmed the UPI writer, “of love found and lost, of the strengths and weaknesses of tradition. But,” he added, “the expressionistic set, the exemplary acting, and the orchestrated direction which combines with the incidental music to give the effect of a spoken opera, add up to the sort of total production which the theater aims for but seldom attains.”
In Baltimore’s Afro-American, Ida Peters complained that the presentation of Habima’s A Simple Tale in the city’s International Theatre Festival was an example that the festival “left much to be desired” because “some of the troupes who perform in Hebrew and Spanish [were] without written explanation of what is happening on stage.”
Peters cited “Baltimore critics [who] each said they couldn’t understand what was happening or told a different version from what I thought I saw.” Reiterating what “the press release says” (the plot laid out as previously described above), Peters gave “[m]y view”:
On Hirshel’s wedding night he castrates himself and refuses to sleep with his bride. When his bride turns up pregnant, he goes mad.
“At the show this reporter caught,” the Afro reviewer observed, “the absence of laughter and the complete silence of the audience proved that not one person in the half-filled auditorium understood what was going on.”
She felt, “For a student of theatre arts especially those studying theatre design, sets and lighting ‘A Simple Tale’ could be a must see. For the average theatre-goer,” the review-writer warned, “it has no appeal.”
In addition to Peters’s allusion to the quality of the tech work, she acknowledged, “Most masterful scene [sic] was Hirshel’s dance of madness . . . . He was accompanied by a half-naked maniacal figure [presumably the boy’s insane uncle] who danced his frenzied contortions with him [the “maniacal figure,” I presume] pulling him [Hirshel] deeper and deeper into his own hell.”
Peters also complained that the Baltimore School for the Arts, “while it has a large stage is not fully renovated and is like an old barn. The temporary seats are uncomfortable.” She was the only reporter who mentioned this, but I looked up the school to see what the reviewer could have meant.
It turns out that the BSA, a newly-established Baltimore public high school for preparing student artists for careers in the performing and visual arts, was in its first year of operation in 1981. Not all the renovations to the once-elegant former Alcazar Hotel, built in 1888 and closed as a hotel in 1932, had been completed at the time of the Simple Tale presentation.
Only the first four floors of the seven-story structure were ready for use. The theater where Habima was working (and several other festival performances were given) had been the hotel’s first-floor grand ballroom.
Except for confirmation from Steimatzky/Schocken about the availability of the text, and an answer from Helen in Tel Aviv, this concluded the research I could think of to locate a copy of the script or an English version of the story. I suspected the only way of getting the script would be to contact Habima directly and ask if they would let us have a copy. I told Cynthia that if she wanted me to do any more on this, she’d have to let me know. I said I’d run out of ideas.
On 20 February, I reported that Judy at Steimatzky called that day to say that Schocken Books, Agnon’s publishers, didn’t have a translation of A Simple Tale at that time, but that they planned to issue one in the fall. The release, which would be part of an anthology, was slated for September ʼ85. I saw no reason why we couldn’t wait until then to do anything about an adaptation.
For now, I felt, all we could do is await word from my friend in Tel Aviv about a possible English version available in Israel (unlikely) and from Ellen Foreman’s (another TJ colleague of Cynthia’s) Habima contact about the availability of their dramatization. I thought that put an end to the research in this matter for the time being.
After I sent this memo to Cynthia, she memo’d me back to “put Agnon on hold, except when that project literally falls in your path en route to another goal.”
On 1 March, she reiterated: “Good work on Agnon. Now put it on hold pendin[g] the September publication of the story and any word we get from our feelers to Israel.”
Schocken Books indeed published A Simple Story (as the translation was entitled) in Israel in January 1985 (also Syracuse University Press in the U.S.), though it didn’t reach the United States until December. (It was not part of an anthology.) It was translated from the Hebrew by Hillel Halkin, an American-born translator, biographer, literary critic, and novelist, who has lived in Israel since 1970. There have been further publications since then. (There’s even a Kindle edition available.)
In his New York Times review of the new book, Robert Alter, a professor of Hebrew and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley, called Agnon’s novella an “understated masterpiece” and Halkin’s translation a “skillful (if at times rather free) rendering of Agnon’s elegantly stylized Hebrew.”
Finding it “a mystery” that it took 50 years for A Simple Story to be released in English, Alter declared that “one must be grateful for its appearance now.”
The novella, Alter found, “conforms . . . closely to the European realistic novel of the 19th century.” Indeed, the UCB professor asserted that “Agnon learned [the] quasimusical technique [‘of recurring motifs’] for developing themes from ‘Madame Bovary’ [(1857) by Gustave Flaubert (1821-80), French novelist] and, probably, also the early Thomas Mann [(1875-1955), German novelist and short story writer].”
The book reviewer pointed out that “Agnon recalls Flaubert” in his “frequent use of an ironic free indirect style to lay bare the self-deceptions, mental evasions and hypocrisies of the principal characters.” The actions in the story, though, are “rendered by Agnon with extraordinary subtlety and conviction.”
“In his intelligently argued afterword,” Halkin “counters the consensus of Agnon criticism,” observed Alter, “by proposing that we regard this as an ‘antimodernist’ work, since it goes beyond the usual modernist hostility to bourgeois values. The novel’s conclusion could suggest that society, after all, provides vitally needed stability.”
In the end, Alter labeled A Simple Story a “wonderfully complex novel [that] keeps the mind restlessly alert, contemplating in shifting perspectives the human figures and social institutions it so persuasively represents.”
[Several of the journalists who covered the North American appearances of Habima’s A Simple Tale made mention of the fact that the performances were in Hebrew without translation or a full English synopsis of the plot in the program. While some writers applauded the clarity of the performances despite the language barrier, a few complained strongly about their inability to understand the story.
[By and large, Americans are language chauvinists. According to a company director from India at the 1986 Theatre of Nations, Martha Coigney (1933-2016), the head of the U.S. Center of the International Theatre Institute, an agency of UNESCO and sponsor of TON, warned that “to take any non-English-speaking theater to America is next to impossible.”
[In Passport, the newsletter of Baltimore’s Theatre Project, Philip Arnoult (now founder of the Center for International Theatre Development), admonished that our “one-and-a-half language society,” as he called it, prejudices Americans against foreign-language performances. Unless it’s Tango Argentino, Marcel Marceau, or grand opera, Americans just won’t accept it.
[Ray Conlogue of the Toronto Globe and Mail cited a statement by the famous American director and theater critic Harold Clurman that he could tell a good performance even in a language he didn’t comprehend (see Part 2). I’ve seen many shows in languages I don’t understand at all, like Swedish and Bulgarian and even Marathi (the language spoken in Maharashtra State, India), and have enjoyed them immensely.
[I particularly recall two national companies I’ve seen in the past decades: the State Theater of Lithuania with a play called The Square by the company’s then-director, Eimuntas Nekrosius (1952-2018), and the Ivan Vasov National Theatre of Bulgaria, with a Russian play called Retro by Alexander Galin (b. 1947). I didn’t know either play, of course, and both were performed in the companies’ native languages.
[And both were magnificent performances—and experiences. The Square (1980), which was at the Joyce Theatre on 8th Avenue in Chelsea in ’91 as part of the short-lived New York International Festival of the Arts, had simultaneous translation, but I have always remembered that play as a fascinating and, at the time, unique take on the shift from communism/totalitarianism to freedom/democracy. This was one of the best theatrical experiences I’ve ever had, and it remains with me even today as a vivid impression. Thirty-one years later, I still remember it.
[Retro (1979), which was part of the Theatre of Nations in Baltimore in ’86 (see my report on this international theater festival, posted on ROT on 10 November 2014), didn’t have a translation—just a synopsis in the program—but the acting was so absolutely sharp that that was all I needed to decipher what was happening.
[The company worked in almost perfect Stanislavsky style for this domestic comedy and every action and intent was entirely clear and comprehensible, even though I couldn’t understand a word of the dialogue. The truthfulness of the performances and the consistency of the characterizations managed to come through.
[Comedies, I think, are the hardest plays to communicate when you don’t understand the language. A recording of the Retro performance would have been a perfect instructional video for Stanislavsky acting. I guess that my remembering these performances 31 and 36 years afterwards says something.]
No comments:
Post a Comment