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Three Sisters
By Anton Chekhov
English Version by Sarah Ruhl
BASED ON A LITERAL TRANSLATION BY
Elise Thoron with Natasha Paramonova and Kristin Johnsen-Neshati
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For my sister Kate
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AUTHOR’S NOTES
When Cincinnati Playhouse approached me to translate Three Sisters I was both terrified and happy. Terrified, because I don’t speak Russian and I love the play; happy, because I don’t speak Russian and I love the play. As such, I thought: I will learn from a great master, and I will try to learn Russian, a language I have always wanted to learn. They said: we need it in six months. So I thought: I won’t learn Russian. But I will learn from a great master, with some help. As it turns out, quite a lot of help. Let me explain about all of my help.
The night before I first met John Doyle, the director of the project, I was at a fundraiser. My husband and I were seated with New York business moguls who often attend fundraisers. I glanced to my left. Three chairs down was a woman wearing a flowing red silk shirt, and she had very long tapered fingers. The hands of a poet, I thought. She didn’t exactly look bored, but she looked intriguing. Who is this woman? I must move chairs, I thought. I moved chairs over dessert. It turns out the woman was a Russian scholar and an extraordinary playwright/director named Elise Thoron. We got to talking about Chekhov and his luminosity, transparency, and spareness, which is often lost in translation. It was serendipity. After I met with John, I asked if Elise could come on as my Russian language conduit. He, and the theater, happily agreed.
Meanwhile, I went to Los Angeles for a family vacation where my in-laws live. My sister-in-law Natasha who is a native Russian speaker sat down with me and read to me from the original. We sat on her stoop while her baby slept and while her twelve-year-old daughter Masha showed us Tae Kwan Do kicks. That Masha asked: what did the other Masha say? Natasha gave me literal translations of the idioms—as when Solyony says: pull my finger, meaning, just as it does in this country, make me fart, which the more polite translations usually cover, making Solyony seem completely opaque. Or when Masha says: Life is a raspberry! I wanted to keep the raspberry, even though it’s not readily accessible in English. Working with Natasha, it became clear to me that getting to the root of the original Russian was what I wanted, rather than putting my own authorial stamp on the text. I wanted to get as far away from a “stamp” as possible. I desperately needed a native speaker for things like: a word in act four that could either mean “a metal lid on top of steaming food” or “the kind of hat an entertainer would wear when performing for a czar.”
Not speaking Russian and translating Chekhov, is of course, a terrible disadvantage. Luckily I had four very able helpers. Cincinnati Playhouse procured for me a translation to look at, by Kristin Johnsen-Neshati. It is a lovely translation, clear and modern, and was very useful to read in the early stages of my work. Because it is a wonderful translation in its own right, and not literal, I couldn’t work directly from it. Still, it was a valuable tool for comparison, as was Stark Young’s translation; and his, I think, is one of the closest in English to the literal Russia...
