Tony Kushner, Bertolt Brecht, and Authorship in Translation
Drama of Power & Resistance, Fall 2024
After being the dramaturg on a production of The Caucasian Chalk Circle last fall, I decided to look at multiple English versions of Mother Courage and Her Children for my final project in Dramaturgy 5. Fascinated by Brecht’s work and its complex, contradictory nature, one of the obstacles I faced was my desire to consume and incorporate every source of information I could find. I spent over an hour of a library work session trying to track down a digital copy of Hanif Kureishi’s translation (or a physical one that wouldn’t cost $40), even as I knew deep down that the effort was futile. I failed to engage with some of the sources I’d been excited about, so overwhelmed by the thought of “getting it wrong” that I ran out of time to create a project that I’d feel really proud of. While I can’t say I’ve kicked that habit entirely, I’ve appreciated the opportunity to do something different and more focused this time around. I owe most of my knowledge about evaluating translations to what I learned in that class, and it’s been rewarding to employ it in a different context.
Kushner’s political inclinations as a playwright warrant near-constant comparison between himself and Brecht, and Brecht’s influence on his work is documented extensively. The best parts of Kushner’s translation, though, come from his unique voice as a playwright and his interpretation of Brechtian principles. He sees the text as a living, malleable thing and treats it as such. My opinions on this subject are not solidified or definite, much like Brecht’s on his own work and ideas. At this time, though, I believe that Kushner’s intervention is largely successful within his stated intentions, and he’s created one of the only (if not the only) versions of Mother Courage that’s tailored to a 21st-century American audience—particularly one with diverse backgrounds and varying knowledge of Brecht. For this analysis, I’ll engage with Kushner’s response to Brecht’s work, scholarship and interviews on his practice as a playwright and translator, and examples from a close reading to demonstrate the nature of his intervention.
Brecht has had an outsized impact on 20th and 21st-century theater, but his work can be difficult enough to engage with that it’s sometimes neglected in arts and humanities curricula. As Jonathan Kalb put it in a 2006 New York Times article, “Brecht’s influence is so ubiquitous it is taken for granted.” I believe that a foundational understanding of Brecht’s work and his place in history can open up a world of new perspectives for literary analysis. As such, I really admire Kushner’s aim to make this work accessible and comprehensible to a modern American audience. Brecht was not a high-culture or low-culture playwright—he approached popular themes with experimental techniques, pushing his audience to think critically about the world around them and take action on their realizations. So much of the thematic material in his work is timeless, allowing a work responding to World War II to later serve as a response to the U.S. war in Iraq without changes to the text’s original plot or setting.
The story of how this translation came to be is detailed in a 2006 interview with Kalb. Kushner states that his interest in Brecht began at Columbia University, when he read Courage for a course he was taking. He also calls it his favorite of the playwright’s works (1). Shortly after graduating from NYU’s directing program, he was hired to direct it at the University of New Hampshire when a colleague had to step down. This is where the desire for a translation begins: “We used Ralph Manheim's version at New Hampsire, and ever since then I’ve wanted to do an American English version of it” (1). He got Meryl Streep on board to play the titular character while working on the screen adaptation of Angels in America, then Oskar Eustis expressed interest upon starting his tenure as the Public Theater’s artistic director. George C. Wolfe was brought on to direct, Kevin Kline to play the Cook, and the rest, as they say, is history! This sequence of events demonstrates Kushner’s decades-long relationship with Brecht’s work, established long before there was a professional incentive for it. He talks about Brecht with a deep reverence for his innovations in experimental theatre, his social and cultural impact, and his intelligent, insightful observations about the world. The best person to engage with a writer’s work is someone who loves them, and Kushner’s love for Brecht shines through not only in how he speaks, but in the great care with which he handles the material he’s working with.
A 1997 New York Times article provides context to the uptick in English-speaking playwrights trying their hand at translation: “Playwrights have been adapting—and sometimes simply appropriating—the work of foreign dramatists for centuries…But the great modern translators like Constance Garnett, who brought Chekhov to the English-speaking world in the early part of this century, have been scholars, not playwrights” (Gold 2). This asks us to question both how playwrights approach translation differently from scholars and why it’s become so popular to commission new translations. The argument for American translations is usually that American English operates differently than its British counterpart. In any case, language is ever-changing, as pointed out by playwright and two-time Brecht translator Frank McGuinness. He says that his translation of A Doll’s House will eventually become dated, “but Ibsen will never date. And somebody else will come along and they will do him in the language of their time” (Gold 7). Almost 30 years later, at least a dozen new translations of Ibsen’s play have come out (Johnson and Sandberg).
I’d also argue that these adaptations are usually not the work of only one person—if unfamiliar with the language of the source text, a playwright may commission a “literal” translation from a scholar to use as a baseline. Examining our notions about Brecht through the lens of Michel Foucault’s theory of discursive construction leads to the conclusion that “the understanding of ‘the Brechtian’ that circulates in anglophone discourse is seen as the unified locus for all writing on or by Brecht in English, while it is constantly re-defined through its encounters with literary institutions and systemic practices” (Summers 238). Summers also argues, “Foucault leads us to the conclusion that multiple translations of a text will contribute to a cumulative sense of ‘who Brecht is’, as the assumed point of coherence between the competing accounts of his writing” (239). So, the collective understanding of Brecht that we have today will undeniably influence any new acts of translation. Beyond this, the text will be further interpreted and adjusted between its creation and its eventual performance. Kushner seems to understand that the writer’s authority is not absolute, that collaboration is in keeping with the spirit of Brecht’s Epic Theatre. He says that the necessity of interpretation between page and performance, due to the limited amount of information in the text, means that “the effect of Brecht on playwriting has been more in the emancipatory than proprietary direction” (Kuhn 206).
Production reviews notwithstanding, responses to the new translation of Mother Courage were largely positive. The author of a 2006 journal article about Kushner’s updates asserts, “Perhaps the greatness of a work lies in its capacity for many adaptations…Kushner's version of Brecht's work may suit the twenty-first century better than the original…Kushner's version, even with its deviations, keeps to this central frame of referential intactness” (Tucker 5). In an excerpt of an interview appended to an article he published in The Guardian, Fiona Shaw says, “Like Brecht, who used a peculiar German for the play, he has written a hiccupy English, which often has the verb at the end of the sentence…We don’t speak like that, and the effect it has is to make the language, which is often about something tiny like a package or a skirt, poetical.” Eustis was quoted as saying, “This is the first time a truly great American playwright, with exactly the right voice and political sensibility, has turned his hand to Brecht…I think the result will open a lot of eyes” (Kalb 1). Though Shaw and Eustis both have emotional and professional motivation to praise Kushner’s translation, their quotes suggest a genuine appreciation for his innovative way of taking on such a major text.
For the purposes of my analysis and my lack of experience with German, I’m operating on the assumption that Bentley’s translation is one of the closest we have to what might’ve been authoritative in Brecht’s eyes. But this, like everything in literary studies, is not an absolute truth. A recounting of their collaboration in The Cambridge Companion to Brecht says, “We obtain a sense of the intense enthusiasm Brecht must have brought to this process from Eric Bentley's amused account of his own attempts to work with Brecht on an English translation: ‘It would take me the rest of my life…he not only kept rewriting me, but then started rewriting himself’” (Thomson and Sacks 86).
In a close reading of both versions side-by-side, my general impressions were as follows: Bentley employs speech patterns closer to conversational English, while Kushner’s are more stilted, much like what he observed in Brecht’s “peculiar” German. Though it’s more poetic than natural, it’s also written in such a way that effective line readings will make the plot clear to an audience. (This is also what I believe to be true of Shakespeare, whose work I was once told is better seen or heard than read.) In many places, he employs modern colloquialisms that aren’t necessarily in keeping with the purposefully unfamiliar dialect, like “knuckleheads” (16) and “get lost” (48), but they help the lines make sense without adding much to the sentences in which they’re employed. Kushner employs harsher obscenities than Bentley (and Brecht, for that matter) but this is, in my opinion, well-justified. In the Kuhn interview, Kushner said, “I had a long exchange with Frau Brecht-Schall about that. When I first sent my version to her, she wrote back and said, ‘It’s OK but why do you have to use the F word?’ (She actually called it ‘the F word.’) And I said, well, I think your father’s work was not particularly polite and for a modern audience’s ears, if it doesn’t have that word then it won’t sound earthy enough. So she let me keep it” (204). The language is often more startling than that employed by Bentley—using words such as “cunt,” “asshole,” “fuck” and its accompanying variations, “shit,” and “bullshit.” Bentley does use “bitch,” but only twice. But the increase in the use of these curse words mirrors the increase in their use among American adults, many of whom now think of these words as far less taboo than they might’ve several decades ago. Their placement is intentional and purposeful; they’re used by Kushner to help the play read as grittier to an audience that might have a more shocking standard of what that means.
Kushner also expands upon existing (or perceived) subtext, namely to make explicit Mother Courage’s attitudes towards each of her children and the punchlines of jokes. Comments added by Kushner on Courage’s feelings about her children recur throughout, but one summarizes her thoughts on all three: “He's my brave, clever boy, I've got another one, stupid but honest. The girl's nothing. At least she's quiet, at least there's that” (26). In other scenes, she repeats variations of these sentiments and refers to which of her children’s traits supercede the others—who is honest, who is strong. While a helpful expansion of the relationships between these characters, the repetition is cloying at times. As for the humor, my favorite examples are when Swiss Cheese relays to his mother that he knows his woolies are supposed to be stored “except when I’m wearing ‘em” (38), and when the Chaplain tells his story about a spy hiding in the latrine. This leads to the following exchange, though the spy’s location had been glossed over in Bentley’s version: “SWISS CHESE: He was in the latrine? THE CHAPLAIN: Yes! In the latrine! SWISS CHEESE: Why was he in the latrine?” (Kushner 54). The results of these expansions are a mixed bag. I feel that most of them add to the text’s humor without putting forward the joke in an obvious manner, but there are a couple of occasions where Summers’s argument that “A less sympathetic reading would suggest that the translation enhances the comedy of the scene by reducing its subtlety, making the figures on the stage appear more foolish than they do in the German” (252) rings true. Perhaps the most significant alteration by Kushner is the addition of a section in scene 3 where the cook, chaplain, and Mother Courage discuss the human body and its need for liberty within the context of the Swiss King’s religious war. This section is generally insightful and does not break with the scene’s tone or thematic material, but the Cook’s assertion that “it’s expensive, liberty, especially when you start exporting it to other countries,” reads as a nod to the 2006 American audience that’s a little too on-the-nose for my taste.
One of the most difficult things about evaluating translated works is that there really is no right answer when debating their merits, especially when the writer of the source text isn’t alive to chime in. (Even if they were, who’s to say a playwright’s understanding of their own work holds greater value than that of their collaborators and audiences?) No playwright is perfect, Kushner included—there are valid criticisms of the liberties he took and how they might impact audiences, sacrificing subtlety for the sake of making sure theatre goers “get it.” All in all, I do think that Tony Kushner was the best playwright to adapt Mother Courage for a 21st-century American audience. Beyond the name recognition that’s (unfortunately) a crucial consideration in any theatrical project, Kushner is a sincerely brilliant playwright who displays a passion for and deep understanding of Bertolt Brecht’s work. While his adaptations to the material are not all uncontroversial, they seem to me to be all sincere and purposeful. In both translation and adaptation, I think that’s about all we can really ask for.
Works Cited
Brecht, Bertolt, and Tony Kushner. Mother Courage and Her Children: A Chronicle of the Thirty Years’ War. London: Methuen Drama, 2009.
Gold, Sylviane. “Today’s Big-Name Playwrights Are Busy Translating the Past’s.” The New York Times, August 3, 1997, sec. Theater. https://www.nytimes.com/1997/08/03/theater/today-s-big-name-playwrights-are-busy-translating-the-past-s.html.
Johnson, Ida Moen, and Mark Sandberg. “English Translations.” Ibsen Society of America. Accessed December 13, 2024. https://ibsensociety.org/in-english-translation/.
Kalb, Jonathan. “Still Fearsome, Mother Courage Gets a Makeover.” The New York Times, August 6, 2006, sec. Theater. https://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/06/theater/06kalb.html.
Kalb, Jonathan, and Tony Kushner. Tony Kushner on Mother Courage, July 17, 2006. http://www.hotreview.org/articles/tonykushneronmc.htm.
Kuhn, Tom. “Constructing the Fabel: Tony Kushner in Conversation with Tom Kuhn.” In The Brecht Yearbook / Das Brecht-Jahrbuch 42: Recycling Brecht, edited by David Barnett, Theodore F. Rippey, and Tom Kuhn, 203–15. Brecht Yearbook 42. Boydell & Brewer, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781787441903.015.
Kushner, Tony. “Tony Kushner: Mother Courage Is Not Just an Anti-War Play.” The Guardian, September 8, 2009, sec. Stage. https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2009/sep/08/tony-kushner-mother-courage.
Summers, Caroline. “The Playwright as Epic Translator? Mother Courage and the Intertextual Construction of an ‘English Brecht.’” German Life and Letters 69, no. 2 (April 1, 2016): 233–55. https://doi.org/10.1111/glal.12115.
Thomson, Peter, and Glendyr Sacks, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Brecht. 2. ed., Repr. Cambridge Companions to Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Tucker, Martin. “Poetry & Protest/Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone?” Confrontation, Brookville, United States: Long Island University, 2006. https://www.proquest.com/docview/211515937/abstract/F335C78725EA4532PQ/1.
