Ibsen and Watts: a deadly combination

The good news is, I managed to read book six in this quest in just three days. The bad news is, I thought Peer Gynt was awful.

And I don't know what was worse, Henrik Ibsen's ridiculous play or Peter Watts' heavy-handed, patronising translation of it.

I was prepared to be charmed by this 1867 Norwegian play, to be delighted by it and to enjoy its loose versification after the density of the 18th-Century novels I've been reading. I even got quite excited when I realised that, like Lennox's The Female Quixote, Peer Gynt features a main character who over-indulged in romantic fiction/fairy tales as a youth and lost track of reality as a result.

But as my reading of this play progressed, I got more and more frustrated with it. I know, the scholars will tell you all kinds of wonderful things about Ibsen and this particular play but, as a lay reader who is reading for enjoyment, this thing is a bust.

It didn't help that Watts, translating it for the Penguin Classics edition, took great liberties with the original text and even bragged about it in his silly footnotes. All too often, he makes comments that amount to the following: "the literal translation of this passage would be X but I didn't think modern readers would understand that so I made it Y".

Awful. But, it's book six in the bag at least.

And now I'm on to book seven which is (the horror the horror), a collection of Ibsen's plays: the Penguin Classics book The Master Builder and other Plays. I am trying to glean some hope from the fact that Watts isn't responsible for the translations in this one.