ABSTRACT
Producers of ‘The Sea Gull’, so far as I know, have usually taken some published version and to varying extents - sometimes a good deal, sometimes very little - cut here and there, or transposed bits from other versions of the play, or written in, wherever they felt the need, words of their own. They hoped thus to clarify the dialogue; above all they hoped to give it stage naturalness or plausibility as human theatre utterance. But no dialogue could be more marked with clear, straight movement than Chekhov's is in ‘The Sea Gull’. In translating it, the need for simplicity may well daunt us, since such simplicity as his must rest on great precision. For example, anyone who knows the version that reads, ‘as if the field of art were not large enough to accommodate both old and new without the necessity of jostling’, might readily dismiss, ‘but there is room for all, the new and the old, why elbow?’, as some avoidance of the literal; why otherwise the elaboration of the other, or for that matter what reason other than fidelity could there be for ‘old and new’ instead of ‘new and old’? But the second form is what Chekhov literally says. The same is true in such cases as the following, where the second version is Chekhov:
‘Everyone writes in accordance with his desires and his capacity.’ - ‘Everyone writes as he wants to and as he can.’
‘I am irresistibly impelled toward her.’ - ‘I am drawn to her.’
‘It made me quite dizzy.’ - Chekhov says, ‘Everything's black before my eyes.’
‘It's beyond everything!’ - ‘The devil knows what it is!’
