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A History of Stanislavski in Translation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2009

Jean Benedetti
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Abstract

Stanislavski has become a minor industry, both in theatre training and in publishing, with courses and related books endorsing, elaborating, or questioning his ‘System’. But how much of the System is really accessible to an English-speaking readership, and how full a view of Stanislavski's fully-formed ideas does it represent? Even the order and timing of the appearance of his works in English has, argues Jean Benedetti, determined our reception of his thought, and left us ignorant, sometimes wilfully, of the real development of his thinking: and in the following article, he traces the complicated and often fraught history of the translation of Stanislavski's works into English, revealing how (sometimes from the best of intentions) a slanted and incomplete view of the System still dominates our perceptions. Following a career in the theatre, film, and television. Jean Benedetti was Principal of the Rose Bruford College of Speech and Drama from 1970 to 1987, and since 1979 has been chairman of the Theatre Education Committee of the International Theatre Institute. In 1982 he published Stanislavski: an Introduction, and his biography of Stanislavski, the first in the West in forty years, was published in the autumn of 1988, and in paperback earlier this year. He is currently working on a documentary history of the Moscow Art Theatre.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Theatre Quarterly , Volume 6 , Issue 23 , August 1990 , pp. 266 - 278
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1990

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References

Notes and References

1. Such details as we possess of Koiranski's relationship with Stanislavski have been established by Senelick, Laurence, in ‘New Information on My Life in Art’, Theatre Survey, XXIV (05 and 11 1983).Google Scholar

2. Stanislavski Archive, No. 1052, published in Volume I of the new Soviet edition of the Complete Works, p. 502.

3. Article by Bokshanskaīa, Olga, in Ezegodnik MXAT (1943), p. 582.Google Scholar

4. Laurence Senelick, op. cit.

5. Letter from Stanislavski, to his wife, 27 11 1923, in Complete Works, Volume VIII, p. 73.Google Scholar

6. For a detailed comparison of the American and Soviet editions, see Senelick, Laurence, ‘Stanislavsky's Double Life in Art’, Theatre Survey, XXII (11 1981).Google Scholar

7. Letter from Stanislavski, 6 September 1924, Archive No. 2976.

8. Hobgood, M. Burnet, ‘Stanislavski's Books: an Untold Story’, Theatre Survey, XXVII (1986).Google Scholar

9. Hobgood, op. cit.

10. Brook, Peter, The Shifting Point (Methuen, 1988), p. 7.Google Scholar

11. For a detailed discussion, see Camicke's, Sharon M. article ‘An Actor Prepares’, Theatre Journal, 12 1984Google Scholar. See also her contribution to the proceedings of the seminar, ‘Le Siècle Stanislavski’, held at the Centre Pompidou, November 1988, in which she discusses the inconsistency in the translation of the key term pereživanie (roughly translated in this article by ‘experience’).

12. Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood, Preface to Creating a Role, p. xi.