Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 March 2009
Arthur Schnitzler's cycle of sexual permutations in fin de siècle Vienna has always been prone to problems of translation – not least of its title, properly in German Reigen, but often miscalled La Ronde, after Max Ophüls's film version of 1950. But its problems for translators also derive from the cultural specificity of its time and place, and in this article Heidi Zojer first examines how its numerous English translators have tried to overcome the difficulties the play presents, illustrating from a cross-section of versions examples of its resistance to easy translation, whether ‘faithful’ or colloquial. She concludes that freer adaptations such as David Hare's The Blue Room (1998) have in fact been truer to the spirit of Schnitzler's play – while perhaps truest of all has been Carlo Gébler's complete rewriting, in Ten Rounds (1999), which ‘translated’ the play to contemporary Belfast during the years of the peace process. Heidi Zojer was awarded her D. Phil. from the University of Innsbruck, Austria, in 1999. From 2000 to 2002 she was Lecturer at the University of Birmingham, and since then has been teaching at University College Dublin.