Three Sisters (TCG Edition)

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Anton Chekhov. Three Sisters (TCG Edition)

Three Sisters

CONTENTS

Introduction

Act One

Act Two

Act Three

Act Four

Notes

Отрывок из книги

Three Sisters

TCG TRANSLATIONS

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Another reason that compelled me to this translation was the experience over many years of having American actors ask me to explain certain curious expressions, certain odd foreign behaviors indulged in by Chekhov’s characters. Especially, over and over, I was asked to explain the mysterious workings of the samovar they had inevitably to confront onstage. Now, when reading Chekhov’s plays I have always been struck by the absolute ordinariness of his language, and by the humdrum everyday actions of his characters. His entire art is the creation of extraordinary human depths out of the surface banalities of everyday life. And it usually turned out that the curious expressions, the oddness and foreignness, the mysteries of the text that bothered my actor friends, were oddities of the translation they were reading. Over the years, unfortunately, these oddities were passed along in versions of the plays done by people who couldn’t read Russian, because, as far as they could tell, that’s the way Chekhov’s characters talked. But with the exception of those few characters whose speech is marked by rural dialecticisms or by comic locutions, Chekhov’s characters speak quite ordinary Russian. Even after a hundred years, it seems remarkably simple, colloquial and accessible. And Chekhov himself was well aware of this need for a natural style. In a letter to a novice playwright, Chekhov advises him to “avoid unnecessary filler words, you don’t need them in a play—for instance, the word ‘that’ in the sentence ‘you know that there’s nothing for sale here.’ Whenever you’re writing dialogue, be careful about those ‘thats.’” I wanted to make a translation for American actors in the kind of plain language Chekhov actually wrote, one that might remove some of these nonexistent problems.

I hope, too, that this text may help American actors and directors of the play to move away from the “Russianness” of Three Sisters, and toward its universal humanity. It had always seemed to me there must have been in 1900 women living in Nebraska, let’s say, who longed to go back to Boston where they’d been born and brought up. That connection is lost, or somehow trivialized, whenever I see an American actress done up as a Russian peasant shuffle across the stage carrying a samovar. In Chekhov’s time a samovar was as ordinary an item of domestic life as a television is today. To bring one onstage, fraught with symbolism and “Russianness,” is to miss the point and lose the focus of the play. The quaintness of it goes against everything Chekhov as a dramatist was striving for.

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