Peer Gynt

1980
•
Author:

Henrik Ibsen
Translated by Rolf Fjelde
Introduction by Rolf Fjelde

In this revised and amplified edition of Rolf Fjelde’s widely acclaimed translation, Peer Gynt is available in a contemporary version that captures the poetic form of the original yet does justice to its subtlety of meaning and enduring theatrical vitality. Fjelde provides an interpretive foreword, extensive notes, a new background essay titled “Text/Translation/Script,” a selected bibliography, and an American stage history covering significant revivals since its English-language premiere in 1906.

In this revised and amplified edition of Rolf Fjelde’s widely acclaimed translation, Peer Gynt is available in a contemporary version that captures the poetic form of the original yet does justice to its subtlety of meaning and enduring theatrical vitality. Fjelde provides an interpretive foreword, extensive notes, a new background essay titled “Text/Translation/Script,” a selected bibliography, and an American stage history covering significant revivals since its English-language premiere in 1906.

In this revised and amplified edition of Rolf Fjelde’s widely acclaimed translation, Peer Gynt is available in a contemporary version that captures the poetic form of the original yet does justice to its subtlety of meaning and enduring theatrical vitality. Fjelde provides an interpretive foreword, extensive notes, a new background essay titled “Text/Translation/Script,” a selected bibliography, and an American stage history covering significant revivals since its English-language premiere in 1906.

Henrik Ibsen, generally acknowledged as the master builder of modern drama, was born on March 20, 1828, in Skien, Norway. He began his writing career as a poet, soon turning to a series of verse and prose plays, mainly on Norwegian historical themes. At thirty-eight, exhausted by his efforts to create a national theater, he left his native land for twenty-seven years of voluntary exile in the south of Europe. Brand, Peer Gynt, and Emporer and Galilean, works of his middle period, expressed his philosophy of the individual self and of the course of civilization. In 1877, with Pillars of Society, he embarked on that cycle of twelve probing, evocative, ostensibly realistic plays which confirmed his international standing as the foremost dramatist of his age. Ibsen died of a stroke in Olso on May 23, 1906.

Rolf Fjelde, born in New York City of Scandinavian ancestry, was educated at Yale University, including the Yale School of Drama, and at Columbia University. His poetry and criticism has appeared in many leading periodicals, as well as in two collections of verse; and his original plays and Ibsen translations have been staged in England, Norway, Canada, and throughout the United States. He has edited Ibsen: A Collection of Critical Essays in the Twentieth Century Views Series and translated the final twelve-play realistic cycle in the volume Ibsen: The Complete Major Prose Plays. Mr. Fjelde is founding president of the Ibsen Society of America. He currently teaches drama and film at Pratt Institute and dramatic literature at the Juilliard School.

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