Page:The collected works of Henrik Ibsen (Heinemann Volume 1).pdf/19

Rh cation which may at first have escaped him. In almost all cases, a spaced word in the translation represents a spaced word in the original. I have very seldom used spacing to indicate an emphasis peculiar to the English phraseology. The system was first introduced in 1897, in the translation of John Gabriel Borkman. It has no longer even the disadvantage of unfamiliarity, since it has been adopted by Mr. Bernard Shaw in his printed plays, and, I believe, by other dramatists.

Just thirty years have passed since I first put pen to paper in a translation of Ibsen. In October 1877, Pillars of Society reached me hot from the press; and, having devoured it, I dashed off a translation of it in less than a week. It has since cost me five or six times as much work in revision as it originally did in translation. The manuscript was punctually returned to me by more than one publisher; and something like ten years elapsed before it slowly dawned on me that the translating and editing of Ibsen's works was to be one of the chief labours, as it has certainly been one of the greatest privileges, of my life. Since 1887 or thereabouts, not many months have passed in which a considerable portion of my time has not been devoted to acting, in one form or another, as intermediary between Ibsen and the English-speaking public. The larger part of the work, in