the translator, the actor and the poet are of imagination all compact–at least for Paul Schmidt they are. A true renaissance man of the theatre, Schmidt seems anomalous in our late 20th-century world of micro-specialization: a poet who translates, a translator who acts, an actor who writes plays, a playwright who writes poems. But lest this conjure up an image of some dusty relic in knee-breeches and powdered wig, consider a few of his thoroughly modem accomplishments: acting roles in the Wooster Group’s Brace Up! and Tom Kalin’s experimental film Swoon; a racy poem which accompanied Robert Mapplethorpe’s controversial “X” portfolio; a stage adaptation of Alice in Wonderland directed by Robert Wilson with music by Tom Waits; a Ph.D. from Harvard and an Equity card; theatre translations of Brecht, Chekhov, Genet and Khlebnikov for Liz Diamond, Elizabeth LeCompte, Joanne Akalaitis and Peter Sellars.
A tall, handsome man with a dignified bearing and liquid speaking voice, it’s easy to see why the 59-year-old Schmidt gets occasional work acting on television soaps. He is a literate, entertaining conversationalist–his careful diction and lively vocabulary are clues to a consuming passion for language. It is this love of words–or perhaps more accurately, this love of the spoken word–which is at the bottom of all his artistic pursuits, especially his translations. Liz Diamond, who directed Schmidt’s translation of Brecht’s St. Joan of the Stockyards, calls him “a poet of the theatre who loves language and the sound of rhythmic speech, in particular in the theatre.”
When Schmidt talks about translation, his views are never abstract and theoretical, but refreshingly pragmatic, rooted in his own theatrical experience. He likens the translator’s craft to the actor’s: “For me, translating is performing and performing is translating. You have to be able to let someone else’s words come through you, and not impose your voice. You have to find a voice.” And to do that, says Schmidt, you need to use your ear rather than your dictionary–to listen for the playwright’s “voiceprint.” “If that voiceprint exists, say, in Russian,” he continues, “and I know enough Russian to be able to hear that voiceprint in my ear, then what I have to do is to recreate in American English a voice which echoes…and I mean that rather metaphorically…which echoes the same way the Russian voice echoes in the Russian language. That’s an elaborate process, it’s very complex.”
One of the things that makes translating for the stage particularly tricky is that the translator must negotiate between three parties: the playwright, the actor and the audience. “Whatever language I speak as the translator must either be the language of the audience,” Schmidt maintains, “or if it isn’t their current language, be recognizable to them as an echo of what they already know. Theatre only works if the actors speak the same language as the audience. The language must be as natural in the actor’s mouth as it is in the audience’s ear.”
And for Schmidt, that common language is American English. One of the constant stumbling blocks to staging foreign plays in this country has been the fact that most of the published translations are British. “A play that is marked as British is, to my American ear, foreign. There can be a strangeness or a charm to the foreignness, but it’s there.” When he worked on St. Joan, which Brecht set in the Chicago stockyards he had found in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, he faced a particular challenge: “What’s interesting about working with Brecht in English in his American plays is that he’s already doing this fictional |American.’ In St. Joan, for instance, you have stockbrokers talking in dactylic hexameter, and so you have to keep the meter and still make them sound like American stockbrokers.”
as a fourth-generation New Yorker, Schmidt knows what America sounds like. Of Irish and German ancestry, he started experimenting with languages in high school: “I remember reading the Aeneid and translating a passage into English, and then my focus shifted at one moment from understanding the Latin to writing something in English. It was one of those moments where you think, ahh, that’s interesting.” During his college years he continued acquiring languages at Colgate University not for career reasons, but because it was fun for him. “I never had at any point a real clear sense of what I wanted to do,” Schmidt confesses.
His wandering interests led him to try acting, and after a year of graduate work in Russian at Harvard, he shocked his parents with the news he was quitting school to be an actor. Which is what he did, working in the Boston area, and landing his first Equity job in a summer Shakespeare festival in Cambridge. Then, in 1956, the 22-year-old Schmidt followed his muse to Paris, where he stayed for two years. While perfecting his French, he fell in with a group of actors from the Combdie Francaise and went to the theatre almost every night.
Just when he had been accepted into a French conservatory to study acting, Schmidt was drafted into the U.S. Army and had to return to the States. It was the late |50s, between the Korean and Vietnam wars–a safe time to be a recruit. Stationed in Texas (“It was more foreign to me than Paris,” Schmidt remembers), Schmidt was trained as a Russian prisoner-of-war interrogator in a period when there were, inconveniently, no prisoners of war. During war maneuvers, he would be assigned to the “aggressor battalion,” made up of American soldiers dressed in “funny uniforms that were vaguely futuristic, vaguely Nazi.” Armed with fake weapons and smoke grenades, Schmidt’s job was to get captured by the “Americans,” and then speak Russian to them. “The fun was to see how far behind the lines we could get, and how much destruction we could wreak before they picked us up. It was all like a very funny improv.”
When he got out of the army in 1960, parental pressures led him back to Harvard to work on his doctorate, although he somehow managed to find time to keep up his acting, even doing a season at the Charles Playhouse in 1964. When in 1967 he was offered a teaching job in the Russian Department at the University of Texas in Austin, he accepted and spent the next 11 years teaching in Austin–which was, in the late ’60s, according to Schmidt, “a real paradise, a hippie heaven.” It was there that he also began to translate seriously, encouraged by his two mentors, Richard Howard and Roger Shattuck. His first major piece of translation was the complete works of French poet Arthur Rimbaud, published in 1975 by Harper and Row.
But actually Schmidt kept up his double life as actor/academic, acting part-time with a Mexican theatre company and returning to spend several summers in Boston with the Agassiz Players, a classical company founded by director Tim Mayer, playwright Thomas Babe and producer Honor Moore. It was a remarkably talented group of actors, counting among its members John Lithgow, James Woods, Kathryn Walker, Tommy Lee Jones and Stockard Channing, to whom Schmidt was married for seven years.
By 1978 Schmidt had received tenure (what his father had always wanted for him), but felt burdened by the concomitant administrative responsibilities and sticky university politics. He also felt a growing distance between himself and the students of the mid-’70s, “who were what turned out to be yuppies,” he recalls. “It’s hard to teach people with whom you have very little commonality of interest. They hadn’t seen the movies I had seen, I hadn’t seen the TV shows they had seen.” So he made the difficult, frightening decision to chuck the security of his life as a professor and return to New York and the vagaries of a life in the theatre.
His academic reputation served him well in his new freelance lifestyle; about the same time he was approached by the Dia Art Foundation to do a massive translation project: the complete works of the Russian Futurist Velimir Khlebnikov. Schmidt was at first hesitant about jumping right back into such a vast scholarly project, but he eventually agreed: “The notion of tackling everything a poet had written–I had already done that with Rimbaud–is a really interesting challenge. If you commit yourself to translating the writer’s entire work, you really have to think through the whole thing. You have to know, for example, if he uses that word there, when he uses it again, the resonances are all the same…it’s like three dimensional chess.” The enormous undertaking, which gave him 10 years of fairly constant work, has been published in three volumes by Harvard University Press.
but with increasing frequency he was drawn towards the stage, putting his knowledge of Russian, French and German to good use at regional theatres across the country. In 1985, with Elizabeth Swados, he wrote The Beautiful Lady, a musical about a cafe full of Russian poets of the 1920s, which was produced in Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles. Peter Sellars staged his translation of Khlebnikov’s Zangezi in 1987; the production, with music by Jon Hassell and featuring Ruth Malaczech, was performed in Los Angeles, Boston and Brooklyn. That same year his collaboration with composer Stanley Silverman Black Sea Follies, produced in New York by the Music-Theatre Group and Playwrights Horizons, won the Kesselring Award. He translated Genet’s The Screens for JoAnne Akalaitis’s 1989 production at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, and his play The Bathtub, adapted from Mayakovsky’s 1929 political satire The Bathhouse, was commissioned and staged by the Empty Space Theater in Seattle in 1990.
Some of his most recent projects have provided hybrid, collaborative challenges. He just joined forces with Theatre de la Jeune Leune’s Dominique Serrand and Paul Walsh on an adaptation of Marivaux’s The Triumph of Love for the Guthrie, which combined that play with another Marivaux play, The Dispute. Last year he worked with Robert Wilson and Tom Waits on an adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland that came to be titled Alice. Starting with Wilson’s initial visual ideas, it was Schmidt’s job to fashion a text from the famous children’s story. Although the task seemed daunting at first, the fact that the work would be produced in Germany helped: “It was a little easier because I was working for a German audience who were not familiar with the language the way we are, the Lewis Carrollisms and the famous phrases. So I didn’t have to worry about competing with Lewis Carroll.” Schmidt decided to use the relationship between mathmetician Charles Dodgson (Carroll’s real name) and his young pupil Alice Liddell as a framework for the fairy tale. The text, as delightfully mischievous as Carroll without copying him, puts Alice in Wonderland in poetic, not sociological, relationship to Alice Liddell, illuminating a wild fantasy world through the looking glass of Victorian England: ALICE: Chase the chickens, choke the child.
