1Although Geoffrey Hill’s poems refer often to other writers and their texts, and although he had a working knowledge of French, he rarely undertook the imitative labour of translation—a doubly transformative interaction that requires both a profound openness to the (strange) other and a full deployment of one’s own individual talents. The notable exceptions are his versions of Henrik Ibsen’s two Norwegian verse dramas, Brand and Peer Gynt, which Hill developed from literal translations of the plays into English by Inga-Stina Ewbank and Janet Garton. Critics easily assimilated Brand into the corpus of Hill’s work; Peer Gynt, coming at the end of Hill’s life, published on the very day of his death, and dealing with a strikingly different kind of protagonist, may at first appear less typically Hillian. Nonetheless, Peer Gynt’s fundamental concerns, which are not in their essence so different from those of Brand, ultimately reveal themselves to be central to the arc of Hill’s thought, and especially to its psychological dimensions. While Hill’s translation work is rare—and perhaps even partly because it is rare—his versions of Brand are remarkable in themselves and illustrative of other concerns.

2Both of Hill’s versions of Ibsen’s verse dramas offer complex allegories for human spiritual and ethical failure. In their matching contrasts, the two plays, now printed together by Penguin, mutually illuminate one another and form an aesthetic whole that resembles an allegorical diptych. While this brief essay is primarily suggestive, sketching out some possible directions for further consideration, it does claim that Brand and Peer Gynt, especially together, illustrate psychological hazards of which Hill was well aware. First, as in the case of Brand, vigorous egotistic efforts to abnegate the ego are inherently counter-productive and will in fact further aggrandize the ego, to its own detriment and to the detriment of other human beings. Second, in a somewhat curious corollary, as illustrated by the case of Peer Gynt, when the ego, mired in egotism, deliberately indulges in the pleasures of the self, it corrupts and destroys itself, and damages other people. While these texts are not exactly psychological morality tales, between the lines of Hill’s translations, co-created by two great writers from different countries and different centuries—together with a third writer acting as a medium, expert in both Norwegian and English—one might seek to discern how to tack between the Scylla of the superego and the Charybdis of the id.

3The skill of Hill’s writing in these translations is indisputable. A poet in this era must have the entirety of the English language’s technical and semantic possibilities at his disposal to be able to compose a verse drama—let alone a rhyming verse drama—that sounds like vibrant, lucid, everyday speech. One feature of Hill’s verse that is notably absent from his translations of both of these plays is his supposedly characteristic “difficulty.” He has rendered Ibsen’s dramatic structure and the dialogue of his characters entirely accessible. While this achievement required extraordinary expertise and great formal facility, it is noteworthy and relevant to my larger argument that Hill subordinates these skills to the purpose of conveying the original Brand and Peer Gynt in the best possible English; his own poetic genius, that aspect of self that exemplifies individual exceptionalism, remains fully engaged but is self-consciously set at the service of another.

4Commentators have considered the place of Brand in Hill’s corpus to be relatively straightforward; Adrian Poole’s 1985 essay notes natural affinities between Brand’s idealistic religious ferocity and Hill’s concerns. In one of the most substantial essays on the topic, Susan Ang quotes Hill’s own comment that Brand is “consistent with certain things that have held [his] interest in [his] other work” (Haffenden 97) and she lists those things as including martyrdom, endurance, resistance, and especially “language, its nature, its proper place and function in the world, the ethics of its use” (27).

5While the (few) critical treatments of Hill’s Brand easily interpret it in terms of his other work, early published responses to Peer Gynt have been more quizzical. Karl O’Hanlon claims, for example, “Peer Gynt is quite unlike Hill’s other verse: that is to say, I see nothing characteristically Hillian about it as such.” Yet the fact that the two Ibsen plays are often spoken of together suggests that the later translation is equally pertinent to Hill’s œuvre as a whole. The comments in Madeline Potter’s review of Peer Gynt about how the poems compare indicates that the plays act as a diptych, a point long-established about Ibsen’s originals, for example by Downs in the mid-sixties:

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They form complements to one another, a contrasting diptych, as it were, the one half by Jean-qui-pleure and the other by Jean-qui-rit, centered on two figures whose characters and fortunes contrast as completely as the tones of their background—Norway of the fjords and glaciers in Brand, Norway of the rich dales and infinite spaces in Peer Gynt.

7Even the blurb on the Penguin edition notes that the plays are “contrasting,” as does Kenneth Haynes at the beginning of his interview with Hill printed towards the end of the volume. If Hill’s interest in Brand is evident, and if the plays are in contrast—the characters of Brand and Peer Gynt acting as foils to each other—then it is likely that something about the concerns of Peer Gynt will be of equally strong relevance to Hill’s own thinking.

8In the most substantial treatment of Peer Gynt’s place in Hill’s career so far, Paul Franz speaks of the similarities between Hill and Brand extending as far as “some over-determined identification of [Hill’s] own with Ibsen’s protagonist” (156), but Franz also seeks to begin to explain why the newer play “offers a suggestive parallel for Hill’s own poetic trajectory” (155). Unfortunately, he misinterprets how to understand both Hill’s attraction to and repulsion by Peer Gynt: “If this kind of hero doesn’t sound very Hillian, one’s reservation needs to be counter-balanced by certain apparent stylistic affinities between Peer Gynt and Hill’s recent poetry. Where his Brand seems to present a case of strong, if ambivalent, identification on the levels of both character and style, his Peer Gynt suggests their disjuncture” (159). Franz is right about Hill’s complex affinities with Brand, but Hill may ambivalently identify with the character and style of Peer Gynt at least as much as with Brand’s. In fact, the identification in the latter play is even more essential—because Hill sees Peer Gynt as someone who could have, and should have, been a great poet.

9In the interview with Kenneth Haynes, Hill says that in Act Four, Scene 5, Ibsen “makes Gynt who is loud in his disdain for ‘Poetry’ throughout the play—reveal that he might well have been a poetic genius (greater perhaps than Ibsen himself) [2] if his creative imagination had not been so warped and misdirected from childhood on” (349). With this realisation in mind, it becomes apparent that Hill frequently portrays Gynt in terms that suggest a “warped and misdirected” poet. In this light, Hill’s comment suggests he is aware that Peer Gynt’s disdain for “Poetry” is, in psychoanalytic terms, a kind of “reaction formation”: his repressed passion for and skill in poetic composition gets consciously expressed as a hatred for poetry. A reaction formation is a type of defence mechanism; it is too painful for Peer Gynt to face the reality of his warped poetic genius head-on, and so the energy of all those feelings turns into dismissive hatred.

10The very beginning of the play, the climax of the folk tale that Peer Gynt narrates to his mother—with himself as the first-person hero who went for a wild ride off a cliff on a captured reindeer—illustrates his poetic gifts. Hill translates this passage as if Gynt were almost Gerard Manley Hopkins—a Hopkins who actually falls down the dreadful mountains of the mind, the “cliffs of fall / Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed” that Hopkins describes in “No worst, there is None” (167). Hill’s Gynt-Hopkins sketches this scene: “Behind us, sheer, / the cliff-side, black; beneath us, / ne’er a glimpse of ground.” The Hopkins poem that this section evokes even more strongly is “The Windhover.” Both Gynt and Hopkins’s narrators fantasise about hunting—about catching a wild animal that they ride metaphorically. Gynt’s language echoes Hopkins’s in breathlessness, rhythm, and vocabulary: “striding,” “out of hiding,” “swung,” “broke,” and, most tellingly perhaps, the line “buck from the air with phantom buck,” whose epanalepsis (a figure that Hill incorporated self-consciously into his own verse in The Triumph of Love, 2000, 4) at once points to the interpretively problematic “buckle!” in the middle of Hopkins’s poem and showcases the fundamental difference between Hopkins’s successful poetics, which always seek to turn to the reality of the Other, and Gynt’s, which always crash into an illusory representation of self (Ibsen, 171).

11In terms of character, Peer Gynt has qualities associated with many modern male poets: womanising, a tendency to drink to excess, an ambivalent relationship with his outsider status, and a blistering preoccupation with his own genius. Peer Gynt is also, as has been much pointed out, a fantasist—a trait he also shares with his fellow poets. Fantasising is an inevitable susceptibility for a poet, who must make things up out of words, who must imagine things other than as they are, and who must self-consciously speak as other than who he is. Gynt, like many a poet, is also problematically beloved—by Solveig in the play and by readers and watchers who are drawn to his vital life force.

12So, when Franz dismisses large sections of Peer Gynt as “mere sweepings from the later Hill’s desk” (166), he loses sight of the fact that these lines are all from the mouth of a character: a fantasist, a “poet” of sorts. Hill’s attention turns here, towards the end of his own career, to criticize the flaws of the kind of genius behind his own creative triumphs. It is not that this version of Peer Gynt offers a Hillian critique of all poets and of poetry itself; Peer Gynt is a poet whose creative gift is blocked by his “warped and misdirected” imagination. But the line between a poet and a blocked poet can be very thin, potentially crossed over at any moment even by the most successful writer. Hill had a long period mid-career when he published little or nothing. It makes sense that he translated this play during the very last stage of his life—when the dangers of blockage were fading to a close.

13If Peer Gynt dramatizes the life of a failed poet, what has Gynt’s creative imagination been warped by? Partly by unfortunate external circumstances “since childhood,” as Hill points out, but also, as a result of those circumstances, by egotistic over-identification with the id. Gynt does not consciously sublimate his libidinous energy into aesthetic and cultural contributions. He habitually allows it full rein—with ludicrous and cruel consequences. The linguistic result is the “sense of sublime doggerel” that “informs the many scenes of farce,” as Hill describes them (344).

14This telling oxymoron, “sublime doggerel,” suggests several things at once: the comedy and the poverty of Peer Gynt’s verbal productions, and their simultaneous, paradoxical, aesthetic and spiritual grandeur. “Sublime doggerel” is exactly what one might expect a warped poetic genius to produce—especially a warped poetic genius whose utterings were created by one poetic genius and translated by yet another. The lines are “sublime” in the traditional aesthetic sense of supremely grand. At the same time, in a poetically punning sense, Peer Gynt’s ultimately nonsensical utterances are the successful products of Ibsen’s and Hill’s creative sublimations, as well as the detritus of their character’s creative failure. In sublimation (a conscious process), the energy of the id, i.e. libido, the source of sexual drive, is creatively, and with intention, turned into aesthetic, philosophical, and even spiritually-oriented productions. While the scope of this essay does not allow for a full examination of the relationship between aesthetics and psychoanalysis in this context, it seems likely that the most effective sublimations will create sublime art. Nothing less than the act of transcending egotism while enabling the ego’s genius can achieve artistic transcendence.

15Peer Gynt’s productions are ultimately meaningless, but in the hands of Ibsen and Hill they are identified as such—and thus stand not as meaningless but meaningfully “meaningless.” What Franz hears as “sweepings” should actually be understood as Hill saying: “Look at this warped poet’s ‘sweepings’!” In this light, the poetry of the text appears simultaneously grand in its superficial rhetoric (Peer Gynt as poet), pathetic in its significance within the play (lies, fantasies, embroiled in cruelties of all kinds), and also great in its linguistically resonant dramatization of the unconscious displacements and condensations of the could-have-been-great poet.

16Both of Ibsen’s plays as translated by Hill present characters who succumb to temptations that Hill’s own poetry reveals as ever-recurring dangers for the self. Both Brand and Peer Gynt fall victim to the self-interested machinations of their own psyches: Brand to the superego’s masochistic quest for self-abnegation, also tragically projected onto others, and Peer Gynt to the id’s quest for self-serving, self-indulgent pleasures. In both cases, the ego’s mistaken identification with these other aspects of the psyche leads, in both directions—the sacred and the profane—to the ego’s aggrandisement and dissolution. In a characteristically Hillian twist, there is a linguistic dimension to these twin forms of perdition. For both of Ibsen’s protagonists, as Ang has already established in the case of Brand, part of the root of their error is a failure to relate themselves rightly to language. Brand’s “All or nothing” is as detrimental to the human psyche as Gynt’s contrasting “whatever.”

17Ibsen himself of course was not deliberately “Freudian.” Yet as Oliver Gerland points out: “Ibsen is widely considered a precursor of psychoanalysis. Gunnar Brandell argues that Ibsen’s was ‘one of the minds that gave stimulus to Freud’s imagination’” (54). To my knowledge there is no evidence external to the text itself suggesting that Hill was self-consciously invoking Freudian ideas. But I do recall Professor Hill speaking in the early 2000s at Boston University of Freud and his influence being truly great, “greater even than Jung’s.” This reading of these plays is psychoanalytically inflected thus far only in the most basic terms of Freudian personal identity structure. Extending for a moment the scope of consideration to Jungian archetypal theories, it is worth noting that both Brand and Peer Gynt not only fail to recognise their own shadows, but also treat women—and thus implicitly their own undeveloped yet potent animas—with utter disrespect. As Hill rightly points out, Brand’s “spiritual exploitation of Agnes is if anything worse than Gynt’s treatment of women” (349).

18Translation, especially of a long text like these verse dramas, requires a restraint of linguistic egotism, a prolonged renunciation of the high that can come from getting carried away by one’s own rhetorical prowess—as Peer Gynt is by his imagined buck and his narration of it. It is a truism of literary translation theory that translation requires an attitude of respect for the other writer, alongside a self-conscious grounding in one’s own verbal skills as well as the fabric of the target language. The poet’s mind must perforce engage at depth with the exigencies of the mind of another, but it must do so actively not passively, and without a self-conscious posture of damaging self-sacrifice (a Hillian concern elsewhere). The Penguin edition rightly makes Ibsen and not Hill the primary focus of the volume and the subject of the prefatory matter. In this published context, Hill acts as a conduit for Ibsen’s migration into English. It is worth dwelling on how he ends his interview with Kenneth Haynes, by expressing in simple terms the human effort required to maintain fidelity to the self and to the Other: “I try throughout both plays to remain faithful to the literal versions” (351). In straddling both sides of the tension between literal versus literary translation, Hill is also seeking a psychological and ethical middle way.

19By translating Ibsen, he had the opportunity to write vividly about two contrasting forms of stark psycho-ethical failure that he himself had to reconnoiter and elude: self-righteous sacrifice and its counterpart, self-indulgent dissipation. As these plays dramatize, the victims of such failures are not only the central characters themselves but the other people in their lives. Intriguingly, translation itself, a necessarily liminal act requiring attention to self, and to other, and to the higher power of language, offers a symbolic model of one possible path through this difficult territory. Hill’s magnanimous translations of Ibsen point to one way a poet might train himself to recognise and avoid these dangers.