Tom Kuhn is a Faculty Lecturer in German at St. Hugh's College / University of Oxford and is the General Series Editor of Brecht Collected Works in English, formerly published by Methuen, and now by A.C. Black. In the first part of the interview, he discusses the history and the future of the Methuen / A.C. Black editions, in the process touching upon the role of John Willett and the possibility of a standard English-language edition of Brecht. In the second part of the interview, which was published in CIBS 36 (Fall 2007), he discusses his work as a Brecht translator, specifically his translation of the The Round Heads and Pointed Heads, which was staged in March 2007 at the California Polytechnic Institute in San Obispo, CA.

PART I

THE BRECHT INDUSTRY AND THE FUTURE OF A STANDARD ENGLISH EDITION

Tom Kuhn

CIBS: You are the general series editor for the Brecht Methuen / A. C. Black editions. Could you just give us a bit of background on how and when the series arose, the major participants in its construction, the goals of the edition, and your involvement?

Tom Kuhn: This is a tortuous saga. The edition really arose way back in the late 1950s – so not that long after Brecht’s death, when John Willett managed to persuade Methuen Publishing in London to publish two volumes of Brecht’s plays alongside his own book, The Theatre of Bertolt Brecht: A Study from Eight Aspects (which came out in 1959, the first general monograph in any language). Over the subsequent forty years, as Brecht became more established and demand grew, John went on to translate a huge quantity of the playwright’s work, and he edited every volume in the Methuen Brecht series up until the end of the century, choosing or commissioning translations by others, and supplying a detailed apparatus, with translations (mostly by himself) of significant variants and other relevant texts. We owe to John Willett much of our knowledge and understanding of Brecht in the English-speaking world. Notwithstanding the all-important involvement, as a translator, of Ralph Manheim, this was, in a sense, a one-man show. And the published volumes betray that, both as a strength (the coherence of voice and vision) and as a weakness. As a formal edition of the collected works, Methuen Brecht just sort of evolved, over a very long time and with all sorts of hiccups and changes in direction.

John may have been an inspiration and tireless in his application to the task, but he wasn’t a great planner and he had no academic training. For example, when I joined the project in the late 1990s I discovered that there was a part-volume labeled 4iii, but there wasn’t enough material left to fill both 4i and 4ii. When I asked John what was intended, he confessed that he no longer had any idea. Perhaps more importantly, the ownership of Methuen had changed several times over the intervening decades. The process of publishing Brecht was drawn out by the sagging interest of the money men, and by very real commercial pressures. For a few awful months Methuen was even owned, as a distant subsidiary, by Bertelsmann – at which point Barbara Brecht refused to give them permission to publish any more of her father’s work at all. Anyway, all this perhaps helps to account for the relative mess of the edition, historically at least, with books and part-books in all sorts of liveries and no coherent marketing strategy.

I was brought in by John (who knew me from conferences and from a little book called The Young Brecht) to help sort all this out and bring the project to some sort of a conclusion. First of all we wanted to conclude the series of plays, then see what could be done to augment the published body of theory, and so one. The architecture of the eight volumes of Collected Plays, the three volumes of Theory (Brecht on Theatre, Film, and Art and Politics), and so on, was the best I could achieve given the history and the continuing financial constraints.

Round Heads and Pointed Heads Production: California Polytechnic Institute, March 2007

CIBS: How has the series been doing since you assumed sole editorship? What does the future look like? Are you close to bringing the project to an end?

Tom Kuhn: John Willett died in 2002. Since then the principal volumes we have managed to bring out are Collected Plays 8 and Brecht on Art and Politics. That may not sound like much, but I lost a good year through illness and, more importantly, there were more publishers’ sagas. Last year, amid some secrecy, Methuen sold off the whole of the ‘drama’ list, including Brecht, in order to satisfy their venture capitalist creditors. Now ‘Methuen Drama’, confusingly, has nothing to do with Methuen proper, but is an imprint of A&C Black, which itself is a subsidiary of Bloomsbury. Suhrkamp and the Brecht heirs took some persuading that this was an acceptable solution, but Bloomsbury is a medium-sized (in UK terms) independent publishing house with some financial strength (not least because they publish the Harry Potter books!). It is still a commercial operation – no academic or university publishing house has ever been involved in publishing Brecht – but it is probably the best home in the UK that Brecht could hope for. It is important to stress the commercial aspect to all of this because of course there are lots of wonderful books I can imagine doing, and some of only marginal profitability which are under active consideration, but I have to tread cautiously and work constantly to persuade the publisher that Brecht is worth the effort (and the significant royalty which goes to Suhrkamp and the heirs).

Nonetheless, the future looks good. In press at the moment there is a new scholarly edition and translation of Mahagonny by Steve Giles, and in prospect we have a book by Ekkehard Schall (the great Brechtian actor and Brecht’s son-in-law) as well as the extended Brecht-Weigel correspondence (which must come out in German first). A&C Black are also keen to develop other, potentially more profitable, sides of the Brecht list, and that is as it should be. Under contract at the moment we have Student Editions of Fear and Misery of the Third Reich and The Good Person of Szechwan, and there are new translations of Mother Courage (Michael Hofmann) and The Caucasian Chalk Circle (Frank McGuinness). A&C Black will continue to publish new translations associated with stage productions, so long as they make a significantly new contribution (and so long as the heirs agree). That all adds up to quite a lot of activity. There are of course also still important gaps in what is available in English. Amongst other things, I should love to do books of dramatic fragments (Fatzer in particular) and adaptations, we need more prose (the Flüchtlingsgespräche amongst other things), there’s plenty more ‘theory’ we could contemplate, and lots more poems. Of the latter, for example, I’d like to do some parallel text editions. There is a sense in which this project can never come to an end, and I hope to be associated with new Brecht publications for many years to come.

A&C Black, by the way, should be able to market the Brecht list more effectively than Methuen could. Although A&C Black are not permitted to market the old volumes directly in North America, there are hopes that they may acquire exclusive worldwide rights for some of the new material. Besides, Bloomsbury have an office in New York, so that must help – as of course does the internet.

CIBS: How important is English-Language Brecht for the Globalized Brecht Industry?

Tom Kuhn: It is hard to overestimate the importance of good English-language Brecht editions. It is of course not only students of German who are interested, but also students and practitioners in other literatures and in the worlds of theatre, film, media studies, and cultural studies. Internationally, far more of these read English than any other language. The North American market is of course the most important, but it is worth bearing in mind that, as well as other Anglophone populations, many people may have access to Brecht through English as a second or foreign language. In India and Asia as a whole it is the English-language editions that do the work, not the original German texts.

CIBS: Methuen / A. C. Black “competes” with Arcade / Penguin and Grove for the English-Language Brecht market.  Is this competition “good for business,” or do you see it as a dilution of the Brecht product?

Tom Kuhn: I have nothing in principle against competition. There is of course the danger that it may create new commercial pressures, and it would be a pity if all the publishers were to be put off publishing less famous texts for fear that their market-share would be too small. On the other hand, it is great for the reading public to have more than one ‘product’ to consider. The Grove editions have historically offered significant alternative versions. In addition there have been lots of extremely welcome initiatives by smaller publishers taking risks: for example the City Lights (San Francisco) edition of the Keuner stories or the Libris (London) War Primer.

There is more of a problem with the Arcade volumes. As I understand it, these have been more or less pirate editions, exploiting the translations and other material of the Methuen volumes without either permission from or payment to the original publisher or the translators and editors who actually did the work. Arcade was able to do this because the Brecht heirs make it a condition that publishers and translators hand over copyright for their work to Stefan Brecht. If Stefan says yes, as he did in the past, then the grounds on which Methuen could pursue a case against Arcade are limited (and the potential rewards not worth the cost). I am hopeful that Arcade will not be able to do this sort of thing again, but it doesn’t seem that we can easily prevent them hawking the old volumes.

CIBS: Do you see the need for a standard edition of Brecht in English and is your series meant to be that, or would you like it to be that? Or, are you happy enough to see Brecht served by different, diverse masters?

Tom Kuhn: I do think there is a need for a standard scholarly edition. And by that I mean the editorial apparatus more than the translations themselves. The Methuen Drama volumes are scholarly editions which of course make heavy use of the German editions but remain in important respects independent of them. In the old days, John Willett was sometimes able to publish material even in advance of the German publishers, and he gave accounts of the genesis, context and reception of works which are still a useful (and underrated) supplement to the scholarly literature in the field. When I did my version of Round Heads and Pointed Heads I thought, similarly, that it was important for an English readership to bring out the relationship with Shakespeare, and so again my editorial notes and material set different accents from the German editions. Of course I don’t mean that these should be the only valued accounts in English. On the other hand, no publisher is likely to take on this sort of edition again in the near future, so it’s important to get it as right as possible. I feel a responsibility there.

As for the translations, as series editor it’s my job to make sure that those that appear in the Collected Plays series are as full and accurate as is reasonable for an independently readable text. They are likely to be taken as ‘standard’, even if that doesn’t make so much sense applied to a translation. For the other single play editions, like the new translations of Mother Courage and The Caucasian Chalk Circle, there is significantly more freedom. In general I am extremely happy to see good alternative versions on the market. I would be nowhere as restrictive as John Willett was inclined to be. There are signs too that the Brecht heirs have softened their line in that respect.

CIBS: The editions published under your watch have kept the same editorial apparatus as the original Manheim / Willet ones, with the exception of the new general introductions. Have you ever considered changing the editorial apparatus?

Tom Kuhn: For the Collected Plays it seemed worthwhile producing a standard set, all presented in the same way. But, for example, Steve Gile's single play volume for Mahagonny does not adhere all that closely to the “model.” For the theory volumes, since there was then no prospect of updating Brecht on Theatre (or starting over again – much as I would dearly like to have done that), I thought it best to try to make the three books “belong together” and cross-refer. But of course I have considered other paths! If there were complete freedom and no commercial constraints it would be fun to do an edition modeled on the Versuche, and not even begin to divide the texts into these often awkward genre categories.

CIBS: Is it time for the “classic” editorial treatment of Brecht? Why not create an editorial apparatus that is used for Greek Tragedy or Shakespeare, i.e. heavily annotated edition? Money aside, might this not be a new way to market Brecht?

Tom Kuhn: Indeed, there is scope for this sort of thing. But money is the ineluctable problem. The “product” has a limited market, whatever you do with it, so the pressure from the publisher is always to do it as cheaply as possible. The Methuen Drama Student Editions, which are perhaps not so well known in the US, go some way towards satisfying the need you describe. They are designed for schools and for university students of drama and theatre, and so do provide relatively distanced and elementary introductions and other material. Anything more ambitious is probably out of the question at the moment. The best way to do it would be as an electronic publication in collaboration with Suhrkamp (so that you could refer to the German or English text and follow up links to other Brecht texts and all sorts of editorial material at will, not to mention music, production recordings, set designs and so on). For a while, I even hoped that something like this might be possible, at least for The Threepenny Opera, given its immense popularity (and so commercial viability), but all the various copyright holders are far too cautious to take this sort of risk.

CIBS: You and David Constantine have supplied new translations, but you continue to use older translations as well. One example comes to mind – H.R. Hays’ Trial of Lucullus. What was the rationale for continuing to use the older translations?

Tom Kuhn: It’s money again, really. Since there is very little profit to be had from these volumes and as I wanted new translators to be paid decently (the more so since they forfeit the copyright in their work) it was simply sensible to use some old translations if they were at all usable and not expensive to acquire. I should prefer to do everything new.

CIBS:  On a related note, one could even make a case that the Manheim / Willett translations are getting on in years. Could one make a case for entirely new 21st century translations of Brecht?

Tom Kuhn: Absolutely. It would be wonderful to start over again and re-do the whole edition. Translations age in a way that originals cannot. Every generation or so there should be new published versions of all the classics. But no publisher is going to pay for that. The approach has to be much more piecemeal. I am very pleased to involve new translators (like David Constantine and Steve Giles) when I can, and I occasionally check translations for the theatre to see if a case could be made for them too. The problem there is that, however I might embrace competition, I can’t expect A&C Black on their own to publish too many rival versions of one and the same text (we already have three versions of Mother Courage in print). Also, ideally the theatres should approach us first, so that we can do an edition, not in the aftermath, but to coincide with the production. That is a marketing opportunity on which the publishers are quite keen.

CIBS:  Your series has been the one, if not the only one, which has published extensive material from Brecht’s theoretical writings: Willett’s Brecht on Theatre, Kuhn / Giles, Brecht on Art and Politics, and Silberman’s Brecht on Film and Radio. Are there more publications of this material planned? Are there any thoughts to publishing as much material as is included in the BFA? In regards to the theoretical writings, Willett started the whole ball of wax with his Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic first published in 1964. It’s still a handy, popular and useful text, which might possibly be the single most important text in the post-WWII English Brecht reception? Do you agree?

Tom Kuhn:  The organization of this material is of course significantly different from that in the BFA (where things are just more or less chronological). In Methuen, as well as the three principal theory volumes you name, there are the Messingkauf Dialogues and all the material published in the Notes to the individual Collected Plays volumes. Yes, it would be good to do more, or maybe even to consolidate some of what we have. Above all, I should like to update Brecht on Theatre and to do a supplementary volume with the Practice Scenes for Actors and material like that. And I should like to take on the Buch der Wendungen material. I have hopes that, eventually, we’ll get to do some of this, but it would be unrealistic even to plan to publish all the fragments and bits and pieces in the BFA. We have to think, what is the real English-language readership for this material?

We should also not forget that Brecht on Theatre came out in 1964, before much of this material was available even in German. It was a huge achievement on John Willett’s part and has become the single most important text for the reception and understanding of Brecht in the English-speaking world. It still enjoys very good sales. But it has dated. Now all of the material of which John was permitted only to give secondhand accounts has been published in German, along with much, much more. A selection with this title made today would look very significantly different. Besides, much as I respect John’s achievement as a translator, this is the volume which most betrays his weaknesses. For example, he often overlooks instances where Brecht is making deliberate use of Marxian or Hegelian vocabulary, and so mis-renders important ideas. The success of the volume, however, (as well as the license to Farrar, Straus and Giroux) make it particularly hard to persuade the publishers that there is a need to change it. That was why, when we came to compile Brecht on Film and Radio and more especially Brecht on Art and Politics we had to tailor them to what had already appeared in John’s volume, even though that involved some slightly messy compromises.

CIBS:  Brecht on Art and Politics and Brecht on Film and Radio are the two most recent additions to Brecht’s theoretical works in English. We have enjoyed both volumes immensely and have been able to use them in courses and at conferences. Not only do they extend the scope of Brecht’s theoretical work in English, but they provide material which seems very contemporary, 21st century, postmodern, etc… in comparison with the Willett text. Was this the intent? I mean, you did have to make selections, or were you just interested in adding to the theoretical corpus in English?

Tom Kuhn:  The fact that these two later volumes read so differently from Brecht on Theatre has to do with the onward march of Brecht criticism since the 1960s and above all with the perception that Brecht’s is an important voice in the debates of cultural theory as they have developed in more recent decades. John wanted to establish Brecht as an important voice in the theatre; Marc Silberman, Steve Giles and I needed to demonstrate Brecht’s place in relation to Benjamin, Adorno, and later French theory. Nonetheless, our primary aim was simply to add what we perceived to be the most significant essays to what was available in English.

CIBS: We don’t have time to discuss each and every piece, so let me just pick out a few. I found “On the Theatricality of Fascism” and “The Crime Novel” in Brecht on Art and Politics and “The Threepenny Lawsuit” in Brecht on Film and Radio to be particularly engaging texts and translations. To what extent have these texts or others influenced Brecht scholarship since they came out?

I’ve liked “On the Theatricality of Fascism” since I was an undergraduate, so I was determined to include that, but of the texts you mention it is “The Threepenny Lawsuit” which is undoubtedly the most important. It reveals the sophistication of Brecht’s emerging theory of the artwork in modern capitalist society in a way that no other text does. Its place has been established above all by Steve Giles’s book, Bertolt Brecht and Critical Theory: Marxism, Modernity and the Threepenny Lawsuit (Peter Lang 1998). It is too early to say how much influence the English publications have had yet.

PART II

TRANSLATING BRECHT: THE ROUND HEADS AND POINTED HEADS

CIBS: You have done a significant amount of translation over the course of your career, specifically on Brecht, how did you come to be such a prolific translator? Did you train as a translator? Do you follow any theory of translation?

Tom Kuhn: I am not sure I am so very prolific, but translating is an activity I have come to enjoy enormously. I have a certain amount of training, in that formal literary translation is still an important component of the undergraduate German course at Oxford where I was a student and where I now teach. So I teach translation, I even sometimes teach the theory of translation. But I came into the professional practice of all of this more by accident, and no, I follow no specific theory. Indeed, fascinating as the theory is, it seems almost a separate discipline, concerned with the philosophical relationship between original text and foreign rendering, rather than with the actually nitty-gritty of labouring over a passage in the privacy of your study.

CIBS: What are the biggest thrills in translating Brecht? What are the biggest difficulties?

Tom Kuhn: Brecht’s literary language is extraordinary. At one and the same time it apes the gestures of naturalistic dialogue and achieves the most exquisite stylizations. It draws on the Luther Bible, on English sources, both literary and colloquial, on Latin authors and inflections, and on especially South German dialect. When you think you have grasped a phrase in your own tongue you so often discover that you have fallen short of the poetry, or of the resonances, or of the direct and forceful appeal. The difficulties are clear! The thrills lie in uncovering all this. There is no better way to get to know the intricacies of someone’s writing than by trying to translate. And then sometimes, just sometimes, you feel you may have come close to it in English. That is a rewarding experience.

CIBS: How do you assess Brecht as a wordsmith, a language master? Does he belong in the language pantheon of German Culture with Luther and Goethe?

Tom Kuhn: I guess I’ve made that clear already. His contribution to the development of the German language as it is used daily and written by all does not of course compare with that of Luther. But his contribution to the literary language, especially to the writing of poetry, is very significant. The comparison with Goethe is apt in many ways. They both made themselves masters of all the genres, and both wrote an immense quantity of lyric poetry, right up to their last years. They were both innovators and theorists, as well as skilled exploiters of the tradition.

Round Heads and Pointed Heads Production: California Polytechnic Institute, March 2007

CIBS: Do you approach Brecht’s work with a particular emphasis? For example, do you approach his work primary through language, through theater, or through scholarship? I ask this question because one can often detect a certain predilection when reading a dramatic translation. Sometimes the translator is a working poet or writer who has no linguistic or historical background to speak of, yet is able to deliver a workable text. Sometimes, the theatricality of the translation jumps out at me, and I know immediately that the translator is a playwright, or a person of the theater. And sometimes, I read a translation and it breathes the erudition of history and language knowledge, yet sometimes fails on the level of poetry and theatricality. Care to tackle this issue?

Tom Kuhn: I come to Brecht first as a scholar. When I translate I have to throw some of that off, to speak and sing my own versions and make them ‘work’ as independent creations. Sometimes I’m sure I fail. I also come to the process of translation, especially of poetry, as a curious (I hope, intelligent) outsider to a puzzle. I have had interesting experiences working with David Constantine. He is a very notable poet. When he translates he seems, by some process very foreign to me, to enter the world of the poem, to discover a voice akin to that of the original, and to deliver a poem perhaps equivalent to it, from the inside as it were. When I translate a poem, I look at the form, the metre and the rhymes (I am always quite relieved to have those crutches), I count syllables, I find equivalents for the words, I use dictionaries, a rhyming dictionary and a thesaurus. I work mimetically with the surface of the poem, and then I juggle and tweak and play with it, until it seems to fall into place. Sometimes it’s fast, but the process can last weeks for a single couplet. The astonishing thing is that, just occasionally, my colleague David Constantine’s and my versions meet in the middle. We have talked of doing a volume of Brecht poems together. I wonder how that would turn out!

I am NOT a man of the theatre, and in some naive way I was unaware of the risks of the translation of dialogue until I experienced my own text in production. Having done so, I am now keen to take on another dramatic text, and I think I would take more risks. I am inclined to think my naivete about translating for the theatre is actually an advantage. In England and in the US there is a semi-naturalistic roughened-up argot which is often taken as a sort of standard in the theatre, so that Chekhov and Lorca and Brecht all end up sounding the same. I have heard versions of Brecht in the theatre, by established playwrights and screenplay writers, which have made him sound like a ‘70s kitchen-sink dramatist. It is terribly important not to flatten out his writing like this, but to keep the oddities and the poetry, even if they may sometimes make his lines harder to deliver. There is meant to be a Verfremdung in the language too.

CIBS: Which Brecht plays ones have given you the most difficulty and why?

Tom Kuhn: I have only translated Round Heads and Pointed Heads and The Congress of Whitewashers. I’d love to do more. They both have their own difficulties. In the Congress I spent hours consulting with experts and deciding what to do about all the Chinese names and references. But for the rest, the language in that play is prose, and so there’s quite a bit of room for manoeuvre. My dialogue hasn’t been tested in the theatre so I’m not sure how well it has worked. Round Heads and Pointed Heads, by contrast, is substantially in verse and with lots of songs. There are irregular rhyming couplets, close rhymed ditties, and lots and lots of blank verse. I tried to use the same verse forms throughout as Brecht. And for the songs, I tried to make them fit the music, paying attention to things like extended syllables, high notes etc., as well as to rhythm and rhyme. (In the published version some of the songs are in John Willett’s versions, but I have versions of my own for the whole thing.)

A scathing sideswipe by one of the student audience at the CalPoly production drew my attention forcibly to perhaps the most difficult task of all: translating bad stuff! In the play there is a very silly song sung by the proto-SA supporters of the Fascist dictator Iberin, the “Whitewash Song.” It’s meant to be embarrassing doggerel. In the German that will be read as Brecht intended, as a reflection of the cultural and linguistic impoverishment of the Fascist supporters, but in English there is a terrible, probably unavoidable risk that it will be read as stupid translation.

CIBS: Give us an idea of the business of translation: i.e. what copyright permissions are required; what conflicts arise?

Tom Kuhn: Well, first of all, anything we want to publish has to be approved by the Brecht heirs, normally by way of the German publisher, Suhrkamp. Anyone who tries to publish Brecht without this authority and without having paid for the privilege is likely to be pursued through the courts. The theatre end of things is, however, not really my business. The heirs and their agents have considerable authority. The IBS website and the imprint pages of the relevant volumes give information about who you have to approach. The degree of interest depends on the degree of prominence which the production might have: they are likely to pay much more attention to a production on Broadway than to a student production in a quiet college town. In general, the heirs are unhappy with the idea of ‘adaptation’, and even cuts may have to be made carefully and quietly. In Berlin, Barbara Brecht is said even to have intervened in casting decisions.

CIBS: What copyright permissions and general permissions do you hold as an English-language translator of Brecht when a theater wants to use your translation? Do you received licensing fees; Do you have authority to reject edits, deletions, additions?

Tom Kuhn: I hold copyright only on the editorial material which I have authored. The publisher has copyright only for the design and lay-out. I can “assert my moral right” to a translation, but the copyright for that is passed to Stefan Brecht. Formally, no one has to ask or tell me anything. In practice, I hope that most theatres, if they were interested in using my translations, would contact me (after all, I’m not hard to find). I wouldn’t dream of interfering in their creative processes, but I’d be fascinated to know what they think and how things go, and I’d be glad to help if I could. In the case of the CalPoly production of Round Heads and Pointed Heads, I received a completely unexpected cut of the royalty from the Brechts’ New York agent ($141.75). That was very nice, and I hope it may happen again, but I have no contract with them and no formal rights.

CIBS: Let’s turn to your translation of The Round Heads and Pointed Heads (Vol. 4 in the A.C. Black Edition which was produced in March 2007 at the the California Polytechnic Institute in San Obispo, CA.  Did you consult any other translations of the text before you started; e.g. The N. Goold-Verschoyle text from 1937? If so, what were your opinions of these other translations? What did they lack?

Tom Kuhn: I did indeed read the Goold-Verschoyle and I looked at a couple of other old translations which I discovered in manuscript. My purpose was to see if there was a usable text which might obviate the need for a new translation. I’m afraid I thought they were all, by turns, completely unreadable and hopelessly inaccurate.

CIBS: How much did you work with Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, the original rationale for the play?

Tom Kuhn: I read a lot of Shakespeare, not just Measure for Measure, in order to get myself into the groove of writing blank verse. But Brecht’s play has wandered so far from the original intention of an adaptation of the Shakespeare, that I didn’t use it much after that – until I came to do the Notes. Then I sought to give a sense of that early draft adaptation by translating a page of Brecht’s very first version (from the Archive in Berlin) and slaughtering Shakespeare (as he had done). That was quite fun!

Round Heads and Pointed Heads Production: California Polytechnic Institute, March 2007

CIBS: As the editorial apparatus notes, Roundheads occupies a similar space in the Brecht canon as that of Galileo: namely, a piece that underwent several variations, and which served as a critical Auseinandersetzung for Brecht at a transitional moment in his career. As a result, Galileo and Roundheads both have enormous primary and secondary materials associated with the texts. How did you confront and engage this issue?

Tom Kuhn: Yes, this work holds a rather special place in Brecht’s output, especially as it was the only one of his plays which experienced any sort of large-scale professional production (in Copenhagen) between 1933 and 1938. Given how his ideas of acting and the theatre were developing over this period, it comes to play an important role in his theoretical deliberations, as his only real example. I was aware that I could have let the Notes section swell out of all proportion to the importance of the play in other terms (and in relation to the other plays in the series). I hope we grouped all the most important texts in the Notes to volume 4; others are cross-referenced to Brecht on Theatre.

CIBS: The California Polytechnic Institute in San Obispo, CA produced your translation of Round Heads and Pointed Heads this past March (1-3; 8-10 March 2007) and you were able to attend at least one production and participate in a seminar discussion on the production. So, start us off here: How did this production come about? How did Cal Poly decide to do this piece and use your translation?

Tom Kuhn: I honestly never figured quite how the director, Josh Machamer, landed on this particular play. He is a Brecht fan, and was simply casting around for new material. When he discovered my translation he clearly liked it enough! Josh has some experience in political theatre and was clearly moved by the parable of racial divisions. Interestingly, he had already done a show on the subject of ‘racial cleansing’ in Bosnia; and I did my first draft of the translation while the first Yugoslav war was raging. I remember, the third scene (where the peasants discover their racial differences and drift apart, with the glow of burning cottages in the background) made a shiver run down my spine. It still does.

CIBS:  Were there any edits, deletions, or additions made to the translation for the production?

Tom Kuhn: Oh yes! It’s a messy and long play, with a huge cast, so there were plenty of streamlining cuts. But they were generally content with my text, I’m pleased to say, there weren’t many ‘corrections’ or re-writes.

CIBS:  Were you solicited for any dramaturgical background during the rehearsal phase of the production; i.e. were you asked to provide insight into words, expressions, modes of performance, Brechtian Gestus, etc…

Tom Kuhn: No, I came to the production too late for that. But Josh is now talking (possibly dreaming?) of doing Turandot or the Congress of Whitewashers, and if he does we have indeed planned a much closer collaboration. I should welcome the opportunity to work with the students, and I should be very open to re-working the text. I find those sorts of processes fascinating, and I hope I wouldn’t be “proprietorial” about “my” text.

CIBS:  Describe the production to us. What did you think about the stage design, directorial strategy, performances?

Tom Kuhn: Well, this is quite a small-scale drama department, so resources are limited. The set was a flexible scaffold frame with stairs and levels. That gave the production some vertical space which was well used, especially in the street scenes and for Iberin’s major interventions. A lot of the rest of the props were very simple or improvised, sometimes with a slightly cartoonish quality to them, which came off very well. For example, the peasants’ guns were outlandishly large wooden cut-outs (actually rather like the early settlers’ blunderbusses in the Mission museum in town!). That caricatural aspect was also a feature, by the way, of the first production, in 1936 in Copenhagen. For the rest, the “look” of the production was quite conservative, especially in European terms, with plenty of early C20 (slightly ‘cabaret’) references in the costumes etc. I think the team was aware of the need to win over a potentially Brecht-sceptical audience. After all, this was a daring choice for a production in San Luis Obispo. But it did make pretty full use of Brechtian ideas of theatre and acting. The production was also designed very clearly to maintain a narrative flow (something easily lost in this play, with all its sub-plots) and did not in the least shy away from Brecht’s political messages. That was great. And some of the performances, notably Kerry DiMaggio as Madame Cornamontis, were excellent. The greatest loss for me was the very limited use that was made of Eisler’s music (and several songs were cut). I can see that, at the outset, Josh may have been nervous about depending too much on musicians and singers, but in fact the production featured a couple of outstanding performers, and the musical numbers that survived were very good. All in all, it was an extremely entertaining and thought-provoking event, just as it should be.

CIBS:  What was the audience reaction to the performance?

Tom Kuhn: That, I suppose, is the real test. The responses that I encountered, in the theatre, in discussion with students afterwards and in reviews, were exactly as one might hope them to be. The whole team should be congratulated on that. People may have been a little wary of Brecht and of political Germans in general, but they were curious and quite excited to find that they could be entertained and have their political ideas shaken up a bit at the same time. There was lots of laughter during the production (it is a very funny play) but afterwards I found people talking about racial conflict in Iraq and elsewhere, about how governments betray their people (yes, including the Bush government), about the role of the media in politics, about the relationship between economics and morality, and so on. Clearly it had been a thought-provoking experience. I was much heartened by that.

CIBS:  How did it feel to have your translated Brechtian prose produced onstage?

Tom Kuhn: This was my first experience of that, and my initial reaction was embarrassment! I had not needed to think of myself as a ‘writer’ before, and it is indeed a very odd experience to hear your own words coming back at you from the stage. There are definitely some passages which I think I should have tackled differently, but all in all – after I got used to it – it was rather encouraging. I think it has given me confidence to translate more, and to be, when the need arises, a little more daring. It is exciting to be able to contribute to making these texts work again in a new and different world.

Photo Credits: Tim Dugan

© Electronic Communications from the International Brecht Society: ECIBS 36.1 (Winter 2008)