Any translator of La Ronde is faced with the question of which text to use. We have drawn both on the 1896-7 original version (Ein Liebesreigen), the manuscript of which is in the Bibliotheca Bodmeriana in Geneva (and published in Gabriella Rovagnati, Ein Liebesreigen: Die Urfassung des ‘Reigen’, 2004), and the 1903 Wiener Verlag edition. It is clear that most of the (generally minor) amendments were made with the aim of toning down the play’s sexual explicitness, especially as regards the female characters. Living in more robust times, we have almost always preferred the unexpurgated original.

One of our first decisions was the title and here, sadly, English doesn’t help: Round Dance has none of the right associations, and we wanted to avoid a radical renaming. Perhaps in deference to Ophüls’ great film, we have decided that the French title La Ronde is the best.

We see the play as being of its time and place and have kept most of the proper names in their original form. The modulations in Schnitzler’s text between Sie and du (respectively, the formal and intimate forms of ‘you’) are highly significant; we have had to make do with various indirect ways of indicating these shifts, such as introducing terms of endearment as a substitute. None of these devices is entirely satisfactory, but we feel that they are preferable to simply ignoring the point. On the whole, we have not retained the distinctively Austrian formalities of address, such as küss die Hand (‘[I] kiss your hand’), except where some equivalent English expression was available. Generally, we have tried to find a palette of tones which reflect the minute twists and turns of Schnitzler’s brilliantly heard, class-specific dialogue. We have not attempted a pastiche of Edwardian English, although we have done our best to avoid obvious anachronisms. Above all, we have sought to achieve speakable, idiomatic English which captures the spirit, rather than always the absolute letter, of the original.

We are grateful to the remarkable group of actors who read a draft of this translation in the rehearsal room of English Touring Theatre in March 2007. The acid test of any dialogue is to hear it spoken aloud, and the actors helped sharpen our ears; where we have failed, the fault is entirely our own.

Stephen Unwin, Peter Zombory-Moldovan
London, October 2007

For Further Reading

For Further Reading