“Vildanden” is perhaps the most difficult of all Ibsen’s prose dramas to translate. Some of the speeches of Gina and Relling are indeed quite untranslatable. The difficulty in the case of Gina is in respect to her frequent malapropisms, which, for the most part, turn on the mispronunciation of a word, or the use of a word which resembles in sound the one she wants. It is obvious that in the transference of such blunders of one language to another their exact significance can not be caught. Occasionally it has been possible, as when she says “divide” for “divert,” or calls the pistol “pigstol.” But these instances are rare, and more frequently Gina’s slips could only have been indicated by en…
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