​   RAE DALVEN
                                                                                                                                                    TRANSLATION


Veery: Of your translation, what is your favorite?
Rae Dalven: Cavafy.

​Veery: Did you have any tough years of trying to make it all work, money, prestige?
Rae Dalven: You never get paid for translation properly, nobody does really. You don’t get paid for it well. It’s really a labor of love, period. There’s a lot of rivalry, and it makes it harder.

 

Veery: Do you interest yourself in another field to bring your translating an added dimension?
Rae Dalven: Sure. My field is theater. I’m a graduate of the Yale University Theatre, and I write plays. And that always helps me in translation because I try to get a vivid reaction to the words.

Veery: Who are your favorite writers and why?
Rae Dalven: In the ancient, all the dramatists: Aristophanes, Euripides, and Sophocles especially. I think the two greatest plays – Oedipus Rex written by Sophocles is a great drama; he has all the principles of good playwriting. Surprise, holding your interest to the very end. And the other one is Hamlet, and it’s for the same reason. I consider those two plays the greatest plays that I have come across in English. The modern? Eugene O’Neill. He attacked our society in some ways. His greatest play is The Iceman Cometh, and he writes about people who are disinherited in that play, and you’re sympathetic. He writes about the lower class of people in some of his plays, and of course he’s clever, he’s clever. Strange Interlude – he was clever because he used the aside. I enjoyed that very much. I think I saw most all of Eugene O’Neill’s plays in the theater. I went to see them. As a matter of fact, I wrote my doctoral dissertation on Eugene O’Neill: The Concepts of Greek Tragedy in the Plays of O’Neill.

Veery
1992