Brand: A Version for the Stage by Geoffrey Hill (Penguin Classics) [Paperback]

Geoffrey Hill (Adapter), Henrik Ibsen (Author), Inga-Stina Ewbank (Translator)

Book Description

Series: Penguin Classics | Publication Date: January 1, 1997

This is the story of a minister driven by faith to risk the death of his wife and child. "Brand" pits a man of vision against the forces of ignorance and venality.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Henrik Ibsen was born of well-to-do parents at Skien, a small Norwegian coastal town, on March 20, 1828. In 1836 his father went bankrupt, and the family was reduced to near poverty. At the age of fifteen, he was apprenticed to an apothecary in Grimstad. In 1850 Ibsen ventured to Christianiaopresent-day Oslooas a student, with the hope of becoming a doctor. On the strength of his first two plays he was appointed "theater-poet" to the new Bergen National Theater, where he wrote five conventional romantic and historical dramas and absorbed the elements of his craft. In 1857 he was called to the directorship of the financially unsound Christiania Norwegian Theater, which failed in 1862. In 1864, exhausted and enraged by the frustration of his efforts toward a national drama and theater, he quit Norway for what became twenty-seven years of voluntary exile abroad. In Italy he wrote the volcanic Brand (1866), which made his reputation and secured him a poet's stipend from the government. Its companion piece, the phantasmagoric Peer Gynt, followed in 1867, then the immense double play, Emperor and Galilean (1873), expressing his philosophy of civilization. Meanwhile, having moved to Germany, Ibsen had been searching for a new style. With The Pillars of Society he found it; this became the first of twelve plays, appearing at two-year intervals, that confirmed his international standing as the foremost dramatist of his age. In 1900 Ibsen suffered the first of several strokes that incapacitated him. He died in Oslo on May 23, 1906.

Product Details

• Paperback: 176 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Classics (January 1, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0140446761
• ISBN-13: 978-0140446760
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #658,131 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #15 in Books > Education & Reference > Foreign Language Nonfiction > More Languages > Norwegian

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Patience hardens, August 15, 2000

By 

Dominic Fox (Leicester, Leicestershire United Kingdom) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Brand: A Version for the Stage by Geoffrey Hill (Penguin Classics) (Paperback)

This is unmistakeably Hill's _Brand_: the technical grace of his Englishing of Ibsen shows an acute awareness of the responsibility of the translator to both the original text and the language into which it is to be translated. Hill's translation enriches not only the English language but the ability of English (and non-Norwegian) speakers to appreciate Ibsen's brooding, symbolically charged drama of the challenge of faith in the midst of common life. Is Brand's fidelity to his "dear Christ hurt with thorns" obdurate or obstinate? In this play, the repudiation of social morality in the name of higher things is put to the question: what if devotion to such "higher things" also leads to, or becomes a mask for, moral isolation, the cauterization of social feeling? Uncompromising and yet compromised, Brand is a caution, and _Brand_ a cautionary tale...

2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the best books I have read...., March 8, 2000

By 

Jonathan Johnson (Toronto, Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Brand (Paperback)

This book captures the essence of humanity. I recommend to anyone who wants to find themself.

2 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars The "Good" Ibsen, June 5, 2000

By 

Carra R Lane - See all my reviews

This review is from: Brand: A Version for the Stage by Geoffrey Hill (Penguin Classics) (Paperback)

Brand is the flip side of Peer Gynt. Ibsen may well have intended to write heroism into Brand, a charismatic dissenting priest, but could not breathe any life into his protagonist at all. Brand is cold, righteous, merciless, uncompromising. The play is dated, dull, static, but of historical interest to Ibsen scholars, since he may have learned plenty by writing Brand. The rather rigid Norwegian state/church of his time loved it, granted Henrik a permanent poet stipend for Brand. Modern gentle readers may roll their eyes.