by Henrik Ibsen
BUTTON MOULDER: There we agree. The brimstone lake of fire
is not for toe-dippers, such as you were and are.
PEER: That’s very good to hear.
Now may I go?
BUTTON MOULDER: No!
It’s been decreed that you’ll be melted down,
here, in my spoon.
PEER: So that’s the trick you’ve come up with, you devils,
while I’ve been on my travels.
BUTTON MOULDER: The process dates back to the first creation
of living things; and is an essential link
in the grand economy. You’ll have a fair notion
of what I mean: you could trim a button mould
in your young days. Many castings are spoiled;
sometimes a button is without its shank.
What did you do with a spoiled button?
PEER: Tossed it as junk.
BUTTON MOULDER: Ay, so you did. You were Jon Gynt’s lad.
Everyone rooted around in his grand pile
just so long as it lasted, with the ale-casks full.
But the master I serve is economical;
he doesn’t throw out what can be reused.
You, dear sir, he meant for a shining button
on the world’s waistcoat; but somehow a loop broke.
Even so, you were never forgotten.
You shall be fused
into the lump that he’ll rework.
PEER: Re-smelt me, you mean? Not that, surely?
Like Askeladden’s failed brothers,62 and all?
BUTTON MOULDER: Upon my soul, you’ve hit the nail entirely!
It’s happened to thousands. At the Royal Mint
in Kongsberg63 they melt down and then re-coin
whatever’s been defaced or has worn thin.
PEER: But this is torture, not economy.
I beg you, beg your master to relent.
One shankless button or one battered shilling,
what’s that to him? What could he possibly want
from me? I won’t be melted down for ready money.
I’m shocked that he so lacks all decent feeling.
BUTTON MOULDER: According to, dependent on, and by and large,
all things considered, with appended clause,
just as the spirit takes you, tit for tat,
the metal in itself is worth a bit,
you must admit.
PEER: No, and again no! It’s physical abuse!
With tooth and nail I’ll fight my case.
You can’t detain me without charge!
BUTTON MOULDER: But we must do the best with what we’re given.
You’re not ethereal enough for heaven.
PEER: Obviously not. And I don’t aim that high.
I hope I’ve my fair share of modesty.
But of my Selbstgrundlage I’ll not yield
one farthing’s worth to rivals in that field.
Let me be judged by the old rules of law.
I’ll take my punishment – yes, that I vow!
I’ll do my stretch with Old Nick, him with hooves,
a hundred years if need be. Modern thought believes
there’s no real fire and brimstone, and that all
the torment’s merely metaphysical.
So, things won’t be too bad, more quarantine
than torture-chamber: ‘transition’, the fox said,
admittedly while being flayed.
But there we are. We wait and stand in line;
redemption’s bell peals out. One doesn’t thrust
ahead of others, waits one’s turn in trust.
This other scheme, though, is ghastly: to be fused
into the beings of a thousand strangers
without distinction; Selbstgrundlage abused;
this utter travesty of the Gyntian Whole.
This is what angers,
this is what makes my innermost self rebel!
BUTTON MOULDER: My dear sir, you’ve no call
to make such protests. Never in the past,
even for a moment, have you been yourself,
so what does it matter? And on whose behalf
do you bewail this lost identity?
PEER: Have not I been? I weep with merriment.
Something else he has been – that’s it? – this fellow Gynt?
No, button moulder, you stand in blind judgement
against me. Could you but see into my heart and soul
you would discover
Peer, Peer, the one and only Peer,
the irreducible entity
indissoluble to mere quantity.
BUTTON MOULDER: Such is not possible. I have my orders set out in print.
Look, they’re here; and I shall read them aloud.
‘You must claim back Peer Gynt.
He has defied our determination for his road
through life. Into the casting-ladle with him; he is skint.’
PEER: Do they indeed say ‘Peer Gynt’, those words you read?
Should you not truly have said ‘Rasmus’ or ‘Jon’?
BUTTON MOULDER: It’s a long while since they were melted down.
Come along with you, now; you’re trying to buy time.
PEER: I jolly well won’t.
Suppose that someone else is meant,
and tomorrow you find that out, and it’s too late?
Have a care, my good man!
Be slow to deliver this verdict as your own.
You’d be complicit in a crime.
BUTTON MOULDER: It is written.
PEER: Grant me some time of grace.
BUTTON MOULDER: How would you use it?
PEER: I shall get you proof
that I have been myself the whole of my life.
That’s what we’re wrangling over.
BUTTON MOULDER: What would the proof comprise?
PEER: Eye-witnesses, notarized referees.
BUTTON MOULDER: I say
that, even so, my lord’s judgement will stand.
PEER: No, that’s impossible; and, anyway,
sufficient unto the day!
Give me the chance to borrow myself against
my self remortgaged. I’ll soon be back, you’ll find.
You’re born once only and, even if you’re trounced,
you grow attached to yourself as you’ve been made.
Can we agree on that?
BUTTON MOULDER: It’s so agreed.
You have until the next crossroads. Take heed.
PEER hurries away.
SCENE 8
Another part of the heath.
PEER [running hard]:
Time is money, time is money, time is money, so it’s said.
Where the next crossroads are, I do not know.
Near? Far? I register earth’s heat
through the soles of my feet.
Witness! Must get a witness to show.
But how?
Surely not now, not on this desolate run.
The world is a botched job, the way things are done.
One’s rights should be self-evident as the sun!
A bent OLD MAN, staff in hand, around his neck a bag, is shuffling along, slightly ahead of PEER.
OLD MAN [pausing]:
Good sir, for charity! A shilling for the deserving poor.
PEER: Alas, I have no ready money.
OLD MAN: Prince Peer,
so we meet again, you see, after many a long year.
PEER: Who the devil are you?
OLD MAN: The old man of Rondane; you can’t
have forgotten the Dovre King, even in his condition of want?
PEER: You’re truly him?
DOVRE KING: On evil days though fallen, evil times.
PEER: Hard to believe …
DOVRE KING: And left to beg my way while hunger clems.
PEER: Witnesses like this don’t grow on trees!
DOVRE KING: The prince also has grown grey since last we met.
PEER: We both have cause to recall things with regret,
the wear and tear of the years.
But let us draw a line under private affairs,
the family feud.
Back then I was a footloose madcap lad.
DOVRE KING: That’s true enough. The prince was young,
and youth is full of folly and does wrong.
But fortune smiled on him when he put aside
his bride.
In so doing he spared himself a lifetime
of grief and shame.
These many years she’s run a dissolute course.
PEER: Is that so? You don’t say?
DOVRE KING: Lives off cold water and lye;
what’s as bad, or worse,
she’s taken up with that Trond.
PEER: Which Trond?64
DOVRE KING: Why, him from Valfjeldet!65
PEER: Once, he found
I’d run three girls he thought were his to ground.
DOVRE KING: My grandson, though, has become tall and fat
and is a stud. There’s scores can vouch for that.
PEER: May we put by nostalgia for a while,
I have something quite other to reveal
about a trifling problem: I require
a reference, a testimonial,
which you could well provide, father-in-law.
An honorarium or a pourboire66
could be arranged.
DOVRE KING: If I can meet his wish
the prince may care to offer me, in turn,
a written affidavit duly signed.
PEER: With pleasure, as I’m slightly strapped for cash.
I’ll tell you now the thing that’s on my mind.
You must remember well my brief sojourn
in Rondane when I came to claim my bride …
DOVRE KING: An unforgettable occasion, prince.
PEER: No need for titles here … and how you made
an unprovoked attack on my eyeball
in an attempt to change me to a troll;
how resolutely then I fought,
swore I would stand firm on my own two feet,
abjuring love, renouncing power and glory,
in order to retain my self and soul.
I need you now to swear to that in court,
there’s an all-prying judge I must convince.
DOVRE KING: I’m sorry; can’t be done.
PEER: Why on earth not?
DOVRE KING: The prince would not demand such perjury.
He donned the nether garment of a troll,
he will recall,
and quaffed our mead.
PEER: While you all tried
to lure me with troll arts which I rejected.
I refused to deny
my humanity:
that’s how you recognize a man, indeed.
It’s all there in the last line of that song.
DOVRE KING: Your lifetime’s recollections heard it wrong.
PEER: What utter nonsense!
DOVRE KING: When you fled my hall
you went with the troll’s commandment stuck in your soul.
PEER: Commandment?
DOVRE KING: Strong and divisive that command
which utterly divides our two worlds, trolls and men:
‘Troll, be to yourself sufficient!’
PEER [taking a step backwards]:
Enough! No more!
DOVRE KING: And with your utmost strength of mind
that is exactly how you’ve lived since then.
PEER: I am Peer Gynt!
DOVRE KING [lachrymose]:
Oh, what ingratitude!
You have lived like a troll but taken care to hide
the debt. The motto, the commandment, that I gave
has helped you to become a man of power.
And yet you come along and toss your head
at me and mine, who best deserve
your thanks.
PEER: Enough, I said.
You’re but a mountain troll equipped with ego’s goad.
What you’ve been saying is a load
of old rubbish.
DOVRE KING [pulling out a bundle of old newspapers from his bag]:
Do you suppose that in Dovre they lack
news and newspapers? Here it all is, in black
and red; so hearken. Hear the Blocksberg Post applaud,
the Heklefjeld Times67 resounding with your praises,
all since the winter that you left us, Peer.
Perhaps there’s something else you’d want to hear.
One writes under the byline ‘Stallion-hoof’
and someone – here it is – outlines the thesis
‘Concerning National Trolldom’. He offers proof
that trolldom, rightly understood, is not
a matter of horns and tails exactly, but
possession of a vital strip of skin.
The troll’s motif ‘Enough’ can of itself donate
essential trolldom’s powers to any man.
He cites you as an instance.
PEER: Me? A troll?
DOVRE KING: That’s how it stands; and how things stand as well.
PEER: I could have stayed, then, where you had me,
and, in a kind of peace, let you degrade me;
spared toil and trouble, many pairs of shoes.
Peer Gynt a troll? Your image I refuse.
Here, take a shilling for a bit of baccy.
DOVRE KING: My dear Prince Peer – for prince I do still take ye –
PEER: Shog off, old man, you seem bewildered,
confuse plain facts; you’re in your second childhood.
Some hospital for paupers may admit you
and be more lenient with your vacant chat. You …
DOVRE KING: A pauper hospital is what I’m seeking.
But, sad to say, my grandson’s many offspring
have gained such power in national politics;
they claim that I exist only in books.
‘Kinsman to kinsman’, as folk say,
‘is worst’; and that’s a proverb few can deny.
I’ve proved it, skin and bones. It’s very hard
to find yourself dismissed as tricks and trumpery.
PEER: Many can vouch for that, you will have heard.
DOVRE KING: And in Rondane itself we’re much in need
of charities and charitable aid,
poor boxes and the like. I’m told they have no place.
PEER: Among your ‘self-or-nothing’ populace.
DOVRE KING: The prince can hardly disagree with that.
Indeed he’s sharp enough to follow suit.
PEER: Look, gaffer, you are wrong. Wrong track entirely.
I tell it fair-and-squarely.
I myself stand upon the barren scarp, or …
DOVRE KING: Surely this cannot be! The prince a pauper?
PEER: A pauper through and through. My princely ego
long since pawned, though it still goes where I go.
What’s worse, I owe it all to you damned trolls.
Bad precedents can’t be soaped away like smells.
DOVRE KING: Well, there’s another hope dropped off its perch.
I’ll limp on into town.
PEER: And when you reach
town, what will you do?
DOVRE KING: Think I’ll audition.
They’re putting on The Character of the Nation68
in the theatre there; it’s widely advertised.
PEER: Good luck go with you. I may do the same
if I can solve my problem in good time.
I have a farce in mind; crazy, yet deep;
Sic Transit Gloria Mundi,69 deep though crazed.
Perhaps Enough To Make the Angels Weep?
He hur
ries off along the path. The DOVRE KING hobbles after, shouting something unintelligible.
SCENE 9
At a crossroads.
PEER: Now things are urgent, Peer, as never before!
The Dovrean ‘enough’ pronounces sentence.
My vessel’s wrecked, the flotsam drifts to shore,
and I’ll float with it; hope yet for remittance.
BUTTON MOULDER: So, Peer Gynt, present your affidavit,
always supposing that you have it.
PEER: This is the crossroads then? It got here fast!
BUTTON MOULDER: I can read on your face, as on a ‘Wanted’ fly-sheet,
what your document says, even before I scry it.
PEER: I was hot and bothered and then lost.
BUTTON MOULDER: Quite so, quite so; and, after all, what’s the point?
PEER: What indeed, stuck in this lousy forest.
BUTTON MOULDER: Here comes an old man trudging his poor stint.
Let’s call him over.
PEER: Pah! Let him go; he’s squiffed.
BUTTON MOULDER: But yet, perhaps …
PEER: I’ve told you: squiffy, daft.
BUTTON MOULDER: Shall we proceed, then?
PEER: Just one question, please.
To ‘be oneself’: I’m not sure what that is.
BUTTON MOULDER: Astounding, such a question, coming from one
who only lately …
PEER: Answer me, if you can.
BUTTON MOULDER: To be oneself is to do away with oneself.
That explanation, though, is wasted on you.
So let’s rephrase: it is to treat as pelf
the master’s treasures, and to smear with glue
his best intentions, plaster them on the wall
of your self-adulation and desire to sell.
PEER: But what if that man could simply never learn,
however much he tried, the master plan
of purpose and salvation?
BUTTON MOULDER: Why, then, he must
‘intuit’ it.
PEER: But intuition-on-trust
is enigmatic and our aims misfire;
we find ourselves ad undas,70 in despair.
BUTTON MOULDER: Ah yes, Peer Gynt, you strike exactly, there.
Failure of intuition: there the bloke
with the hoof finds the best bait for his hook.
PEER: A complex business, I think you’ll agree.
Say I renounce my right to autonomy,
how do I find convincing evidence
that I have done so? I’ve lost it in advance,
I see that now. Stuck on this ashen heath
I felt my conscience like a catch of breath;
said, almost without thinking, ‘I have sinned’.
BUTTON MOULDER: You seem to run round
in circles the whole time.
