27
Stanislavski in translation: character and rol’ 
Colley Roberts 
While Stanislavski continues to be an influential practitioner in the acting world, 
English speaking readers may be unaware of inaccuracies present in some  
translations of his writing. In this essay, I draw from my native Russian-speaking 
background to evaluate disrepencies between the original Russian and Hapgood’s 
English editions of Part One of the The Work Of The Actor On Himself (referred to as 
WAH). Any italics are translations by the author. 
These extracts are taken from an essay responding to the question: “What does it 
mean to ‘become the character’? How do one or two different practices define and 
actualise on stage ‘character’ in relation to the body?” 
An Actor Prepares – translated by Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood and serving as the 
first successful publication of any part of WAH in 1936 – is not only  
controversially ruthlessly edited-down and “reduced” (Benedetti 2016: xxiv), but is 
also considered by certain critics and Russian speakers to be linguistically  
inaccurate to the practice-ideology Stanislavski conveys (Benedetti 1990:  
Carnicke, 2009). For example, according to Benedetti (1990), Hapgood’s  
translation suffers from an ignorance “of the System in action”, and “fails to  
maintain...essential distinctions” (p.276) in how Stanislavski’s action-concepts 
were articulated in his original writings. Not only do I assent to Jean Benedetti’s 
concern with clarifying how Stanislavski distinguishes action through specific 
Russian verbs, but I also believe there are “essential distinctions” in concepts of 
personhood and connection conveyed through the Russian that Hapgood seems 
to believe are synonymous with loose American understandings, that she thus fails 
to adequately convey or accommodate for the American actor. 
Hapgood’s distinct lack of attention given to cross-cultural nuances is only  
worsened by the total absence of any translation commentary in the publication, 
which could make the subjective process of translation more transparent. She 
instead opts for a foreword about Stanislavski’s work and process of writing, which 
could have been nonetheless vitally beneficial for contextualising the work, if she 
had used it to mention that this first text was only one half – Part One – of the  
intended WAH publication – one half of Stanislavski’s System. She does not. Even 
with the translation and publication of Part Two over a decade later (that  
Hapgood titles Building A Character), Hapgood positions the physical  
“incarnation” elements of Stanislavski’s System contained in this publication as if 
they were only add-ons to the first, and does not provide a sense of the  
integrated System Stanislavski envisioned (Benedetti, 1990). As it is, An Actor  
Prepares would pretend to be the authoritative English guide to Stanislavski’s  

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