The problems of the academic coming to grips with a classic of foreign literature, in this case some three centuries old, puts me in mind of Francis Galton, the cousin of Charles Darwin, on his travels in Damaraland, southern Africa, in 1851, who, wishing to measure the phenomenon of steatopygia in what he called ‘a Venus among Hottentots’, but restrained by Victorian pudeur, took a series of observations with his sextant, and having obtained the base and angles, proceeded to work out the lady’s intriguing ‘endowments’ by trigonometry and logarithms. The poet, and the man of the theatre, has to be bolder and more intimate.
The salient feature of Molière’s verse is its vigour and energy, rather than any metaphorical density or exuberant invention, and it is this which gives his verse plays their characteristic dramatic pace. In Le Misanthrope the effect of the rhyming couplet is like that of a time bomb ticking away behind the desperation of Alceste, and Célimène’s fear of loneliness. The relentless rhythm helps to create the tensions and panics of high comedy, and that rire dans l’âme that Donneau de Visé experienced on the first night of the play in 1666. The explosion never comes. But the silence, when the ticking stops, is almost as deafening. There is an almost Chekhovian tension between farce and anguish. To create this vertiginous effect, verse (and rhymed verse) is indispensable. Neither blank verse nor prose will do. I have made use of a couplet similar to the one I used in The Loiners, running the lines over, breaking up sentences, sometimes using the odd half-rhyme to subdue the chime, playing off the generally colloquial tone and syntax against the formal structure, letting the occasional couplet leap out as an epigram in moments of devastation or wit. My floating ’s is a way of linking the couplet at the joint and speeding up the pace by making the speaker deliver it as almost one line, not two. And so on. I have made use of the occasional Drydenian triplet and, once in Act III, of something I call a ‘switchback’ rhyme, a device I derive from the works of George Formby, e.g. in ‘Mr Wu’:
Once he sat down – those hot irons he didn’t spot ’em.
He gave a yell – and cried, ‘Oh my – I’ve gone and scorched my … singlet!’
or:
Oh, Mister Wu at sea he wobbles like a jelly,
but he’s got lots of pluck, although he’s got a yellow … jumper!
I have also tried both before and during rehearsals to orchestrate certain coughs, kisses, sighs and hesitation mechanisms into the iambic line. These are sometimes indicated by (/) in the text.
An American scholar (forgetting Sarah Bernhardt) said of rhymed translation that it was ‘like a woman undertaking to act Hamlet’. A similar, though much more appropriate, summary of the kinship between my version and the original was given by my six-year-old son, Max. ‘I know that Molière,’ he said, with true Yorkshire chauvinism, though he was born in Africa. ‘She’s Jane Eyre’s sister.’
MOLIÈRE NATIONALISED
I
Even the Pictorial Record of the National Theatre 1963–71 on sale at the Old Vic bookstall was discouraging. ‘Molière’, it says curtly of the National’s production of Tartuffe in 1968, ‘rarely works in English and the National failed to find the key.’ I began to feel that I had involved myself in a masochistic enterprise. What the key to Molière in English was I had no clear idea, but I had vague notions of what it wasn’t. The trouble with many versions of verse plays done by poets is that publication tends to be primary and performance secondary. It has obvious effects on the resulting text. Despite the growth of public poetry readings in the last ten years and the obvious feedback of oral performance into some of the poetry now being written in Britain or the USA, the poet is still very much bound to the private pleasure of the solitary literate. This doesn’t help much when it comes to writing for the theatre. I had to re-examine a great many rhetorical presuppositions. Above all, it seemed to me that if Molière was to work in English, the verse, while retaining his sort of formality, should be as speakable as the most colloquial prose. The negative idea of rhyme as an obstacle one tried to surmount as best one could I discarded, and tried to think of it in positive terms as a way of continuously throwing the action forward, accelerating the pace of the play when necessary, and controlling the flow in a way that prose could never do. The playing time of a verse version tends to be shorter than an equivalent version in prose, and this is a considerable advantage. From the very earliest drafts of my Misanthrope I resolved that publication would be as secondary to my purpose as providing a printed score for the concert-goer would be for the composer.
When I first met the director John Dexter in September 1971, he had asked me for a version for seventeenth-century costume, accurate, speakable, no anachronisms, no jarring slang, but in ‘modernish’ colloquial English. An almost impossibly paradoxical request, I thought at the time. My earliest drafts tried to create the illusion of the colloquial by syntactical means rather than by lexical. Deprived of a really up-to-date lexicon and with a barrier across my choice of image at 1666, the date of the play’s first performance, the energy of the spoken lines had to come largely from the syntactical contractions and elisions of modern speech. Some of these problems tied up with those I was trying to cope with in my own poems. I have always listened closely to speech and noted down the devices of relaxed informal styles. I took long walks and spoke the drafts aloud to myself, going over and over the lines to make them as naturally speakable as I could, and at the same time as formally impeccable as possible. I counted lines like the following as an early success with the diction I was aiming for:
But what I’d like to know’s what freak of luck’s
helped to put Clitandre in your good books?
Mais au moins dites-moi, Madame, par quel sort
Votre Clitandre a l’honneur de vous plaire si fort.
(vv. 475–6)
Or this kind of exchange between Alceste and Célimène:
CÉLIMÈNE: I can’t not see him. He’d be most upset.
ALCESTE: I’ve never known you ‘not see’ people yet.
The elision of is, as in the first example, in positions natural to English speech, though uncommon in representations of that speech in English verse, was one of the first devices I hit upon to create the illusion of the colloquial and to capture some of the pace of the original, a recording of which I played continuously as I worked, as a way of keeping my mind on performance rather than on the page. Here is an example of the same elision used in a position which enables the speaker to run the couplet together:
and what I mean to do
’s find out what her love is: false or true.
The same device can be extended over four lines without violating natural English usage:
what use would all our virtues be, whose point,
when all the world seems really out of joint,
’s to bear with others’ contumely and spite,
without annoyance, even though we’re right.
Sometimes my contractions can look, as the ‘Commentary’ column of the TLS (16 March 1973) put it, ‘messy on the page’, quoting as an example Célimène’s line:
Surely I’d’ve thought it wouldn’t’ve mattered …
but adding that ‘English isn’t well equipped to point out its vernacular elisions.’ I have, for a long time, felt that it ought to be better equipped. One has great need of notations as these things must be scored for the actor in a form as metrically tight as the heroic couplet. The work wasn’t written for the page but to be spoken. I wanted the illusion of real people talking and arguing, in a context where we have come to expect declamation and verse arias. The rigorous form of the verse, though, is necessary to create the detachment from reality so essential to the workings of comedy. I worked in this way from the beginning of November 1971 to the end of January 1972, more or less all day every day. As well as the problem of idiomatic speech rhythms which had to be free from slang, I tried to vary the rhythm of the couplet, which is capable of a great deal more variety than it is often given credit for, so th
at I could give elements of a characteristic rhythm to each actor: the rather rocking rhythm of Philinte, both conciliatory and somewhat complacent; the barbed wit of Célimène, where the end-stopped couplet of Pope was effective; the sly insinuating rhythm of Arsinoé; the staccato oiliness of Oronte; and leaving a much wider scale of variations for Alceste – implacability, satirical outrage, baffled love. Another problem, and one which is perennial in translating from French poetry, is the greater degree of physical concretisation characteristic of the genius of English poetry. I did feel the need to anchor sentiments and statements much more closely to the specific, but I had been very careful, at this stage, to research my concretisations so that they remained in period and I introduced nothing into the text after 1666. John Dexter’s reaction to the first draft was that it was very speakable; at the same time, it was so free of vocabulary exclusively modern that Sir Laurence Olivier picked out only two words, ‘manic’ and ‘randy’, and the phrase ‘so what?’ as being too modern to be spoken in period costume. I revised the text only a little between January and August, and then only in a direction away from anything I thought a mere gesture to the dubious permanence of the printed page. In early August, I had a letter from John Dexter saying that he had decided to produce the play in ‘modernish dress’. We met for a discussion, and I felt somewhat worried that his decision to transfer the setting had rather marooned my text in the seventeenth century. There were so many references to things specifically of the period: clothes, customs, institutions, the king and the Court with all its etiquette and protocol.
II
The problems of translating a classic of the stage seem to me inextricable from the problems of production. The problems with a version of Le Misanthrope are vastly different from those of producing an English play of the seventeenth century in modern dress. There the text is fixed. With a translation the text need not be fixed, and when the collaboration was as close and open as ours was, the words could anchor the production in its chosen time as much as the clothes and the setting. It seems to me now, after the experience of creating a version of the Lysistrata for Nigerian actors (unplayable outside West Africa) and of Le Misanthrope for the National, that the best way of creating a fresh text of a classic is to tie it to a specific production rather than aim, from the study, at a general all-purpose repertory version. This undoubtedly gives a limited lifetime to the version, but this is no bad thing, as I believe that a ‘classic’ needs to be retranslated continuously. It seems to me that one could do worse than treat a translation as one does décor or production, as endlessly renewable. Indeed, one could say that one of the marks of a literary classic is its capacity for change and adaptation. I have been very impressed by (and all translators could learn from) the probably obscure but indefatigable labours of John Ogilby (1600–76), who did two entirely different translations within a short space of time of a poem as vast as Virgil’s Aeneid, nearly 10,000 lines, five times as long as Le Misanthrope. His first version was in 1649 and his second in 1654. What happened to change not only his but the whole period’s focus on the poem were the momentous events leading up to the execution of Charles I in 1649. Ogilby’s second version is a far more explicitly Royalist version than the first. History had shocked him into a fresh appraisal of a complex poem, capable of many interpretations, though some of them mutually exclusive. Here, for example, is a piece of Virgil’s Latin about the activities of the subversive Fury Alecto:
tu potes unanimos armare in proelia fratres
atque odiis versare domos, tu verbera tectis
funerasque inferre faces, tibi nomina mille,
mille nocendi artes, fecundum concute pectus,
disice compositam pacem, sere crimina belli;
arma velit poscatque simul rapiatque iuventus.
(Aeneid VII, 335–40)
Here is Ogilby’s version of 1649:
Thou loving brothers canst provoke to War,
Houses destroy with hate, both sword and flames
Bring to their roofs; thou hast a thousand names,
As many nocent arts; then quickly shake
Thy pregnant breasts, and peace confirmed, break;
Lay grounds for cruel war, make with thy charms
Their wilde youth rage, require, and take up arms.
Five eventful years later, the same translator sees the same passage through the disturbances of his own times:
Unanimous Brothers thou canst arm to fight,
And settled Courts destroy with deadly spight;
Storm Palaces with Steel, and Pitchy Flames,
Thou hast a thousand wicked Arts: and Names,
Thy Bosom disembogue, with Mischief full,
And Articles concluding Peace annull.
Then raise a War, and with bewitching Charms
Make the mad People rage to take up Arms.
The implications of those changes are obvious. Civil war has become a vision of revolution. Dryden’s version of 1697 is informed with the same Hobbesian fears. Momentous events, and even minor, less spectacular shifts in our mores and environment, give us new attentions and demands on the long-surviving classic, whose very survival is dependent on its being, in the widest possible sense, retranslated. History gave Simone Weil her sudden, illuminating insight into the Iliad as ‘the poem of force’, and made Shakespeare a ‘contemporary’ in eastern Europe. If we were to expand a usual organic metaphor for a work of art, we could say that, like the rose, for example, in a state of nature, a work is constantly throwing up new growths. Into these new growths it gradually directs its sap, and the older growths become starved out. The activity of pruning, in our case the historical consciousness at work in the mind of the director or translator of the classic, is to hasten the rejection of the old wood and to encourage the instincts for producing new growths especially (the gardening manuals tell us) from the base of the plant. And pruning of this kind is a regular, recurrent task. In the oral cultures of Africa, when words or phrases no longer signify, thrill or seem relevant to the hearers of a recitation in a particular society, they tend to become changed. There is in this sort of culture a homeostatic process at work which we in our museum culture must often envy, that which the anthropologists call ‘structural amnesia’, a form of constant, often barely conscious, pruning that keeps a work continuously alive. In our conditions of literacy and individualism this ‘structural amnesia’ is frustrated by a concern for the text that is almost fetishistic. We update Shakespeare; we clothe him in modern dress; we give his words new emphases, but those words are fixed. It is precisely because of this rigidity in the text that we have come to expect fluidity in the changing focuses of production. The American linguist Charles Hockett has drawn some rather disturbing implications from the objective comparison of oral and literate cultures, and he says:
In an illiterate society the precise shape of a poem may be gradually modified, a word replaced here, a rhythm or rhyme brought up to date there, in such a way as to keep pace with the changing language. On this score the introduction of writing has some implications which might be called unfortunate. Once a poem is written down it is fixed; it has lost its ability to grow with the language. Sooner or later, the poem is left behind.
We then, even in our own language, have to translate. The implications for an essentially oral art like the theatre are even more interesting. It is in theatrical production and translation that we of a late literate culture can in some measure reassert our lost instincts for ‘structural amnesia’. The original is fluid, the translation a static moment in that fluidity. Translations are not built to survive, though their original survives through translation’s many flowerings and decays. The illusion of pedantry is that a text is fixed. It cannot be fixed once and for all. The translation is fixed but reinvigorates its original by its decay. It was probably on these lines that Walter Benjamin was thinking when he said in his The Task of the Translator that ‘the life of an original reaches its ever-recurring, latest and most complete unfolding
in translation’. It was with thoughts such as these in the back of my mind that I took away my version of Le Misanthrope to revise. Between then and 22 February 1973, when the play opened, I must have rewritten over half the play, though the basic stylistic choices had already been made.
III
The first things to be updated were the clothes. The grands canons, vaste rhingrave and perruque blonde of the foppish Clitandre became, in Alceste’s mockery to Célimène:
What makes him captivate the social scene?
Second-skin gauchos in crêpe-de-chine?
Those golden blow-wave curls (that aren’t his own)?
Those knickerbockers, or obsequious tone?
Or is it his giggle and his shrill falsetto
hoity-toity voice makes him your pet?
Clitandre’s ‘knickerbockers’ came in only very late, after I had seen what Tanya Moisiewitsch had given him to wear in the last act. Clitandre’s ongle long, the long fingernail of seventeenth-century fashion, I found hard to contextualise, as I only knew of Brazil where the fashion persists into our own day. Finally, I made Clitandre an habitué of Angelina’s tea shop on the rue de Rivoli:
What amazing talents does the ‘thing’ possess,
what sublimity of virtue? Let me guess.
The Inky Digit of Defiance: Selected Prose 1966–2016 Page 8