Introduction

Introduction Something remarkable happened on December 10, 1896. Something that changed theater forever. On that day, a diminutive young man of 23 named Alfred Jarry stood before the gathered audience at the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre in Paris and introduced his new play. The expectant audience was mixed with friends and foes, enthusiastic supporters and suspicious critics. They had come to see a new play by a writer of promise. What they got instead was a riotous parody, a malicious mockery, a scabrous affront, a puerile attack on literature, on drama, on theater and on themselves. As the first word of the play was pronounced from the stage, the theater erupted in pandamonium: a riot perhaps, or perhaps a demonstration that testified to the belligerent daring of Jarry’s Ubu Roi. Friends celebrated, foes fumed, and the bad-boy avant-garde was born. It took nearly fifteen minutes before the play could continue. People stormed the exits, fist fights broke out, and Jarry’s supporters shouted: “You wouldn’t understand Shakespeare either!” (always a useful retort during any kind of brawl). Here was a play unlike anything seen on the stages of Paris before: a scatological mockery that challenged assumptions about good taste and good behavior, a performance that questioned the very nature of theater and divided the audience between those who came expecting the ordinary and those who came hoping for the extraordinary. All at once the very notion of risk was redefined as both a style and a goal. And the greater the risk, the greater the reward. What had started out as an adolescent puppet show for school friends, lampooning a hated teacher, ended up an avant-garde scandal of momentous proportions: an irreverent parody of Shakespeare’s Macbeth without poetic rhyme or logical reason. The tragic heroes of old were replaced by an omnivorous, foulmouthed ogre who becomes the king of Poland simply by x Three Translations from The Cutting Ball Theater being greedy, sadistic, mean-spirited, and obscene. Perhaps Father Ubu was meant as a monstrous metaphor of the modern philistine, bent only on self-gratification and ready to abuse the power of success. If so, we know the type, just as we recognize what Father Ubu calls “the battle of the voracious against the courageous” in which “the voracious have completely devoured the courageous.” And that’s why Jarry’s play continues to capture our imagination today. Jarry’s Ubu Roi was a deliberate affront, an impudent attack on established culture, and an impish act of self-performance in which the artist demonstrated his right to say whatever he wanted in whatever way he wanted, and the world could like it or take their lumps. As an artist, Jarry celebrated the unhealthy and the unnatural. He was given to excessive displays of excessive behavior, including worship of the mysteries of absinthe that hasted his death at age 34 of tuberculosis complicated by dissipation. In his final years he took to dressing as Father Ubu, violating every rule of polite society and decent conduct, and inventing his own school of artistic practice, which he called ’pataphysics or the “science of imaginary solutions.” 20th century playwrights from Jean Genet to Eugene Ionesco to Mac Wellman have described themselves as following in the ’pataphysical tradition. The opening volley in what was later described as a pitched battle for the terrain of the stage between avant-garde barbarians and middle-class philistines was a craftily inappropriate obscenity, an untranslatable mispronunciation that was itself a denunciation: “merdre!” The word has been rendered into English in dozens of ways from “Shittr” to “Shite” to “Pschitter” to “Shee- yit,” but none of these translations has achieved the same riotous response that first welcomed Father Ubu to the stage. Perhaps the task is impossible. Riots don’t happen every day. Or perhaps it’s not a matter of translation but a matter of situation. Maybe it wasn’t the word that caused the riot or demonstration or ruckus or outburst, but the play’s blatant attempt to insult its audience by utterly disregarding theatrical conventions and the conventions of going to the theater. Perhaps it was the winds of change that sparked the riot or the shadow of things to come. In fact, we are Introduction xi told, more obscenities were hurled by members of the audience at one another than were heard from the stage. Jarry’s audience was poised for trouble — both friends and foes — and they found trouble at the first excuse. Today we are inured to insult, especially from the stage, and less prone to find offense, even when it’s intended. What is a translator to do? Perhaps the goal is not to try to cause a riot but simply to make the play available to contemporary audiences in all its raw and playful mockery: to find a theatrical language that captures the semiotic polyvalence of Jarry’s original, that shares its heterogeneity, and embraces its admiration for the inappropriate, the fatuous, and the downright bad. When merdre becomes “To shit or…,” as in Rob Melrose’s translation printed here, two of the greatest turns of theatrical phrase in our shared vocabulary are combined and deflated in a single gesture, and the ambiguous relationship of Jarry’s text to the history of its performance and the history of all performance is underscored. This simple example points to what is so remarkable about the three plays collected here. Each in its own way is untranslatable and each demands to be translated anew. Each creates its own theatrical language that defies the conventions of the stage and demands to be staged anew with each new age. Together the three demarcate the risky terrain of the 19th century avant-garde as it was inherited and transformed by the modernists of the 20th century and reshaped by the innovators of the 21st century. If Jarry divided his audience between knowing barbarians and smug philistines and goaded them with obscenities and irrational violence into behaving badly in public, Maurice Maeterlinck entranced his audience with a new kind of dramatic action that was more static than active and more contemplative than resolute. Pelleas and Melisande was among Maeterlinck’s first great plays for the new theater. It was given a single performance on 17 May 1893 at the Bouffes-Parisiens, directed by Aurélien Lugné- Poe, whose Théâtre de l’Oeuvre would host Jarry’s Ubu Roi three years later. The Belgian-born Maeterinck was 29 and already heralded (by Octave Mirbeau writing in Le Figaro) as the most xii Three Translations from The Cutting Ball Theater brilliant, sublime and moving dramatic poet of the age, rivaling Shakespeare in his ability to pierce the mystery of human nature. Other critics were less kind. They found Maeterinck’s mystical tale of forbidden love and the inescapable lure of destiny both undramatic and unnatural. Maeterlinck countered that the dramatic was itself unnatural, and chose instead to explore the inescapable inevitability of fate as it mocks the paucity of human intentions and human desires. His story is a simple one but its reverberations are immense. A child-like woman marries a man, falls in love with his brother, and dies. For a moment, beauty pervades the world of shadows sending ripples across the surface of a lake and then fades. At the moment of happiness, disaster strikes. Only a drama of inaction can capture the mystery of a world in which action itself proves futile. Like Ubu Roi, Pelleas and Melisande was judged unstageable because, like Ubu Roi, it created a new language for the stage. Among those who attended Lugné-Poe’s performance of Pelleas and Melisande were Stephen Mallarmé and Claude Debussy. Both were entranced by the play. Debussy considered it the perfect vehicle for a new kind of opera. Inspired by Maeterlinck’s search for meaning in suggestion rather than statement, Debussy composed an opera of fleeting impressions floating in a strangely insubstantial and decidedly metaphysical ether. Debussy’s opera premiered in 1902. The following year, Arnold Schoenberg used Maeterinck’s play as the basis for an orchestral tone poem, and two years later Jean Sibelius composed incidental music for a production of the play in Helsinki. Something in Maeterlinck’s play spoke to the tenor of the modern age. At a time when the Parisian critic Ferdinand Brunetière promoted a drama that turned on the battle of wills and Émile Zola promoted a drama that documented the elemental battle for survival in realistic environments, Maeterlinck chose an unassuming fairy-tale plot composed in an ambiguous language, at once formal and surprising direct. This poetry of the theater, without rhyme or meter, relies on repetitions and symbolic resonances to craft a drama of metaphysical import. These characters seem to glide through a world that is familiar even if Introduction xiii not like that in which we live our daily lives. And in the process, Maeterlinck created a new dramatic vocabulary capable of intimating the feelings of incomprehension and suspension we feel in our most intimate moments: when we acknowledge our aloneness before the fear of death or the longing we experience at moments of inexpressible happiness. “I’ll never find my way out of this forest again”: the clarity of the words point to without capturing what remains immediate and unfathomable. There is an acknowledgement of implacable cruelty at the heat of Maeterlinck’s play that pushes it into the 20th century. It is this that terrified audiences at the play’s first performance and it is this we cannot escape today. This sense of implacable cruelty ties Maeterlinck’s play with Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck.

Load more