Living on in Translation: Fin de siècle Operatic Adaptations of Pierre Loti’s Le Mariage de Loti
Rebecca Ewart
Afterlives: Death, Transformation and New Life
While the term ‘afterlife’ suggests death, it also denotes the living on of the deceased in a new, ghostly, form. The same can be said for the afterlife of a text. A text’s afterlife begins when it enters the domain of the reader. Thereafter the potential for afterlives is infinite as various readers interpret the text, rewrite it or adapt it. When passing into its afterlife, a text ceases to exist in its original form, as the writer left it; in this sense, the original text is dead. Yet, it also lives on. This is because the original text assumes a new form each time a reader engages with it. Textual afterlives can very helpfully be understood as translations. Just as a translation removes a text from its original context of production and reception and rewrites it for a new receiving culture, so too does a textual afterlife consist of a text being rewritten, or reformed, for a new audience. It is the new context that determines the very nature of that text; its original context of production is left behind. A text’s afterlives can emerge in many different forms, perhaps as the result of interlingual translations, intralingual rewritings, adaptations into new mediums or simply as echoes in other texts. In all of these, the original text is a ghostly presence. It is both dead and alive, left behind and at the same time given new life. Walter Benjamin terms the transformation of the original in translation a ‘renewal’, suggesting that translation gives an original or source text new life, allowing it to live on, to survive and retain a place in the consciousness of the reading public by being relevant in the IJFrS 15 (2015) 42 EWART
current context of reception. It is this process that Benjamin believes can give texts ‘their potentially eternal afterlife in succeeding generations’, their ‘ever-renewed latest and most abundant flowering’.1 As translators create afterlives for texts by rewriting them in new contexts, they must perform shifts upon the source text, to bring it in to line with current norms — linguistic, stylistic and social norms. Shifts enable the required leap to be made between the source and the receiving systems of production. Of course, norms in the receiving culture must not necessarily be adhered to by the translator. They can enact another kind of shift which moves the translation away from receiving-culture norms. Such a translation might be deemed ‘foreignizing’. As Lawrence Venuti explains, foreignization can be achieved by the translator refusing to adhere to norms of fluency which tend to veil the fact that a translation is just that — a translation with a source text. A foreignizing translation instead uses non-standard linguistic forms and thereby points up the fact of it being a translation originating from a source text.2 Resisting the influence of a norm such as this has ethical capabilities. It means potentially challenging the tendency of translation to efface the otherness of the source text, which occurs when the source is brought strictly into line with receiving-culture norms. Deviating from these norms serves to signify the source text, not by preserving it within the translation, but by using the receiving-culture itself to indicate the nature of the text as a translation. While Venuti’s theory of foreignizing translation is aimed at interlingual translations between a source and a target text, it has wider applicability to other forms of translation, such as cultural translation or adaptation. Also, the shifts that need to be enacted in order to achieve a foreignizing translation need not only be linguistic but might also be, for example, stylistic or may be shifts in attitude towards the subject matter of the source text. Pierre Loti’s Le Mariage de Loti (1880) is
1. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Task of the Translator’, trans. by Harry Zohn, in The Translation Studies Reader, ed. by Lawrence Venuti, 2nd edn (New York: Routledge, 2004) pp. 75−85 (p. 77). 2. Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2008). PIERRE LOTI’S LE MARIAGE DE LOTI 43
a prime example of cultural translation which appears to stick closely to translation norms. Kate Sturge describes cultural translation as the construction as well as the transferral of the source [text] into a different language.3 There is no original source text, per se, but an entire source culture to potentially be grappled with. Innumerable phenomena, customs and traditions, in addition to language, are to be confronted and translated. Le Mariage de Loti4 offers a version of Polynesian culture translated for a French audience. In order to reconcile the differences between the source and receiving cultures, numerous shifts would have had to be enacted upon the source, in order to render the source comprehensible to the French reader. Loti appears to bring about shifts in the source which align it closely with normative attitudes towards Polynesia and exotic cultures in general at the time of writing. He has been widely accused today of blatantly trafficking in the most overused clichés surrounding foreign cultures, not least Polynesia, which he seems to stereotypically represent as an earthly paradise. The novel was not always the object of such harsh criticism. At the time of writing, Loti’s novel enjoyed great success. This might be explained by the fact that Loti translated Polynesia in a familiar manner, in accordance with normative perceptions of Polynesia. In so doing, he brought the foreign culture home to the reader,5 creating a reader-friendly version of Polynesia which satisfied expectations. Rather than grapple with a non-fluent, foreignizing translation, the reader is able to indulge in the comfort of the familiar and experience the pleasure of nostalgia by rereading what they already know. This is not to say that Loti replicated
3. Kate Sturge, Representing Others: Translation, Ethnography and the Museum, Translation Theories Explained, 11 (Manchester: St Jerome Publishing, 2007), p. 6. 4. Hereafter Le Mariage. 5. See Friedrich Schleiermacher and his discussion of translations that aim to ‘spare [their] reader all exertion and toil’, that ‘leave […] the reader in peace as much as possible and move […] the [foreign] writer toward him’. Friedrich Schleiermacher, ‘On the Different Methods of Translating’, trans. by Susan Bernofsky, in The Translation Studies Reader, ed. by Lawrence Venuti, 2nd edn (New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 43–63 (p. 49). A similar process is at work in Le Mariage where the foreign culture of Polynesia is made readily accessible to the reader by moulding it to the reader’s preconceptions about the culture. 44 EWART
all those narratives told by previous writers, but that he tapped into many of the most desirable aspects of Polynesian culture, filling his text with the ghosts of common narratives, thus initiating further afterlives for those texts on Polynesia that constituted his own reading. Today, the stereotypes Loti employs appear outdated and disrespectful towards the culture they deign to represent. This understanding of the text is very much a product of our time and represents one of Le Mariage’s many afterlives. Current scholarship has also, however, suggested that perhaps Loti did not adhere strictly to the norms of his day. New readings have revealed instances of foreignization in his work, when he in fact moves away from normative representations of typically exoticized cultures, offering innovative approaches and new versions of these cultures that are at odds with the context in which he was translating.6 One snapshot of the ever-shifting afterlives of Le Mariage which is particularly revealing of the role played in translation by context is its adaptation7 into two operas towards the end of the nineteenth century — Léo Delibes’s Lakmé8 in 1883 and Reynaldo Hahn’s L’Île du rêve9 in 1898. Although both were first performed at the popular Opéra-Comique,
6. Margaret Topping and Akane Kawakami, for example, propose that in Madame Chrysanthème (1887) Loti replicates exoticist cliché in a highly ironic manner. Topping argues that the ‘apparent Eurocentrism’ of the novel ‘is an illusion cultivated to satirize both its protagonist and the orientalist assumptions of its contemporary readership’. ‘Exoticist Illusion in Pierre Loti’s Japan’, Artful Deceptions: Verbal and Visual Trickery in French Culture, ed. by Catherine Emerson and Maria Scott (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2006), pp. 83–96 (p. 84). Kawakami suggests that while seeming to confirm stereotypical ‘japoniste’ discourse about Japan, Loti at the same time shows that he is fully aware of doing so by including hints of humour or ‘private jokes’ (‘Stereotype Formation and Sleeping Women: The Misreading of Madame Chrysanthème’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 38.3 (2002), 278–90 (p. 280)). Such self-consciousness can also be detected in Le Mariage, as I suggest elsewhere: Rebecca Ewart, ‘Translation, Interpretation and Otherness: Polynesia in French Travel Literature’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Queen’s University Belfast, 2015). 7. It is becoming increasingly accepted that adaptation is a form of translation. Just like translation, adaptation involves removing a work of art, often a text, from its context of production and relocating it to a new context of production where it is transformed. See Lawrence Venuti, ‘Adaptation, Translation, Critique’, Journal of Visual Culture, 6.25 (2007), 25−43. 8. Libretto by Philippe Gille and Edmond Gondinet. See note 13. 9. Libretto by André Alexandre and Georges Hartmann. PIERRE LOTI’S LE MARIAGE DE LOTI 45
they followed opposite trajectories in terms of success. Albert Carré, theatre director at the Opéra-Comique from 1898, writes of Lakmé that it maintained ‘une place de choix au répertoire, bénéficiant, de la part de tous les publics, d’une faveur qui ne s’est jamais démentie’.10 L’Île du rêve, on the other hand, he describes as ‘[un] spectacle un peu ridicule’ whose composer was accused of having much to learn and even more to forget.11 Why was the initial fame of Le Mariage equalled in the form of Lakmé and why was the closer adaptation, L’Île du rêve, cast in a shadow of mockery? The answer will lie in an examination of the extent to which these translations initiate shifts in the source text and the extent to which they adhere to, or shift away from, receiving-culture norms governing representations of exotic cultures.
‘Lakmé’: Shifting to ‘newly resonant contexts’12
Lakmé would, like Le Mariage, appear to fit comfortably within the parameters of nineteenth-century exoticism. Many of the common strategies for translating Polynesia and other tropical cultures for a French audience appear in the opera, as well as some of the more specific ways in which Loti employs these norms. Take for example the water, flower and native woman motifs employed in both. The Fataoua stream is a recurring setting in Le Mariage. It is used to initiate the reader into the daily life of Tahitian women who bathe there — it indicates their idleness, their avidity for pleasure and their closeness to nature. It is also the site of Loti’s first meeting with his lover Rarahu — the archetypal Tahitian woman. In Lakmé the stream holds a central position within the haven of the eponymous heroine. It is the prime destination for Lakmé and her servant Mallika, who describes their ritual visit to ‘le ruisseau sacré’ as ‘l’heure où je te vois sourire/ l’heure bénie où je puis lire/
10. Albert Carré, Souvenirs de Théâtre (Paris: Éditions d’Aujourd’hui, 1976 [1950]), p. 245. 11. Carré, Souvenirs de Théâtre, p. 223. 12. Julie Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 81. 46 EWART
dans le cœur toujours fermé/ de Lakmé!’.13 Proximity to natural water sources in both Lakmé and Le Mariage denotes an ideal state of being that corresponds to the idealism inherent in exoticist discourse — dreams of spaces remote from civilization based on a return to a more natural way of life and the undivided attention of a beautiful foreign woman. The Fataoua stream in Le Mariage came to be closely associated with tropical flowers and beautiful native women, together constituting three of the most recognizable symbols of Polynesia. This association was not so much promoted in the text itself but was a feature of the 1898 illustrated edition of Le Mariage, in which several sketches by Alcide Robaudi14 coupled flowers and water sources together with a normally topless Tahitian woman (such nakedness was not emphasized by Loti). Robaudi’s choice to illustrate many of the novel’s water scenes suggests the significance placed on them by Loti, but the illustrator’s decision to link them so closely to Polynesian womanhood and to flowers initiates a new afterlife for the text. Clearly, the triptych of water, woman and flower was considered to indulge the reader’s expectations of the exotic, to epitomize Polynesia in the collective imagination, thus making it worthy of numerous illustrations. Brought together like this, each element of the triptych transfers its significance to the neighbouring component: flowers become associated with the feminine, the female form, sexuality; women are linked to the most beautiful forms of nature, and so on — together they become a powerful projection of the desire of the onlooker. In a case of afterlife influencing afterlife, it is very possible that Robaudi’s decision to focus on these elements of Polynesia was influenced by Lakmé, which was performed several years before this edition of Le Mariage. The opera amplifies the significance of both water sources and flowers. It uses Hindu religion to impart a sacred quality to the water, which is presented as both a life-giving entity
13. Philippe Gille and Edmond Gondinet, librettists, Lakmé: Opéra en trois actes, composed by Léo Delibes (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1883), p. 5. 14. Le Mariage de Loti, illustrated by the author and Alcide Robaudi (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1898). PIERRE LOTI’S LE MARIAGE DE LOTI 47
governed by the god Ganesh and a means to unite lovers for eternity. Flowers flood the stage, in terms of libretto, music and stage design. The well-known and much-performed duet by Lakmé and Mallika, known in Anglophone cultures as the ‘Flower Duet’, raises the status of flowering lianas, jasmine and rose to objects of wonderment and praise. The libretto describes the scene in detail, with the jasmine and roses clinging together, forming a grand and awe-inspiring dome structure — a religious symbol which lends the scene a mystical quality. The flowers are closely linked to the water source which they line and overhang, creating a ‘rive en fleurs’.15 The libretto’s description of the setting finds its match in the stage design:
Le jardin du Brahmane Nilakantha, un enchevêtrement de toutes les fleurs et de tous les arbustes de l’Inde. Une petite rivière bleue se perd dans la verdure. Près de la pagode sur laquelle est dessinée une fleur de lotus, se trouve la statue de Ganeça, dieu de la sagesse. Cette idole a une tête d’éléphant. L’ensemble est d’une poésie délicieuse.16
From this description of the staging in Les Premières illustrées we can see that the water and flower motifs present in the libretto are mirrored in the visual aspects of the opera. As suggested in a drawing by Antonin- Marie Chatinière of the 1883 stage design, vegetation dominates the scene, dwarfing man-made constructions and indeed any actors on stage. The third act is very similar, except that here all traces of man have been eliminated, leaving only the forest as the site of the lover’s potentially regained happiness. The music, too, conspires to suggest a natural paradise and is particularly suggestive of water. This effect is created by combining harmonic thirds and sixths, creating the sense of ‘le doux clapotement d’une source’17 or the strokes of a boatman’s oars.
15. Gille and Gondinet, Lakmé, p. 33. 16. Raoul Toché, Les Premières illustrées: ‘Lackmé’: Notes et croquis (Paris: Monnier & Cie, 1883), p. 100. 17. E. Grand, ‘Lakmé’, La Scène: Revue des succès dramatiques, 2.5 (1883), 97–100 (p. 99). 48 EWART
The audio-visual extension of Lakmé’s libretto takes the idyllic image of a flower-lined waterside further than Loti’s novel can. On being translated into an opera, the novel’s expressive potentialities are extended. This is achieved primarily through two shifts characteristic of this type of adaptation: amplification and reduction. The two shifts often work hand in hand and lead to similar effects. Amplification of the translation of Polynesia present in Le Mariage is achieved by bringing it into new semiotic fields — visual and audio — which possess more immediate and more persuasive means of communication. The visual aspects of Lakmé, such as stage design, are able to efficiently and effectively evoke an exotic paradise by means of the ‘connotational’18 function of pictures. This function itself operates via knowledge shared by both the artist and the spectator regarding the significance of certain pictures — and so lush vegetation and tranquil waters operate as a meta-discourse to denote an idyllic space. Music similarly operates by means of a set of assumptions about the connotation of particular musical forms. In this way, the gentle lull of the ‘Flower Duet’ instantly suggests an aspirational space of tranquillity.19 Because meaning can be so easily grasped from the music and pictures used in Lakmé, it could be argued that Le Mariage undergoes a reduction, being stripped down to the bare minimum of images. Indeed, in order to abide by the constraints of their medium, music and pictures must be selective with regard to the elements they depict. Reduction, however, does not mean that the image is less powerful. Rather, it is rendered more persuasive through a process of distillation that removes any excess and leaves only the most potent images behind. This potency derives from the close relationship between the images being presented and audience memory. The opera is haunted by memory throughout, both cultural memory and personal memory — memory of representations of exotic otherness, memory of how tropical 18. Roland Barthes, ‘Rhetoric of the Image’, in Roland Barthes, Image — Music — Text, ed. and trans. by Stephen Heath (London: Fontana Press, 1977), pp. 3251 (p. 33). 19. Hence the adoption of the duet by advertising companies to promote luxury brands. See Daniel Jackson, Sonic Branding: An Introduction, ed. by Paul Fulberg (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 109. PIERRE LOTI’S LE MARIAGE DE LOTI 49
cultures are normally translated, memories of how particular media deliver these representations, memories of personal reactions to these representations and memories of what constitutes a normative reaction.20 It is clear from contemporary criticism that the audience took pleasure in seeing their expectations of the exotic met in Lakmé. A contemporary review in Le Figaro described ‘des sons et des couleurs propres aux régions lumineuses qui baignent les bords de l’Indus et du Gange’ (my emphasis).21 Les Premières illustrées explained how Delibes’s musical composition was suitable for those who dislike actual foreign music, or ‘la musique incompréhensible’.22 In opera production at this time, and indeed more widely in other translations of exotic cultures, the desire to preserve true otherness in translation, such as Victor Segalen expressed23 or Loti hinted at, does not appear to have had widespread support.24
20. See Marvin Carlson, The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003 [2001]) on the theatre as a haunted space. 21. Auguste Vitu, ‘Lakmé’, Le Figaro, 15 April 1883, pp. 1−2 (p. 2). 22. Toché, Les Premières illustrées, p. 98. 23. Underlying Segalen’s Essai sur l’exotisme (Paris: Fata Morgana, 1978) is a desire to experience otherness in a pure, untranslated form. He discusses the possibility of representing another culture from that culture’s point of view, suggesting that otherness can be preserved by the travel writer, that the writer can simply transfer otherness onto the page independently of the subject and remote from the subject’s interpretation of the object. Loti expresses a similar belief when he wishes to ‘conserv[e]’ his Tahitian lover as a primitive being (Le Mariage de Loti, Paris: GF-Flammarion, 1991 [1880], p. 125, henceforth ML in the text). While this represents a similarity in the two writers’ approach to translating otherness, Segalen was determined to offer ‘une vision neuve’, ‘la contre-épreuve’ (Essai, p. 36, emphasis in original), to repetitive, highly domesticating writers such as Loti who he felt made abundant use of various exoticist clichés. 24. It is widely accepted among translation scholars that the preservation of otherness in translation is impossible, given that otherness is necessarily altered once the translation process begins. Pure otherness can never truly be experienced, only a domesticated version of that otherness. Sanford Budick, for example, talks about ‘the absolute impossibility of embracing the otherness of the other’, and thereby indicates the futility of attempting to contain or preserve the other within ourselves and within our own culture (‘Crises of Alterity: Cultural Untranslatability and the Experience of Secondary Otherness’, in The Translatability of Cultures: Figurations of the Space Between, ed. by Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 1–22 (p. 4)). The impossibility of preserving otherness is also central to Venuti’s concept of foreignization. Foreignization is not achieved by transferring otherness, untouched, into a translation but through ‘disrupting the cultural codes that 50 EWART
Composers were not striving for accuracy in their musical translations of foreign cultures.25 Instead, more highly domesticated forms of otherness, which met expectations of what constituted the exotic, gave the audience member a more pleasurable listening experience and enjoyed greater popular success.26 The processes of amplification and reduction in Lakmé, then, serve to create a new afterlife for the source text, but it is a transformation which shifts little from receiving-culture norms of cultural translation. Thus the opera serves to renew and lend new credence to those images presented in the source and, in so doing, reinforce genre-normative strategies of representation. Although a very significant shift, the relocation from Polynesia to India can be said to facilitate the afterlife of generic conventions employed in Le Mariage by offering what Sanders terms a ‘newly resonant context […]’.27 Polynesia had already been attempted, and attempted very successfully, earning Loti great acclaim. Thus to relocate the novel to India made sense — the opera could thereby hope to incite similar interest as that which Le Mariage enjoyed by giving the audience a new foreign culture upon which to focus its attention. Cultures in the Indian subcontinent had been the subject of several operas in the years previous to Lakmé, such as Massenet’s Le Roi de Lahore (1877) and Daniel Auber’s Le Premier Jour de bonheur (1868). Thus, there had been established an understanding of what India was like. By taking as inspiration the crowd-pleasing cultural translation strategies employed
prevail in the translating language’. Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility, p. 15. 25. In the nineteenth century, Annegret Fauser suggests, music ‘rarely transgressed the boundaries of [contemporary] European tonality and musical forms’. Annegret Fauser, Musical Encounters at the 1889 Paris World’s Fair (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2005), p. 140. Even when another culture was to be suggested through music, it did so within the confines of ‘generic exoticism’ (p. 140) straying only to provide ‘surface color within the framework of a familiar tonal language’ (p. 146). 26. This ‘pleasure principle’ is explored by Sanders who cites John Ellis’s suggestion in relation to film adaptation of classic literature, that ‘[b]y prolonging the pleasure of the initial act of reading or the initial encounter with a text, “adaptation trades upon the memory of the novel, a memory that can derive from actual reading or, as is more likely with a classic of literature, a generally circulated memory” (Ellis)’. Julie Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 24. 27. Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation, p. 81. PIERRE LOTI’S LE MARIAGE DE LOTI 51
by Loti, Delibes and his librettists could create a winning combination of familiarity, together with something slightly different. Stage design and costume changed to reflect the particularities of Hindu culture — and so specific traditional dress, religious iconography and architecture are featured. Yet, as we have seen, the basic elements of exotic cultures as they are perceived by the West are still very obviously present. For example, the main female character is promoted from a naïve primitive girl to a goddess-like woman, yet she still operates as a site of male fantasy; she still represents an antithesis to European life and European women. Also, although the primitivist discourse of Le Mariage may have been lost, given that India appears as a more developed society than Polynesia, Lakmé still represents an apparently better alternative to life at home. India provides the perfect setting for the amplification of this trope; the exotic woman is idolized as a goddess, against whom the European woman cuts a particularly ridiculous figure. Polynesia and India have many similarities in terms of how they were perceived in France in the late nineteenth century. Both were cultures in which French colonial activities were minimal. Tahiti only became a French colony in 1880 and even then could not be described as a site where French colonial activity was particularly vigorous. India was predominantly viewed as a British possession, with France only occupying a comparatively small area. Both Le Mariage and Lakmé represent a British encounter with Polynesia and India respectively, rather than a French one, which suggests that these cultures were experienced more on the imaginary plane than as a concrete French colonial asset.28 Indeed, both cultures are represented as dream sites populated with projections of fantasy. Kate Marsh suggests India has been feminized in the European imagination, with many ‘female stereotypes’ featuring ‘in writings on India’.29 Polynesia is no less feminized in French literature, given that it is so often viewed through the lens of male fantasizing eyes. Women as sites of sexual freedom have become symbols of Polynesian
28. See Kate Marsh, India in the French Imagination, Empires in Perspective, 8 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009). 29. Marsh, India in the French Imagination, p. 41. 52 EWART
culture as a whole. Drawing attention to the similarities between the two cultures serves to suggest that there was not a great leap to be made in translating Polynesia into India. Although the shift in setting enacted a transformation and thus reengaged audience interest, it nonetheless largely maintained the status quo of the exotic genre.
Moments of Foreignization
Of course, not all French representations of exotic cultures are entirely in accordance with translation norms. We must remember that all adaptations are transformative, and not just on a surface level of mise en scène, but more fundamentally transformative of generic paradigms. Surely given the many new media and forms to be adopted by Le Mariage as an adaptation, there might be found some way to move the genre forward by doing something different. Clive Scott suggests that through translation a text ‘fans out into multiple versions of itself, not just interpretations of its meaning, but performances of the experience of reading it’. He goes on to say that the source text ‘becomes increasingly synaesthetic’ as it ‘proliferates performatively’.30 Scott argues that this ‘synaesthetizing’31 process helps develop ‘the expressive potentialities of the typographical revolution’. He is talking specifically here about translation between texts but I would suggest that the translation of a text into operatic form constitutes the ultimate ‘synaesthetization’ of that text. The operatic form allows the text to be expanded into various areas of performance which enable the audience to engage with it via several senses simultaneously. Going by Scott’s argument, then, opera would mean the unlocking of the text’s multiple ‘potentialities’, such as, perhaps, its genre-breaking potential. Margaret Topping argues
30. Clive Scott, ‘From the Intermedial to the Synaesthetic: Literary Translation as Centrifugal Practice’, Comparative Critical Studies, 8.1 (2011), 39−59 (p. 40). 31. Scott describes ‘synaesthetization’ as ‘the expansion of sensory involvement with the text’ and ‘the aiding of one sense by another, and the aiding of percept by concept; that is, one sense functions as the prosthetic extension of another’. Scott, ‘From the Intermedial to the Synaesthetic’, p. 40. PIERRE LOTI’S LE MARIAGE DE LOTI 53
something similar when she says that ‘the interaction’ of photograph and text in travel narratives creates ‘an arena for productive verbal/ visual “struggle” and/or “co-operation”’.32 We have seen above how the various media involved in an opera ‘co-operat[e]’ to produce strong images of the foreign culture being represented, which were also present in less amplified form in the source text. But what about instances when they ‘struggle’ against each other or against translational norms and so disrupt the dominant images of the foreign culture and/or break away from the images present in the source text and so create moments of foreignization within the adaptation? Several shifts mark the translation of Le Mariage into opera, which might equally be said to enact a shift in the genre of exotic writing at the time of production. As is inevitable with opera, as opposed to a written text, the largely predominant single voice of the narrator is lost. The single point of view which maintains close control of reader response by privileging certain discourses loses its monopoly as several voices are, literally, heard. As a result of losing this dominant male voice, Lakmé seems to break with the norms of cultural translation. Loti’s male ego and chauvinism are less able to come through in the reduced role of the male protagonist, Gerald. The character who is heard the most is in fact a woman — Lakmé. Whereas Rarahu’s voice is only heard on rare occasions of reported speech or in letters, arguably only included in order to show her naivety, Lakmé’s voice is heard loud and clear and is often elevated to the highest forms of song such as recitative and coloratura. These heightened musical forms provoke emotional responses from the spectator, thus allowing them to develop empathy for her and therefore placing her voice high up in the ‘hierarchy of discourses’33 present in the opera. Whereas a written text can much more easily sustain a monologue, opera is necessarily polyphonic, and is thus already fertile ground for breaking down the monologues of exoticist discourse. The
32. Margaret Topping, ‘This is Not a Photo Opportunity: Verbal/Visual Struggle in Francophone Travel Narratives’, Journal of Romance Studies, 13.1 (2013), 65−92 (p. 86). 33. Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice (London: Methuen, 1980). 54 EWART
exotic object, it could be argued, is given agency in this way, although necessarily within a receiving-culture context. We also see a less passive foreign culture in the fact that the natives do not stand idly back while the invading British take over their land. Instead, there is an organized attempt to resist colonization, led by Lakmé’s father Nilakantha, who is ready to use deadly force at any sign of his stronghold being breached. This marks a distinctive shift from the passive Polynesians of Loti’s text who welcome foreign visitors with open arms, while their royal family quietly dies out. The parental figure(s) also change significantly, from weary old monuments of traditional Polynesian culture in the form of Rarahu’s adoptive parents to an active defender of traditional Indian / Hindu culture. As James Parakilas suggests, Lakmé offers moments of foreignization when the protagonist fails to ‘present […] herself to [Gerald] in exotic music, except in the Bell Song’, or to perform any exotic dance, but instead cuts a European figure by singing ‘“European” music’.34 This can be interpreted as a moment of foreignization because the foreign subject is domesticated to such an extent that it does not meet audience expectation; the foreign is rendered too European-like and not acceptably exotic. Parakilas makes this point by comparing Lakmé to the opera Carmen (1875), which he feels better fulfils exotic criteria for the exotic woman. He feels that Lakmé operates on the principle that something as ‘“universal”’ as love must be represented through a ‘shared musical language’, namely in the form of a ‘European musical style’.35 This principle, he suggest, creates ‘inconsistency’ within the work. Normative exotic strategies of representation are interrupted by an equally domesticating but less conventional strategy. It is a case of two types of media colliding; Gerald’s libretto speaks of an exotic fantasy but Lakmé’s musical performance fails to corroborate this. This ‘struggle’ (Topping) between media is evident elsewhere in the opera. The potentially ethical shifts in favour of increased native
34. James Parakilas, ‘The Soldier and the Exotic: Operatic Variations on a Theme of Racial Encounter, Part One’, Opera Quarterly, 10.2 (1993), 33−56 (p. 48). 35. Parakilas, ‘The Soldier and the Exotic’, p. 48. PIERRE LOTI’S LE MARIAGE DE LOTI 55
agency, which in themselves may not be genre-breaking (opera typically accords the dominant voice to a foreign-character female lead) stand at odds with more unshifting elements of the opera — in particular the fixed stage design, which suggests an enduring image of India as paradise, as an object of Europe’s eye and which gives the audience exactly what they expect from an exotic culture. Such idyllic tableaux are similarly at odds with the introduction of threat and peril to the plot, which does not disturb Loti’s narrative. In the opera’s introductory piece, the libretto accorded to Nilakantha is decidedly menacing in tone, as is the accompanying music. He predicts that the vengeance of Brahma will fall on the heads of the natives’ ‘vainqueurs odieux’.36 And yet, the backdrop is the same as that which colludes with the idyllic music and libretto in Lakmé and Mallika’s duet to create an overwhelming vision of paradise. The element of peril present in Lakmé represents another shift away from Le Mariage which serves to temper the mostly purely idyllic discourse and imagery of Loti’s text. Combined with the idyllic backdrop, it creates a dialogue of media, a set of competing monologues, the one disrupted by the other. The dominant images of the foreign culture, which appear to fit neatly within the receiving genre, are thus made unstable.
‘L’Île du rêve’: Bare-Bones Exoticism
Some of the innovative changes made to Le Mariage in Lakmé appear to be reversed in Reynaldo Hahn’s adaptation, L’Île du rêve. Similar opera- specific elements which allow Lakmé to at times create a foreignizing translation could just as easily be at work in L’Île du rêve, yet this opera appears to reinstate some of the representational limitations present in Loti’s novel. For example, whereas Lakmé disrupts the male hegemony present in the novel, L’Île du rêve, despite also ‘giving voice’ to other characters, reintroduces the male protagonist’s dominance. Much of the dialogue is accorded to this character, who is also named Loti; he is
36. Gille and Gondinet, Lakmé, p. 2. 56 EWART
even granted a lengthy monologue and is present in all but a few scenes. Where he is absent, the scene serves to act out sentiments that he has expressed elsewhere in the text. Several drawings depicting the opera on stage show Loti to be centre stage. One drawing by Paul Destez (1898)37 shows him standing in between two women, one of whom is on her knees in a supplicatory pose and being supported physically by Loti, with the other woman looking on attentively at him. Another drawing by A. de Parys (1898)38 tips the comic scale by depicting Loti seated at the base of a tree in the woods surrounded by Tahitian women, one of whom fawns over him and another of whom sprinkles petals on his head. The opera almost recreates the ‘auto-diegetic narrator’39 of the travel text. With all characters’ eyes on Loti, the audience is similarly drawn to grant the character their attention and to locate their sympathies within him and experience the action from his point of view. He is granted the authority of the story-teller as the plot revolves around him, in response to his actions, to his emotions and his desires; it is with him that the dominant discourse and the truth appear to lie. One of the scenes in which Loti is not present shows Tahitian women bathing and planning how they will welcome foreign visitors. It serves to confirm Loti’s raptures in his monologue over this ‘terre d’extase’.40 Another scene involving Tahitian women and a Chinese man — Tseen- Lee (a character also present in Le Mariage) — would seem to attempt to justify Loti’s racist attitudes towards the man and his desire to prevent Mahénu (a more palatable version of the name Rarahu) from having any contact with him. These scenes are extensions of the images
37. ‘Théâtre national de l’opéra-comique. L’Île du rêve, idylle polynésienne de MM. Pierre Loti, André Alexandre et Georges Hartmann, musique de M. Reynaldo Hahn’, engraving by Reymond, 1898 [electronic print] available at
of Polynesia described by the character Loti elsewhere in the opera, who thus appears to dictate the narrative even when not physically on stage. The strong female protagonist of Lakmé has disappeared, as has the sense of a dialogue between the lovers. While Mahénu is heard to speak, she is again a young naïve girl whose words only serve to confirm and justify the male protagonist’s monologue. These scenes, of course, in turn point up those common images of Polynesia which Loti spun out and amplified in his novel through his use of sentimentality and melodrama — Polynesian culture as a paradise on earth that should remain unsullied but which, sadly, is in the grip of destructive forces. L’Île du rêve is a close translation of Loti’s novel, with distinct similarities in plot, character and stage design. Just as in Le Mariage, the male protagonist is baptized Loti by a group of Tahitian women; he falls in love with a young Tahitian girl whose innocence and naivety is to be chuckled at; she dishonourably consorts with the token Chinese man before realizing her place beside Loti, who protects her when she fears the spirits of the dead (Act One). Act Two sees Loti establish contact with his brother’s old Tahitian lover and Act Three is concerned with Loti’s departure and Mahénu’s deep-felt sadness. It is perhaps nostalgia for Le Mariage which drove Hahn and his librettists’ efforts to write such a close translation. In the almost twenty years between the publication of Le Mariage and the first performance of L’Île du rêve Loti’s novel began to attain canonical status.41 The French reading public had grown attached to the novel and thus, as is often the case with adaptations, wary of attempts to mimic it. It cannot be denied that the opera appears to be a weak copy of the original, which removes the complexity of the original by reducing it down to its bare bones of stereotype and cliché. While an audience can experience pleasure from reliving past experiences in an adapted work, the work nonetheless needs to renew the source and thereby give it new life. L’Île du rêve 41. Loti and his novels were frequently the subject of literary reviews in the late nineteenth century in which they were often referred to in terms of affection. La Revue politique et littéraire in 1892 refers to Loti as ‘un des écrivains les plus aimés de ce temps’. Paul Sirven, ‘Pierre Loti’, Revue bleue: Revue politique et littéraire, 49 (1892), 461−66 (p. 461). 58 EWART
lacks Lakmé’s ‘newly resonant context’.42 Its shifts and changes are inadequate for renewing the source, for initiating a healthy afterlife. In a letter (c. 1898) to his mentor, Massenet, Hahn reveals how he views the process of adapting Le Mariage into an opera: ‘J’étais anxieux de savoir comment vous trouveriez ma petite polynésienne revêtue de ses ornements de théâtre’ (my emphasis).43 He views his adaptation as a ‘re-dressing’ of the original, not a fundamental change but a superficial change to make it theatre-appropriate. Hahn may have erroneously believed that by giving the audience what they knew and loved, he would have a winning formula. But it is this close translation which doomed it to box office failure. Hahn was himself unsure about the opera while he was writing it: ‘le premier acte, bien que fort soigné, n’est pas bon. Et le deuxième est franchement mauvais.’44 This feeling was shared by critics when the opera opened, with accusations of monotony, lack of action, lack of originality and of having reduced the Polynesian idyll ‘à sa plus simple expression’.45 Whereas adaptations possess the potential to ‘disrupt the hegemony of author intention’,46 it would seem that L’Île du rêve was almost precluded from being disruptive in this way by translating the original too closely.47 Amplificatory and reductive shifts between
42. Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation, p. 81. 43. Reynaldo Hahn cited in Philippe Blay and Hervé Lacombe, ‘À l’ombre de Massenet, Proust et Loti: Le Manuscrit autographe de L’Île du rêve de Reynaldo Hahn’, Revue de Musicologie, 79.1 (1993), 83−108, (p. 90). 44. Blay and Lacombe, ‘À l’ombre de Massenet, Proust et Loti’, p. 89. 45. Alfred Bruneau, ‘Les Théâtres’, Le Figaro, 24 March 1898, p. 4. An entry in La Plume was incredulous that the director of the Opéra-Comique had decided to produce the opera, describing it as an opera ‘sans action, dans une monotonie désespérante’. L., ‘La Musique’, La Plume: Revue littéraire, artistique et sociale, 1898 [Geneva: Slatkine Reprints (1968)], p. 255. Criticism is not only levelled at the libretto, but also the musical score, which Alfred Bruneau explains is lacking in originality, with repetitive themes inadequately developed and ‘trop visiblement inspirée par M. Massenet’. Bruneau, ‘Les Théâtres’, p. 4. 46. Neil Archer and Andreea Weisl-Shaw, ‘Introduction: Theorizing Adaptation’, in Adaptation Studies in French and Francophone Culture, ed. by Neil Archer and Andreea Weisl-Shaw, Modern French Identities, 99 (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2012), pp. 1−12 (p. 7). 47. Lesley Blanch reveals that Loti was often consulted by Hahn during the writing of PIERRE LOTI’S LE MARIAGE DE LOTI 59
source and adaptation seem to instead better fulfil authorial intention. For example, the contrast between ‘civilization’ and ‘the primitive’ such as Loti established is made starker through L’Île du rêve’s stage design for Act Three, which juxtaposes a natural background, including the mornes, palm trees and southern constellations, with a gilded salon populated by Tahitians in European dress. Yet, what of the instances of foreignization present in Le Mariage, which may or may not have been intended by the author? How do they fare in translation? It is here that L’Île du rêve deviates most from the source, by sticking too closely to norms for translating Polynesia. We have already seen that L’Île du rêve reverses the shift in point of view offered by Lakmé. It also removes those instances in Le Mariage when the narrative voice is handed over to characters other than the male protagonist. Bruneau (1898) perceptively notes that L’Île du rêve does away with the darker moments of Le Mariage, such as dying royalty, murderous Tamatoa, funeral proceedings and lying Taïmaha. While some of the examples given by Bruneau are treated by Loti in a sentimental manner, just like many other themes in his novel, they nonetheless represent a break from the dominant idyllic tone of the text. Other, even more sombre moments of inner turmoil and depression emerge towards the end of the novel, darkening the tone further and giving the novel a complexity and depth which L’Île du rêve is definitely lacking in. At the other end of the scale, self-consciously comic moments in Le Mariage are also removed in translation, with comedy only apparent for a retrospective audience viewing an opera that takes itself far too seriously.48 The opera, when viewed in comparison to Le Mariage, reveals the latter to be much more complex, nuanced and ambiguous than a cursory reading of the novel
L’Île du rêve. Hahn once wrote to Loti saying: ‘If one can trace a little poetry in my modest talent, then I owe it to you… It is you who have charmed yet cast a vaporous melancholy over my whole adolescence.’ Lesley Blanch, Pierre Loti: Portrait of an Escapist (London: Collins, 1983), p. 235. 48. In the years leading up to Segalen’s recognition of the out-datedness of Loti’s Le Mariage, an adaptation which removed any complexity the novel might have had must surely have appeared somewhat ridiculous to a contemporary audience. Perhaps the sentimentalism that, according to Blanch, a French audience tolerated in Loti (Blanch, Pierre Loti, p. 144) was too much to bear in the amplified form of an opera. 60 EWART
might suggest, thus, in fact, revealing the productive power of even a mediocre adaptation to continue the afterlife of its source text. The last words in the libretto to L’Île du rêve sum up the plot, but also can be read as a reflection upon the afterlives of Loti’s novel and also upon the survival of Polynesia in translation: ‘Un soir d’été, son frère est parti comme lui!’49 These words from Téria suggest a cyclical and repetitive process which sees Europeans come to Polynesia full of expectation and curiosity, who fall in love with the place, but which is never enough to prevent their return home. Lakmé and L’Île du rêve both mark stages in the afterlife of Loti’s text which are characterized by a sense of repetition and replication. While change also inevitably marks these translations of the source text, they nonetheless play to the translation norms surrounding Polynesia, returning home as sailors like Loti did, where Polynesia becomes an object of nostalgia remembered and retold in relation to the European interpretative context. The reduction and amplification of Le Mariage in both operas is also indicative of how Polynesia is normally translated, by both Loti and his predecessors. It is again a case of bringing Polynesia home through the metonymic process of cultural translation and exoticism which uses the strategies of reduction and amplification to emphasize and focus on the most familiar elements of otherness, thus bringing forth nostalgias and feeding back into desires for Polynesia, which in turn creates the desire to travel there. Queen’s University Belfast
49. Alexandre and Hartmann, L’Île du rêve, p. 29.