Translator's Introduction

translator’s introduction: taking up the gauntlet i Poor Racine! Martin Turnell begins his Jean Racine: Dramatist by quoting François Mauriac: “Of all our authors, Racine is one of the least accessible to the peoples of other countries” (Turnell, 3). Rob- ert Lowell’s preface to his translation of Phèdre opens with this dis- heartening pronouncement: “Racine’s plays are generally and cor- rectly thought to be untranslatable” (Lowell, 7). Patrick J. Smith, in a New York Times article of January 3, 1999, occasioned by the imminent importation of the Almeida Theater Company’s produc- tions of Phaedra and Britannicus, accurately reports that “it has long been an axiom of Racinian criticism that his works are untenable in translation.” So pervasive is this view, and so often is it resorted to by translators as a preemptive apology, as it were, for the inevitable inadequacy of their versions, that they seem to be offering up not so much the tragedies of Racine as the tragedy of Racine. Strange, if not shocking, to say, I have not found Racine to be untranslatable. Perhaps this is because I have made use of a ready- to-hand verse form that, for reasons explained below, is ideally designed to translate Racine’s poetic and dramatic style into Eng- lish, namely, the “heroic couplet” (or “English couplet,” as I prefer to call it). My decision to translate Racine into rhymed, end-stopped iambic pentameter couplets was prompted by several consider- ations. Let me introduce the first by quoting from C. H. Sisson’s xxii s translator’s introduction introduction to his Racine translations. He begins, of course, with the usual despondent disclaimer: Nothing can adequately represent in English the movement of the French alexandrine, the rhymed couplets which are the classic French form, and the form used by Racine. To offer as an equivalent some crude version of English heroic couplets — in pentameters — as more than one modern translator has done, is frankly absurd. Even the classic couplets of the real performers in this field, of Dryden or of Pope, would not entirely fill the bill, though they would of course have been the best available form for those two poets, had either attempted a version. A poet-translator has always to start from the forms of his own time, as he has to start from his own language. (Sisson, xvi) In my own case, I chose to use the English couplet as inevitably as Dryden and Pope would have, “had either attempted a version.” Based on my reading and my tastes, I find it as natural to write poetry in rhymed couplets as M. Jourdain found it to make use of prose when he opened his mouth to speak. The high Augustan poetic style, so decried by A. E. Housman and others (see Sec- tion IX below), is the one in which I have most deeply steeped myself. So I believe I can say I have followed Sisson’s prescription and have started from the forms of my own time. But the beautiful ease with which, in translating thousands of them, I found Racine’s alexandrines slip into their English counterparts I attribute not so much to my own poetic predilections as to a natural compatibil- ity between the two verse forms. I never had to strong-arm the alexandrines into English couplets; they always seemed to go will- ingly. They were more than compatible: they were companionable. For the most part, I had no trouble in maintaining a couplet-for- couplet correspondence with the original; indeed, it was easier to remain faithful to the French than to depart from it. A second consideration recommending the English couplet was its being a verse form that, like the French alexandrine, represents a high point in its language’s poetic development, “a medium,” translator’s introduction s xxiii according to Maynard Mack in his introduction to the Yale edition of Pope’s Iliad, “vitally expressive of the poetic sensibility of the age, and the one in which most of the age’s best original poetry had been or would be written” (Pope, VII, xliii). The English couplet is truly a verse form with a noble heritage, a verse form whose com- pressed power and flexibility have been exploited to produce some of the greatest works of English poetry. Certainly, Pope’s translation of the Iliad (generally held to be its finest) proves the English couplet capable of rendering into verse “the grandeur of the con- ception, the perfect structure, the irony, the sheer excitement of the action . [and] the extraordinary psychological penetration” of Homer’s epic, the very qualities Kenneth Muir finds in the plays of Racine (Muir, vii). Let me offer, apropos of the preeminence of the English couplet in the late seventeenth century, the following quotation, which appeared in the New York Times obituary (September 13, 2002) of Rolf Fjelde, the great translator of the plays of Ibsen: “In an essay, Mr. Fjelde quoted Ibsen on the art of translation: ‘I believe that a translator should employ the style which the original author would have used if he had written in the language of those who are to read him in translation.’ ” Granted, it is not easy to imagine Racine as an Englishman, and still less easy, perhaps, to think of Pope writing Racine’s plays, but had Racine been English, he might very well have found the English couplet, in such wide use at the time he wrote, most congenial to his dramatic disposition. ii Before proceeding with my discussion of the aptness of the English couplet for translating Racine, I would like to address the argu- ments of those commentators who, contrariwise, are ever at pains to urge its inaptness. (Indeed, I have seldom encountered one who has not been at such pains.) Derek Attridge, in his stimulating article “Dryden’s Dilemma, or, Racine Refashioned: The Problem of the English Dramatic Couplet,” comes to the conclusion that “the failure of the English dramatic couplet” as a vehicle for drama is xxiv s translator’s introduction a case of “the extinction in the evolutionary struggle of a species unfitted for its environment” (Attridge, 76 –77). The conclusion I arrive at, based on the same historical survey Attridge adduces, is that its failure results more from the lack of any dramatists of Racine’s stature who could have overcome the limitations (to admit such arguendo) of the verse form and forged it into a viable vehicle for their dramatic genius, than from any insuperable liabilities inherent in the form itself. Attridge concedes that even Dryden, great poet that he was, was unable to compensate for the weakness of his dramatic gift by the strength of his verse. Although he tries to argue for the supremacy of blank verse as a vehicle for tragic drama by citing Dryden’s growing dissatisfaction with the rhymed couplet and his eventual “conversion” to blank verse, I would counter by asking whether Dryden’s blank verse dramas have proved any more resilient than his dramas written in English couplets. Indeed, aside from the plays of Shakespeare (surely to be considered sui gene- ris) and a select few by Marlowe and Webster, are there any Eng- lish dramas in blank verse that enjoy a significantly greater currency than Dryden’s Aureng-Zebe, his last rhymed tragedy? Yet Racine’s plays have held the stage in France since the seventeenth century. Attridge finds that Dryden, in Aureng-Zebe, “comes nowhere near achieving Racine’s dramatic power,” but, though he cites rhyme as contributing to that failure, there is no reason to believe that Dryden’s use of rhyme has any bearing on his also finding that “where Phèdre in the face of death involuntarily gives voice to her thoughts, Aureng-Zebe makes a touching speech” or that “in the play as a whole there are still too many pretty speeches, too many dilemmas, debates, resolves, and renunciations, to create any- thing like the rising wave of intensity that gives Phèdre its remark- able cohesion” (Attridge, 71–72). These strictures speak rather to Dryden’s shortcomings as a dramatist than to the shortcomings of the English couplet. Dryden may not have been able to write a great play in either heroic or blank verse, but may we not believe that an English Racine might well have done so? And, to pose a correlative question, had not France been blessed with the genius of Corneille and Racine, where would the classic French theater be? Languishing, one may be sure, in the same oblivion that has translator’s introduction s xxv swallowed up the contemporaneous English plays written in heroic couplets and blank verse. It is necessary, too, to point out here, in reference to Attridge’s assertion that the English couplet’s “unsuitability as a dramatic vehicle is a widely accepted fact” (Attridge, 56), that such an assertion is based on remarkably little empirical evidence: how often have contemporary audiences been given the opportunity to assess its suitability or unsuitability? Nor is there evidence of any greater probative value to support the view that the English couplet is an invalid mode for translating Racine’s plays. There are far too few occasions of its having been attempted for us to reach any confi- dent conclusions. At the present time, since one can neither point to an English dramatist, of a genius comparable to Racine’s, whose plays, written in rhymed couplets, have failed to hold the stage, nor adduce many — or, rather, any — examples of performances of foreign-language plays (by Racine or whomever), whose failure can be attributed to their having been given in a translation using English couplets, how can one pronounce with certainty on “their unsuitability as a dramatic vehicle”? iii Most prior translators of Racine have recoiled from rhyme, and all have avoided the more or less strictly end-stopped couplet (even though both are features of Racine’s poetry), believing that they create a different effect in English.

Load more