The Saint-Domingue Plantation; or, The Insurrection: A Drama in Five Acts

Translator's Note

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE Theater, like poetry, presents the translator with more of an artistic challenge than fiction. Although I believe firmly that all literature , ideally, is meant to be heard, even if only in the head, fiction writers (and hence their translators) are, by the very nature of the genre, generally less concerned with matters of sound and tonal nuance than their dramatic and poetic colleagues. Which is not to say that they ought not be. Translating the likes of an eighteenthcentury French novel into contemporary American idiom, for example (except as an intentional pastiche or burlesque), would be unthinkable. It might purport to be an adaptation, but not a translation in the true sense of the word. Still, if fiction translators can (and, I think, should) choose to write “with an eye toward the ear,” verse and theater translators haven’t the luxury of choice. Those who take their craft seriously will, I think, feel obliged to do so. Even the most abstruse poet expects a living reciter/listener out there somewhere; although, perhaps, one who may have to stop, repeat several times, and ponder on the text before really “getting it,” whether the “it” is in the original or filtered through a translation. With drama the author has even less of a choice. Plays are written to be performed, not merely contemplated on paper. When read, even in silence, they are no less performed in the mind of the reader, who also has the option, lacking in a stage performance, of stopping for reflection viii Translator’s Note and jumping forward or back at will, from scene to scene. What’s more, the translator of theater has the further obligation to transmit not only the “meaning” of the text, whether the “performance” is virtual or real, inside the head or out, but also—pardon the truism —its tone. Charles de Rémusat’s L’Habitation de Saint-Domingue; ou, L’Insurrection is a case in point. It was never actually staged (although read from time to time in contemporary artistic salons), but its very existence as a play implies, ipso facto, that its author certainly hoped—expected?—that it would be performed at some time, and no doubt wrote it with spectators in mind. Striking though it is as a vehicle for his timely social and philosophical ideology , as theater it should not be relegated to the status of a mere archival document. But it would be clear, I think, to anyone reading the original, and especially to one setting about to translate it, that, for all its powerful dramatic action, its theatricality must have been less a concern to Rémusat than its ideological intent and its pertinent contemporary message. As a result, one of the difficulties in effectively translating the play lay precisely in Rémusat’s seemingly rather casual attitude toward nuts-and-bolts matters of stagecraft. For him, so long as his message rang out loud and clear, any shortcomings in dramatic technique could, it appears, be overlooked. Are his stage settings and directions, unlike those of his typical French Romantic contemporaries, rather vague? Is too much left to the reader’s imagination and dramatic intuition? Do entrances and exits remain a little too imprecise? Are characters free to position themselves more or less at their own (or a director’s) will? What do they all do while such-and-such a character is delivering a lengthy tirade or dialoguing with others? And is it realistic for such often lengthy speeches, however packed with philosophical and social speculation , to plow forward uninterrupted, unrelieved by an interlocutor ’s “oh” or “ah,” or by another character’s well-motivated reflections ? Rémusat appears little taken with such practical concerns Translator’s Note ix for the ideal of theatrical vraisemblance. Nor does he seem overly bothered by details, such that two characters in chains in one act appear bound by rope in the next, or even such that a character unmentioned in the dramatis personae suddenly appears in the action to deliver a single line. But such “flaws” are unimportant when the overall strengths of the play—its message and its dramatic development and illustration—remain powerfully intact... A translator faced with such arguably secondary theatrical shortcomings has to decide whether to remain rigorously faithful to the original with its occasional blemishes, or to smooth them out for the sake of consistency...