Molière in North America: Problems of Translation and Adaptation

Moliere in North America: Problems of Translation and Adaptation DAVID EDNEY When the task of translating a difficult text seems too daunting, I sometimes think of a remark made by drama teacher Charles Werner Moore: talking to an acting class about the difficulties of making Shakespeare intelligible, he said: "We don't have the advantage of being able to do it in translation" (my emphasis).' This encourages me to see the translator's work not as a pale imitation of something superior but as a creative endeavour in its own right. The following reflections come from my experiences with Moliere's plays over many years as spectator, reader and translator. Referring both to my own practice and to that of other translators in three areas - humour, verse and updating - [ shall show that modem North American audiences and theatre people do not see the French playwright as their counterparts in France do and that translators are partly responsible for this different perception, which has led to the creation of a distinctively North American MoMre. Humour is notoriously difficult to translate, but, in most cases in Moliere's plays, the problem is not insunnountable. Physical comedy (Orgon hiding under the table in Tartuffe, Scapin beating Geronte in the sack in Scapin) usually poses no great difficulty for the translator.' Comic repetition ("Le pauvre homme" [Poor fellow] in Tartuffe [Liv] and "Que diable allait-il faire dans cette galere?" [What the devil was he doing in that galley?] in Scapin [[Lvii] ) works the same in English as in French. Verbal humour can be difficult, it is true. At first [ did not even attempt to render the wordplay in "Le Seigneur Harpagon est de taus les humains I'humain Ie moins humain...." (The Miser II.iv),' simply putting: "He's the most inhuman of all beings." But then, feeling that this was an ignominious surrender, I tried to find a closer equivalent to the original. A colleague, Moishe Black, came up with the version I finally adopted: "He's the most inhuman being a human being could be......' I have found that MOliere's humour is more universal than that of Shakespeare or Beaumarchais, for example, and that, with a litModern Drama, 41 (1998) 60 Problems of Translation and Adaptation 6t lie determination, a translator can transpose most of it into English without much loss of comic effect. North American audiences and theatre people have certain expectations of humour in a Moliere play. They expect it to be funny, and, if the laughs are not sufficiently frequent and boisterous, they feel let down. In France, on the other hand, performance practice and audience expectations are rather different . The French cherish their great playwright as a classical writer whose best works offer a penetrating study of society and an expression of profound truths about the human condition. Productions of certain works - Tartuffe, Don Juan, The Misanthrope, The Miser, and George Dandin, for instance are sometimes broadly comic, but they can also be very serious. An American scholar, Jim .Carmody, has strongly emphasized this tendency for serious interpretations in France. "[G]enerations of directors," he writes, "have shown a marked preference for a 'tragic' Moliere.'" While this may be overstating the case, the importance of serious interpretations of Moliere in France is undeniable. Roger Planchon's second mounting of Tartuffe (1973), for example , was a chilling portrait of totalitarianism; during the performance I saw in Paris, there was not a single laugh, and the audience left the theatre shaken· Many North American theatre people, on the other hand, are unaware of the possibilities for drama in Moliere. A Festival adjudicator, baffled by the restraint of a production of Tarluf/e, thanked the cast in caustic termS: "I have always wondered what it would be like to see The Mikado done seriously.'" When John Hirsch directed this play at Stratford in 1983, his interpretation was "middle of the road" in terms of French petformance practice: neither drama nor farce, but high comedy. Praised by one critic as "delightful ... buoyant ... broadly comic ... [with] real and believable characters,'" it was criticized by another for not fulfilling her comic expectations: Tartuffe is very nearly actor-proof. That is to say...