Gabriel: The Original French Text, and: Gabriel: An English Translation. Trans. Kathleen Robin Hart & Paul Fenouillet (review)

The Modern Language Association's Texts & Translations series has made a habit of finding lesser-known and out-of-print literary works, pairing these works with excellent translators, and thereby affording scholars new opportunities to learn, teach and publish. Kathleen Robin Hart's presentation of George Sand's Gabriel and Hart and Paul Fenouillet's translation of the work continue this laudable trend. It is an excellent translation and faculty should not hesitate to include this play on reading lists for theatre and literature classes alike.

Sand's thought-provoking and polemical play presents the hero, Gabriel, who, although born a girl, is raised as a boy. The grandson of a spiteful prince who wants to choose his successor, Gabriel is hidden from the rest of the world, given an education typical of a male of his social standing, and constantly reminded of the superiority of men and the inferiority of women. The play poignantly questions the societal constraints of gender roles through a noble hero(ine) who is graced with the proverbial best of both worlds—in this case, the best of both sexes — and seeks to maintain the freedoms granted only to men. The idyllic character that Sand creates, "un ange sous la forme humaine" (117), stands in stark contrast to the play's other characters who are imperfect, fallible and ultimately non-angelic.

Hart's introduction to the play (found in both the original and translated versions reviewed here) skillfully condenses Sand's controversial life and works, making this play accessible to Sand experts and neophytes alike. Hart nicely navigates the unavoidable connections drawn between Sand's life and this particular work, explaining them as "indirect" and stating that "art gives Sand the freedom to exalt a transgressive identity" (xii). By directing readers' attention to issues relating to Romanticism, genre, gender, and class, Hart successfully points out the most important and researched elements of the play, all the while encouraging further reading. The notes and bibliography are complete and highly useful.

Hart & Fenouillet's translation deftly handles the linguistic and cultural difficulties of this play. The mood and tone of Sand's work are rendered beautifully through the translators' choices. The translators' note logically explains the treatment of theatrical language, seventeenth and early nineteenth-century particularities of language, and gender. With gender playing such a seminal role in the work, even the gender of the nouns and pronouns in the work are carefully considered. For example, how to handle the gender ambiguity of the pronoun lui? The footnotes throughout the play are judiciously employed to explain that which is untranslatable: the use of tu versus vous, the puns and rhymes that must be changed in order to keep the original humor, and the cultural differences between a Francophone and Anglophone readership. However, an explanation of the English and French pronunciations of Gabriel/Gabrielle would have helped the non-French speaker better understand Sand's conscientious choice to play on the androgyny present in these homophonic names.

It was a pleasure to read both the original text and Hart and Fenouillet's translation. I look forward to using them myself in future classes. The original French text would complement a literature course at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. For the undergraduate student, the language is accessible and the subject matter exciting and provocative. For the graduate student, the complexity present in Sand's handling of the gender question allows for rigorous analysis of gender identity in Romanticism. The translation that Hart and Fenouillet have provided is an admirable addition to our field that should introduce many new non-francophone scholars and students to George Sand's important play. It will...