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2 The Translation as a Doppelgänger: Heinrich von Kleist’s Amphitryon: Ein Lustspiel nach Molière (A Comedy After Molière) is not a translated text on every page, but it differs from eighteenth-century adaptations in that the vast majority of the text—almost all of the first two acts—is a work of extreme servicetranslation fidelity, rendering the sense, tone, and cadence of Molière’s lines with exceptional accuracy. The nach of its title implies not only “in the manner of” or “in imitation of” Molière, but also Amphitryon in a post-Molièrean, post-Enlightenment age, when the comedy of manners has ceased to be a socially relevant form, and Kleist’s text is marked throughout by a multivalent ambiguity. On the one hand a model of the most faithful translation, it turns radically away from the authorial intent expressed in Molière’s Amphitryon: Comédie, and thus it is exceptionally well suited for examination as a work of authorial translation . Molière’s 1668 interpretation of the Amphitryon myth assumes a basic equilibrium in the state of the world. Prank-playing gods can knock things out of kilter—as Jupiter, out of lust for the virtuous Alcmena, assumes the guise of her husband, Amphitryon—but the humans in their hands are, finally, in good hands, and order can always be restored. The play concludes with a grand spectacle of resolution, with Jupiter explaining his ruse and promising compensation for any 47 by Molière and Kleist CHAPTER 2 48 harm done. In Kleist’s play (written most likely in 1803 and published in 1807), 1 the potential of the gods to do unintended harm—not to mention the chaos explicitly planned by Jupiter—is far greater, and at the end of the play there is a strong sense that very little has been put to rights. Alcmena, rather than being whisked off stage as in Molière, is placed, explosively, at the center of the action. By the time Jupiter has given his final address and the curtain drops, she has been restored to her legal husband, but with what may prove to be grave psychological damage (the play ends before the full consequences of her disorientation become apparent, leaving the spectator free to fear the worst). Meanwhile, Amphitryon himself has been severely rattled in his sense of personal identity. In short, Molière’s Amphitryon has become, in Kleist’s hands, a play very much as Kleist might have written it without the use of Molière’s text as a template, and as such it challenges the primacy of Molière’s play as original text. A more complete appropriation is hardly imaginable. To avoid confusion in the discussion that follows, the word translation will be used to refer only to those lines of Kleist’s play that have direct antecedents in Molière’s text, even if they are significantly transformed in their new contexts. Otherwise I will speak of the adaptation of individual passages and scenes. In these terms, Kleist’s play is an adaptation of Molière’s play that includes a translation of most of it. Molière’s play is itself an adaptation of a work by Plautus (inspired in part by Rotrou’s 1636 adaptation, Les Sosies), but Molière is not to Plautus as Kleist is to Molière. The difference lies in the nature of the critical distance Kleist brings to Molière’s text. Not content merely to update or modernize the older work, he creates an adaptation capable of standing beside its original as a subversive double, a model of an anti-classicist aesthetic. My analysis will address the ways in which Kleist used his translation as a tool to serve his own aesthetic, literary, political , and philosophical ends, and how he was able, by the most subtle shifts in the lines he translated, to produce scenes that seem far less the work of Molière and far more his own. In particular I will be tracing a thematic strand that, though already present in embryonic form in Molière’s play, is far more developed in Kleist’s version. Kleist took advantage of the elements of the original that are suggestive of a crisis of identity and expanded them radically to create a play whose thematic concerns are very much in keeping with the body of Kleist’s own work: the contingency of indi- [3.17.154.171] Project...

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