l'Infâme!
Today's must-read is this Sebastian Faulks review of "Shakespeare Goes to Paris: How the Bard Conquered France," by John Pemble.
It turns out, "The French were so appalled by the vulgarity of Shakespeare’s plays that it took them 300 years to come near to an accurate translation." On reflection, that's hardly surprising. Not only was the language coarse and direct, Shakespeare didn't follow the classical "rules" of drama that guided everything that set foot on a French stage.
The French tried to snub him into oblivion, but eventually they had to face the rough music:
French verse was the domain of the cultured -- no groundlings allowed. When they finally rendered Shakespeare into French, the results would have made Bowdler howl in objection. Ninteenth-century translators made wholesale plot changes. "The ghost of Hamlet’s father returned in the final scene and told him to survive; Malcolm took republican vows; Romeo and Juliet lived happily ever after."
The language suffered no less:
As usual, Faulks is half the fun:
It turns out, "The French were so appalled by the vulgarity of Shakespeare’s plays that it took them 300 years to come near to an accurate translation." On reflection, that's hardly surprising. Not only was the language coarse and direct, Shakespeare didn't follow the classical "rules" of drama that guided everything that set foot on a French stage.
The French tried to snub him into oblivion, but eventually they had to face the rough music:
Then came this Englishman — a Caliban from the island of fog and bad food, whose pious and practical people enjoyed violent entertainments and bouts of introspection punctuated by sea voyages to plunder other countries. It was not until the mid-18th century that the intellectual rise of Anglo-Saxon power, following Newton and Locke, obliged France to formulate a proper response to the menace Shakespeare posed. Voltaire, who did so much to bring England to the French, is the key figure in this story, and he went to his grave believing Shakespeare had offered “a few pearls in an enormous dungheap”. He hated the pantomime that accompanied performance, the blank verse with emotion surging through the enjambement, the common characters, and the language where metaphor and association seem to breed without control.
French verse was the domain of the cultured -- no groundlings allowed. When they finally rendered Shakespeare into French, the results would have made Bowdler howl in objection. Ninteenth-century translators made wholesale plot changes. "The ghost of Hamlet’s father returned in the final scene and told him to survive; Malcolm took republican vows; Romeo and Juliet lived happily ever after."
The language suffered no less:
Lear’s sky became a “firmament”; a horse was a “coursier” and Hamlet’s “How now, a rat?” behind the arras, became “Comment, un voleur?” As late as 1904, when King Lear was staged for the first time in Paris, Kent’s lines at the height of the storm, “The tyranny of the open night’s too rough / For nature to endure” became “Il n’est pas possible de rester plus longtemps dehors.”
As usual, Faulks is half the fun:
This reminded me of the hours I spent in Left-bank cinemas as a student learning French by reading the subtitles of English films. My brother claims to have seen a western in which the trail-weary cowboy’s first line on entering the saloon — “Gimme a shot of red eye” — was translated as “Un Dubonnet, s’il vous plaît.”
