to confirm it. I suggested
J.
Dover
Wilson.
We were smoking Pall Mall cig–
arettes, of which I offered
him
a
package. Cigarettes, with the
Americans gone, were then very
difficult to come by. But when I
returned to see him the second
time, there were three different
brands of American cigarettes
spread out on his writing desk,
and he asked me to choose among
them. This was in the middle of
November, and this time we were
to complete the interview that the
first two hours had not permitted.
Gide had returned a day or two
before from a trip to Brussels,
where he had seen an English com–
pany do
Hamlet
in a one-night
stand. The performance had de–
lighted him, and it was with the
playing of that company in mind
that he considered the answers to
the questions that I had proposed
during our first interview. He had
then declined to answer them be–
cause he felt that they required
very careful thought. Of my orig–
inal nine questions he had deuded
to answer only four. The five ques–
tions rejected were: 1) Hamlet
in
Gide's novels, 2)
Hamlet
and
Montaigne's
Apologie de Raymond
Sebond,
3) Hamlet and Alceste
of
The Misanthrope,
4) Hamlet's
secret ("the heart of my mystery")
and psychoanalysis, 5) Hamlet and
T. S. Eliot's statement that Ham–
let's emotion is in excess of the
facts. I was somewhat disappointed
that he had chosen the old chest-
216
nuts among my questions, the
schoolroom glories, but it pleased
me that he had carefully written
out the answers in his absolute
French. He wished to see my trans–
lation when I had made one, he
told me. I then posed my first ques–
tion in his order, which was:
"What specific feature or qual–
ity of the play
Hamlet
did you
emphasize in your translation of
the work?"
"There are numerous French
translations of Hamlet, and they
have all proved very useful to me
in my work. They indicate a great
care for precision. That I persisted
in working on my translation, and,
upon the earnest entreaty of Jean–
Louis Barrault, brought it to com–
pletion, I ascribe to the fact that
I have always felt something lack–
ing in the earlier translations,
something that I considered indis–
pensable: the poetic as well as the
musical essence that animates the
play throughout; a kind of lyrical
transposition of key, vibrating in
a surcharged atmosphere that
bathes the characters and colors
their speeches. It seemed to me
that my work would be in vain
if
I conveyed into the French no
more than the meaning of these
speeches, which a number of the
earlier translators had rendered
quite well, but at the cost of the
rhythm, the rapture, and the pe–
culiar latent music in which Shake–
speare's genius sports. That is what
I proposed to render, and without
sacrificing the precise meaning of
