672
PARTISAN REVIEW
seem important to have foreign plays accurately transported across
frontiers. The whole purpose of adaptation is to enable the audience
to grasp at once how life is lived-wherever it may be. Yet in the
verbal part, which is surely the most manageable, good adaptations
are rare. Mr. Eric Bentley, who collects them for his volumes
From
the M adem Repertory,
tells me that it is difficult to find texts that
can
be
relied on throughout. The simple requirements of sayability,
sense, and truth to the original seldom come together. From my own
knowledge I can testify that it passes belief what the French listen
to and read as the works of Bernard Shaw. The title of
The Apple
Cart (La Charrette aux Pommes)
indicates how the rest goes-blind
man's buff amid strange idioms. Every speech suggests the plight of
the indifferent pupil who excuses himself with a stubborn "That's
what it says." The pity is that the idioms
in
Shaw are quite translat–
able and the Apple Cart image too: the French for it
is
renverser
Ie
pot de fieurs.
At the opera, of course, sound and meaning fare still worse.
After repeated efforts, one can point only to Edward Dent's ver–
&ions of the Mozart librettos as successes in the genre.
If
we listen on
other occasions, say to
Bons Godunov,
we are punished by hearing
about
villagers
and
monkeree.
The old texts, full of 'neath and 'gainst,
have no doubt been discarded as the silly nonsense they were, but
the modern substitutes are either hard to sing or deplorably prosaic:
in a recent version of Monteverdi, his music is made to accompany
suburban-train diction. It becomes a mercy that enunciation in singers
is
~till
as rudimentary as notions of fitness among musical translators.
All these signs of primitivism
in
one important department of
our culture point in the same direction. They point to the need for
a new discipline, perhaps a new institution.
If
we take our century at
its word, it is pining for Communication. It believes in the Commu–
nication
Arts
and has got as far as inventing the dismal phrase.
Unesco takes one shaky step farther and issues "bilingual" cards
headed, on one side,
Dipartement de l'Information
and on the other,
"Department of Mass Communication." Well, our century and Unes–
co and any other massive communicators might do worse (by which
I mean they could not do better) than to set up an Institute of
Translation.
Its purpose would be, first, to collect a library of works of theory
