Robert Lowell
FOUR SPE ECHES
,
FROM RACINE'S " PHEDRE "
,
ON TRANSLATING PHEDRE
Racine's plays are generally and correctly thought to be
untranslatable. His syllabic alexandrines do not and cannot exist in
English. We cannot reproduce his language, which is refined by the
literary artifice of his contemporaries, and given a subtle realism and
grandeur by the spoken idiom of Louis the Fourteenth's court.
Behind each line is a, for us, lost knowledge of actors and actresses,
the stage and the moment. Other qualities remain : the great can–
ception, the tireless plotting, and perhaps the genius for rhetoric and
versification that alone proves that the canception and plotting are
honest. Matisse says somewhere that a reproduction requires as
much talent for color as the original painting. I have been tor–
mented by the fraudulence of my own heavy touch.
My meter, with important differences, is based on Dryden and
Pope. In his heroic plays, Dryden uses an end-stopped couplet,
loaded with inversions, heavily alliterated, and varied by short un–
rhymed lines. My couplet is run on, avoids inversions and allitera–
tion, and loosens its rhythm with shifted accents and occasional
extra syllables. I gain in naturalness and lose in compactness and
epigrammic resonance. I have tried for an idiomatic and ageless
style, but I inevitably echo the English Restoration, both in ways
that are proper and in my sometimes un-Racinian humor and
bombast.
Copyright
©
1960, 1961 by Robert Lowell. To be published this spring
by Farrar, Straus
&
Cudahy, Inc.
