My version is
free;
nevertheless I have used every speech in the
original, and indeed every line is either translated or paraphrased.
Racine is said to have written prose drafts and then versed them.
We do not have the prose drafts, but I feel sure that necessities of
line rhyme, etc. made for changes of phrasing and even of meaning.
In versing Racine, I have taken the same liberty. Here and there, I
have put in things that no French classical author would have used.
Such interpolations are rare, however.
No translator has had the gifts or the luck to bring Racine into
our culture. It's a pity that Pope and Dryden overlooked Racine's
great body of works, close to them, in favor of the inaccessible
Homer and Virgil.
Racine's verse has a diamond-edge. He is perhaps the greatest
poet in the French language, but he uses a smaller vocabulary than
any English poet-beside him Pope and Bridges have a Shakespeare–
an luxuriance. He has few verbally inspired lines, and in this is un–
like Baudelaire and even Fontaine. His poetry is great because of
the justness of its rhythm and logic, and the glory of its hard, electric
rage. I have translated as a poet, and tried to give my lines a certain
dignity, speed, and flare.
R.
L.
BACKGROUND OF THE ACTION
The story of Racine's
Phedre
is a Greek myth. Phaoora, the
wife of Theseus, the hero and king of Athens, is the daughter of
Minos and Pasiphae, the rulers of Crete. Pasiphae coupled with a
bull, and bore the Minotaur, half bull and half man, who was
slain by Theseus
in
the maze at Crete. Phaedra falls madly in love
with her stepson, Hippolytus. She is rejected by him, and falsely
accuses
him
of trying to assault her. Theseus prays to Poseidon, the
sea-god, to destroy Hippolytus; Hippolytus is destroyed. Phaedra
confesses and kills herself.
Phedre
is in some ways a miraculous
translation and adaptation of Euripedes'
Hippolytos.
Racine quite
alters, and to my mind even surpasses, his wonderful original.
