New Yorker movie critic Pauline Kael had this to say about the 1968 film version of Phèdre:
Marie Bell has been acclaimed as the greatest Phèdre since Bernhardt. Most Americans must take this judgment on faith, but at least it's possible to see her legendary performance and to glean an idea of the sound and look of the classic French style of acting from this somewhat shortened version of the Racine tragedy in Alexandrine verse, directed by Pierre Jourdan.
This clip, which begins with a vertiginous over-the-shoulder shot ("one of those ladder-high positions from which birds and movie cameras view the world" - Vincent Canby, New York Times), features Claude Giraud (Hippolyte), Tania Torrens (Aricie) and Jean Chevrier (Théramène).
It's a shame this clip doesn't have the English subtitles it did on the grainy VHS I watched last night. William Packard's 1966 translation went full-monty with the twelve-syllable rhyming couplets -- an "incredibly difficult undertaking" for an anglophone:
It is not as if the alexandrine line had never been used in English literature; it has, and sometimes to great effect. But it is not in our pulse, the way Shakespeare's blank verse line is in our pulse. Just as the Italians have their terza rima, and the Japanese have their 17-syllable haiku, so the French have their alexandrine and the English have their pentameter; it is the unique expression of a civilization, and it cannot really be accounted for.
Tim Chilcott, undaunted, gives it a shot:
Three hundred or so years after Jean Racine's death in 1699, the best reason for offering a new translation of his work may also seem the most ironic: that his plays continue to appear untranslatable....Racine's plays are famously written in alexandrines, twelve-syllable lines that were first used in the late twelfth-century epic Le Roman d'Alexandre, and that later became the standard metrical form for French neo-classical tragedy....
Although two recent translations (by C.H. Sisson and Robert David MacDonald) have sought to reproduce this expansiveness (with an eleven-syllable and a hexameter line, respectively), few versions have followed the example. Pope's well-known comment continues to bite ('A needless Alexandrine ends the song, / That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along').
The weight and ponderousness of the metre in English are a substantial disadvantage, evoking as they do a stately largo di molto rather than any more vibrant pulse. As a result, this translation adopts an iambic pentameter line.
Robert David MacDonald spikes the ball back into the other court:
On looking at the two most distinguished of the translations currently available, by poets a generation apart, both of considerable technical achievement, I found them veering dizzily between the wilfully paraphrased and the vapidly cute....Part of the trouble seemed to lie in the adoption of the rhymed five-foot heroic couplet, making everything sound like a succession of final distichs in some Shakespearean forgery. I have therefore preserved the Alexandrine hexameter.
"Le dessein en est pris, je pars, cher Théramène" - to director Jean-Louis Barrault, the opening line of Phèdre "matched the rhythms of Hippolyte's footsteps, ensuring that he was in position on the word 'Théramène'." Susan Bassnett's Translation Studies gives three different English takes on the same line:
I have resolved, Theramenes, to go. (John Cairncross)No, no, my friend, we're off. (Robert Lowell)
No! No! I can't. I can't. How can I stay? (Tony Harrison)
(Phaedra Britannica, by Harrison "after Jean Racine," not only translates the language, but moves the action to the British Raj in 19th-century India.)
Here are a few others:
I have made up my mind: I go, dear Théramène. (William Packard)I am resolved to leave this place, Theramenes. (Robert David MacDonald)
I have made my decision. (Ted Hughes)
Hungry for more? Check out Colin John Holcombe for a feature-length translator cage match.
Some 35 years after the video above, Patrice Chéreau directed Phèdre at the Ateliers Berthier, Théâtre de l'Odéon, in 2003 (here are the teacher's notes, in French). The production was filmed by Stéphane Metge for ARTE France (here's a DVD press release, also in French).
This clip from the same scene features Marina Hands (Aricie), Éric Ruf (Hippolyte) and Michel Duchaussoy (Théramène).
And for dessert, here's The Divine Sarah as Phèdre (act 2, scene 5) on a scratchy Pathé cylinder recorded over one hundred years ago.