All For Love; or, The World Well Lost by John Dryden

Abstract

Reviewed by: All For Love; or, The World Well Lost by John Dryden Víctor Huertas-Martín Víctor Huertas-Martín. Review of John Dryden, Todo por amor, o el mundo bien perdido (All For Love; or, The World Well Lost), edited and translated by Rocío G. Sumillera. Madrid: Publicaciones de la Asociación de Directores de Escena de España, 2018. ISBN: 9788417189112 In his preface to All for Love; or, The World Well Lost, first performed at London's Theatre Royal (1677), John Dryden claimed to have outdone himself by using Shakespearean blank verse, albeit having adjusted Shakespeare's model to the neoclassical rules of the Restoration. In writing the first Spanish translation of All for Love, Rocío G. Sumillera did not copy Dryden uncritically either. While she accurately followed Dryden's text content-wise, the formal features of her translation bring potentialities to the play. Sumillera's translation was produced for a collection of Spanish versions of early modern English plays. These were carried out as part of "Entorno Digital de Investigación y Traducción del Primer Teatro Moderno Inglés" (GVAICO 2016–094), a research project led by Jesús Tronch-Pérez (Universitat de València, Spain). It was published with a preliminary study by Publicaciones de la Asociación de Directores de Escena de España and, with the publisher's permission, later appeared online on the EMOTHE Digital Library.1 Despite the dearth of Spanish translations of non-Shakespearean early modern plays, Sumillera could take vantage point from precedents to translating Dryden's work into Spanish. Her first model was José Luis Martínez-Dueñas Espejo's use of free verse to translate The Conquest of Granada; her second model was Mercedes Vella Ramírez's use of alexandrine verse to translate Dryden's satiric poetry.2 One benefit of using non-rhymed alexandrines to translate All for Love is that, as Sumillera explains, often, single lines suffice to express thoughts which, in Dryden, required enjambments.3 The length of alexandrines is balanced by a consequent shortening of the play from 2,613 to 2,561 lines, without any loss of content. The 332 truncated lines in Robert G. Lawrence's edition of All for Love, which was published in his anthology Restoration Plays and formed the basis for Sumillera's translation, are turned into shorter, complete lines, avoiding monotony in the pattern. These decisions favor suggestive [End Page 183] off-beat interventions and pauses in the alexandrines. Some select sequences maintain the original truncated lines—for instance, during Ventidius and Mark Antony's first encounter, a scene Dryden himself regarded as particularly successful—to highlight the scene's import. This stylistic variety permits a multi-faceted stageability, consistent with the heteroglossic features of contemporary verse drama, described by Kasia Lech as "a dialogical interaction between often contradictory viewpoints … [reflecting] the globalized world's multifaceted and pluralistic nature."4 A sense of relevance is, likewise, encouraged by the translation's bridging of present and past through its paratexts. As an overture to the edition, Sumillera inserted a quotation from C. P. Cavafy's "The God Abandons Antony" (1911): When suddenly, at midnight, you hearan invisible procession going bywith exquisite music, voices,don't mourn your luck that's failing now,work gone wrong, your plansall proving deceptive—don't mourn them uselessly.As one long prepared, and graced with courage,say goodbye to her, the Alexandria that is leaving.5 The passage evokes Plutarch—a source for Dryden, as well as for Shakespeare—: the night before Caesar's arrival in Alexandria, a merry dance troupe is seen walking towards the city gates. It is a sign that Dionysus has turned away definitively from Antony. Cavafy's call to Antony to gather courage finds echoes across Sumillera's interpolations. Such interpolations implicitly resist a possible endorsement of Ventidius' sanctimonious diagnoses of Antony's daydreaming. It was, as Sumillera's conclusion reads, "worthwhile losing the world for love."6 Unsurprisingly, the translator's interpolations emphasize Antony's need to gather bravery more explicitly than it is done in Dryden. See, for instance: … Now she's dead...