Moliere in North America: Problems of Translation and Adaptation

Abstract

When the task of translating a difficult text seems too daunting, I sometimes think of a remark made by drama teacher Charles Werner Moore: talking to an acting class about the difficulties of making Shakespeare intelligible, he said: "We don't have the advantage of being able to do it in translation" (my emphasis). This encourages me to see the translator's work not as a pale imitation of something superior but as a creative endeavour in its own right. The following reflections come from my experiences with Moliere's plays over many years as spectator, reader and translator. Referring both to my own practice and to that of other translators in three areas — humour, verse and updating — I shall show that modem North American audiences and theatre people do not see the French playwright as their counterparts in France do and that translators are partly responsible for this different perception, which has led to the creation of a distinctively North American Moliere.