The Roots of Translation

Paul Schmidt, one of America’s most influential translators, returns to the American Repertory Theater’s stage this season with Phaedra, a new translation of Racine’s seventeenth-century masterpiece, Phèdre. In recent years, the A.R.T. has staged Schmidt’s versions of Euripides’ The Bacchae and Brecht’s In the Jungle of Cities. With its difficult language and cultural distance, many people believe Racine’s play to be untranslatable.

Schmidt first experienced Phèdre in performances given by two extraordinary French actresses in the 1950s: Edwige Feuillière and Marie Belle. He was taken with the actresses’ ability to make an unnatural verse form sound natural. “It could never sound like street talk, but these great actresses were able to bend the language so that the emotions and passions of the character were fully conveyed despite the alien quality of Racine’s verse.” After seeing these productions, Schmidt understood Phèdre as a play about thwarted passions, the dominant metaphor the contrast between light and dark, underlining the void between Phaedra’s external demeanor and her smoldering passion within. In his translation, Schmidt aimed to convey this metaphor as powerfully as he could and hopes the production design will draw it out further: “I would want the designer of a production to take this metaphor into account.”

Many translators make the mistake of trying to translate the rhyme scheme of the original. Schmidt steers clear of this approach. He sees himself as a “bad rhymer.” Although Racine’s verse rhymes in French Alexandrine couplets (lines of twelve syllables and six stresses that rhyme in pairs), any attempt to translate this into English produces an jarring sing-song effect. A staunch pilgrim in his quest to develop a new American vernacular, Schmidt is adamant about writing in an American style. “For decades, the whole thrust of American poetry has been against rhyme. In translation, it simply comes out as laughable and does not sound like poetry at all.” Because the American language is not predominated by florid expressions, Schmidt sees it as vital that the actors who speak his lines sound like living human beings to an American audience.

If not through rhyme, then how to capture a sense of Racine’s poetry? Sticking close to a vocabulary he believes is familiar to contemporary theatre audiences, Schmidt uses blank verse. “Audiences are familiar with the stage language of Shakespeare, so the iambic pentameter feels formal yet familiar. It was a matter of trying to adapt Racine’s rhythm to something that would sound natural to the ear of an English-speaking theatergoer.” But Schmidt’s chief goal with his Phaedra is to bridge the chasm between American language and culture and Racine’s world. Phèdre is a seventeenth-century French tragedy, written according to specific neo-classical rules. Schmidt aims to find a vocabulary within American English that will reflect the concerns of Racine’s culture and contemporaries: “seventeenth-century Europe was a time of extreme repression. Ingrained in Racine’s text, this idea must be reflected in any translation.”

Schmidt has one litmus test for a good translation: “The audience goes in and sits down. The curtain goes up. The actors perform the play and at no point is the audience ever aware that the play was written in any language other than English. If at any given point a member of the audience says, ‘That’s odd; I wonder what it says in the original?’ then it’s not a good translation.” In order to create this kind of theater in America, translations need to be written and performed on stage by Americans. “There are some writers, like Tom Stoppard, who could probably write in the American vernacular as well as they write in English, but this is unusual. I would never presume to write a translation for a British audience. English actors should use British translations because the writers know the particular inflections of their language. I can imitate it, but it isn’t native to me. Every dialect of English, be it Australian, Irish, Scottish, or whatever, ought to have its own translators.”

For Schmidt, translation is culturally specific, and a play should be re-translated every fifty years. Theater texts need to be translated more often than other forms of literature because spoken language changes even faster than written language. Slang changes radically from decade to decade, for example. He does, however, concede to the longevity of “classic” translations, which do stand the test of time. He sees Edward Fitzgerald’s translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam as a standard English classic. “You read it as English poetry and never think of it as having been originally written in any other language.”

Schmidt focuses his efforts on bringing the world of the play to his contemporary audience rather than attempting to carry the audience back in time to seventeenth-century France. To those who have a vested interest in the original text, Schmidt’s “irreverent” approach arouses consternation. People might criticize his lack of fidelity, but he rightly notes, “If you think that it’s impossible to translate Phèdre, then you shouldn’t come to the A.R.T. production. You should go to Paris to see a production that’s running there right now.”

Although for Schmidt the act of translation follows specific rules, his notion of translation is somewhat broader. Virgil’s Anaeid could be seen as a translation of Homer, as could Dante’s Divine Comedy of Virgil. Molière and Shakespeare are also translators of a kind. Taking a source, such as Plautus or Holinshed, they transformed it into something else. “What we tend to speak of as creativity builds on something else; it never springs full-blown from anybody’s brain.” Works of art are never original. Schmidt’s point is epitomized by Racine’s Phèdre, where close analysis reveals that the French author directly translated passages from Euripides’ Hippolytus.

Although all literature is a form of translation to Schmidt, he draws a distinction between translation and adaptation. The difference is simple: with a translation, the translator knows the original language, whereas the writer of an adaptation is not necessarily familiar with the original language. Schmidt himself has written what he would call adaptations in the past. “A few years ago, the Guthrie Theatre asked me to work on The Triumph of Love by Marivaux. The director was interested in another Marivaux play and asked me to combine the two works into one. It was a matter of translating two plays, cutting them together to make one play, and then writing scenes of my own where they were needed to hold things together. This was an adaptation.”

Schmidt is often present in the rehearsal room for the first two weeks of production. He helps the actors find the sense of problematic lines and is also on hand to make any necessary changes to the script. Despite careful writing, he knows a line works only when it sounds right on stage. “Although I can get up and act the parts out by myself in my room, until I hear the actors speak these lines I’m still not sure if they’re right. If there’s something in the lines that stops the actors from performing them, I have to do something about it.” The A.R.T is lucky to collaborate with such an flexible writer. In many productions, the text is finalized before rehearsals begin and very little can be done to make those small yet important changes.

The upcoming A.R.T production of Phaedra is just one of several projects both in the offing and at completion stage for Schmidt. Having just completed a translation of Euripides’ Medea for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Schmidt is looking forward to his next project, a translation of Pushkin’s play Boris Godunov for the Court Theatre in Chicago.

Chloe Veltman is a first-year dramaturgy student at the A.R.T./MXAT Institute for Advanced Theater Training.