The Complete Plays of Jean Racine. Jean Racine

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      This translation of Britannicus, Racine’s fifth play, is one of a series that, when complete, will offer in English translation all twelve of Racine’s plays (eleven tragedies and one comedy), only the third such traversal since Racine’s death in 1699. This traversal, in addition, is the first to be composed in rhymed iambic pentameter couplets. My strategy has been to reconceive Racine in that pedigreed indigenous English verse form in order to produce a poetic translation of concentrated power and dramatic impact. After all, as Proust observes, “the tyranny of rhyme forces good poets into the discovery of their best lines”; and while subjected to that tyranny, I took great pains to render Racine’s French into English that is incisive, lucid, elegant, ingenious, and memorable. For I believe that the proper goal of a translation of a work of literature must be, first and foremost, to produce a work of literature in the language of the target audience. For a considerably more expansive discussion of my approach to translation, as well as a vigorously, rigorously argued rationale for my decision to employ rhymed couplets, I direct the interested reader to the Translator’s Introduction that appears in Volume I of this series, devoted to my translation of Racine’s first play, The Fratricides.

      This translation is based on the definitive 1697 edition of Racine’s theater as it appears in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade edition of 1980, edited by Raymond Picard. The 1697 text represents Racine’s final thoughts on this play. The divergences between the first edition (1670) and the last are, with three exceptions, relatively inconsequential. Most of them involve minor textual emendations that Racine made for his later editions, all of which represent clear, if subtle, improvements over the earlier versions. All three of the noteworthy changes occur in Act V (and indeed I devote a note to each). The first involves Racine’s deletion of eight lines for Britannicus that originally preceded line V.i.56. I have consigned these lines, translated into rhymed couplets, to note 12 for Act V, where, in addition, I expatiate on several cogent reasons for deleting verses that do no service either to Britannicus or to Britannicus. The second significant change, a more consequential one, in that it restructures the second half of Act V, involves Racine’s removal of an entire, albeit brief, scene, signaled by the reappearance of Junia, who has, to say the least, an awkward moment when she encounters Nero after Britannicus’s murder. Again, I offer this scene, comprising all of twelve lines, as well as the original version of the last few lines of the prior scene and the first few lines of the following scene (all for Agrippina) — which Racine had to modify when he jettisoned the intervening scene — translated into rhymed couplets, in note 31 for Act V. That this intrusive scene was an undoubted miscalculation on Racine’s part was soon recognized by Racine himself, notwithstanding his having at first, in the face of criticism from friend and foe alike, defended its dramatic necessity with much vehemence but little cogency in his first preface, for, soon after СКАЧАТЬ