Unfailing Showman

...And, very probably indeed, with exceptional playability...

...And with The Rehearsal at Versailles, as Bermel points out, we are deep in Pirandello . Of the seven plays, I should say only The Seductive Countess (La Comtesse d'Escarbagnas), being merely a curtain-raiser and prologue to a ballet of greater pretentions, is of no interest to a modem reader or writer...

...In any case, it is a good study in the master's unfailing showmanship...

...Worse, when he tries to give the effect of the alexandrines of Corneille, in The Rehearsal at Versailles, he translates into rather faulty but emphatic anapaests...

...It occurs to me that Moliere does not much need a favorable review by me, and my real business is with Bermel...

...There are-I lay it down-two distinct ways of going about translating an old French classic into English...

...One is to suppose that English is a quite open and unsettled language, that you can still jump it through any hoops you please, and you can force it to imitate the manner of 17th-century French with no bad conscience whatever as to what Shakespeare or Christopher Fry or T. S. Eliot might feel due to traditional English usage...

...And in a way he is no alien here, not because he is an American citizen, but because the American public is such that it believes in the mere sound of England, and will accept what should have been an immediate turkey, The Cocktail Party, as a cultural and even religious thriller, on no ground but the English accent with which it was uttered...

...For example, the force of the French expression Mon Dieu...

...What with the incurable epidemic of Shakespeare festivals and our habituation to rich coloristics of vocabulary and reeling debauches of rhetoric in the l6th century manner, the linear stylistic rigors of the French 17th century may seem too frigid for the going theater, hence to be mitigated in translation by little endearments of specific wording and trope...

...where the wickedness of a woman cannot reasonably be in her feet, even if she has sarabanded on them away from the straight and narrow...

...Bermel is far closer to theatrical realities here than I am, though I must add that my own procedure, to a small public, also gets across...

...The other way is to suppose a French text, especially one three centuries old, must be accommodated to contemporary stage English, or traditional English from Kyd or earlier onward...

...The other plays, Two Precious Maidens Ridiculed (I offer $100 to the genius who can get the title Les Precieuses Ridicules at last tran slated both accurately and catchily into English without false or irrelevant implication), The Imaginary Cuckold, and The Forced Marriage are full and self-sustaining little masterpieces, not in the least dependent on historical curiosity...

...We have lately seen the one-act format rise above the mere sketch or vaudeville turn or curtain raiser and take on a full dramatic weight and force of its own...

...Alas, I differ with his principles of translation and cannot be entirely fair...

...by any such euphemism as Bermel's Good Gothic!, especially when Gothic, good or bad, is a totally unassimilable notion in the mentality of Moliere's theater...

...And it is a great joy to find that good old Moliere is not so much eternal, as our professors told us, as he is fiercely contemporary with us and not infrequently well ahead of our games...

...One was told in school that it is far less violent than our My God!-but at this time of day the two expressions are about equally faint and there is little if any reason to temper the force of Mon Dieu...

...Even if one has read these plays before, it is rewarding to read them now in the light of the mod em productions of Ionesco, Beckett, Sartre, Albee, and so on...

...Many French alexandrines can be read as anapaests, but the anapaest is not the essential metric and to take the accentual English anapaest as the equivalent to an alexandrine is to declare no ear for the rhythm in either language...

...At least I hope so...

...is very hard to measure in any period or context, though the literal meaning is quite plain...

...It is rather as if Renoir were restoring a damaged Cubist painting, or Tiepolo a Poussin...

...But when in certain details and passages a literal version would make no sense either to a reader or to an audience in a theater, Bermel dubs in, I think extravagantly, the traditional English manner...

...Again, we get such a line as "He's swept the woman off her wicked feet...

...Here we seem to be reading eye to eye with Beckett...

...Whatever the reasons, this collection of varied one-acts by an intensive master of forms, addressed to a public in an even more trenchant mood than our own, makes an irresistible study for anyone involved in current theater as well as a brisk entertainment for a disengaged reader...

...I only know that reading the book has been immensely absorbing, and even where I disagree with Bermel's theories and practices in translating, I have never had a dull moment...

...While I am at it, I will venture to say that the one play in verse, The Imaginary Cuckold, though it does come out in very lively and traditionally varied English iambic pentameters, and remarkably close to the phrasing and stops of French alexandrines, is based on a quite unaccountable ignorance of the theory of both English and French prosody, if you take Bermel's remarks in his preface to the play as soberly meant...

...He says he loves the originals, the original form, and though lovers are notoriously the least reliable authorities on what their beloveds are, I must admit that the essential spirit and verve of the originals comes through these translations-past what I see as incidental faults-with exceptional vividness...

...Except perhaps that, given our adventures into mixing music and dance with drama, short of straight opera, the piece may be technically promising...

...The ultimate proof of this kind of pudding is in the eating, that is, how it goes in the theater, and of this I know nothing...

...He refers to a caesura as "the break halfway along the line" and says he has sometimes resorted to it, without seeming to realize that a caesura after the fifth syllable of an iambic pentameter is a different rhythmic device entirely from a caesura after the sixth syllable of an alexandrine...

...Before I go too far, let me say that for the most part Bermel plays it straight, literally, and the hard-edge manner of the Age of Reason and the Geometric Spirit is very far from lost...

...The two early farces, The Jealous Husband and The Flying Doctor, ground ed as they are in the stage conventions and spirit of the Italian Commedia dell' arte, are still very instructive models of the subjugation of horseplay to profound intellectual farce...

...One of the most workable conventions of French prosody is the constant alternation of masculine and feminine rhymes...

...The reasons for this are partly economic, as Bermel points out ; and partly too, I think, they reflect a demand of the writer and the public alike for a higher compendiousness- a passion for continual essentials and an impatience with elaboration...

...So violently transferred an epithet, which is perfectly bearable in old or modern English, is not imaginable in any French epoch I know of, least of all in the 17th century...

...There is a general introduction but also an individual introduction to each play, and all of them make not only instructive reading for the most part but delectable reading for anyone interested in both historical gossip and stage detail...

...but God would seem to be with him anyway, and his verses in this play have an uncanny grace about them, which very likely makes them also beautifully enunciable in the theater...

...Reviewed by DONALD SUTHERLAND Department of Classical Literature, University of Colorado It was a bright and also very to a public in an even more useful idea of Albert Bermel's to collect and translate seven of the more interesting extant one-acts of Moliere, offering them in one handy volume...

...I am being pedantic, but without a basic pedantry one had best stay out of the French 17th century...

...But before I get on to that painful subject, let me say that he is, as an introducer, enchanting...

...Due to circumstances beyond my control, I take the first way when translating 17th-century French, and Bermel, who cannot help having been born an Englishman, necessarily takes the second...

...Moreover, Bermel apologizes for using feminine rhymes in his translation "with more abandon than in the original"-though he uses them frugally by English standards and a good 50 percent of French classical couplets are on feminine rhymes, quite rigorously and regularly so...

...To Bermel, the vocabulary of Racine must appear, as he says, "bleak," and the monotonous or repetitive wording of Moliere in need of touching up...

...All these small formalities which were very important in the 17th century, come French come English, seem to have escaped Bermel entirely...