Language and Silence by George Steiner

Author:George Steiner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media

TWO TRANSLATIONS

No, no, my friend, we’re off! Six months have passed

since Father heard the ocean howl and cast

his galley on the Aegean’s skull-white froth.

Listen! The blank sea calls us—off, off, off!

I’ll follow Father to the fountainhead

and marsh of hell. We’re off. Alive or dead,

I’ll find him.

Robert Lowell, of course. The lines carry the stamp of his vivid rhetoric. The howling ocean, the skull-white froth, the marsh of hell declare that oratory of sea and Gothic landscape distinctive of Lowell. Yet these lines purport some scrupulous relation to the opening couplets of Racine’s Phèdre. “My version is free,” says Lowell, “nevertheless I have used every speech in the original, and almost every line is either translated or paraphrased.” We must be reading from different editions:

Le dessein en est pris, je pars, cher Théramène,

Et quitte le séjour de l’aimable Trézène.

Dans le doute mortel où je suis agité,

Je commence à rougir de mon oisiveté.

Depuis plus de six mois éloigné de mon père,

J’ignore le destin d’une tête si chère;

J’ignore jusqu’aux lieux qui le peuvent cacher.

Not only has Lowell made no attempt to render the general meaning, but the whole thrust of his version goes wrong. Racine opens on a muted, dubious note. The long vowel endings, the repetition of j’ignore, the dark, delicate premonition in doute mortel, define Hippolyte. Rougir tells us of his easy blushing. The lines “place” him accurately in the complex tangle of the drama. They bespeak his candid but shy and bending virtue. Nothing of all this is even hinted at in the robust eloquence of Lowell. Let us try elsewhere.

The crux of the play occurs in Act II, scene v. Maddened by her incestuous love, Phèdre seeks out Hippolyte. Through hint and oblique metaphor she tries to enforce upon his chaste, naïve spirit an awareness of her own ardent and dread condition. At first the young prince shows no apprehension of what she is trying to get across. Suddenly a terrible light flashes through his incredulous mind. Stunned, he asks the Queen whether she has forgotten that his father, Theseus, is her husband. In a final surge of reason and self-command, Phèdre seeks to deny her own revelation:

Et sur quoi jugez-vous que j’en perds la mémoire,

Prince? Aurais-je perdu tout le soin de ma gloire?

Hippolyte stammers his apology and turns to flight. But now the doors of chaos spring open. Phédre drops all pretense and yields to the rush of her roused blood (blood and fire is the dominant trope of the whole play). She proclaims her love in wild, self-accusing accents. All the horrors that have gathered beneath the mask of decorum stand naked:

Ah! cruel, tu m’as trop entendue.

Je t’en ai dit assez pour te tirer d’erreur.

Hé bien! connais donc Phèdre et toute sa fureur.

J’aime.

Yet this ultimate crisis is conveyed essentially through a change of syntax. It is the brusque passage from the formal, customary vous to the intimate tu which proclaims the catastrophe. Repeated four times in three lines (once in the verb connais donc), this tu signifies the total collapse of Phèdre’s governance over her own soul.

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