French With/Without Tears

PHAEDRA AND FIGARO (213 pp.)--Translated by Robert Lowell and Jacques Barzun--Farrar, Straus & Cudahy ($5).

Translating classics is a little like skywriting. The effort is high-flown, and the blurs are dramatically visible. Remarkably blurless are two new translations: one, a tragedy, Racine's Phaedra, done by Robert Lowell; the other, a comedy, Beaumarchais' Figaro's Marriage, by Jacques Barzun. Coming after Robert Fitzgerald's superior modern rendering of The Odyssey (TIME, April 14), they suggest a boomlet in good translations.

Poet Lowell (Lord Weary's Castle) has taken the more demanding dare. For one thing, as he himself notes, Racine's flawless "syllabic Alexandrines do not and cannot exist in English."* Lowell relies on loose-rhythmed couplets with idiomatic echoes of the English Restoration. Another hazard is that the powdered elegance and stately cadences of French 17th century tragic drama have proved persistently uncongenial to Anglo-American tastes. Poet Lowell, stoking his lines with fire and flair, keeps Phaedra and its key characters well above room temperature.

Sex Hex. The underlying story comes from Greek myth via the Hippolytus of Euripides. Hippolytus is the bastard son of Theseus, slayer of the Minotaur, and Hippolyte, single-breasted queen of the Amazons. He lives in the home of Theseus and Theseus' young bride Phaedra. An outdoors he-man sort, Hippolytus neglects the service of Aphrodite, goddess of love. The goddess puts a sex hex on Phaedra, who is consumed with a ravenous passion for her stepson Hippolytus. She is rebuffed in her advances, and in revenge tells Theseus that the boy has made attempts on her virtue. Theseus prays to his father, the sea god Poseidon, to destroy Hippolytus, meanwhile banishing his son from Troezen. As Hippolytus drives along the seashore, Poseidon sends a sea monster to scare his horses. Flung from his chariot, Hippolytus is entangled in the reins and cruelly dragged and mangled to death.

As Euripides developed it, the tragedy was nature's rebuke to pride. Hippolytus had ignored the elemental force of love. In Racine's hands, the focus is on the hysteric furor of a woman scorned, the unrequited love that becomes undiluted hate. Phaedra's pathos is to writhe vainly in a jungle of untamed instincts:

I fled him, yet he stormed me in disguise, and seemed to watch me from his father's eyes. Then . . . he was gone; my lazy, nerveless days meandered on through dreams and daydreams, like a stately carriage touring the level landscape of my marriage. Yet nothing worked.

Andre Malraux has gone so far as to suggest that Phaedra is not a tragedy at all. He calls it "a modern play, a drama of sexuality."

High Marx. Figaro's Marriage is also a drama of sexuality, but in the French bedroom-plus-bedlam farce tradition. The frenetic plotting and mistaken identities are conducted with the roguish, surrealistic aplomb of the best of the Marx Brothers' films. Translator Barzun captures the effervescence of Beaumarchais with lines of pinpoint carbonation that bubble wittily with what G. B. Shaw called "retortive backchat." In Phaedra there is a faint glimmering of the prototype of the modern emancipated woman; in the character of Figaro, the lackey who lives by his wits and scoffs at his aristocratic betters, there is a broad hint of the dawning age of the common man.

*As Alexander Pope protested: A needless Alexandrine ends the song, That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along.

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