School for Husbands and the Imaginary Cuckold, or Sganarelle

145 Pages·2009·0.63 MB·English

Table of Contents

Title Page
Dedication
Foreword

The School for Husbands
Act One
Scene 1
Scene 2
Scene 3
Scene 4
Act Two
Scene 1
Scene 2
Scene 3
Scene 4
Scene 5
Scene 6
Scene 7
Scene 8
Scene 9
Scene 10
Act Three
Scene 1
Scene 2
Scene 3
Scene 4
Scene 5
Scene 6
Scene 7
Scene 8
Scene 9

The Imaginary Cuckold, or Sganarelle
Scene 1
Scene 2
Scene 3
Scene 4
Scene 5
Scene 6
Scene 7
Scene 8
Scene 9
Scene 10
Scene 11
Scene 12
Scene 13
Scene 14
Scene 15
Scene 16
Scene 17
Scene 18
Scene 19
Scene 20
Scene 21
Scene 22
Scene 23
Scene 24

Copyright Page
For Brian Bedford
Foreword
By John Simon

Literary trends come and go, and yesterday’s favorite may be
forgotten tomorrow. But most nations have one supreme
author—poet, playwright or novelist—who is the fountainhead
of their literature. For England, it is Shakespeare; for
Germany, Goethe; for Italy, Dante.
For France, this role is shared by two superstars: the great
tragedian Racine, and the great comedian Molière. Racine
stands for purity, a classically restrained vocabulary of great
musicality; Molière, whose motto was, “I gather my property
where I find it,” offers profusion of motley mirth.
Most of Molière’s greatest dramatic achievements are in
rhymed verse, in the traditional French alexandrine, a rhymed,
regular, twelve-syllable line. English verse drama, unlike
French, is in an accented language and traditionally espouses
the five-beat pentameter line of slightly varied length. It avoids
being as regimented as the unaccentual French, lest the
monotonously placed drumbeats produce doggerel. The wonder
of it is that Wilbur’s translations attain all the lightly tripping
elegance of the originals.
It should be noted that Wilbur is one of our finest poets, but
also one of the best—perhaps the best—verse translators into
English. As a poet, he has won all possible prizes, but he
deserves as many as translator, not only of the verse plays of
Molière and Racine, but also of lyrics from various languages.
The translations contained in this volume—The School for
Husbands and The Imaginary Cuckold, or Sganarelle—should
provide ample proof.
Consider, for example, Wilbur ’s masterly use of enjambment
—run-on lines taboo in the strictly end-stopped French—to
excellent effect. Take this enjambed couplet, “My name’s no
longer Sganarelle, and folk /Will dub me Mister Staghorn, for a
joke.” The enjambment both slightly downplays the rhyme and
creates a certain suspense: Just what will folk do? It has been
argued, that there is some loss of “darkness” in the
translations, to which Wilbur replies, in his collection of prose
pieces The Catbird’s Song, “English rhyming is more emphatic
than French rhyming, so that a translation into English
couplets will more often have the whip-crack sound of joke or
epigram than the original did.”
That is a consequence of an accentual language, but, in my
view, neither decreases nor increases whatever is meant by
“darkness.” What is true and important about the couplets in
both French and English is that they add musicality while also
acting as a mnemonic aid by making consecutive lines click
satisfyingly and memorably into place. They also challenge the
actor to the bravura feat of neither emphasizing nor wholly
losing the rhyme—or, otherwise put, to reconcile naturalness
and artifice.
There exists a centuries-old toy the French call bilboquet and
we call cup and ball. A wooden ball is attached by a fairly
extensive string to a long-handled wooden cup; when the ball is
propelled into the air, it must be caught by the cup into which
it snugly fits. So, too, Wilbur ’s couplets, in which there are no
awkward inversions, omissions, flab or obscurities.You might
say they snap to.
Some examples from Cuckold. Sganarelle’s wife, of her
husband: “He saves his hugs for other women, the swine, / And
feeds their appetites while starving mine.” And he, jealously, to
her: “Why, when your mate’s well favored, spry and dapper,
Were you attracted to this whippersnapper?” The maid, to her
mistress, Célie, as they look at the locket picture of her would-