Act III, Scenes iv-vii, the
famous balcony scene, provides an excellent introduction to the difficulties of
translating this play. The formula is familiar: as well as the obvious memories
of Shakespeare, there are more closely similar scenes in Molière’s Dom Juan and
Mozart’s opera based on it, Don Giovanni. But those are cruelly farcical
scenes, in which the lady is being mocked by the two men. Here the scene
modulates from fairly broad comedy at the beginning (the tongue-tied Christian,
scene v), through witty linguistic play (scene vii), to an increasingly
passionate declaration by Cyrano under the cover of darkness. Familiar, even
aggressive language between Cyrano and Christian alternates with the
high-flown, over-ingenious language of seventeenth-century love poetry. Cyrano
can deploy this language with the best, but from line 246 onwards he becomes
increasingly impatient with it and tries to address Roxane more directly,
drawing upon immediate sense-impressions. His language then comes to resemble the
Symbolist poetry of 1897 rather than the précieux
poetry of 1640, until by l. 272 it has become almost incoherent with passion
(though still voiced in correctly formed alexandrines). The register of the
text is therefore extremely inconsistent, and any attempt at a faithful
translation must be inconsistent in the same way.
Act III, scene xiii presents a particular
challenge in that Cyrano is supposed to adopt a regional accent (the ‘switching’
that I have rendered by the sound ‘krk, krk’ is in Rostand’s original text as Cric! Cric!) But what accent? In French,
presumably a Gascon one, though the only example of ‘Gascon’ that Rostand gives
(jeung’ for jeun’ at l. 2073 of the original text) is in fact more
characteristic of his native Marseille. The translator would favour using a
Scottish accent at this point, for several reasons. For British readers or
hearers, it is associated with bravery and stubbornness (the Scottish regiments
are famous in the history and present service of the British army). Scots are
traditionally underdogs, poor and proud, like Rostand’s Gascons: less
admirably, they are seen as heavy drinkers, and Cyrano is pretending to be
drunk at this point. The button-holing, confidential drunk is a traditional
Scottish comic type, from Will Fyffe in the 1920s (‘I Belong to Glasgow’) to
Billy Connolly today. Finally, it is my own original accent. But a director may
well wish to use a different accent that his Cyrano is more familiar with (or
none at all, though the plot requires it as part of Cyrano’s disguise). For an
American audience a Southern accent might have some suitable associations, and
the story of the journey to the moon would fit well into the Southern ‘tall
tale’ tradition. My translation includes very small hints of Scottish
vernacular in Cyrano’s first couple of speeches, leaving it to the discretion
of the actor to continue (as Shaw does, much more broadly, with Eliza’s cockney
in Pygmalion). A director curious to
see a complete version of broad Scots should consult Edwin Morgan’s translation
of the play (see Further Reading). Whatever accent is chosen could probably
become less marked as the content of Cyrano’s speeches becomes more learned,
and as De Guiche is successfully drawn in to the deception.
There is only one word in the play which
is really untranslatable, and that is unfortunately the final and most
important word – panache. Its primary
meaning is a plume, particularly the plume on a helmet, and this is the only
meaning given in Littré’s dictionary of 1868 (the French equivalent of the
original OED). But by the early twentieth century it had acquired in French the
secondary meaning of dash or swagger: ‘avoir du panache’ is rendered in the
Robert dictionary of 1933 as ‘avoir fière allure’ (another almost untranslatable phrase,
unfortunately). The first illustrative quotation suggests that in
military circles it was by then a term of praise, since it says that the ‘exemple et contagion’ of an officer’s panache could inspire his troops to
feats of daring (as Cyrano’s does at the end of Act IV of our play). The
remaining illustrative quotations, however, taken from intellectuals like André
Gide and Jean Dutourd, suggest that for them panache was a much more suspect value. It seems quite likely that
Rostand was responsible for the establishment, or at any rate the popularising,
of panache in its onyms éclat (literally, brilliance; eye-catching
quality), brio and bravoure. The latter two, interestingly,
are borrowings from Italian: bravoure
can mean either bravery or bravura. Panache in the sense of a plume does exist
in English, but is rare. For us the figurative meaning, borrowed from French,
is the primary one.
Cyrano’s dying words – ‘mon panache’ – much refers to the actual
plume on his hat, since he speaks of doffing it and sweeping the floor of
heaven with it. But it also seems to refer metaphorically to some defining
aspect of his character. And this quality must, I believe, be a Morally
admirable one, or one at any rate that his hearers (whether of 1640 or 1897)
would have recognised as Morally admirable: certainly something more than the
definition we find in the Concise Oxford
of 2004: ‘flamboyant confidence of style or manner.’ whatever the precise
meaning of ‘panache,’ it is something
that many French people still admire, and it is encapsulated for them by this
play. The first illustrative phrase in the Petit
Robert (the standard school dictionary) of 2004 is ‘le panache de Cyrano.’ Finding an English equivalent for this
totemic object, and at the same time a concluding rhyme, was, I am afraid,
beyond me.
I have followed Rostand’s own division of the
acts into scenes. The French way of doing this, in published play texts, is to
begin a new scene whenever a character enters or leaves the stage (though
Rostand is rather lax in observing this rule and characters do leave the stage
and sometimes return in the course of what is set out as a single scene). A
change of scene does not, therefore, indicate a change of location, and should
not even be marked by a pause in the dialogue unless one is specified in the text.
In fact, Rostand often has a change of scene, in this sense, occurring in the
middle of a line of verse, and it is important that the rhythm should be
sustained across what is simply a visual break in the text.
A note on pronunciation. French
words are lightly stressed on the last syllable, except where that is the
so-called ‘mute e’. But when speaking English it can sound very artificial to
stress the characters’ names in this way. I therefore suggest stressing them as
follows:
Belle’rose
Bris’saille
Car’bon (because ‘Carbon sounds
even worse)
‘Christian
‘Cuigy
‘Cyrano (not Cy’rano)
‘Jodelet
Lig‘nière
‘Montfleury (not Mont’fleury)
‘Ragnueneau
Rox’ane
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