Cyrano de Bergerac E-Book

Edmond Rostand

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Serie: NHB Classic Plays
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 210

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

The nineteenth-century French classic about the swordsman-poet with the nose too large to be taken seriously, in an acclaimed English translation by Anthony Burgess. This translation of Edmond Rostand's play Cyrano de Bergerac was first performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Barbican Theatre, London, in July 1983, with Derek Jacobi as Cyrano. Burgess's translation was subsequently used as the basis of the sub-titles for the 1990 film version of Cyrano de Bergerac starring Gérard Depardieu.

Leseprobe

Edmond Rostand

CYRANODE BERGERAC

translated and adapted by Anthony Burgess

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Title Page

Introduction

Extract from a Letter by Jean-Paul Rappeneau

Original Stage Production

Original Film Production

Characters

Act I

Act II

Act III

Act IV

Act V

About the Author

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

Introduction

This rendering of Rostand’s comédie héroïque en cinq actes en vers was commissioned for production by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Barbican Theatre in London in the summer of 1983. But I had previously been commissioned, thirteen years earlier in fact, to translate and adapt the work for the Tyrone Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA. It was proposed that Christopher Plummer play the lead, but the part was taken instead by Paul Hecht. That was in the summer of 1971. The following year a Broadway musical was made out of this version, with lyrics by myself and music by the Welsh film composer Michael Lewis. In this Plummer played the lead – his first and last singing role (I do not think his few parlando interjections in The Sound of Music can be termed singing). The musical opened at a bad time – the time of the Watergate revelations – and it suffered from union problems. Moreover, though I participated in what amounted to a vulgarization of the original – chiefly in the hope of making money which I did not, in fact, make – I had always had my doubts about the musicalization of Cyrano de Bergerac, as it had seemed to me that there was already enough music in the words. I worked too hard on the editing, fresh adaptation and provision of new lyrics (a total of eighty-one, I remember). Perpetually changing Cyrano, as the musical was called, to make it more acceptable to a fairly indifferent public, was a daily business, and it was like working on the repair of an aircraft in flight. I was at the time doing a full-time academic job as Distinguished Professor at the City College of New York; I was also helping aspiring writers in a creative writing course; I was also lecturing all over the United States at various universities. It was too much.

The Tyrone Guthrie Theater version (published by Knopf in December 1971 and still in print) was commissioned by the artistic director of the theatre, Michael Langham, and he proposed that the original text be somewhat radically changed. Of all the characters in the play, the least satisfactory to a modern audience appeared to be Roxane (whose name was degallicized to Roxana). She loves Christian, and yet she rebuffs him because he cannot woo her in witty and poetic language. This must seem very improbable in an age that finds a virtue in sincere inarticulacy, and I was told to find an excuse for this near-pathological dismissal of a good wordless soldier whose beauty, on her own admission, fills Roxane’s heart with ravishment. So I inserted a little speech which I hoped would ring plausibly, to the effect that inarticulate brutish wooing was a mark of the aristocracy that would regard a middle-class bookish pretty girl like Roxane as fair game, and that to her the advent of true love must reveal itself in divine eloquence. This was meant to add a human substratum to Roxane’s preciosity. On the American stage it seemed to work.

But, adding to her lines in Act III, I had to subtract her entire physical presence from Act IV. Her sudden appearance outside the walls of besieged Arras, with gifts of wine, cold chicken and sausage for the starving Gascony cadets, relieved the tension of a scene which, the director insisted, should remain taut to the end, and it was felt that it relieved it in an unworthy manner – through farce and the atmosphere of a fairy tale. Apart from the difficulty of staging (and it is this scene more than anything which puts good amateur companies off the play), everything that is good in this phase of the action seemed to the director to go bad as soon as Roxane came on in her coach and Paris perfume. The hungry cadets cease to be heroic and become merely foppish. They are nearly dying of starvation, and yet they have to go through the motions of taking an elegant little dinner, complete with cutlery and napery. They become mean; they make sure that de Guiche, their detested colonel, who is as ill from hunger as they are, gets nothing of their feast. We may be persuaded, with difficulty, that they now feel fine, but there is a nasty taste in our mouths. Then comes Roxane’s avowal to Christian: it is his soul she loves, she tells him, not his physical beauty: she would prefer him to be ugly so that his spiritual qualities may shine the more. All this is on a battlefield, with death ready to arrive at any moment. The whole thing, so Michael Langham believed, became absurd, farcical, unacceptable in terms of even the most far-fetched dramatic convention. He said it had to go, so it went.

I had to substitute for Roxane’s personal appearance the arrival of a letter from her, which she, distant and disembodied, had to breathe into a microphone while the lights dimmed and perfume was sprayed through the auditorium. I was amused to find Langham’s radical desire for such a change abetted by a Mr Magoo cartoon film, in which Mr Magoo, playing Cyrano, returns amid shells and snipers from mailing the daily letter to Roxane with a letter from the beloved herself in his hand. Roxane’s Platonic rhetoric comes off well enough when we can take it as epistolary literature, but, to some, and certainly to Langham, it sounds unreal on speaking lips.

I made, on my own initiative, a less fundamental change in Act III. Roxane and Christian are being hurriedly married by a Capuchin duped into performing the act, and Cyrano has to prevent de Guiche – who wants Roxane as a mistress and has, through his uncle Cardinal Richelieu, power over the entire Capuchin order – from discovering that the ceremony is taking place and stopping it. In the original, Cyrano pretends to have fallen from outer space and he insists on telling de Guiche – who does not see the outsize nose and thinks he is being accosted by a madman – the various possible ways of getting to the moon. Since, at the time of the first production of my version, we had not long been celebrating the moon landing, it seemed that there was a danger that the audience might feel very superior to Cyrano (who, incidentally, as 2 historical personage wrote the world’s first science fiction) and ignore his ingenuity while wanting to put him right on rocketry. So I wrote a couple of speeches in the satirical vein of the historical Cyrano, which could be taken as prefiguring the polemic indiscretion that (in the play, fifteen years later) is the cause of his assassination. It does not greatly matter what Cyrano does to prevent de Guiche’s discovery of the clandestine wedding, since it is merely a matter of filling in time entertainingly. Damn it, he could dance and sing, as Christopher Plummer eventually did.

Michael Langham suggested merging the characters of Le Bret and Carbon de Castel-Jaloux to make one meaty personage instead of two thin ones. I did this. I also, at his behest, had the poet Lignière recite some lines from the libellous poem that is the cause of Cyrano’s fight with a hundred armed ruffians. It was my own idea to make Cyrano improvise a kind of acrostic on his name in Act II, instead of leaving it to a poet to go home and do it for him. For the rest, the Tyrone Guthrie Theater version was close enough to the play as Rostand wrote it, except for one or two lops of Occam’s razor.

The version you have in your hands has many passages in common with that American Ur-adaptation (those two additions just mentioned, for instance), but it represents an almost total return to Rostand’s text. A translator-adaptor is a servant of the originating producer or director. Formerly a servant of Michael Langham and of Michael Kidd (for the Broadway musical version), I became a servant of Terry Hands, the director of the Royal Shakespeare Company. He, a French scholar, did not want too many departures from Rostand. He also wanted an English version which should be in neither prose, blank verse nor relentless heroic couplets. In other words, something on the lines of the Tyrone Guthrie Theater version, but without too many fanciful reworkings of the original.

The original American commission was the result of long dissatisfaction with the version of Cyrano de Bergerac that Brian Hooker made for Walter Hampden and published in 1923, and which – with many directorial cuts – Michael Langham had used for a production at Stratford, Ontario, in 1963, when Christopher Plummer played the lead for the first time.

The Hooker translation (often termed facetiously the unhappy Hooker) is still the standard version used in America, though my own is beginning to supersede it, and it was the basis for the film of the play in which José Ferrer starred. It achieved a kind of literary sanctity as the Random House Modern Library of the World’s Best Books definitive and undislodgeable Everybody’s Cyrano, and this status is not undeserved. Hooker was a respectable minor poet, and, like many minor poets of the twenties, very skilful with traditional minor poetic forms like the ballade and the triolet – both represented in Cyrano – as well as possessing a knack with blank verse. Moreover, he had the humility to stick very close to Rostand, and he does not cut one line: his translation can very nearly be used as a key to the original. But he was not so slavish as not to recognize that certain literary references in Rostand would not easily be caught by non-French audiences. Thus, in Cyrano’s long speech about his nose, he substitutes ‘Was this the nose that launched a thousand ships?’ for

Enfin, parodiant Pyrame en un sanglot:

‘Le voilà donc ce nez qui des traits de son maître

A détruit l’harmonie! Il en rougit, le traître!’

Here Rostand is referring to a tragedy known to a Paris audience but not to any likely to fill a theatre in London, New York or Minneapolis. Encouraged by Hooker’s ingenuity, but unhappy about his failure to render the poignant tone of the original, I tried the following equivalent of the Pyrame parody:

And finally, with tragic cries and sighs,

The language finely wrought and deeply felt:

‘Oh that this too too solid nose would melt!’

But, if I had not read Hooker, I might have translated Rostand’s lines more or less literally, thus losing a climax and a comic-heroic effect.

Hooker’s translation, then, is both faithful and bold, but it never works on the stage, or on the late-late television screen, with the zing and bite or (since we have to use the word sooner or later when discussing Cyrano or Cyrano) panache we have a right to expect. Hooker has produced a play in cinq actes and vers, but he has not produced a comédie héroïque. Rostand is funny, as well as pathetic and sentimental, but Hooker rarely raises a laugh. For that matter, his pathos is sometimes too mawkish for comfort, and when we are moved it is very frequently in spite of the words. The trouble lies, I think, in Hooker’s decision to use blank verse, a medium that ceased to be dramatically viable about 1630. Overwhelmingly rich in Shakespeare, solid, chunky, sometimes magnificent in Ben Jonson, packed and astringent in Massinger, blank verse became, in the nineteenth-century revivalist tradition that Hooker followed, an over-limpid or limping medium full of self-conscious Shakespearian echoes and somewhat remote – which the blank verse of the Elizabethans and, even more so, Jacobeans was not – from the rhythms of ordinary speech. Hooker makes Cyrano sound like a man speaking blank verse:

What would you have me do?

Seek for the patronage of some great man,

And like a creeping vine on a tall tree

Crawl upward, where I cannot stand alone?

No, thank you! Dedicate, as others do,

Poems to pawnbrokers? Be a buffoon

In the vile hope of teasing out a smile

On some cold face?

Elizabethan characters, on the other hand, sound like men imposing their own idiolects on a fundamental beat of iambic pentameters that is, so to speak, the unconscious and disregarded pulse of the play.

Rostand, of course, wrote in rhymed alexandrines, like the great classical French dramatists, tragic and comic alike, and this metric ought strictly to be rendered into English heroic couplets:

What would you have me do?

Seek out a powerful protector, pursue

A potent patron? Cling like a leeching vine

To a tree? Crawl my way up? Fawn, whine

For all that sticky candy called success?

No, thank you. Be a sycophant and dress

In sickly rhymes a prayer to a moneylender?

Play the buffoon, desperate to engender

A smirk on a refrigerated jowl?

Not, certainly, the very regular couplets of Pope, which no living writer can easily imitate, but five-beat lines with a varying number of syllables and a regular couplet rhyming scheme. Sprung or counterpoint rhythm, to use Gerard Manley Hopkins’s terms, not strict decasyllables. I read and saw performed Richard Wilbur’s translation of Molière’s Tartuffe, in which he clings doggedly to rhymed decasyllabic couplets, and, in my first draft of Cyrano in translation, I tried to follow his example. Christopher Fry’s version for the Chichester Theatre is in strict couplets, and I do not think it works any more than my first effort did. French alexandrines can be used in many ways, and the classical comic way, which is Molière’s, is conventional, unpoetic, arhetorical: the metric seems to symbolize the social order and it is not available for the special expressive purposes of any individual character. Rostand is a late Romantic, and his alexandrine, though sometimes merely traditional and conventional (the tuning-up violins in Act I have to accommodate their la to it), becomes sometimes a highly rhetorical medium as well as a clever instrument of stichomythia. The English heroic couplet, with its mostly intellectual associations, cannot do as much. And the double clop of rhyme, always expected, always fulfilled, though admirable for moral or philosophical discourse, is difficult to sustain in a play which contains a lot of action and sudden surprises.

My final decision was to use some rhyme, but to avoid couplets except for Cyrano’s big scenes, which have an insolence or lyrical self-confidence to which the relentless unvarying clang of couplets seemed appropriate. Very frequently, the auditor will register rhyme irregularly placed, and for that matter verse rhythm itself, only subliminally. Rhyme is deliberately muffled at times, but there are occasions when it has to assert itself and snap out wittily. Take, for example, the passage in which de Guiche tells Cyrano that, Quixote-like, he is fighting windmills and that it may happen that

Un moulinet de leurs grands bras chargé de toiles

Vous lance dans la boue!

To which Cyrano replies: ‘Ou bien dans les étoiles!’ That is not, by English standards, a true rhyme, but to French ears it is witty, exact and subtly punning. In Hooker’s version, de Guiche says that the windmills

May swing round their huge arms and cast you down

Into the mire.

And Cyrano answers: ‘Or up – among the stars!’ This is romantic enough, the tone of a diluted Mercurio, but Cyrano is being neat as well as bold. He needs the wit of rhyme. My version goes:

DE GUICHE. If you fight with windmills, they’ll swing their heavy spars

And spin you down to the mud.

CYRANO.Or up to the stars.

As Hopkins said of his Eurydice, the reader, if he reads the kind of verse I have contrived here with his eyes, and not his ears, will get a brutal impression of ‘raw nakedness’. The needs of speaking actors have come before the desire for prosodic neatness. Though I sustain a basic five-beat rhythm throughout the greater part of the translation, this is sometimes deliberately allowed to collapse: in the final act the line often breaks down totally, leaving a gasping kind of vers libre. The true test of the verse technique, such as it is, rests in stage performance. This is not a poem but a play.

The very last word spoken by Cyrano before he dies is, in the original, and in my translation too, panache. This attribute, he says, is the one thing that death and judgement cannot take away from him. We use the word in English, since there is no native synonym for it, but we cannot always be sure that we are using it in a Rostandian sense. Rostand was kind enough to attempt a definition for the French Academy in 1901:

Le panache n’est pas la grandeur, mais quelque chose qui s’ajoute à la grandeur, et qui bouge au-dessus d’elle. C’est quelque chose de voltigeant, d’excessif, et d’un peu frisé . . . c’est le courage dominant à ce point la situation qu’il en trouve le mot. . . . Certes, les héros sans panache sont plus désintéressés que les autres, car le panache, c’est souvent, dans un sacrifice qu’on fait, une consolation d’attitude qu’on se donne. Un peu frivole peut-être, un peu théâtral sans doute, le panache n’est qu’une grâce; mais cette grâce . . . suppose tant de force (l’esprit qui voltige n’est-il pas la plus belle victoire sur la carcasse qui tremble?) que, tout de même, c’est une grâce que je nous souhaite.

So subtly Gallic a concept cannot easily be conveyed by any English word, except perhaps by something as symbolic as plume, or white plume, which is what Cyrano flaunts on his hat and, of course, is his literal panache. Allowing Cyrano to make his last English word the same as his last French one, I have tried to prepare the audience for its totality of meaning by using it in various contexts (odd lines additional to Rostand’s) throughout the play.

Cyrano de Bergerac may not be the greatest play ever written, and this English version is certainly highly supersessible, but I do not think that, when noticing the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production, the critic of The Times Literary Supplement was in order in suggesting that a highly talented troupe of actors had something better to do with its, and its audience’s, time than to put on such rubbish. No play is rubbish if it pleases and if it takes money at the door. The conditions for good dramaturgy are not quite the same as for good fiction or lyric poetry. Dare we despise The Mouse Trap for packing them in for thirty-odd years? My first version of Cyrano put the Guthrie Theater into the black after years of being in the red. It fulfilled the first rule of the professional drama – to feed the actors. I recognize very clearly the aesthetic faults of Cyrano de Bergerac – the bald contrivances, the psychological implausibilities, the gross sentimentality of the ending – but I consider that the leading role is one of the great ones and that Cyrano has something not altogether superficial to say to an age trying to make a style out of despair. The play was worth translating, is worth acting and, I trust you will find, worth reading.

Monaco, April 1984

Anthony Burgess’s translation of Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac was commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company and first staged at the Barbican Theatre, London on 21 July 1983. The cast, in order of appearance, was as follows:

THE DOORKEEPER

Jimmy Gardner

A CAVALRYMAN

Richard Clifford

D’ARTAGNAN

Robert Clare

TWO FLUNKEYS

Philip Dennis, Brian Parr

A MUSKETEER

Geoffrey Freshwater

A FLOWER GIRL

Lesley Sharp

AN EATER

Niall Padden

A DRINKER

Phillip Walsh

A CITIZEN

Simon Clark

HIS SON

Paul Russell

TWO PAGES

William Adams, Rupert Baderman

John Holmes, Claire Smith

A PICKPOCKET

Ray Llewellyn

TWO MARQUISES

Jeffery Dench, David Glover

CUIGY

Dennis Clinton

BRISAILLE

Raymond Bowers

LIGNIERE THE POET

George Parsons

BARON CHRISTIAN DE NEUVILLETTE, a Norman

Floyd Bevan

A FOOD SELLER

Cathy Finlay

RAGUENEAU, a pastry cook

Pete Postlethwaite

LE BRET

John Bowe

ROXANE, Cyrano’s cousin

Alice Krige

HER DUENNA

Jennie Goossens

LE COMTE DE GUICHE

John Carlisle

LE VICOMTE DE VALVERT

Christopher Bowen

MONTFLEURY, a tragic actor

Michael Fitzgerald

CYRANO DE BERGERAC, a Gascon

Derek Jacobi

BELLEROSE, leader of the acting company

David Shaw-Parker

JODELET, the comedian

Tom Mannion

PRECIEUSES

Penelope Beaumont, Alexandra

Brook, Clare Byam Shaw

LISE, Ragueneau’s Wife

Penelope Beaumont

CARBON DE CASTEL JALOUX, Captain of the Gascony Cadets

Ken Bones

THE GASCONY CADETS

Niall Padden, Tom Mannion,

Christopher Bowen, Richard

Clifford, Brian Parr, David

Shaw-Parker, Robert Clare, Philip

Dennis

THEOPHRASTE RENAUDOT, a journalist

Phillip Walsh

A CAPUCHIN

Jimmy Gardner

MOTHER MARGUERITE

Penelope Beaumont

SISTER MARTHE

Cathy Finlay

SISTER CLAIRE

Lesley Sharp

Actors, Nuns, Pastry Cooks, Poets, Soldiers,played by members of the Company

Directed by Terry Hands

Designed by Ralph Koltai

Costumes by Alexander Reid

Music by Nigel Hess

Lighting by Terry Hands with Clive Morris

Fights arranged by Ian McKay

Cyrano’s nose by Christopher Tucker

Excerpt from a letter read by Jean-Paul Rappeneau to forty actors on his film as he greeted them at the opera-comique in Paris March 13, 1989 for a month of readings and rehearsals.

We are preparing to shoot a film called Cyrano de Bergerac: freely adapted from Rostand’s play. I don’t care to talk much about the play here because, during the past two years of work, throughout the five successive drafts of the script, the play gradually faded in the distance as the vision of a film grew stronger and more tangible. Today, I can no longer tell what is by Rostand, what is by Carrière, and what is by Rappeneau. However, in working out the shot list with my sister Elisabeth these past few weeks, I was overwhelmed by the constant feeling of setting a marvellous story to images. But this film, because you mustn’t forget we are dealing with a film, will have a particularity: the characters speak in verse. For a long time this has frightened a number of people. Several producers who were tempted by the project ended up shelving it for they felt the challenge impossible to meet. But all films today are alike. We are flooded with sounds and images that are all the same. As soon as you see two shots of a film, you hear two lines of dialogue, you know what comes next. Then all you can do is change the channel or walk out of the theatre. Today, as you know, only films that have something different can captivate the audience. Cyrano de Bergerac won’t be like any other film. We think that its rhyming dialogue, its sudden flourishes, these alexandrines cut in two, three, four and sometimes even five phrases, this vertiginously acrobatic ping-pong will be the key to the film’s success. So what will we do with this verse? How will we deal with these wayward alexandrines, so different from those of Racine and Corneille, but that descend rather from Victor Hugo’s Romantic drama? I’m not an acting teacher, I have no theories, I have no guidelines, and furthermore there aren’t any reliable ones that work in all circumstances. The only thing I possess is an ear, and I trust it. Some actors and actresses whom I won’t name and who I obviously didn’t hire told me, after reading the script: ‘No problem, it’s just like prose.’ But no, precisely, it isn’t at all like prose, and if we make the verse sound too commonplace, we will diminish it and all the charm will vanish. French poetry is based on count, and here the count is twelve. But if we go to the other extreme, if we emphasize each line, each break, if we hammer out each of these twelve syllables, the film won’t hold up. It will fall apart, shattered by its own metrics. Finally, what I want is for the verse to be present in an absent manner, like music in the background heard throughout a film, sometimes faintly, amplified at others. That’s right, I’m searching for a music, a sound, a harmony.

Jean-Paul Rappeneau

Cyrano de Bergerac: The Film

Cast

CYRANO DE BERGERAC

Gerard Depardieu

ROXANE

Anne Brochet

CHRISTIAN DE NEUVILLETTE

Vincent Perez

COMTE DE GUICHE

Jacques Weber

RAGUENEAU

Roland Bertin