Cyrano de Bergerac

by Edmond Rostand

Newly translated by Sean Patrick Taylor
Directed by Stephanie Shine

 

Note from the Translator

As a translator coming from a scholarly background, my foremost aim has been to preserve, as far as possible, the literal sense of Rostand’s words. Such a task is beset with difficulties, since there is no way to carry the unmediated text over from its own language and historical moment into our own century and tongue. Accordingly, translating Rostand’s French words requires not merely producing lexical equivalents in English, but also an attempt to frame them in an appropriate register of discourse, to preserve nuance and ambiguity of expression, etc. For this part of my task, I’ve relied on what native wit allied with imperfect knowledge and understanding of the two languages and historical moments may be trusted to perform.

But the play is intended as a poem as well, and to the extent possible should be “carried over” as such.

Cyrano was composed in alexandrines—that is, rhyming couplets of 12 syllable lines. Translations of the play that have preserved the rhyming couplet scheme have, in my opinion, done violence not only to Rostand’s literal sense, but to his briskness of expression that lends the work its dynamic range, alternating between fanciful rhetoric and frank boldness of speech.

To preserve that sense in as musical a form as can be found in English, I’ve attempted to render the lines into a fairly free-form pentameter verse, something closer to Chaucer than Shakespeare: a decasyllabic line, governed by five stressed syllables divided between a roughly equal number of unstressed syllables. The lines will not necessarily end on a stressed syllable, though I’ve tried to do so at moments of high tension. At times the excessive energy of speech, such as Cyrano’s final defiance of Valvert, reaches such a pitch that some lines have swollen to include six, or even seven stresses. Conversely, at the play’s moment of most concentrated energy, with Cyrano beneath Roxane’s balcony, I have allowed the line to contract to a single iamb: “Roxane!”

Suffice to say that I have used my conceptualized five-stress line as a kind of inner ear to guide me as I have carried the French over into English, and while attempting to preserve the literal sense of the language and the music of the verse, I have allowed myself to bend or break any of my own rules in order to avoid saying anything barbarous, and to do the beauty of the play’s language the honor it deserves.

 

Sean Patrick Taylor
Translator