Oldal 192 [192]
THE TRAGIC OF “VITAL HATRED”
utterances like “Two wounds in both eyes. This world is rotten. / I dare not
look around lest III throw up.”**° were guaranteed by the new translation
of Gyorgy Petri, which was connected to his own poetry in many ways.**¢
Subsequently, the “disgust” erupting in an undisguised way expressed the
desperation of “we cannot live here” with the same power as Three Sisters by
Tamas Ascher three years earlier.
DRAMATIC TEXT, DRAMATURGY
Petri’s excellent version of Moliére, still widely used today, replaced the
impeccably metricized translations of Lőrinc Szabó (1954) and Dezső Mészöly
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(1971). Instead of formality, Petri made an attempt at the clarity of thoughts:
he did not update, but made Alceste’s temper clear, eliminating a great number
of problems of the play that had not survived Moliere’s times.“ The rhetorical
complicatedness — all figures that did not serve the content of speech — had
% It is a word by word translation of Petri’s rendering of the couplet: , Két seb a két szemem.
Ez a világ rohad. / Nem merek szétnézni, mert elhányom magamat." Moliére: Drámák. Petri
György fordításában, Pécs, Jelenkor, 1995, 146. — In Richard Wilburs English translation:
“All are corrupt; there’s nothing to be seen / In court or town but aggravates my spleen.”
Moliére: The Misanthrope and Tartuffe. Translated into English Verse and Introduced by
Richard Wilbur, New York, Harcourt, Inc., 1965, 20.
See, for example, the stream of invective of Electra through the persona of the heroine of
the myth adapted by all three playwrights of the ancient Greek tragic trio: “What they think
is that it’s the twists and turns of politics / that keep me ticking; they think it’s Mycenae’s
fate. / Take my little sister, cute, sensitive Chrysothemis — / to me the poor thing attributes
a surfeit of moral passion, / believing I’m unable to get over the issue of our father’s twisted
death. / What do I care for that gross geyser of spunk / who murdered his own daughter!
The steps into the bath / were slippery with soap — and the axe’s edge too sharp. / But that
this Aegisthus, with his trainee-barber’s face, / should swagger about and hold sway in this
wretched town, / and that our mother, like a venerably double-chinned old whore, / should
dally with him, simpering — everybody pretending not to see, / not to know anything. Even
the Sun glitters above, / like a lie forged of pure gold, the false coin of the gods! / Well, that’s
why! That’s why! Because of disgust, / because it all sticks in my craw, revenge has become
my dream / and my daily bread. And this revulsion is stronger / than the gods. I already see
how mould is creeping across Mycenae, / which is the mould of madness and destruction.”
Gyorgy Petri: Electra, trans. George Gömöri, Clive Wilmer, in Michael March (ed.): Child of
Europe. A New Anthology of East European Poetry, London, Penguin Books, 1990, 7.
Cf. Géza Fodors statement, who was the dramaturg of the show and (not incidentally) wrote
a monograph on Petri’s poetry: "From the point of view of a theatre production [...] that
wants to convey Alceste’s problems and the topicality of his temper, a form-true translation
has serious limitations. [...] The problem and temper [...] for which our own ‘experience and
vision’ are looking for expression, are not as concrete as Moliére’s and cannot be rendered
by the pure form of the classical style.” Géza Fodor: Mizantrép-valtozat, in Moliére:
A mizantrép, Program for the production of the Katona Jézsef Theatre, November 1988, 11.
Cf. “Quite a few moments of the play are so much rooted in the age that they have no dramatic
weight and vibrancy anymore. The relationship between the court and the city, the city and
the countryside, the nobleman and the artist, the society as the medium of life, the honnéteté
(honesty, fairness, virtuousness) and some important ethical debates of the 17th century,
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