Oldal 192 [192]
OCR
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 5947 (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, 946 947 948 + 190 +
