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49 3 Musical Realizations: a Performance-based Translation of Rhythm in Koltès’ Dans la solitude des champs de coton Roger Baines and Fred Dalmasso Introduction This essay provides an account and analysis of an experimental method focusing on the performance of rhythm and sonorities to produce a new translation into English of Dans la solitude des champs de coton (1985) by Bernard-Marie Koltès (1948–89). Koltès’ works have con-tinued to grow in popularity in Europe since his death in 1989 and he is now considered one of the most srcinal and influential French playwrights of recent decades. Dans la solitude des champs de coton (here-after Solitude ) is an encounter between two characters, a Dealer and a Client, in an ill-defined nocturnal space. On his way from A to B, from one lit window at the top of a building to another, the Client enters the territory of the Dealer. They circle around each other for the dura-tion of the play, but the Client will not reveal what he desires and the Dealer will not reveal what he has to offer to satisfy the Client’s desires; the play unfolds until it ends in a moment of inconclusive potential violence.The reception of Koltès’ work on the English-language stage has been identified as problematic. According to Maria Delgado and David Fancy (2001, pp.149–50), this may in part be due to the emphasis in English-language theatre on psychologically driven characters and action-centred narrative; but we believe that it may also be because existing translations do not completely engage with the fundamentally important rhythmic qualities of Koltès’ writing; certainly we feel that this aspect of his work in translation deserves more attention. 9780230228191_05_cha03 indd 49 9780230228191_05_cha03.indd 49 11/25/2010 9:17:25 PM 11/25/2010 9:17:25 PM 50 Staging and Performing Translation Koltès (1999, p.27) writes in his collection of autobiographical interviews Une part de ma vie :The French language, like French culture in general, only interests me when it is distorted. A French culture, revised and updated, colonized by a foreign culture, would have a new dimension and its expressive riches would be increased, like an ancient statue with no head or arms which draws its beauty from this very absence. 1 Solitude is a particular text because of the way in which the playwright uses and distorts complex syntactical structures and seemingly fixed rhythmic patterns specific to the French language, but also because of the way in which Koltès deploys sonorities and rhythm to make such a multi-layered text performable.The following analysis is the product of a reading of the text which is, crucially, influenced by performance. Our approach to stage translation emphasizes the adaptation of the rhythm of the source text to the target language thus allowing the srcinal rhythm to be retained. Rhythm, however, is not dealt with as inert and inflexible but as malleable and adaptable so that the srcinal rhythm is allowed to survive the transla-tion process. The idea is to create a musical variation of the srcinal text. For example, we did not try to either recreate the deviations from formal structures or to repair cohesion or meaning. We sought a text in translation that had a similar trajectory to the srcinal, a momentum provided by the complex structures and the minimal use of full stops. As stated above, importantly, our method of achieving this was the development of a translation in conjunction with a performer who is expert in performing and designing complex texts for speech, and can locate appropriate rhythms and sonorities in the English text via speech, rhythmic vocalization and drumming. We thus set ourselves the prob-lematic of whether we could successfully establish rhythm in sound, and tempo through alliteration and assonance, and whether the choices of syntactic structures and lexis go hand in hand with the physical and vocal rhythms of the performer. Consequently, our method is one which transfers the text from one performance to another and experiments with a reading of a play which is informed by translation practice. The rhythm of Koltès’ writing in Dans la solitude des champs de coton A dictionary definition of rhythm gives us ‘an effect of ordered move-ment in a work of art, literature, drama, etc. attained through patterns in 9780230228191_05_cha03 indd 50 9780230228191_05_cha03.indd 50 11/25/2010 9:17:25 PM 11/25/2010 9:17:25 PM Roger Baines and Fred Dalmasso 51 the timing, spacing, repetition, accenting, etc. of the elements’ (Websters, 2009). In opposition to this common conception of rhythm as a regular-ity of similar intervals or recurrences, based on repetition, periodicity and measure, French linguist and translator Henri Meschonnic defines rhythm as a disposition or configuration without any fixedness, one which results from an arrangement which is always subject to change (Meschonnic, 1982). So, how is rhythm achieved in Koltès’ texts? How does he enable his complicated texts to flow in performance, giving the actor ‘rails’ on which to run? As mentioned above, what is distinctive in Koltès’ writing in this play is its apparent linguistic formality. This is achieved in part through the use of a text which, to an extent, subverts classic French alexandrine structures. It is also achieved through the use of complex syntax with minimal punctuation, described by a critic of Patrice Chéreau’s 1995 surtitled Edinburgh production as ‘mind-numbing sentences that zigzagged through ranks of subordinate clauses’ (Delgado and Fancy, 2001, p.155). This description of one translation of the text gives an idea of some of the challenges that it poses to translators. The following, more detailed, analysis of the particular features of Koltès’ text which are especially relevant to our translation process will enable us to present an assessment of the issues on which we elected to focus our experimental translation strategy. This strategy will then be discussed and illustrated.The apparent formality of the text is periodically punctured when stanzas based on an elusive twelve syllable alexandrine are interrupted or distorted, when highly complex syntax is stretched to extremes. The syntax accommodates the stanzaic pattern but also erects obstacles in the flow of the text. As the text is spoken, an irregular dodecasyllabic metric system evoking the alexandrine appears and disappears through-out the text but imprints a durable rhythm. The Dealer sets the rules for the ensuing verbal jousting, as if he is laying down a rhythm which needs navigating back and forth from, and the Client follows the same cadence, the same rules, as though in a competition. If communication is present, it is enacted through rhythm, the two protagonists jousting with language to attempt to unseat the opponent, and this is indeed one of the images the Dealer uses. Like the Dealer who reins in his tongue so as not to unleash his stallion, the characters seem to be chas-ing rhythm through the text. The elusive alexandrine can be identified as the basic unit of organization and the frame within which acoustic designs are composed. 2 The music of a sequence of lines is to be found in the rhythmic movements back and forth from the haunting alex-andrine cadence. The alexandrine verse is the most deeply ingrained melodic structure in the French language, it is the most suited to the 9780230228191_05_cha03 indd 51 9780230228191_05_cha03.indd 51 11/25/2010 9:17:25 PM 11/25/2010 9:17:25 PM 52 Staging and Performing Translation melodic movements of the language. 3 Given the length and complexity of the sentences in Solitude , the performer might indeed fall back upon the natural rhythm of the alexandrines for his delivery and somehow force them upon the text. The way in which Koltès’ text evokes the alex-andrine has parallels with Schoenberg’s conception of atonal music as a free, twelve-tone chromatic field where any configuration of pitches could act as a ‘norm’, a flexible way of providing a foundation with any number of variations on that foundation.Like the alexandrines, the syntax in the play is overarching but it often carries so many interpolated clauses governed by the same main verb (which, in some cases, is so distant that the interpolation is isolated) that it appears to lose grammatical coherence. In fact the text is so well crafted that, although the syntax is stretched to the limit, there is nonetheless grammatical coherence. As with the alexandrine structure, the syntactic cohesion is omnipresent but not always foregrounded. The following is an example of a highly formal structure which sets up a complex syntactical shape that is stretched to the limit:A Le Dealer Alors ne me refusez pas de me dire l’objet, je vous en prie, de votre fièvre, de votre regard sur moi, la raison, de me la dire; et s’il s’agit de ne point blesser votre dignité, eh bien, dites-là comme on la dit à un arbre, ou face au mur d’une prison, ou dans la solitude d’un champ de coton dans lequel on se promène, nu, la nuit; de me la dire sans même me regarder. (2004, p.31)So do not refuse to share the object, pray, of your fever, of your eyes on me, the reason, share it; and if that compromises your dignity, well then, say it like you would say it to a tree, or to a prison wall, or in the solitude of a cotton field where you would wander in the nude, at night; share without even a glance. (Baines and Dalmasso, unpaged)Here, there is an elliptic construction [‘de me la dire’] which is used chiastically as the referent for the final phrase of the sentence. In the end, the Dealer would be satisfied with any response from the Client. The request in the sentence becomes increasingly abstract: first the Dealer asks for the object of the Client’s desire, then more abstractly the reason for this desire, and then he reiterates his question resorting to the pronoun ‘la’ in place of ‘la raison’, but pronoun and noun are so dis-tant in the sentence that the object of the question is almost forgotten. 9780230228191_05_cha03 indd 52 9780230228191_05_cha03.indd 52 11/25/2010 9:17:25 PM 11/25/2010 9:17:25 PM Roger Baines and Fred Dalmasso 53 All that remains is the prompt to speak, ‘de me la dire’. The text seems here to exhaust both syntax and meaning.Next, a different example of complex syntax which, although gener-ally more typical of French than English, is nonetheless here pushed to extremes:B Le Client Et si je suis ici, en parcours, en attente, en suspension, en déplace-ment, hors-jeu, hors vie, provisoire, pratiquement absent, pour ainsi dire pas là – car dit-on d’un homme qui traverse l’Atlantique en avion qu’il est à tel moment au Groenland, et l’est-il vraiment? Ou au cœur tumultueux de l’océan? – et si j’ai fait un écart, bien que ma ligne droite, du point d’où je viens au point où je vais n’ait pas de raison, aucune, d’être tordue tout à coup, c’est que vous me barrez le chemin, plein d’intentions illicites et de présomptions à mon égard d’intentions illicites. (2004, p.19)And if I am here, on the way, on the move, paused, postponed, out of sync, out of joint, provisional, practically absent, say, not here – would you locate a man flying across the Atlantic at such and such a moment in Greenland, is he there? Or right in the tumult of the ocean? Say I did step aside, although my straight line, from point of departure to arrival has no reason, none, for a sudden curve, well, you are blocking my path, full of illicit intentions and misplaced assump-tions of my illicit intentions. (Baines and Dalmasso, unpaged)The bare bones of the sentence are ‘si je suis ici [ . . . ] et si j’ai fait un écart [ . . . ] c’est que vous me barrez le chemin [ . . . ]’ (if I am here [ . . . ] say I did step aside [ . . . ] well you are blocking my path), yet there are as many as seventeen diversions from this simple premise in the one sentence. Foregrounded in the structure of the complex sentence in the example above is ‘the isolation of the man in the plane lost in the ocean’, a metaphor for the construction of a text which isolates clauses – in this case the very clause which is the metaphor – in the tumult of the syntax, and this is a distinctive feature of a text which has performative features, a text which often ‘does what it says’. The performativity of the language used in the text works on a number of levels, it provides metaphors for the situation of the characters and isolated sounds which perform actions and interrupt the flow of the text. 9780230228191_05_cha03 indd 53 9780230228191_05_cha03.indd 53 11/25/2010 9:17:25 PM 11/25/2010 9:17:25 PM
