The Misanthrope: Translating Oronte's Sonnet

Early in Molière’s play, Oronte reads a sonnet he has written and asks Alceste to offer his candid feedback. What Oronte really wants is for Alceste to flatter him and tell him how great his poem is. Philinte understands what Oronte really wants, and praises the poem. But Alceste offers a harsh critique, even though he knows Oronte just wants flattery.

How bad is Oronte’s sonnet? French critic Jacques Guicharnaud suggests that the poem isn’t nearly as bad as Alceste claims it is. It’s a pretentious poem, a Petrarchan sonnet with a carpe diem theme. Oronte’s use of “poetic” word order breaks up the rhythm of the poem. But the poem does follow French rules of versification for the sonnet form. The octave and sestet explore the theme of hope from somewhat different perspectives. The rhyme scheme (ABAB CDCD EEF GGF) is appropriate, and offers alternating masculine and feminine rhymes. Alceste could fault the near rhymes in the second and fourth stanzas, but his critique is more about the poem’s pretensions, and his reaction says more about who he is as a character than about the actual quality of the poem.     

Here is the French text of Oronte’s sonnet:

L’espoir, il est vrai, nous soulage

Et nous berce un temps notre ennui:

Mais, Philis, le triste avantage,

Lorsque rien ne marche après lui!

Vous eûtes de la complaisance,
Mais vous en deviez moins avoir ;
Et ne vous pas mettre en dépense
Pour ne me donner que l’espoir.

S’il faut qu’une attente éternelle

Pousse à bout, l’ardeur de mon zèle,

Le trépas sera mon recours.

Vos soins ne m’en peuvent distraire

Belle Philis, on désepère,

Alors qu’on espère toujours.

Constance Congdon translates this as follows:

Hope, ‘tis true, comforts us anon,

Puts roses in our cheeks when wan.

But, Philis, what a most sad benefit

When no thing hoped for follows after it.

Your constant kindnesses end our ennui,

But would that you were more miserly,

Not given to such generous expenditure,

Dear Philis, of hope, then better we’d endure.

If it should be that this eternal waiting

Prolongs my zealous ardor to my death,

Then zealot shall I be, with my last breath.

Your little favors, Philis, won’t appease me,

Beautiful Philis, receive me ere I mope,

Because I’m in despair with joyful hope.

Congdon’s translation emphasizes the poem’s pretentions and arguably makes the poem worse in English than it is in French. She gives Oronte even more near-rhymes and changes up the rhyme scheme to decrease its complexity. The final image of moping suggests that Oronte is being childish, though the contrast of despair and joy is quite appropriate to Petrarchan imagery of love as leading to paradoxical feelings.

Richard Wilbur, an important American poet and the best-known American translator of Molière, offers the following English version of Oronte’s poem:

Hope comforts us awhile, ‘tis true,

Lulling our cares with careless laughter,

And yet such joy is full of rue,

My Philis, if nothing follows after.

Your fair face smiled on me awhile,

But was it kindness so to enchant me?

‘Twould have been fairer not to smile,

If hope was all you meant to grant me.

If it’s to be my passion’s fate

Thus everlastingly to wait,

Then death will come to set me free.

For death is fairer than the fair;

Phyllis, to hope is to despair

When one must hope eternally.

How does Wilbur’s version compare to Congdon’s? Which “bad” poem is more fun to read out loud in English?