Iphigenia / Andromache / Britannicus: The Complete Plays of Jean Racine – Volume 1

This is the first volume of what is planned to be a complete traversal in English of Racine’s twelve plays, only the third time such a project has been undertaken in the three hundred years since Racine’s death. Volume I comprises “Iphigenia,” “Andromache” and “Britannicus”; all three are potent blends of passion and politics, explosive in their confrontations between Racine’s highly charged, highly volatile characters. For this new translation, Geoffrey Alan Argent has taken a fresh he has rendered these three plays in a verse form that Racine might very well have utilized had he been English, namely, the rhymed “heroic” couplet, which, as Argent powerfully argues in his stimulating Introduction, is particularly well-suited to convey the genius of Racine. While his versions are remarkably faithful to Racine’s textual content and emotional tone, Argent’s aim has been to produce, not something that sounds like bad Racine, but something that sounds like good English. To effect this, he has brought to bear on Racine’s rhymed alexandrines all the resources of English prosody, allowing their English counterparts to perform according to their own nature, rather than wrenching the verse into a superficial resemblance to the original. Argent’s translations, resuscitating a great and still-viable English verse form, should prove to be the first complete traversal worthy of “the greatest French author” (in the words of Roland Barthes).