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The Tartuffe in paired Alexandrian verses is a Spanish translation of the theatrical comedy Le Tartuffe or L'imposteur, by Molière, made by José María Gómez García in 2023. Molière's original work was published in Paris in 1669. The translation is free of rights for its partial or total reproduction, citing the authorship. It is distributed under a Creative Commons CC BY NC ND 4.0 Internacional license. It holds copyright for its theatrical performance, permission for which can be obtained by contacting e-mail tartufoalejandrinos@gmail.com.

The original is available for viewing and download at El Tartufo en versos alejandrinos pareados.

Font
José María Gómez used for the translation the edition of Tartufo by C.L.F. PANCKOUCKE, EDITEUR of the year 1824, although during his work he reviewed many alternative editions in which the incorporated comments provide information of great interest about the work, about its author and about the great pressures he received for this work.

As is known, the original work was received with great criticism from various social classes and from the French Church, which forced Molière to make up to three versions of it to overcome this obstacle. Finally, the work was allowed, not without great scandal. On Molière's death, the Church refused to bury the playwright on sacred ground. Due to pressure from King Louis XIV, he was finally buried in the Saint Joseph cemetery, in Paris, but in the area reserved for unbaptized deceased children. In 1792 the revolutionaries opened the grave with the intention of locating his remains in a more notable place, but they found it empty, without having determined the reason, giving rise to multiple possible interpretations.

Translation
As José María Gómez indicates in the preface: "It has been translated into Spanish on multiple occasions, but never keeping the Alexandrian couplets that Molière used and respecting the literalness of the content. On multiple occasions it has been translated into prose, and twice into verse, once with free verse between seven and twelve syllables and another using hexadecasyllables, losing, in my opinion, a great deal of the beauty that the original, very strict verse brings". In all of them, the original content has been altered, sometimes in a very significant way, citing various reasons. In this case, José María Gómez has preferred to offer the reader the original work, putting in his hands the adaptation he deems necessary, therefore respecting not only the author, but also the reader, who will be able, if he considers it appropriate, to adapt the work in the way he deems appropriate. For the same reason, it has dispensed with footnotes, understanding that the reader is able to search for explanations about the work he needs, which has greatly lightened the length of the text and made it more attractive for reading.

The verses used, of 12 syllables in French, are called Alexandrian because they appear in the "Roman d' Alexandre" composed by Lambert le Tort. In them were wrote the works of Racine, Corneille and Molière.

"The verse, like music, enriches the literary work, bringing it closer to the spectator, who receives it more easily. The verse does not force one to stick to serious themes, just as it does not force one to stick to humorous themes. Like music, the verse allows convey pure emotions, sometimes almost distinguishable from the content itself. As Pater said, 'all the arts aspire to the condition of music, which is only form'. Versification achieves the same result. Two simple examples:

Mecen los árboles suave rumor

cuantos	más pájaros crecen en flor,

porque	los cántaros y el ruiseñor

hacen	sus gárgaras alrededor.

En	las pírricas faldas de los valles

se	lucían los bárbaros alerces,

y	cuando el alma por los pelos tuerces

se	vuelve más sedoso el pasacalles.

Accented in different ways, these hendecasyllables are very "musical". They don't say anything; well, they say nonsense things, but they sound good. They make you want to go out dancing. For this reason I decided to confront the translation of Tartuffe into Spanish using the same Alexandrian couplets with a caesura that Molière used, in order to further embellish a work whose content is already beautiful in itself. It is a complex task, as translation always is if you want to be faithful to the original, which has been one of my biggest problems (staying strictly faithful to the original); I think I have strayed from the text on a few occasions throughout the work, when the combination of content, metrics and rhyme was already unfeasible".

Versification

The couplets that Molière uses to build Tartuffe are so-called Alexandrian verses. An Alexandrian verse in French is made up of twelve syllables, and is divided into two hemistiches of six syllables each.

Each six-syllable hemistich is phonetically stressed in various ways:

- Accentuation on second, fourth and sixth

Allons, Flipote, allons

-Accentuation in second and sixth

que d'eux je me délivre

- Accentuation in third and sixth

vous marchez d'un tel pas

- Accentuation in fourth and sixth

ne venez pas plus loin

and surely others.

Both hemistiches always end in a stressed syllable (since all French words are acute), which in Spanish is measured as one more syllable, so Alexandrian spanish verses are measured as having fourteen syllables, with two hemistiches of seven syllables, which is phonetically equivalent to the French Alexandrine of twelve. In the translation I have used these lines of fourteen syllables divided into two hemistiches of seven syllables each, which maintains the caesura, rhythm and musicality of French verse. I have given priority to maintaining the original text of the verses, for which, given the differences between French and Spanish in the number of monosyllabic words and acute words, I have sought the best accentuation for each hemistich, always accentuating, as in French, on sixth, which makes them phonetically equal to the original French Alexandrine, and adopting various variations that have allowed Molière's original texts to be kept practically intact:

- Accentuation in first and sixth

Vamos, Flipota, vamos

- Accentuation in second and sixth

que estoy harta de todo

- Accentuation in third and sixth

que hay aquí muchas cosas

and surely others.

'''Verse embellishment. Musicality'''

And once we get to this point, the hard part begins. We already have the verses, they rhyme as they should, they are well measured, the caesura is correct and they say what they should say. But... oh, they sound horrible. Or, even worse, they "are saying" fatal. A verse written to be read aloud must sound good and must be easy to "say", to declaim on stage. For example, try saying:

A él os deberíais vos más haber confiado

Impossible. The tongue is tied in a knot. And if it can be said, the public will not understand it. People don't talk like that, they don't build such twisted sentences. And yet, it is the literal translation. But you have to fix it, so that it is more normal, it can be recited and it is easy to understand. And that's what's difficult, fixing it, because there are no more techniques to help, or graduated rules to measure.

In addition, and at the same time, it is necessary to give the verse a beautiful "sound". When listening to it, the listener must be able to taste it, as one tastes a stew or one tastes a song or one tastes a picture, and therefore the group formed by the words in the order in which they are been placed must be pleasing to the ear and to the understanding.

What is intended is impossible to assess objectively, because the "sound" of a verse is subjective. There are those who like classical music and those who like rock; there are those who like Velázquez and there are those who like Miró. Beauty is a totally subjective concept. And also, each play can better or worse accept a certain literary style, even each scene within the same play, or each character; one scene may call for a more bombastic tone and another for a flatter one; a character can use more cultured terms and another character use a more popular language... there are no rules, only the interpretation of the translator, as it was the author's when creating the work in its original language.

So this last step, the most difficult in any translation, is pure art, and as everyone knows, "el arte es pasar mucho frío" (pun, joke untranslatable). Literally, artistic work is cold, very cold, it is arduous, it is slow, it is hard, it is exhausting, and sometimes it is not very productive. The artist, when some step resists him, stares at the work with an angry face, and can sometimes come to hate it, but the work looks at him and raises an eyebrow as if to say: "what about me?; the artist is you." So he rolls up his sleeves again and fights with that damn verse that doesn't want to be shaped. It's hard, cold and lonely. But when you get what you want, the gratification is extraordinary.

Staging

The text offers stage directors the possibility of analyzing Molière's text as he wrote it, both in its form and in its content. The literalness of the translation has been scrupulously maintained, in order to offer that possibility, which until now did not exist. The theater is always looking for new ways to express the classic works that are adapted to the historical moment, as a means to have greater public acceptance, which is the unavoidable objective of all representation, but this search must start from the exact knowledge of the work to be represented, and this Knowledge was not available until now, since it was always based on non-exact translations of Molière's work. This is a great contribution of the present translation, from which the stage director will be able to alter it to his liking, but starting from a rigorously exact base.

Location in space and time

The text has been adapted for two possible stagings: the classical one, in Paris and in the time in which the work takes place (17th century), and a timeless staging, which can be located at any other time in space and time. weather. To make it timeless, address names have been dispensed with, which have been replaced by the customary familiarity currently used, except for Mrs. Pernelle, Mr. Leal and the royal delegate, who uses formal treatment as they do with the others, by their age and rank, and in relationships like Valerio's with Orgon. Dorina, likewise, uses formal treatment with the gentlemens, and everyone, except Orgon, uses formal treatment with Tartuffe.

Even the 17th century version has been lightened a lot of treatments, because they frequently make versification difficult and also diction on stage, and they do not contribute much to the work when they are excessive in number. They have been maintained on those occasions when age or class differences make them convenient.

For this possible timeless staging, "the Prince" has been replaced by the "Minister", also including some changes in the treatments dedicated to him. The bailiff, Mr. Leal, becomes a judicial police officer, and the royal delegate becomes a ministerial or government delegate.

The changes implied by the timeless version have been placed to the right of the verses in blue, and replace the corresponding verses on the left.