The Translation of «Hamlet» by Leandro Fernández de Moratín: Neoclassical Genius and Dramatic Rules

María del Carmen Bobes Naves

Volume three of the Obras Dramáticas y Líricas by Leandro Fernández de Moratín¹, the only edition recognized by the author, includes his translation of Hamlet; apparently completed in 1794, though not made public until 1798. On August 28, 1866, La Correspondencia published the following text:

According to the opinion of people who know the chronicle of our theatres well, Shakespeare's tragedy has not till now, when Rossi has made it known among us, been staged. And that despite the fact that there are three rather well known translations, more or less faithfully made: one by don Ramón de la Cruz, another by Moratín and still a third by Carnicero. It is said that Máiquez and even Latorre had in their minds the idea of staging it in the theatre of El Príncipe, but did not in the end do so, being convinced that the play would not be a success in Madrid.

We shall not enter into the validity of the data given on the translations of Hamlet and its productions in Madrid, some of which took place before the given date, but we are interested in analysing the final assertion that Shakespeare's best known play would not be a success in the Spanish capital. When Moratín translated it, approximately a century before these opinions were published, he did so fascinated by the tragical greatness of the piece, despite the fact that his ideas regarding drama in general led him to believe that Shakespeare's work is full of defects. His discerning taste, acknowledged by literary criticism, makes him appreciate Shakespeare's genius (like Moliere's), but his neoclassical ideas, particularly those that demand that the tragic and the comic should not be mixed, or those that sustain that reason and truth should guide character behaviour and the dénouement, appear in open contradiction with the forms natural to Shakespearian drama. The reading of the notes that complete Moratín's translation is thus highly revealing of the clash between personal taste and neoclassical dramatic rules in the mind of the Spanish author, who repeatedly explains to the reader the «defects» that he thinks are evident.

The clash between what is spontaneous (the admiration of the greatness in Hamlet) and the respect of given neoclassical rules that Moratín applied to his own drama, can be seen from the very beginning in the motto heading the translation, a sentence by Martial: «Si non erraset, fecerat ille minus». It is also evident in the «Advice to the Reader», and in the numerous notes that the author includes whenever a scene does not fulfil the rules of neoclassical drama, which many of them do not.

The «Advice» informs us, for example, that:

The present tragedy is one of William Shakespeare's best, and that most frequently performed and best received by English audiences. Its beauty and the defects that flaw its perfection conform a monstrous and extraordinary whole, in which there are so many parts, of such difference in quality and merit, that it would be almost impossible to find them equally blended in any other dramatic work...

In this play a great, interesting and tragic action is to be seen; from the very beginning it is announced and brought about by marvellous means, capable of heating one's imagination and filling one's mind with excitement and fear. At times the fable moves ahead rapidly and full of animation, but there are moments in which it appears weak, full as it is of inopportune accidents and ill prepared and useless episodes, which are unworthy to figure beside the great interests and affections contained therein... The result is that those terrible passions, worthy of Sophocles' genius, cease, thus being opened to dialogues so vulgar that they can only cause laughter in the lowest people.

This global view of Hamlet would in itself suffice to discourage the public from reading it and to support the view that its production in Madrid would be a total failure. Máiquez and Latorre, according to La Correspondencia, must still have thought so even at the end of the nineteenth century, when Romantic excesses had become familiar. Moratín, however, reads the work with enthusiasm and even decides to translate it, although he cannot avoid pointing out and censuring those scenes which, he thinks, are difficult to understand. Few were the episodes, however, which he was to leave out, and few the sentences that he was to eliminate, although he was willing to change many, in accordance with his neoclassical lights, to improve the play.

The blending of tragedy and comedy appears as a flaw which Moratín relentlessly and repeatedly points out in the footnotes to the five Acts, but it is not the only one. Also objectionable, from the point of view of a conventional disposition of the fable, is:

... the dénouement, where the different plots are unnecessarily complicated, and where the author breaks them up rather than untying them. Interest is therefore divided and the existence of a fair Providence questioned because all, incestuous and pure and filial love, friendship, tyranny, adulation, wickedness and generous and noble sincerity, all is sacrificed to vengeance amidst horrible catastrophe. All is guilt; all is pure destruction.

Moratín must have pondered much on the advisability of correcting and improving Hamlet by subjecting it to rules which would make of it a more artistic, more reasonable and beautiful product, for in neoclassicism reason is beauty. But he rejected the temptation and ended up by imposing on himself «the duty of presenting it as it is, without adding defects or dissembling the ones found: those who are intelligent will judge».

All in all, however, we shall soon realize that the temptation was stronger than the general declaration of intentions with which he started his translation, and he recommends that certain scenes should not be staged, and even substitutes dots for lines that to his eyes lack the appropriate tone. The issue of maintaining the discourse while at the same time being faithful to the original text was not a minor one; for a proper translation, he asserts, «it is not enough to know the language or the alterations caused by the lapse of two centuries», there is also a need to:

identify oneself with the poetic quality of the author, to follow him in his passionate outbursts, to fall with him, to see through his mysteries, to convey the same vigour and expression that he arbitrarily achieved.

Shakespeare's readers find themselves confronted with a style which on occasions is easy and smooth while at other times it is pompous and redundant, as befits an author, «who has exhausted many scholars from his country, who have tried, without success, to illustrate and explain his works». It is easy to imagine the conflict his work supposes for a translator who accepted neoclassical rules, including those of decorum and expression, as a guarantee of art.

Despite these opinions on the discourse, composition and disposition of the tragic and comic motives in Hamlet, despite the fact that Moratín considers the end of the play exaggerated and too bloody, even poorly didactic because it leaves a just Providence out of the picture, and despite the lack of those rules that dignify dramatic art according to the neoclassical canon, the Spanish author wanted to offer the public, «one of the best pieces of the most celebrated English tragedian». It is difficult to understand why, after his expressed views on characters, discourse and composition, Moratín still considered the play brilliant. It would seem that he considered the conception of the material for the play the work of a genius, while its treatment corresponds to an artist ignorant of all rules.

Moratín consulted both Laplace's French translation of Shakespeare and Letourneur's, which he considered better than the former. He did not, however, find much help there; Letourneur does not translate with the necessary impartiality and objectivity, being very much influenced by the extreme positions which dominated French theatre at the time. The followers of Racine, with Voltaire as their leader, had clashed against those of Corneille, who, although devoid of a prominent leader, defended with great vigour their own preferences: the natural versus the proper, the marvellous versus the possible, wit before art, or, as Moratín sees it, an acknowledgement of the merits of Corneille but not of his defects. Letourneur's translation appears precisely at this moment, backed by the latter's followers; a work which derived its inspiration from the opinions of the most passionate pro-Shakespeare English critics. It thus denied the good principles that Art and Reason had dictated, «establishing a new poetics thanks to which the deviations of the admired author are not only to be excused but even imitated and applauded». Naturally, and taking into account this total lack of objectivity, Letourneur faithfully translates Shakespeare's successful passages, while at the same time, «stopping short of nothing to disguise his deformity». The result can only be, «a wicked translation, or better still, a work made up of pieces which are both personal and alien. A translation that does not deserve that name». Moratín therefore, can see no gain, as the best French translation he knows he finds both prejudiced and full of deviations.

He was to finish his own translation of Hamlet in 1794; in 1772 don Ramón de la Cruz had already completed his Hamleto, a fragmented translation of the same work, based on the French texts; the comparison of the two versions thus shows Moratín's merit, not only on the grounds of the flexible and natural language used, but also on those of respect towards the original work, which leads him to reject the partisan French versions, as well as to fight against his own impulse to correct the many and important «defects» he observes in the original.

Moratín avoided two temptations: that of Corneille's followers, of admitting as inspired everything contained in Hamlet (an option which would demand that he betray his neoclassical ideas), and that of eliminating what according to the rules of drama could be considered objectionable (which would have forced him to betray his role as translator to become a censor). As a result of avoiding these dangers, Moratín's translation can be considered a classical piece, a view that many critics defend. Respect towards the original prevails, and those passages which appear to him excessive, unreasonable or even wrongly disposed, are criticized and assessed in the footnotes.

We have seen what an appropriate translation means for Moratín, and what his aim is when confronted with such an irregular work, which he faces without reference to the «perverted» French versions. His own work, therefore, tries to be faithful to the original in all aspects, but (it could hardly be otherwise) the Spanish author feels forced to set things right, for, after all, he knows the rules. As a result, the text is respected, but a number of notes are added, in which Shakespeare's mistakes are pointed out: hence they constitute a complete classicist poetics.

Generally speaking, Moratín considers that Elizabethan authors, although possessing the quality of genius, lack good taste and ignore dramatic rules. They are, however, able to make the public feel the effects of tragedy, commotion and terror. Hamlet will therefore be a very appropriate work to illustrate what the text owes to pure genius and what happens when the rules that convert Nature into Art are not taken into account. For Moratín, the conjunction of both aspects brings about the achievement of perfect tragedies.

The neoclassical conception of literature implies evident limitations, from which Moratín's criticism springs. Comedy for him is:

imitation in the form of a dialogue (either in prose or in verse) of an event which has taken place in a given place and in die lapse of a few hours between particular persons. By means of it, and of the opportune expression of affection and characters, vices and common errors in society are ridiculed and truth and virtue recommended.

In his best works he strictly follows the rule of the three unities, and, as a result, they are perfect within this given frame. The moral dénouement is never an added imposition, it springs from the syntactical disposition of the work, the latter being always ruled by reason. His works are consistently adapted to neoclassical demands, never lacking the appropriate tone and range. Obviously, when these limits are applied canonically to Shakespeare's works they are exceeded.

The notes of the translation allow a division of the passages in which his disagreement and criticism can be seen. There are two types: first, those that touch upon the expression of the discourse, and second, those directly linked to the structure (composition and disposition) of the plot, especially those sections of the play in which events go beyond the limits of reason and credibility, where the dramatic unities are ignored, or where tragic and comic motifs are mingled.

This is present from the earliest scenes. Expressions such as, «not a mouse stirring», which Francisco pronounces in the first scene of the play, suggest in Moratín the following:

a natural expression in a soldier and alien to tragic sublimity. M. Home in his Ensayo sobre la crítica dares prefer it to that of Racine which appears in the first Act of Ifigenia: «Mais tout dort, et l'armé, et les vents, et Neptune». You have to be either too ignorant or too passionate to make such a choice.

Sentences like this seem trivial to the translator and always due to reasons which have to do with neoclassical rules of decorum and the idea of mimesis, as it is understood in neoclassical poetics: Art copies Nature, and it is only normal and credible that in a conversation between soldiers vulgar expressions may be used; however, the principle that Art generates, that of mimesis, has nothing to do with copying directly from reality. The poet has to select bearing in mind his artistic aim and following the rules of decorum, composition and disposition of the work; it is precisely here that mistakes are to be found in Shakespeare: the genius surpasses the text and there are no norms which keep it within the frame of artistic forms.

However, Hamlet's discourse is not always subject to censure. Moratín, for example, is enthralled with such dialogues as Hamlet has with Horatio and the guards who have seen the shadow of the king in Act I, scene ii: «throughout this quick and lively dialogue, curiosity, anxiety and the terror felt by the prince are perfectly expressed». The same is true of the dialogue between Hamlet and his mother in Act IV, scene iii, of which he says:

In this scene the defects of plan and style are compensated by the interest of the situation, the dialogue, which is both quick and lively, the expressiveness of the picture and the agitation of the emotions.

The translator also regards as worthy of praise some expressions, aphorisms and maxims, «which contain a solid and important doctrine» and enhance the discourse throughout the play.

In a dramatic work built up by means of the characters' dialogue and which does not have a narrator who fills in what they do not know or say, discourse is in intimate connection with composition. That is, a motive in the play may depend entirely on the words of a character, with the result that if he speaks simply for the sake of speaking, episodes are created which are superfluous. This is, for example, what Moratín thinks of Polonius' words to his son when the latter is about to leave for France, or even of the journey itself:

These pieces of advice may be very good, but they are not relevant. Neither Laertes' journey nor the behaviour he should assume in France are interesting; they have nothing to do with the fable. These are episodic things, disunited, irrelevant, with no purpose whatsoever.

In fact Moratín dislikes Polonius' role and interventions, the obscure words and indecent tone he at times uses. The discourse is connected to the figure of the character, who is shaped by his verbal interventions: all is redundant, discourse, motivation and character. The construction of a play by means of dialogical expression works syncretically in all its unities: actions, characters, time and space. If a word in a dialogue is not intrinsically justified within the drama, what is constructed through it cannot be justified either.

The rejection of Polonius' discourse may be the consequence of his verbal excess, an example of which can be seen in the scene in which Ophelia is given parental advice. Moratín says:

Isn't it an error when giving advice to a girl to obscure it with metaphors and allusions which she will not understand? Some will say that Polonius is a ridiculous character, and is it not also an error to introduce ridiculous figures in drama?

Polonius speaks and speaks and, «of all that useless pomp of words and images only one thought gains ground: that Hamlet's love is neither true nor durable». Moratín also finds Polonius' intervention in Act II, scene i highly censurable; here, Polonius asks Reynaldo to investigate the conduct of Laertes in France. The translator has no doubts:

this scene is not to be represented: it is totally useless. It belongs to the comic genre and contains a lot of indecent expressions.

Despite all this, however, he translates the scene, though recommending that it should be omitted for the stage. In Act III, scene ix, the dialogue between Hamlet and Ophelia turns obscene, and Moratín substitutes dots for a sentence pronounced by the former. He still, however, quotes the English original and adds a note in which we can read:

The passage which has not been translated might offend the modesty of the readers. The original says: «that's a fair thought to lie between a maids' legs». Ophelia does not want to understand the rudeness implied and asks, «What do you mean, sir?».

Moratín, of course, does understand it but refuses to translate it into Spanish: his tolerance and accuracy do not go that far. This is, in fact, one of the few passages in which censorship is radical: he totally wipes it out of the discourse. Moratín will also recommend the suppression of obscene sentences in Act II, scene viii, in the dialogue between Hamlet, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. He cannot help exclaiming,

It must be understood that Shakespeare is taken to have been the most honest and decent author among those writing in the age. What must others have been like?

He insists upon the aversion that Polonius' language and the character itself produce in him. In the second note to Act II, he says:

The character of Polonius (Lord Chancellor to the King of Denmark, which is equivalent to «Sumiller de Corps») never changes: a ridiculous old man, vain, nosy; a tireless gossip. Those who obstinately defend anything dreamt by Shakespeare defend the character saying that it is well shaped. They are right. They also argue that there are many of his sort, ridiculous creatures, in any Court or Palace, and they are also right, but such figures are only fit for an interlude, not for a tragedy. The terrible affection that must animate it, the great ideas with which it must be full, the unity of interest, which can never be weakened, none of these go well with the nonsense of a vulgar and talkative old man.

Most specifically, Polonius produces impatience in Moratín when he says he will be brief:

the exordiums and circumlocutions, the way he protests saying that he will be brief (a thing impossible in him), the antitheses and ambiguity so common in him in order to feign wisdom and elegance, the distractions he suffers from, the interruptions with which he continuously breaks off the discourse, his ridiculous vanity of the faithful servant, the sage politician and the prudent father, the knack he has of sticking his nose into everything and showing himself as an important man, make of this character a comic one and also show what Shakespeare would have achieved had he written in a different age and with different principles.

In Act III, scene xxvi, Polonius dies and Moratín comments:

Polonius' death does not produce a tragic effect. It is similar in this to Harlequin's. The character was not necessary within the fable. He has produced no other effect but laughter and has not been either a villain who must die or a great and virtuous man towards whom the audience may have felt attracted. His death is disgusting and does not move us. Hamlet's action, despite the reasons behind it, looks brutal and hasty.

Moratín sustains that if trivial sentences, even when they belong to the world of real human beings that the characters represent, are not to be included, neither should irrelevant figures even if they exist in reality. Art may copy Nature, but the poet and the painter must eliminate those motives which may harm the tone of the work: what is natural may not always be opportune; the creator cannot simply copy, he must also select. The imitation which is proper to Art, Mimesis, cannot simply copy straight from Nature; it must also eliminate anything which may be ridiculous or inappropriate.

He points out another flaw in the discourse of Hamlet: the allusions to facts, circumstances and characters which are sometimes anachronistic and, as a rule, prolific and excessive:

Hamlet could not have sworn by St Patrick. This saint, Patron of Ireland, flourished a thousand years afterwards. In this work, angels and devils are mentioned, the same as Adam, Jesus Christ, the Virgin, Saint Valentine, Purgatory, the Final Judgment, the Holy Gospel, the Holy Cross, Lent, Sunday and the Eucharist. Worst of all is that all these Christian expressions, which belong to a more modern world, are mixed with heathen ideas, the result being a disconnected and absurd muddle. The same happens with profane history, uses and customs. Alexander, Caesar, Brutus, Roscium, Herod and Nero, all come later than Hamlet. In the latter's age there were no cannons or powder, mines or stoves, Dukedoms, Majesty, Royal Highness, clocks, Studies in Wittemberg, French disease, pilgrims or nunneries².

In his first note, which refers to the title of the tragedy, Moratín refers to the sources of Hamlet, the chronicles which deal with the history of Denmark, and points out that Hamlet's death took place, «in the year 3450 of the world, 550 years before Christ according to common computation». Without entering into the question of sources and dates, it is evident that if we take them into account, all the historical references, both Classical and Christian, contained in Hamlet can go down as anachronisms. However, it is also true that, regardless of their chronological propriety, many references and quotations related to characters and facts are embodied within the linguistic knowledge of Shakespeare's age. These given facts, therefore, would not be erudite but simply part of a given use of language, which would have accumulated information on figures and cultural topics whose origin would be very difficult to identify.

On analysing discourse, and given the fact that all the unities and aspects of a literary work appear simultaneously, we have referred to the relationship established between the word, the motives and the characters. We will now refer now to other syntactic units and aspects which are not directly expressed in the discourse since they belong to the fable: the disposition, that is, the order that the fable follows within the drama, the motifs, or the actions and situations which can be taken as functional units, and time.

The disposition of actions and situations is, in neoclassical drama, subjected to reason. Moratín is therefore provoked by the fact that Hamlet begins with the apparition of the ghost:

The apparition of the dead man is unnecessary and totally out of place in this scene. The introduction of such visions may not be generally reprobated, but one would expect to see them where they can fully achieve the theatrical effect they are capable of. If the tragedy starts with the apparition of a ghost, how will it end then? What more horrible object will the author present us with in the rest of the play? Why doesn't he appear before the prince first? Why does he come out of Purgatory to wander about in darkness wasting time and frightening sentinels? If he wishes his son to avenge him, isn't it imprudent to let himself be seen by others? It is impossible for a soul coming from the other world to make more mistakes.

Today, of course, it would be ludicrous to measure with empirical criteria motifs which are not only fictional but fantastic, to consider the time of the ghost historical time, or to subject the disposition of situations within the general plot to a realistic logic either of a chronological sort or based upon criteria of dramatic intensity and tension.

Among the motifs, there are some that Moratín would locate in a different place, and still others which he cannot even accept, for they have no clear function. An example of the latter could be Hamlet's feigned madness:

The reader expects, undoubtedly, great things from this device, but as the play develops we see that there is no interest in it. Hamlet behaves in a very imprudent manner. Johnson says that this madness has no meaning, for Hamlet does nothing with it which he could not do being sane³.

If we turn, however, to later readings of the play, which give full meaning to episodes rendered meaningless by a neoclassical point of view, we become aware of the risk of holding an opinion on what may be lacking or superfluous in a play. From a psychoanalytical approach, the episodes that lead towards a postponement of Claudius' death or those of the protagonist's madness, for example, are full of meaning; they can be explained as inhibitory devices of the Oedipus complex⁴; in a neoclassical reading, Hamlet's feigned madness allows him the same degree of action as sanity.

As regards time, Moratín deals with a problem related to the relationship between discourse and representation; dialogue is drama's form of expression, and the characters' utterances are connected with their own value as such and with the text as a whole; that is, the character who speaks longer is usually the character who is most important, the protagonist. Thus the playwright has to keep a balance between word, action and character. Moratín is shocked every time a secondary character wastes his time in trivial anecdotes. In note 8 to Act I, and regarding their talk of Fortinbras, he exclaims:

This Fortinbras and this war have nothing to do with the main action. Fortinbras, so very often mentioned, speaks four verses in Act IV and buries the dead in Act V. The English ambassadors, the Danish ones, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Reynaldo, Osric, the captain, the priest at the burial, the sailors, the soldiers in Act I, the grave-diggers, and the Norwegian army, all are useless. Nothing of any importance is said by them. The point is to bore the listener to death with long digressions.

The repetition of words and phrases, given the waste of time they imply, makes Moratín furious. In note 12 to Act I, he says:

Why didn't he suppress the first one if the same thought, expressed with more energy and more decorum, is included in the second one? Because Shakespeare ignored Art and he did not know how to polish the text. There cannot be another reason.

In Note 4 to Act III, he is even more radical:

a prince to whom the soul of his father has just appeared, wasting his time in giving lessons on staging. What calm! That's how five acts are wasted when the fable could have been told easily enough in three!

The modifications which according to neoclassical poetics should be carried out in Hamlet could well turn it into a more «reasonable» work, though doubtfully into a more artistic one. Dramatic rules, as is evident after any analysis of Shakespeare's best known work, are of relative value; it is nevertheless curious to see how the tension between genius and technique, in Moratín's neoclassical terms, is the source of comments such as those he expresses in his notes on the work of the classic English playwright⁵.