By Elisa Penha
Edited by Elim Chan and Alloe Mak
Special thanks to Taylor Lipson—a conversation with whom inspired this piece.
- Preamble
I grew up in approximation. As someone who was alphabetized in French, I read English classics in French translation before I ever dared to approach them in their original forms. I knew Roméo, Roméo, pourquoi es-tu Roméo? before I did Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo? Everything for me was this: almost and not quite. An understanding that there was not one: an acceptance of the impossible to breach distance between authorial intent and the brutalism of translation—an art that, no matter how sincere, is fallible by nature. I grew up blindly faithful; trusting that the French I read was earnest in its attempt to replicate what it came from. It’s a naive belief—the same belief we have in storytellers. Did you know that the first man to translate Bram Stoker’s Dracula into Icelandic wrote what was functionally a wholly different novel in its place? Nobody knew until 2014. It was called Makt Myrkranna, and when it was translated back into English, it was nowhere near the novel it had been claiming to be since 1901. A different Dracula existed in the liminal margins of language for one hundred and thirteen years. How was anyone supposed to know better? How do you know better? Do you trust the way you’ve been told human tales? Or have you been fooled to worship at an empty altar?
I suppose it would be disingenuous to bury my lead. This is about religion. This is about overcompensation. It is easy to make things into prayers. It is easy to enhance the intensity of piousness across languages. The canon of ancient Norse paganism is coded in a text titled the Poetic Edda, and it was later “translated” into Icelandic to be made into a prologue to Christianity. The Irish had gods once, but as their texts turned from Goedelic scripts into Latin ones, those gods became men, and Christ was installed in the cold place where magic once was. The practice of doing this—of removing godhood from pagan deities and making them into digestible mortals for the sake of Christianity—is called euhemerization. I call it cowardice, but I’m a spiteful person. The point being: you are not immune to the purposeful retroactive linguistic positioning of God as a subject where He was once merely a vehicle—or perhaps absent completely.
I have read Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables six times—four times in French and twice in English translation. I have seen the 2012 film probably nearly twenty times (I think it’s good—I will die on this hill) and I have listened to the Original Broadway Cast recording of the musical more times than I feel comfortable estimating. I am ashamed to say—it was far, far after I’d become entirely enthused in the world of Les Misérables that I decided to listen to the original French version of the musical—the 1980 version, which was then translated into the epic that we know most popularly now. For one of the first times in my life, it was not my tongue doing the approximating. French was the drawing board—English was the mirror. But a mirror does not give back a fully correct image. And I quickly realised Herbert Kretzmer’s English adaptation of Les Misérables (the musical) was not an ordinary mirror. It was a God-fearing one.
- God Above
“To love another person is to see the face of God.”
This is the closing line to Herbert Kretzmer’s English adaptation of the French Les Misérables musical. I don’t doubt you have heard it before—likely in isolation. The English, very plainly, is structured as a comparison. As in: thing A is thing B, with a simile somewhere implied, thus being: thing A is (like) thing B. In this case, loving somebody is like seeing the face of God. The scale on which this phrase sits is crucial: it is like it. Not greater than. It exists in equivalence to. Further, this sentence begins with an infinitive: to love, and not an active verb: loving, having loved, intending to love. It is vague in this way. It could be to somebody. But it could also be a proverb without pointedness, something like “thou shalt not steal”: a noncommittal instruction, a voiceless, faceless word of advice, to a voiceless, faceless consumer. This English feels nearly deliberately absent of a subject. It is afraid to be more than a hypothetical. But, despite this, I do not believe the English to be soulless. You might read it as a confession. As in: here is something I have learned—do not tell. I must also praise its idolatry. Finding God anywhere other than God—finding God in man—is a positively gutting thesis for a story in which most all of its characters end up martyrs: crucified on the chairs and tables that built the barricade on which they fell. Each of them was, in some way, God.
In many ways, Les Misérables is about selflessness. Rather, it is about paying selflessness forward, moving love along a chain, and not letting devotion die as people do. Almost every action taken by any of the protagonists is done for the sake of another. It is to say, “If looking at you takes me to God, then I will worship you as such too.” As Fantine dies, she looks at Jean Valjean and says that he comes “from God in Heaven.” Fantine’s love for her daughter, Cosette, and final, breathless, thankful moments in her knowledge of Cosette’s ensured safety, has turned Valjean into her God. Thus: To love another person (Cosette), is to see the face of God (Valjean). In this way goes the show. There is the suffering of somebody who is loved, and a saving by a personal God until the God needs saving. So on and so forth. This line might also be a reciprocal one. A simple (but stunning) metaphor for devotion. It is easiest to see in the Marius/Cosette/Éponine love triangle. (Marius and Éponine, childhood best friends, Éponine, madly and secretly in love with Marius, and Cosette, the girl whom Marius sees one time and decides he is in love with.) Éponine sees Marius how Marius sees Cosette: as a bright escape from themselves. Their love interests are what inspire their selfless actions; their lovers are their Gods.
I hesitate to be too demeaning, but this appears to me rather flat. Like the phrase itself, with its equally weighted scale, each example is too clear to cut me in a way that matters. Characters are sanctified. Looking at them is like looking at something else which you are already familiar with. You are pious. This is, however gorgeously, still piety. You see the face of God—but do you do anything else? Or, even now, even when He is found in the eyes of those you love, is He unreachable? Stuck in Heaven? To love another is to see the face of God. And what else? What can you do with the face of God? What can you do when it’s already over? You have done the selfless thing—you have loved and you were loved—and you have gone to Heaven. Perhaps it is just me, but when I look at what the cast of Les Misérables paid, a face is simply not enough.
- God Below
“Qui aime son prochain est plus près de Dieu sur la terre.”
This is the closing line to Alain Boublil and Jean-Marc Natel’s French and original musical adaptation of Les Misérables. The difference is slight. But this slightness ebbs the meaning of the phrase completely. Forgive my hypocrisy as I ask you to trust my translation. Here, Boublil and Natel have written: “Who loves another person is closer to God on Earth.” The implication here as given by on Earth is a silent end to the phrase: than in Heaven. Thus: Those who love another person are closer to God on Earth than they would be in Heaven. To note: plus près: a transliteration: more close, and a translation, closer. This is no longer a comparison. This is an assertion of surplus. With this, the scale has tipped, and finally, finally, something has been truly said. Something is more than what God could give. Furthermore, Qui aime, who loves, is no longer a subject in stasis. Instead of “anybody”, who, as in whomever, can easily mean “everybody”. Everybody who loves. Everybody who is, continually, habitually, loving. I would also like to note the usage of “son prochain” rather than “un prochain” or “le prochain”. Though it would be far less idiomatic in the French to use either alternative, and “son prochain” is simply grammatical, I believe the nature of the possessive pronoun son (his/their) adds to the emotion of the phrase. It is not merely another person. It is your other person.
But it is the last words of the French phrase I would like to hone in on, because it is these words that Kretzmer avoided translating at all, not even adapting for the sake of idiom, but outright omitting and replacing. It is a deeply rebellious sentiment: to be closer to God outside of his domain. In a story such as Les Misérables, where most all of its characters are left dead, this last line does not allow the show’s thesis to glorify their deaths—rebuking it, saying that we have—that they had—God and Glory here on Earth the whole time, by mere virtue of their love for each other. That they died, but they did not have to. That though they were martyrs, the world should never have asked this of them. This thing that you have been institutionalised to call God—you already have it where you are. There is history to this line. Les Misérables, though it is often mistaken to be, is not set during the French Revolution, but slightly after it. The Revolution, in the short term, had failed. By the beginning of Les Misérables in 1815, France was once again ruled by a king. The story culminates with the June Rebellion of 1832. French monarchy behaved as most other Holy Roman Empire monarchies did—the king being a supposed spokesperson for God, with little real attempt to separate the Church from the State, and less attempt to convince the public such a separation was even being practiced in theory. The toppling of the religious institution which positied only nobility as being primed for Heaven was one of the largest cornerstones of the Revolution and remained an adamancy of the middle and lower classes which were left in its aftermath. Only kings were meant for Heaven. But that is fine, says Les Misérables, we have God right here. Not only this, but we have Him more than you do. Plus près.
Do you understand how you have been misled? How the disappearance of words in the French bury religious spite? I beg that you not be tricked into believing Les Misérables is allowing its characters to be grieved passively. To love another person is to see the face of God. A brilliant line on its own. But what does it really mean in this show? And what does it mean that it was trying to translate something else entirely? To love another person is to see the face of God. This is a disguise. This is not what Alain Boublil and Jean-Marc Natel wrote. They said: Qui aime son prochain est plus près de Dieu sur la terre. Remember it.
- Conclusion
This is not the only line in Herbert Kretzmer vastly changed in the English adaptation of Les Misérables (1980). Some of his translations are wonderful and inoffensive. But many of them do just this—aggrandize God in a way that the French actively combat. I am fascinated by this seeming quirk of Imperial English—not that today’s France is the pinnacle of people-led, secular democracy. Far from it. Still, I believe that preserving the humanist fervour of revolutionary and post-revolutionary France is necessary for adapting Les Misérables. It is not about what really happened, but what the children of the barricade believed they were making happen. A furious optimism—inherently contrarian to say we like it here. We are going to continue to like it here. And no promise of Heaven will be greater to me than spending the day with you. It is not that I am already there. It’s that I don’t want to be. And if God is down here, with us, then I ask—what do you have that I cannot already find?