As every theatre buff knows, theatre is meant to be performed first, and many new plays (and a fortiori their translations) are often not published in book form until after the play has enjoyed a successful run on stage. Indeed, some plays (and a fortiori their translations) never get to the publication stage at all due to their commercial failure on stage. If you add to this phenomenon the fact that plays and translations are costly to put into print and do not sell very well, you would understand why most publishers, who are for the most part conservative, shy away from theatrical translations unless the latter are preceded by a blockbuster run on the stages of the most prominent playhouses. On top of it all, theatres have long since adopted the practice of commissioning their resident directors or dramaturgs to translate the works they want to stage in order to avoid paying copyright or translation fees for existing translations. These commissioned translations, which are usually and somewhateuphemistically called 'adaptations', are extremely short-lived, for they disappear when the production at which they are exclusively aimed ultimately closes. They are for the most part disposable translations, as it were.
There is,then, absolutely no reason why Crommelynck's universe should be foreign to English or American consciousness, when it is not to Russian, Polish, Czech, Bulgarian, German, Dutch, Flemish, Italian, and Spanish consciousness, to mention only a few of the cultures and languages in which Crommelynck's plays did enjoy unmitigated success. And Crommelynck's plays were translated into and performed in English,too. Except for the two plays I mentioned earlier, they were simply not published because of unsuccessful staging concepts. I have been able to find, in Los Angeles of all places, an unpublished English translation of what is probably Crommelynck's most complex play to translate, Carine, or the Young Woman in Love with Her Soul.
In its caricaturization of human passions or the dramatic exacerbation of the most human feelings (jealousy, avarice, greed, misanthropy, lust, selfishness), Crommelyncks theatre is closely akin not only to pantomime, but also to the farces, sotties, and morality plays of the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries. It thus finds its roots in some of the oldest forms of popular theatre. "Torn between its physical appetites and its need to go beyond the immediate significance of its actions in order to get nearer to the mysteries of creation, Paul-Louis Mignon wrote,“it is the heir to the greatest medieval theatrical tradition, of which it has at the same time the popular naivety, the religious fervour, and the impious obscenity” (Mignon 1956:2). François Mauriac perfectly saw the vastness of Crommelyncks dramatic universe when he defined the playwright also as "an image-maker from the days of the great cathedral builders" (Mauriac 1926: 82).
Unlike Ghelderode's theatre, which never completely realized the fusion of all its sources of inspiration and ultimately remained a gaudy, though brilliant, junk shop, Crommelynck's theatre managed to solve its apparent paradox, which is also that of Belgian drama as a whole: although it has its roots in both the medieval and the classical traditions, although it is fraught with so many influences from a glorious past, it succeeds in being profoundly modern and in moving us through its deeply original approach to the greatest universal and eternal human myths.
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