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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

Smell of the Lamp

Smell of the Lamp

The translation from Racine by Robert Lowell smells somewhat of the lamp. Lowell is a most painstaking craftsman, and it is something to bring the heroic couplet to life again, but in some way he and Racine are at loggerheads. I suspect that Lowell’s essentially romantic approach is the main difficulty – he is at his best in the long soliloquies, but in the quick interchange of comment and idea the signs of strain begin to show. Unconsciously he has conceived of the play as a dramatic poem, and finds it hard to subordinate individual feeling to the bare algebra of Racine’s action.

Richard Wilbur’s Advice to a Prophet is the fag-end of a book composed too much of trivial epigrams and laboured translations. Milkweeds and stones converse in order that a poem may exist, and the prophet is advised not to tell people who cannot imagine it that the world may end tomorrow. Perhaps Mr Wilbur has taken his own advice too seriously.

Anne Ridler’s play, ‘written in verse to help the actors’, achieves an impressive structure of unity in variety. An unpopular factory owner is beaten up and killed outside a pub by some of his workmen. The action of the play develops from the endeavour of his daughter to find out how and why her father died. It is a severe limit to the dimensions of Mrs Ridler’s play that none of her characters are aware that some people believe in the existence of a class war. But granted this, the events are wholly credible, the characters true, and the language lucid, flexible and admirably adapted for the theatre. I feel that Mrs Ridler owes a mild debt to the T.S. Eliot of The Family Reunion. She has, however, more sense of the way people live than her master has commonly shown. I would like to see the play put on the stage some time.

1964 (317)