Old French loopholes

The medieval French farces were originally performed at fairs and on feast days, and enjoyed across social strata. Written in colloquial verse, they tell simple, comic stories filled with physical humour and puns. Frequently obscene, usually outrageous and rarely in keeping with modern political sensibilities, they can be a translator’s nightmare.

Previous translations have for the most part erred on the side of archaism, faithfully replicating the language of the original plays even when this diminishes their vernacular feel. Jody Enders, in this edition of twelve Old French juridical farces, goes in the other direction: the language here is fully modernized and filled with colloquialisms and references to popular culture.

The translation of the sixteenth-century “Farce of the Washtub”, for instance, makes reference to lyrics from “Bat Out of Hell” by Meat Loaf, Stevie Wonder’s “Signed, Sealed, Delivered (I’m Yours)” and even “Ding-Dong! The Witch Is Dead” from The Wizard of Oz. Characters address each other as “schmuck”, “Jacky-Boy” and “Jackass”. The downside to this approach is that it heightens the dissonance between the play’s medieval origins and the modern context of its performance. The “Farce of the Washtub” tells the story of a wife who imposes an excessively rigid marital contract on her husband and gets her comeuppance when he finds a sneaky loophole. The humour relies on a sense that women ought to submit to their spouses. The modernizing language and references jar somewhat and can feel like an endorsement of the play’s beliefs.

There is, however, an idea behind the modernization. Enders uses her translations to make an impassioned case for freedom of expression, lamenting a shift in reactions to uncomfortable humour from the personal (“This humor is not for me”) to the universal (“If this humor is not for me, then […] it should not be for anyone”). The farces, she argues, offer a foil to this censor­ious streak. They allow modern directors, performers and audi­ences to engage with themes that were once thought hilarious but now cause discomfort, such as voyeurism or a marital obligation to sex. We are invited to enjoy the original humour where it overlaps with our own, and to confront head on those elements that we find less agreeable.

Enders’s translations are not particularly faithful reproductions. They do, however, invite us to engage with the farces in a way that offers an excellent glimpse into the experiences of their earliest audiences. They are an important reminder that it is still possible to find amusement and hilarity even in stories whose morals do not align with our own.

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