Colloquium "Translating and adapting Molière's jokes into English from the 17th century to the present day".

On the occasion of these study days, we propose to examine French-to-English translations of Molière's jokes, from the first translations-adaptations of Moliéresque comedies by Richard Flecknoe(1), Thomas Shadwell(2), John Dryden(3), Edward Ravenscroft(4) and Aphra Behn(5), soon followed by those of Henry Fielding(6). The corpus also includes more literal translations of Molière's plays, whether complete or selected, carried out from the 18th century onwards, such as those directed by John Ozell (1714) and Henry Baker and James Miller (1739). Finally, it covers translations carried out in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, up to and including those by the American poet Richard Wilbur (1921-2017). We may also be interested in the comedies which, from the Restoration onwards (those of William Wycherley(7) and John Vanbrugh(8) in particular), transposed and adapted certain Moliéresque jokes in a freer manner.

Joke, as a statement intended to amuse or make people laugh, is an act of language that aims to produce an effect on the receiver or receivers, readers or spectators. Associated with "raillerie" in Richelet's Dictionary (1680) and with "divertissement" in Furetière's (1690), it is, for Molière, what elicits "laughter", whether a frank, bursting laugh or a more discreet smile. The aim is therefore to read Molière's plays as a collection of jokes and bon mots, and to study the echoes they may have found, in terms of translation and adaptation, among English translators contemporary with Molière or later.

The type of jokes we'll be looking at will therefore be centered on verbal comedy, and the preferred themes, which we'll be able to tackle, always from the point of view of their comic effect, are, by way of example:

- Jokes and female characters, jokes and male characters.
- The parody of certain fashionable languages.
- The translation of "dirty equivocations" (sexual equivocations).
- Treatment of onomastics, toponymy and titles
Swear words and their adaptations - Swear words and their adaptations
- Comic "additions" and "improvements" to source plays.
- The claim of models (Ben Jonson, Shakespeare or Molière), through notions of humor, repartee, ridicule.
- Paratextual discourse, epitextual debates on the comic efficiency of translations.
- Untranslatable" jokes and the strategies of circumvention, explicitness and concealment employed in translations.

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(1) Richard Flecknoe translates Les Précieuses ridicules(1659) under the title of Demoiselles a la Mode in 1667.
(2) Thomas Shadwell translated Les Fâcheux (1661) under the title of Sullen Lovers: or, The Impertinents in 1668.
(3) John Dryden published a translation of L'Étourdi (1655) under the title ofSir Martin Mar-all, or, The Feign'd Innocence, in 1668.
(4) He was the author-translator of The Citizen turn'd Gentleman (1672), which recasts two separate plays by Molière, Le Bourgeois gentilhomme (1670) and Monsieur de Pourceaugnac (1669).
(5) Aphra Behn adapts Le Malade imaginaire(1673) as Sir Patient Fancy in 1678.
(6) Henry Fielding gave The Mock Doctor (Le Médecin malgré lui, 1666) in 1732, and The Miser (L'Avare, 1668) in 1733.
(7) Wycherley's The Country Wife (1675) was inspired in particular by L'École des femmes(1662).
(8) Sir John Vanbrugh, author of The Relapse (1696), takes elements from Bourgeois-Gentilhomme (1670).