"Shakespeare escapes the translator by style, he also escapes by language", wrote Victor Hugo, whose son François-Victor was one of the great translators of the Bard.

And yet countless are the stagings of his plays in the language of Molière.

It is therefore difficult to believe that Le Roi Lear, which is part of the Shakespearean trinity with Macbeth and Hamlet, only entered the French repertoire a few days ago, with its "king" Denis Podalydès in the role- title, a staging by the German Thomas Ostermeier, and a translation by the writer Olivier Cadiot.

- Neither verses nor octosyllables -

For the trio, there is no doubt about the need to revisit the text in French so that it speaks to today's audience, while keeping the poetry.

"We need today to retranslate the great texts with the society and the language which change; an older translation would speak more of the society in which it was translated", assures AFP Denis Podalydès who has already embodied " Hamlet" at the French or even "Richard II" (at the Avignon festival).

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"It's not a question of modernity, but of understanding", underlines Ostermeier, whose second work with the troupe after a caustic production of the Shakespearean comedy "Twelfth Night" in 2019, with scenes from drag queen, techno concert and striptease.

"Many people have a bad image of Shakespeare because they have seen bad productions with old translations", he comments.

He recalls that the Bard wrote in "blank verse" (poetry without a formal rhyme scheme).

"In other languages ​​such as French or German where there are more syllables, the number of words would have to be reduced to respect this, but that would remove content", affirms the director who has staged several plays of Shakespeare.

Above all, he wants "that the public understand the complex plot" around this king who decides to share his kingdom between his three daughters but who asks in exchange for a declaration of love, before being disappointed by his daughter's restraint. favorite, Cordelia, and banishing her unjustly.

"It's very difficult for spectators to take an interest in the play if there isn't this fluidity," adds Olivier Cadiot, who had already translated Twelfth Night at Ostermeier's request.

"My job is not to refresh in the vulgar sense or to make it modern, but to strip down the text a little so that it can come to us a little quickly; it's like stripping a parquet floor or removing the varnish on a painting", continues the writer.

But to what extent is the text we hear Shakespearean?

For him, it is "a question of respecting the complexity of the text in English and not of the verses".

“I translate in prose; I don't try to find a false octosyllable verse form, otherwise it becomes ridiculous; it must not sound dated,” he emphasizes.

He admits having perhaps pushed the cursor a little too far once or twice in the text, in particular in a famous passage of the play.

“When Lear said + Every inch a king +, one of the most sublime sentences that can be said; I proposed + total royal +” instead of proposals like “king from head to toe”.

For Podalydès, the challenge for the actors in a Shakespeare play is to "rebalance all the time (the game) between apparently everyday speech and sentences that come out of the end of the 17th century".

© 2022 AFP