Lost in Translation: Oscar, Bosie, and Salome

by Anne Margaret Daniel

In November of 1891, Oscar Wilde went to Paris. He stayed there two months,

and during this time he wrote in French a play, Salome. Beginning it one afternoon,

Wilde -- if we are to believe him, always an amusing dilemma with Wilde -- could not

stop. Arriving simultaneously at writer's block and hunger, around midnight, he went

out to the Grand Cafe, at the corner of Boulevard des Capucines and rue Scribe, and

asked the gypsy orchestra there for wild and terrible music, music of a woman who,

having slain her lover, danced in his blood. The orchestra obliged with, as Wilde told his

friend Vincent O'Sullivan, "such wild and terrible music that those who were there

stopped talking and looked at each other with blanched faces."1 Evidently satisfied, and

inspired, Wilde returned home after his music and meal and finished Salome before

morning.2 His friend Sarah Bernhardt, immensely popular for her exotic, "oriental" roles

and rhythmic, wildly passionate delivery of lines, accepted the play, tailor-made for her,

as part of her 1892 London season. Salome was banned before it could be presented.

Not, however, before it could be translated for the London stage and English readers.

Lord Alfred Douglas, whom Wilde had met in the summer of 1891 when Douglas was

20, undertook that translation. Douglas's edition is still, unhappily, all too much with us.

What has kept Douglas's deeply flawed translation the most-published version of

this least-known and most different of Wilde's plays? The Methuen edition of Wilde's

complete works (1908) ignored the translation, then owned by John Lane, and simply

1
printed the French original.3 Merlin Holland, Wilde's grandson, gave us in 1994 a new

edition of Wilde's complete works in one volume, and Salome, as presented there, is a

close translation of the original play.4 However, when the Oxford Drama Library issued

its definitive edition of Wilde's plays a year later, the editors staunchly retained Douglas's

bad Salome.5 Wilde's own selection of Douglas as translator, and the connection between

the two that remains the best-known feature of Alfred Douglas's long life and work, goes

far in explaining the endurance of the Douglas translation. And there is the resistance of

Wilde's own French, not always smooth or accurate, and idiosyncratic in its terms and

phrases. Finally, Salome is not the glittering, witty drawing-room and country-house

drama that most people think of when they think of Oscar Wilde. It is a throwback in

some ways to Wilde's obsession with Biblical stories and religion during his Oxford days

in the late 1870s, so evident in his poems. It is a tribute to symbolisme, decadence, and

the French writers Wilde loved, and that he and others tried, without much success at the

time, to make the English common reader love too. It is also a play leagues ahead of its

time in its intricacy, artifice, violence, and poetry, written in French well before Beckett

thought of converting to same, using loops of repetition in its dialogue before Vladimir

and Estragon were born, happily smashing dramatic unities and audience expectations to

bits while celebrating -- in any language -- language.

The Salome story was a favorite with Roman decadents, and centuries later with

French ones. The late 1880s saw Salome resurgent as a quintessential "symbol of luxury,

opulence, and fatal female sensuality" for Flaubert and Huysmans, in the art of Moreau,

in poems by Mallarme and Apollinaire.6 Wilde, ever a magpie in his writings and -- well

before T.S. Eliot -- an assembler of fragments to shore against ruins, certainly borrowed

2
much of his Salome from these men he admired. One source largely ignored is a

ponderous dramatic poem by an American, J.C. Heywood, who published Herodias: A

Dramatic Poem (originally to be called Salome) in 1884, and followed it, a bit

confusingly, in 1887 with Salome: A Dramatic Poem.7 Richard Ellmann years ago

"tentatively" offered the later work as a source -- Wilde had reviewed it, and disliked it --

but condemned the source since Wilde's treatment "did not even remotely resemble

Heywood's."8 Well, Heywood's Salome is no influence at all, but his Herodias certainly

is. The "orient moon" overseeing the play's scenes, the use of "golden" motion and

speech, the incantational repetition of "give me a kiss," and many of Herodias's more

memorable lines, such as they are, may all be found in Wilde's Salome. In Heywood's

play, it is Herodias who loved John the Baptist, "to a frenzy," and, rebuffed, hates him

enough to set her daughter to dance. When he is dead, Herodias, with the head clasped

in her arms, exults to John that "thou art mine! I can embrace thee even,/And weave my

lily fingers in thy hair,/And stroke thy temples, fondle thee, and hate!" The end of

Wilde's play is exactly the same, substituting Salome for Herodias; Heywood's queen,

saying "Come, let me taste thy virtuous, scornful lips --" presses her mouth to the dead

prophet's and pays for this liberty with her life.9

Wilde had evidently thought to have his Salome decapitated, at first -- exiled

from her country, Salome would wander the world, until one day, as she crossed a frozen

lake near the Rhone, she would fall through the ice and the ice would behead her. Those

who came to look would see "on the silver plate of the re-formed ice . . . a severed head

on which gleamed the crown of a golden nimbus."10 Rather mercifully, Wilde set aside

this out-Wagnering Wagner and cut his play short by having Salome crushed on the spot

3
– like Heywood’s Herodias – in a denouement certainly swifter to write in a one-night

stand.

The play was reviewed in England in its French version. The Times found it,

applying a favorite noun of Whistler's, "an arrangement in blood and ferocity, morbid,

bizarre, repulsive, and very offensive in its adaptation of scriptural phraseology to

situations the reverse of sacred."11 Max Beerbohm, ever the other voice, insisted that if

"Oscar would re-write all the Bible, there would be no sceptics."12 And the young Alfred

Douglas, still at Magdalen College, reviewed the play for the short-lived Oxford student

publication that would soon figure prominently in Wilde's trials and conviction, The

Spirit Lamp. Douglas condemned the Philistinism of an England feeling itself "saved

from lasting disgrace" by the ban on an "unwholesome, un-English play." He called

Salome a "perfect work of art."13 W.B. Yeats could not abide the play and termed it

"thoroughly bad," yet Yeats could not keep his mind from the image of the dancer and

the dance, later admitting it was something of the 1890s, "a fragment of the past I had to

get rid of."14

Elkin Matthews and John Lane's The Bodley Head (mocked in the pages of

Punch as "the Sodley Bed")15 published Douglas's translation, illustrated by Aubrey

Beardsley, in 1894. Wilde was unhappy with both the translation and the illustrations --

the former being so poor, and the latter wickedly fraught with family resemblance.

Wilde's own features loom down from the mammoth overseeing man-in-the-moon, fill

the pudgy face of the master of ceremonies heralding Herodias's entrance, and -- poorly

disguised with a beard -- are drawn as Herod's. Beardsley's Herodias (apart from the

4
bared breasts that Lady Wilde never, to my knowledge, exhibited publicly) looks

unpleasantly like the surviving photographs of Wilde's mother, the poet "Speranza" and a

dominant force always in her son's life, dressed in her usual garb. Years later, Douglas

recalled a friend saying that, "with her towering headdresses of velvet and long gold

earrings and her enormous bracelets of gold studded with turquoises," her face hidden by

her customary veils, "she produced a rather painful impression[.]"16 And Wilde thought

of his princess as a light, bright beauty and also a bombshell in several senses, "that

tragic daughter of passion . . . now dancing for the head of the English public," he called

her.17 Beardsley drew her as a protean figure, now blonde and lovely and nude, now

dark and vicious, witchlike and sunken-eyed. In her burial at the end, her pretty

uncrushed body is laid to rest my two masked imps in a powderbox. However,

Beardsley was an ally to Wilde in disliking Douglas's translation, offering to attempt one

of his own as his French was better. When Douglas brought him the English Salome in

the summer of 1893, Wilde immediately complained of Douglas's sloppy, schoolboy

French, and an infuriated Douglas blamed any faults upon the original. He and Wilde

nearly split over the disagreements, and Robbie Ross -- doubtless to his later regret --

made peace between them that fall. Though Wilde tried to fix some of the errors,

Douglas raged when he did, and wrote to the publishers that September, "as I cannot

consent to have my work altered and edited, and thus to become a mere machine for

doing the rough work of translation, I have decided to relinquish the affair altogether."18

Of course Douglas relinquished nothing, and was finally contented when Wilde dropped

his attempts to fix the translation, and dedicated Salome "To my friend Lord Alfred

Bruce Douglas the translator of this play." In Reading Gaol, as he wrote the long letter

to Douglas now known as De Profundis, Wilde was still galled by “the schoolboy faults

5
of [Douglas’s] attempted translation,” but when he concludes, "I took you and the

translation back," one can almost hear the sigh of resignation.19

Wilde's original Salome appeared in thick violet paper covers -- "Tyrian purple,"

he called it -- with his name and hers on the front in silver letters.20 The Parisian

publisher was the Libraire de L'Art Independant, and the only illustration in this first

edition is the library logo, a most unencouraging figure of a fanged, cat-eyed, voluptuous

woman with wild hair, black wings, and twin fishtails for feet. This bastard mermaid

crouches over the scattered bones of her latest meal, above the written warning in Latin

that non hic piscis omnium. Wilde the writer regularly fished strange waters, but the

decision to write the play in French was an odd one even for an always-experimental

stylist and self-described "lord of language."21 Although Wilde's French was certainly

adequate, he "wrote French as he [evidently] spoke it . . . charmingly, but simply and

somewhat in the manner of the phrasebook."22 Why he had written the play in French

was immediately questioned, and critics and friends all centered on the likelihood that

Salome was for Sarah Bernhardt, who did not speak English. Wilde was horrified at the

thought of any performer, even Bernhardt, as a publicly acknowledged influence upon

his drama, and in a letter to the Times he insisted he did not write the play for her, that he

was an artist and not an artisan. Most people who cared about the matter ignored Wilde's

protestations, and Wilde, long a devotee and now a friend of Bernhardt's, did believe that

she was the only person who could act Salome.23 Perhaps Wilde wrote Salome in French

to better its chances of being produced in London, with the shock value of the story line

coated in foreign language. Perhaps he simply wanted to see if he could. Whatever the

case, Wilde's choice of language allowed him to consciously enhance a conception of the

feminine in his linguistic treatment of Salome. Having chosen to write the play in

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French, Wilde completely overloads feminine nouns throughout, particularly when the

princess herself is speaking. Much of the feminine sense and sensibility of the original

Salome is utterly lost in translation, and Douglas did not, or could not, amend this.

Wilde purposefully, carefully chooses and uses objects, body parts, and natural

phenomena that are feminine in French. "Une" is the first word in the play (Fr. 9). "La

lune" can only be "elle;" the recurring hands, angel, death, mouth, and head are all "la."

When Salome first speaks to Iokanaan (using always the familiar "tu," while with one

exception he always addresses her as "vous") her speech of love beginning "Je suis

amoureuse de ton corps" is chock-full of feminines: the rose, the queen, the dawn, the

moon, the sea. (Fr. 32). This remains true of all Salome's love-speeches to Iokanaan.

His mouth is like a band of scarlet on an ivory tower, a pomegranate, a pomegranate

flower, a branch of coral from the sea -- all "une" or "la." When Iokanaan denounces and

rejects Salome, though, her language turns harsh, and fills with masculines: a wall, a

sepulchre, a knot of black serpents (Fr. 32-33). The caressing, melodic flow of the

feminine articles and nouns is jarred by Salome's use of "le" and "un." In her unsaying of

love for Iokanaan each time he denies her, Salome in fact and effect drops the feminine.

Translation into English erases these and other feminine/masculine distinctions, and

Douglas only occasionally compensates for this fact, in easy instances: the moon, for

example, is generally feminine in English poetry too.

A marvelous part of the original French is the repetition Wilde uses, recurring

words and phrases and images that build lavishly and make the (religious, after all)

drama like a litany. Douglas never misses a chance to evade the rhythms of repetition,

7
strange behavior for a poet. Where Wilde repeats that the moon "a l'air tres etrange,"

Douglas alternates "How strange the moon seems" and "She has a strange look" (Fr. 9;

Ox. 65). Salome praises Iokanaan's body for its whiteness, "comme les neiges qui

couchent sur les montagnes," and says the phrase twice; once is enough for Douglas (Fr.

32, Ox. 72). Her insistence that she is "amoureuse" for a whole blason of Iokanaan's

body parts is sometimes "amorous," sometimes "that I desire" in translation (eg. Fr. 33,

Ox. 73). Iokanaan's last words to Salome, "soyez maudite," he repeats. (Fr. 37). Instead

of a simple "be damned, be damned," Douglas uses three words for Wilde's two, and

translates the phrase first as "cursed be Thou" and then, for good measure, "be Thou

accursed" (Ox 74). "Remue" is both "moves" and "stirs," "supplie" is both "beseech" and

"pray." (Fr. 81, 63; Ox 90, 83). It is as if Douglas wanted to show the number of words

he knew, rather than maintain the incantational sound of Wilde's original.

Wilde's linguistic directness is muted in translation. No one could be as

byzantine, baroque, rococo, and otherwise lyrically lavish with words as Wilde when he

wanted to be -- think of the laundry lists of temptations made lovely in The Picture of

Dorian Gray.24 t where Wilde is blunt and direct in this play, Douglas lets too many

words, and the wrong ones, destroy the sense and impact. "Nouveau-ne," a simple

newborn, is in the English an unpleasant, piggish "sucking child" (Fr. 14; Ox 66). "Gros

mots" is prettified into "uncouth jargon" (Fr. 19; Ox. 68). "Recule" is lengthened into

"steps slowly back" (Fr. 26; Ox. 71). When Salome tells the prophet "Ta voix m'enivre,"

Douglas leaves aside the intoxicatory qualities for a far less visceral "Thy voice is as

music to my ear" (Fr. 30, Ox. 72). Her direct, personal requests to Iokanaan -- "Laisse-

moi toucher ton corps!" "Laisse-moi baiser ta bouche" -- become a stilted, formal "Suffer

8
me to touch thy body" and "Suffer me to kiss thy mouth" (Fr. 32, 34, 36; Ox. 72, 74).

And the one time Iokanaan consents to tutoyer Salome, in his last lines to her ("Je ne

veux pas te regarder. Je ne te regarderai pas. Tu es maudite, Salome, tu es maudite.") is

not personalized in any way in the Douglas translation -- she remains "thee" and "thou" --

and the second line is omitted. (Fr. 37, Ox 74). In many places characters are told to

shut up. "Faites-le taire" is a wordy "Bid him to be silent"; "Taisez-vous," which Herod

shouts at his wife, becomes the weirdly soft "Peace, woman." (Fr. 45, Ox. 77; Fr. 62, Ox.

83). That Iokanaan literally vomits, spews, insults at Herodias makes her hate him, for

the truth hurts. Wilde's Herodias complains that "Cet homme vomit toujours des

injures," "Il a vomi des insultes contre moi," but this is sanitized into his "hurling" and

"covering [her] with insults" (Fr. 45, 72; Ox 77, 86). Why must a simple "cinquante" be

"half a hundred"? (Fr. 77, Ox. 88). A "prostituee" lengthen into a "woman that is a

wanton"? (Fr. 81; Ox. 90).

Color mattered immensely to Wilde. In one of his earliest surviving letters,

written to his mother from the Portora School when he was 13, Wilde tells her that she's

sent him the wrong clothes. "The flannel shirts you sent in the hamper are both Willie's,

mine are one quite scarlet and the other lilac.”25 Any other schoolboy would have been

content with a red shirt, and perhaps less so with a purple one. Wilde's, though, are quite

scarlet, and lilac. Throughout his life he chose carefully the colors he wore, painted his

home, used in the binding of his books, and wrote of. Dorian Gray is the antithesis of his

colorless surname, as he walks in beauty, with his “finely curved scarlet lips, his frank

blue eyes, his crisp gold hair.”26 For her entrance, Mrs. Cheveley, with her "Venetian red

hair," must be clad "in heliotrope, with diamonds" (Ox 167). Her full-blackmail dress in

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Act III is full of Wilde's very favorite colors; she is "Lamia-like" in a poison-green "and

silver. She has a cloak of black satin, lined with dead rose-leaf silk." (Ox 216). The

colors of Salome are sadly dimmed in translation. Herod's "yeux de taupe" are indeed the

eyes of a mole, as Douglas says, but he loses the sense of color Wilde also imparts (Fr.

19; Ox 68). "Un noeud de serpents noirs" becomes a colorless "knot of serpents" (Fr. 33;

Ox. 73). "Les figues vertes" are colorless "unripe figs" (Fr. 57, Ox. 81). "Rouge comme

du sang" simply "become[s] as blood" (Fr. 68, Ox. 85).

Simple mistranslation, while not abundant, changes entirely the sense and

meaning of some crucial lines and images. Herod's intensely Wildean observation on

mirrors and masks, "Il ne faut regarder que dans les miroirs. Car les miroirs ne nous

montrent que des masques," came back to Wilde as the directive that, rather than only

looking in mirrors, one must not look in mirrors -- a mistake Wilde was able to change.27

To mistake a lily for a rose is to upend Wilde's symbolic floral universe, and to eradicate

the echoes Wilde intended of the lilies of the field and in the hand of Mary, but Douglas

does it when he translates "Elle fleurira comme le lis" as "They shall blossom like the

rose" (Fr. 14; Ox 66). When the moon is "nue," Douglas prefers "naked" (Fr. 39, Ox.

75).28

To conclude with the conclusion. At the end of Salome, just before her own

execution, Salome holds the head and kisses its lips. Her last lines are: "Je sais bien que

tu m'aurais aimee, et le mystere de l'amour est plus grande que la mystere de la mort. Il

ne faut regarder que l'amour." Douglas translated as follows: "Well I know that thou

wouldst have loved me, and the mystery of Love is greater than the mystery of Death."

10
Her final, powerful observation that one need only look at love, or, in essence, that love

is all you need goes missing.

When Oscar Wilde thought of Salome in Reading Gaol, he remembered his play

as a work with pleasure and sorrow “and the note of Doom” as "recurring motifs [that]

make Salome so like a piece of music and bind it together as a ballad[.]"29 Salome was

quietly reconstructed to take shape, in its English version, more along these lines before

its insertion in Merlin Holland's 1994 edition of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde.

Errors are silently corrected; the text is far less corrupt than Douglas's version. Yet even

this edition identifies the English Salome as Douglas's work, "translated from the French

of Oscar Wilde by Lord Alfred Douglas."30 Finally, a Wilde has managed to mend

Douglas's faults and failures without Douglas's fits and fury – and, with a certain grace,

lets stand the tribute to the youth who worst, but first, and as best beloved, attempted

Salome in English.

Anne Margaret Daniel

Princeton, New Jersey
Copyright Princeton University Library Chronicle 2007

11
1
Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988) 344.
2
Wilde continued working on the play in December at Torquay, as he simultaneously finished A Good Woman, soon
renamed Lady Windermere's Fan. Ellmann, Wilde 363.
3
Robert Ross, ed., The First Collected Edition of the Works of Oscar Wilde (London: Methuen, 1908-1922; rprt.
Dawsons, 1969), vol. 2 of 15 (Salome, A Florentine Tragedy, and Vera) [2].
4
Oscar Wilde, The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. Merlin Holland (1948; Glasgow: HarperCollins, 1994) 583-605.
5
Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays, ed. Peter Raby (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995) 61-91. I
cite in the text of this essay to Douglas’s translation as reprinted here (hereinafter “Ox.”).
6
Gail Finney, Women in Modern Drama: Freud, Feminism and the European Theater at the Turn of the Century (New
York and Ithaca: Cornell, 1989) 55. One of Salome’s most famous appearances in France is across the tympanum of
Rouen Cathedral, where, “like a contortionist,” she “is portrayed upside down, dancing on her hands. Some hold that it
was this work, seen often by Flaubert in his youth, which inspired his Herodias.” Helen Zagona, The Legend of Salome
and the Principle of Art for Art’s Sake (Paris: Libraire Minard, 1960) 21.
7
J.C. Heywood, Herodias: A Dramatic Poem (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, 1884); J.C. Heywood, Salome: A Dramatic
Poem (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, 1887).
8
Philip K. Cohen, The Moral Vision of Oscar Wilde (Cranbury NJ and London: Associated University Presses, 1978) 179
n. 11; see also Ellmann, Wilde 340.
9
Heywood, Herodias 98; 133. In his own inimitable way, Douglas was himself rather a model for Wilde's Salome,
alternating as he did – just like Bernhardt -- among "spoilt child," "bete feroce," and "languid and melodic." See Kerry
Powell, Oscar Wilde and the Theatre of the 1890s (Cambridge, 1990) 40; 47. Douglas first pronounced Salome a "daring
experiment and a complete success," Alfred Douglas, rev. of Salome, The Spirit Lamp, an Aesthetic, Literary, and
Critical Magazine May 1893, in Karl Beckson, ed., Oscar Wilde: The Critical Heritage (New York: Barnes & Noble,
1970) 139. Yet Douglas hated the play later in life, after, as he said, he "reached the age of intellectual discretion."
Alfred Douglas, Oscar Wilde: A Summing-Up (London: Duckworth, 1940) 113. Perhaps Douglas, looking back at
Wilde as -- in Douglas's own word -- a martyr, (Douglas, Wilde 16) did not like to see himself in the selfish young
hedonist.
10
A. Hamilton Grant, The Ephemeral: Some Memories of Oxford in the ‘Nineties, Cornhill Magazine December 1931, in
Ellmann, Wilde 345.
11
Rev. of Salome, The Times 23 Feb. 1893, in Critical Heritage 133.
12
Max Beerbohm to Reggie Turner, 25 Feb. 1893, Max Beerbohm’s Letters to Reggie Turner, ed. Rupert Hart-Davis
(London, 1964), in Critical Heritage 134.
13
Douglas, rev. of Salome, in Critical Heritage 138-9.
14
W.B. Yeats quoted in Katharine Worth, Oscar Wilde (New York: Grove, 1984) 72.
15
Alison Hennegan, "Personalities and principles: aspects of literature and life in fin-de-siecle England," in Mikulas Teich
and Roy Porter, eds., Fin de Siecle and its Legacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 170-215: 195.
16
Douglas, Wilde 36-7.
17
Oscar Wilde, quoted in Richard Ellmann, E.D.H. Johnson, and Alfred Bush, Wilde and the Nineties: An Essay and an
Exhibition (Princeton, 1966) 61.
18
See Ellmann, Wilde 403.
19
Oscar Wilde, The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, ed. Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis (Henry Holt, 2000)
692-693.
20
Ellmann, Wilde 374; Oscar Wilde, Salome: Drame en un Acte (Paris: Libraire de l’Art Independent, 1893) (hereinafter
“Fr.”).
21
Merlin Holland, The Wilde Album (New York: Henry Holt, 1997) 164.
22
Alan Bird, The Plays of Oscar Wilde (New York: Barnes & Noble/Harper, 1977) 57.
23
Powell 40; 47.
24
Douglas's translation of Salome grows curiouser and curioser, when one considers the deep and genuine appreciation
Douglas had from the first, and never lost, of Wilde's ability and agility with language. Still living in 1940 (he would die
in 1945, at – though it is hard to imagine him grown old – 75), Douglas recalled warmly how Wilde "held his audience
spellbound as he discoursed in his exquisite voice of all things in heaven and earth, now making his hearers rock with
laughter and now bringing tears to their eyes. Such talk as Oscar's no longer exists, as far as my experience goes. I have
never known anyone to come anywhere near him." Douglas, Wilde 140.
25
Complete Letters 4; see also Ellmann, Wilde 3-4
26
Complete Works 27.
27
Ellmann, Wilde 402.
28
In an error that Douglas cannot be, I think, blamed for, "les oreilles des sourds seront ouvertes" becomes in the Oxford
edition the perplexing and rather risible proposition that "the cars of the deaf shall be opened" (Fr. 14; Ox. 66).
29
Complete Letters 740.
30
Complete Works 583.