Martin Crimp’s translations of Marivaux’s The Triumph of Love and The False Servant: Capturing the essence of marivaudage in English

This article examines how Martin Crimp manages to capture Marivaux’s art of dialogue in his translations into English of La Fausse Suivante and Le Triomphe de l’amour. It is focused on the function of repetition, identified as a central device in the construction of the Marivaudian dialogue and its handling by Crimp in English. In maintaining a dense network of repetitions, Crimp attempts to recreate the rhythm and tempo characteristic of marivaudage, while reinforcing the dramatic impact of the dialogue. He also aims to make the often opaque meaning of the original more directly accessible, partly by resorting to a more concrete and factual vocabulary, partly by disentangling the syntactic complexities characteristic of Marivaux’s style. Reading Crimp’s translations, one may even feel that the basic mechanisms at work in marivaudage become more easily identifiable.