Beyond his satirical novel A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess’s masterpieces include his translation of Cyrano de Bergerac, Edmond Rostand’s tragic-romantic farce. Now, 29 years after his death, his complete translation of another French classic, The Miser, Molière’s comic satire on greed, has come to light for the first time and is being described as a significant literary discovery.
Miser! Miser! is a complete translation of L’Avare (The Miser) of 1668 – one of Molière’s best-known plays – that Burgess wrote in the early 1990s, yet it has never been performed or published. But now it could finally be staged as it will published for the first time in a forthcoming book.
To the astonishment of academics, there is even a previously unheard recording of Burgess himself reading the entire play. Both have emerged from the archives of the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, an educational charity in Manchester, where he was born in 1917. Its holdings are so vast that they have yet to be fully catalogued.
Burgess made his name as a satirical novelist with A Clockwork Orange, a dystopian portrayal of drugs, music and juvenile violence admired for its exploration of moral questions and its linguistic originality.
Andrew Biswell, the foundation’s director and professor of English at Manchester Metropolitan University, told the Guardian: “The Molière translation and audio recording are all new material from the archive, none of which has appeared in any public forum. The discovery of Miser! Miser! is a major literary event, which is made even more fascinating by having the opportunity to hear Burgess himself reading it aloud.”
He added: “These audio recordings underline the importance of the spoken word to Burgess’s practice as a writer. I believe that he made these recordings because he wanted to listen back to them, test his words on the ear and make revisions accordingly. In one of his critical books about James Joyce, he claims that the best way to understand Joyce’s work is to read it aloud.”
One theory is that it was commissioned by Terry Hands for the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) following a successful collaboration on Cyrano de Bergerac. Burgess’s rhyming translation, acclaimed as a modern classic, was staged by the RSC in 1985 with Derek Jacobi in the lead role, and later revived in a production starring Antony Sher.
Hands died in 2020 and the RSC did not have any record of a Molière commission, Biswell said, noting that Burgess conveyed the voices of the different characters “very entertainingly” in the recording.
They include the miser Harpagon, who wants his daughter Elise to marry a wealthy old man, Anselme, although she is in love with the impoverished Valère. Harpagon in turn wants a young bride for himself, the impoverished Mariane, although his son Cléante loves her.
In Burgess’s translation, Jacques the servant gives Harpagon some hard truths about what people think of him: “The only names they call you by are penny-pinching villain, skinflint and bloody miser.”
Biswell said that Miser! Miser! is unusual as a translation because the original play is written in prose, whereas much of Burgess’s version is written in verse: “It’s not consistently rhymed all the way through. It tends to be the more aristocratic characters who speak in verse. The servants speak in prose.”
He described Burgess as a gifted linguist and a brilliant translator: “Although he is best known as the creator of a new slang based on Russian in A Clockwork Orange, translating work for the theatre was always an important part of his creative work. In a literary career spanning nearly 40 years, he translated a variety of stage plays from French, Russian and Ancient Greek.”
The play will be published in May by Salamander Street, an independent publisher based in Bristol.
Biswell said: “I hope that we will soon see a professional stage production of this splendidly actable version of Molière’s comedy.”
