ABSTRACT
There is no doubt that English translators of French neo-classical drama have been haunted by the alexandrine, as by a formal obstacle which can be avoided but not argued away, which generates a kind of cultural guilt. It is certainly not clear that iambic pentameter is the answer, for although it might be said to parallel the alexandrine as the 'national' verse-lme, by the same token it willy-nilly installs the Racinian play in a dramatic tradition totally alien to it. C. H. Sisson is another translator who vigorously rejects any solution that smacks of anachronism—the heroic couplets of a Dryden or a Pope belong to Dryden and Pope: A poet-translator has always to start from the forms of his own time, as he has to start from his own language. No one who had written poems of his own would suppose that the choice could be other than intuitive.
