This doubt prevents him from expressing his love for his distant cousin, the beautiful and intellectual Roxane, as he believes that his ugliness would prevent him the "dream of being loved by even an ugly woman." However, he has an extremely large nose, which causes him to doubt himself. In addition to being a remarkable duelist, he is a gifted, joyful poet and is also a musician.
Hercule Savinien Cyrano de Bergerac, a cadet in the French Army, is a brash, strong-willed man of many talents. There was a real Cyrano de Bergerac, and the play is a fictionalization following the broad outlines of his life. If you're going to read one piece of drama before you die, read this.Ĭyrano de Bergerac is a play written in 1897 by Edmond Rostand. The result is lovely, and at no point do you ever feel like you're reading a kid's book or an Elizabethan sonnet. There's a little rhyming, but just a little. He knew the most important thing was that Cyrano speak with eloquence, wit, and beauty in his language. And those are best-case scenarios.īrian Hooker was a proper poet, and he realized that the rhyme was secondary. And unless this is done *masterfully* what you're doing ends up sounding arty and pretentious, or like Dr. You really have to stretch to fit it into into couplets. (BTW, what you see up in the previous paragraph is the very definition of a mixed metaphor. pretty much whatever we found laying around the kitchen that we wanted to throw into the pot. Modern English is a rich, delicious gumbo full of Latin, Old Norse, French. We're linguistically Germanic at our roots, but that's like saying a terrier used to be a wolf. Because of the way it's structured, French rhymes very naturally.Įnglish, on the other hand, is a total mutt of a language. The problem is this, the play was originally written in French, which is a relatively pure language, linguistically speaking. In my opinion, the Brian Hooker translation is the best of these, head and shoulders above the rest. Over the years, I've read many translations of the original and seen many different movies and stage productions. I wanted my characters to be as good as this.Ī couple months later, I started writing The Name of the Wind. I decided if I ever wrote a fantasy novel, I wanted it to be as good as this.
The second half of the book broke my heart. For the first half of the play I was amazed at the character, I was stunned by the language. Up until that point in my life, the vast majority of the books I'd read were fantasy and science fiction. I read this book in 1994, and it changed the way I thought about stories.
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