Manuscrit autographe complet de la traduction établie par Jacques Benoist-Méchin de la trilogie Coraux/Gaz I/Gaz II de Georg Kaiser

Complete autograph manuscript of the trilogy, partly unpublished, with additions, deletions and corrections in Jacques Benoist-Méchin's hand.
Three manuscripts written in green ink, of 135, 68 and 106 pages respectively, each with a calligraphed title. The manuscript of Coraux is illustrated with two drawings in red ink. The manuscript of Gaz I is housed in a kraft paper envelope bearing autograph annotations and the signature of Jacques Benoist-Méchin.

Some very minor tears and creases, a few leaves lightly browned and soiled; otherwise a very well-preserved set.

Provenance: personal archives of Jacques Benoist-Méchin.

The young Jacques Benoist-Méchin, who served in occupied Rhineland in the early 1920s, was one of the chief intermediaries of German culture in France. He formed personal ties with several German writers of his day, among them Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, Stefan George and Rainer Maria Rilke, as well as with Georg Kaiser, whose trilogy written between 1917 and 1920 he translated: Die Koralle, Gas and Gas II. The three plays follow the fortunes of a single family of industrialists over several generations.

Die Koralle, whose title Benoist-Méchin translated as Coraux, was written in 1917 and premiered the same year, apparently simultaneously in Munich and Frankfurt. In this indictment of the human cost of industrial power, Georg Kaiser tells the story of a billionaire haunted by the poverty of his childhood. He hires as his secretary his perfect double, whom he ultimately kills in order to appropriate his happy past, while consenting to be executed himself under the other man's identity. The next part of the trilogy, Gas, which Jacques Benoist-Méchin titled in French Gaz I, premiered on 28 November 1918 at the Neues Theater in Frankfurt. After the explosion of his factory, the billionaire's son seeks to abandon gas production, but the workers and the State demand that it resume. The play stages the defeat of social utopia by the dominion of the machine. The final part, Gas II [Gaz II], premiered on 29 October 1920 at the United German Theatres of Brünn (Brno). In the near future, the factory works for an endless war, until a poison gas annihilates every protagonist. Kaiser thus brings the trilogy to its conclusion: the industrial utopia ends in apocalypse.

The care with which Jacques Benoist-Méchin prepared his translations, marked by numerous corrections and rewritings, reveals the earnestness of a young man eager to share his passion for German Expressionist literature. He furthermore accompanied the manuscript of Gaz II with three meticulously drawn folding tables setting out each act and scene of the three plays, and closed it with a signed colophon recording the date and place of the trilogy's translation: "traduite, pendant l'occupation du Ruhr [sic] à l'état-major de l'Armée du Rhin janvier-fev. 1923".

Benoist-Méchin's ambition to introduce this still little-known German-language avant-garde met, however, with the indifference of French theatres and publishers alike. Lugné-Poe, Jacques Copeau, Louis Jouvet and Charles Dullin considered the staging these plays required to be excessive, and their subject matter might moreover have seemed too experimental to warrant a substantial investment. Only Gaz II was published and performed in his translation. It appeared in 1922 in a private edition of 50 copies, not for sale, printed in Wiesbaden by Albert Kempf, and was performed the following year before the general staff of the Army of the Rhine. Benoist-Méchin's translations of Coraux and Gaz I remained unpublished: these two plays by Georg Kaiser did not appear in French until 1997, translated by Huguette and René Radrizzani, in the collection Théâtre 1917-1925 : Le Corail, Gaz, Gaz seconde partie, Gats (Éditions Fourbis).

The earliest known French translation of Georg Kaiser's trilogy, two parts of which remained unpublished, this ensemble bears witness to a young translator's attempt to bring to French audiences one of the major voices of German Expressionist theatre, an attempt that scarcely reached beyond the circle of the French occupation of the Rhineland.