The Trojan War Has Been Canceled

This is an unauthorized translation of La guerre de Troie n'aura pas lieu (1935) by Jean Giraudoux (1882-1944) – his double vision of the run-up to the last war, and to the next as well.

This play touches on an amazing array of subjects, the inevitability of war in particular, yet treats each of them seriously, albeit humorously as well.  Not just a writer, the author was also a famous diplomat, an avid classicist, a world traveler, an occasional philanderer and a decorated war veteran, twice wounded in the Great War.  He knew whereof he wrote.  Yet few have ever heard of him.

Plays are intended to be performed, not read.  A playwright doesn't bother to specify the things that any good actor can infer from the lines alone, things that you and I may very well miss.

This translation is specifically intended to be read, not performed, is formatted accordingly – eg, roles grouped into color-coded teams, dialogues and monologues broken into paragraphs, departures from normal elocution denoted by appropriate text alignment – to make it more readable, more comprehensible, and to make the things, that would be easily inferred by a gifted cast, a little easier for the rest of us to notice even without the benefit of their interpretation.  Happily the author took pains to litter the play with ellipses, many of which translate directly to paragraph breaks – a good start.

In addition, a few margin notes provide bits of background information, stuff that was common knowledge for the intended audience but would come as news to most modern readers.

To be clear, this is not a novelization, which would mostly just add clutter, blurring its crispness, relaxing its intensity, diluting what was so carefully distilled.

If this treatment can bring this story to a wider audience, well good.  That was the intent.