What is lost, and what is gained, in translation? Is the expressive cliché traduttore, traditore, so ironically relevant in the case of my translation of a play whose title is La traición en la amistad, the most accurate representation of the act – my act – of translation? This essay examines several interrelated aspects of the translation and staging of María de Zayas's La traición en la amistad for the English-speaking stage. The first treats the topic of translation (art, craft, science) itself, from literal issues of vocabulary choice to metaphoric “translations” of a culture far removed from that of twenty-first-century United States and Mexican audiences. My experiences with “betrayal” in the course of reconstructing Zayas's comedy are explored via their connections to the field of translation studies. This analysis also focuses on the translator, as well as the text, examining how my decisions in creating a translation and working with an acting company forever changed the way I look at the theatre. Performance is understood differently now; the ways in which the translated words on the page came alive in production illustrate the distance between academic understandings of the theatre and those of theatre practitioners. At the heart of this new understanding lies the play created by María de Zayas, now forever altered by the newly created translation, a text that simultaneously is and is no longer hers.

As part of a project focused perhaps more on the written text than on the performance text, I translated Zayas's comedy as my principal contribution to the 1999 bilingual edition of the play that Valerie Hegstrom edited. In planning the book, we had discussed our projected audience and the type of text we wanted to create. We decided to cast the net wide, hoping that the book would be appreciated by academic and lay scholars and used in graduate- and undergraduate-level classrooms in the fields of Hispanic literary studies, theatre studies, and gender studies.