Translation and the Original

As the colophon to its Spanish Golden Age season, the Royal Shakespeare Company was invited to bring The Dog in the Manger, House of Desires, Tamar's Revenge, and Pedro, the Great Pretender to Madrid's Teatro Español for the 2004 Festival de Otoño. It was not an invitation that Laurence Boswell, who had designed the season and directed Lope's The Dog in the Manger, the play chosen to open the eight-performance run in Madrid, accepted without trepidation. After all, this was to maraud into the lion's den, so to speak, to bring English-language versions of these Golden Age plays home to the birthplace of the Comedia, to an historical theatre situated less than a mile from Lope's home and Cervantes's final resting-place.

In the midst of its preparations, the Company began to discuss the issue of surtitles. The question was to prove surprisingly vexed. On one side, academic advisors counselled caution, urging the Company to revert to the original Spanish as the basis for what Madrid audiences would read. This, they argued, would alleviate those differences between source and target texts that inevitably open up in any translation process, thereby mollifying any potential unease or even resentment on the part of the receiving audience. On the other side, another group, mainly the translators, insisted that the surtitles should be condensed translations of the new versions, partly to reflect what was happening on stage, partly to emphasise that these are versions that give English-language expression to these classical plays, while simultaneously belonging to themselves.

The polemic was instructive, focussing as it did on competing visions of translation, on different ways of considering the source text. On one hand was the view of the philologist, always returning to the fixity of the text, examining its “interanimation of words,” in I. A. Richards's phrase, as the defining feature of what was considered an unchanging literary status (Richards 16–17). The translation exists, in this view, in thrall to the original, a pane of glass that offers as close an unmediated access as possible to the original. Surtitles based on Lope's Spanish would therefore provide spectators with the means of mapping their imagination back to the original play, which, in that experience, would remain located within its culture and within its moment.