Blood Wedding in (re)translation

Abstract

Abstract This article is a comparative study of four different translations into English of Federico García Lorca's play Bodas de sangre (1933) carried out in the United Kingdom and Ireland throughout the 1990s. Since the publication of Antoine Berman's seminal article on 'retranslation', this theoretical concept has provided a fecund framework for descriptive translation studies, illuminating the variety of solutions translators provide when confronted with the same original text. This article furthers that body of scholarship while simultaneously providing new angles on Lorca's dramatic work. The comparative approach to several English translations of this classic work concentrates on two key scenes of the play and discusses the linguistic, pragmatic and theatrical adequacy of each translation.