Translating Golden Age Plays: A Reconsideration

During the past ten years I have made four attempts to discuss the problems involved in translating Calderon's plays and a fifth attempt can be justified only by a shift in my opinions.1 Inevitably one's views alter. They are modified by correspondence and conversations with one's collaborators, by the comments of reviewers and of other translators, by translating for the first time two tragedies, which demand other skills, and, whenever possible, by what one learns from rehearsal and performance.2 The impressive productions of Ibsen by Peter Hall owed a good deal to the presence of both translators at rehearsals and their determination, shared by the actors, to be true to the exact meaning of the original plays.3 The difficulties confronting translators of Calderon and Lope de Vega are sufficiently obvious. Apart from the fact that poetry is by its very nature untranslatable, so that even the most brilliant versions of Shakespeare and Racine are perversions, there is a wide linguistic difference between English and Spanish that makes rhyming too difficult in English and too easy in Spanish. Golden Age dramatists, moreover, made use of a great variety of verse forms, considered appropriate to the content, whereas in Elizabethan drama there is a preponderance of blank verse, an increasing use of prose and a diminishing use of rhyme. The attempt after 1660 to accustom English audiences to heroic couplets petered out after less than a decade, notwithstanding the genius of John Dry den. Despite all these obstacles, Ann Mackenzie and I, and other translators, go on with our impossible task, believing that enough of the plays survives translation to give some small idea of their greatness to readers and audiences. What, then, are the options open to translators at the present time? Jill Booty's versions of Lope de Vega have won golden opinions from hispanists.4 They do indeed display obvious merits, but they are in prose. Although some prose drama, Riders to the Sea and The Master Builder for example, is more poetic than The Elder Statesman or Winterset, Booty's prose, eloquent as it is, is prosaic. No one would suspect from her versions that Lope was a great poet, esteemed by his countrymen, as his first English critic affirmed, as we esteem 'our Will Shakespeare'.5