Between safeguarding and translating: Chinese classical opera and Spanish Golden Age theatre

ABSTRACT Chinese classical opera is caught in a stranglehold, promoted as a key art form in China’s assertion of its global presence but declared untranslatable by gatekeepers distrustful of Western appropriative translation practices, and concerned to safeguard the form as the unique expression of Chinese identity. There is a parallel here with Spanish Golden Age theatre, which has struggled against the tag of an untranslatability rooted in the inviolability of its polymetric form and obsession with a seemingly arcane honour code. By acknowledging the tensions that exist between practitioners and gatekeepers of these two theatrical forms, this article examines translation as an ecology of affordance spaces that extends Chinese classical opera and Spanish Golden Age theatre into new performance practices.