Some Thoughts on García Lorca and the Arts of Translation

Writers do not write in a vacuum. We respond to our immediate surroundings, to our national consciousness, and to international concerns and themes. True exchange can only happen if work is seen in context and in dialogue with the form of other artists who are advancing it. The translator is the mediator, the negotiator of text, and its meeting point. The responsibility of translation is significant because as a translator, you are often the only conduit for the work to be heard and seen. How audiences perceive and receive the work, therefore, is crucial to their potential understanding of the original's intentions, and it is in the translator's hands to make this understanding as complete as possible while still speaking to the audience in a language that is free and accessible and within the living theatre tradition. 

The art of translation is a delicate one. At its best, you should not notice as an audience member that a play has been translated, but feel as if you are watching and listening to the original. Of course, the rhythms and inherent musicality of the Spanish language are not necessarily present in English. The hard, naturally flattening sounds of the English language make a different kind of poetry possible: the poetry of consonants instead of vowels, and the poetry of short elliptical phrases rather than long, fluid ones. However, as many of the best translators of fiction from the Americas and Iberia have demonstrated over the last fifty-odd years, and as some of the finest García Lorca translators and scholars have also shown us, the English language is indeed able to capture the intricacy and flow of the Spanish language with an efficacy and unique transliteral brilliance of its own. Part of the joy of bringing his work to light in English, therefore, is one of recreating the melodious, precise, and free aspect of his writing to bear in a new language.

I have been translating García Lorca's plays for some time now. He is my closest artistic ally and probably my best collaborator in translation. My understanding of his work has gone from dedicatedly studious to intuitive, as if when I am translating his plays I am breathing with him. This ease of entering a master playwright's world comes only after considerable time and effort; it also comes from a spiritual kinship evident in our respective works as theatre practitioners, even though we are separated by seventy years of practice.

When I first read García Lorca's work I immediately felt a connection to the content and shape of his material. It was as if I had encountered a friend who would teach me over the years his singular dream of life. One of the delicious surprises of translating his plays and poems has been to constantly unlock and uncover his genius as a world-class artist—a seer and visionary of the theatre. Moreover, it has been my humble privilege to find an American English voice for García Lorca's plays in performance and to contribute to the ways in which his work is perceived. In the US, García Lorca's work is staged infrequently at major venues and when it is produced, it is often obscured with the unfortunate patina of folklorism or exoticism. He is regarded as a classic writer whose work is "impossible" to capture in the American English idiom unless it is completely transformed, as, for example, Langston Hughes did when he reworked Blood Wedding during the 1930s. The aspect of doom and gloom that has marked productions of García Lorca's work over the years in the US has ensured, sadly, that he is perceived as a high-minded, mannered, and humorless dramatist who pitched his work at an exaggerated operatic, emotional level veering on melodrama.

But García Lorca's plays are anything but funereal. While darkness and gravity prevail in his writing, his work is distinguished by a jocular, sometimes frivolous, and even camp sensibility, as evident in the comedies as well as the tragedies. He...