The Devil's Slave (review)

220BCom, Vol. 42, No. 2 (Winter 1990) lieve this monotony; but those forms too are not without pitfalls. In the original Spanish, Flores' breathless account of the villagers' murder of his master is almost indistinguishable from prose. Consider, for example, the following lines: "Llévanle a una casa muerto, /ya porfía, quien más puede, / mesa su barba y cabello, / y apriesa su rostro hieren" (1984-87). Dixon renders this as: They drag his carcase to a house, and vie persistently to tug and tear his beard and hair and mutilate his face (p. 185). The unremitting beat and the use of internal rhyme in the third line distract from the meaning and, in my opinion, give an inappropriate comic tone to the passage. Dixon's hope was that these shorter iambic lines would "evoke analogous associations in English," (p. 40) but the first analogue that came to my mind in reading this passage was: "I never saw a Purple Cow..." All these problems make me wonder whether verse translation is in fact preferable to poetic prose, which I believe can more closely approximate the tone of the original. I have noticed only a few minor instances where I disagree with Dixon's translation. In act two he has the Comendador address Esteban as "your worship ," while the Spanish has simply "alcalde." Similarly, when the peasants burst in to murder the Comendador, Dixon has him cry out: "Good people, wait," while in the original he simply says "¡Pueblo, esperad!" The Comendador is consistently arrogant from the beginning to the end of the play, and I think the note of flattery—or perhaps condescension—in Dixon's translation of these two passages is unwarranted. Michael McGaha Pomona College Mira de Amescua, Antonio. The Devil's Slave. Translated by Michael D. McGaha. Introduction by J. M. Ruano de la Haza. Carleton Renaissance Plays in Translation, No. 16. Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions, 1989. 114 pages. The past decade has seen a remarkable rededication by comediantes to the difficult art of translation. Unlike earlier, mostly British translations that attempted to keep the seventeenth-century flavor of the plays by casting them in a Reviews221 Shakespearean mode, these modern, North American translations have sought to reinvigorate the texts, making their interesting plots accessible to modern American audiences. A leader in the field has been Michael McGaha, whose insight , wit, and subtle abilities with both Spanish and English have given us first a translation of Lope's Lo fingido verdadero in 1986 (by Trinity University Press, whose unfortunate demise I need not belabor here), and now a thoroughly engaging translation of Mira de Amescua's El esclavo del demonio. McGaha's approach to Mira's complex play is to render the text in a straightforward way; his genius is to choose a middle ground between an overly literal translation that is ponderous and sluggish in its devotion to baroque conceits and word use and a breezy colloquialism that would deny to the English the poetry and imagery of the original. Most of the play is translated into prose, but he has cast the most lyrical passages (such as sonnets and songs sung by musicians ) into an iambic pentameter that is both poetic and flowing. As to the words themselves, it is quite common even in the best translations to run across words or phrases that faithfully render the original but which end up disturbing the flow of speech either because of their lack of common use in modern American English or because they reflect a belief or translate an idiom that really makes no sense anymore, such as Marcelo's assertion that "my old age is an elephant" on page 62 and dutifully explained in an accompanying footnote. In this superior translation, these obstacles to communication are blessedly kept to an absolute minimum. Moreover, McGaha has a good ear for different kinds of speech for different characters, and he even shows his mastery of dialect in his rendering of Domingo's rustic speech in Act 2, although I'm not sure why his substandard dialect was cast in such a way as to mimic Americans from the South ("I has to ax y'all . . ."on page...