Latin American Shakespeares (review)

In the early twentieth century, Latin Americans faced a Western cultural invasion which threatened to dominate and control emerging national political, artistic, and literary movements. Intellectuals such as Oswald de Andrade and Jose Martí suggested that rather than resist the invasion, Latin Americans should devour the imperialist culture – arguing that when the colonized people cannibalize the colonizer's culture, they absorb it without having to sacrifice their national cultural heritage and autonomy. Bernice W. Kliman and Rick J. Santos's Latin American Shakespeares is an all-you-can-eat Shakespeare buffet featuring essays by fifteen authors who have prepared, chewed, boiled down, reconfigured, and presented Shakespeare through the eyes of those who had until recently been left out of the feast. Santos himself justifies this metaphorical cannibalization of Shakespeare by calling it 'poetic justice'. As he points out, Shakespeare's oppressed and colonized Caliban (an imperfectly anagrammatic variant of 'cannibal') learns the conquering Prospero's language so well that he makes it eloquently his own.

The instability of Shakespeare's rhetoric reflects a clash between the oral traditions of the masses and the soon-to-be hegemonic high literary print culture. The fifteen essays in this anthology examine the work of scholars, filmmakers, writers, and actors who approach Shakespeare's text as work with a 'mestizo' heritage similar to their own, a product of cultural and social hybridity. Santos and Kliman divide their anthology into three sections – Stage, Pages, and Screen – but the essays seldom stay within these boundaries, and most of them tend to address simultaneously both performance versions of texts and textual translations of stage performances.

This crossing of boundaries illustrates the authors' shared beliefin the malleability of Shakespeare's work, which lends itself easily to adaptation and translation by people as culturally and racially diverse as those of Latin America. This pliability is addressed in several of the essays in the anthology, including José Roberto O'Shea's tracing of the rise of Brazilian national theatre through the career of the celebrated actor-manager Joao Caetano dos Santos, a well known Shakespeare actor, and Jesús Tronch-Perez's description of a stage adaptation of Hamlet showing a Danish prince who is neither heroic nor avenging, but who still managed to appeal to nineteenth-century Mexican audiences.

The diversity of cultural interpretations of Shakespeare is also evident in the refusal by translators and directors to work within the normsof the Spanish language and Spain's imperial legacy. Some scholars acknowledged they felt pressured to translate Shakespeare's words using their colonial mother tongue to make the characters sound like Spaniards. But others refused to bow to social pressure and decided to accommodate Shakespeare to their own local dialects. For example, poet León Felipe, exiled in Mexico after the Spanish civil war, wrote three adaptations of Shakespeare plays, which included elements from both Spanish and Mexican literature; Juan J. Zaro details León's creative process and the irony of the popularity of these adaptations in Mexico, as well as León Felipe's obscurity in Spain, where his Shakespeare work has never been printed nor staged.

The Latin American translator soon realizes that to translate Shakespeare literally is to act as a propagandist for Prospero. But to treat Shakespeare as a source of inspiration liberates independent alternatives to the original. Two essays in the anthology track Shakespeare's influence on well-known Latin American writers. José Luiz Passos outlines how the Brazilian realist writer Machado de Assis used Shakespeare to render his fiction more plausible and deepen his characters morally; and Catherine Boyle analyses the Chilean poet Nicanor Parra's discovery in translating King Lear that Shakespeare's linguistic structures anticipated his own form of anti-poetry. Grace Tiffany, in a fascinating essay which will appeal most to those already familiar with Jorge Luis Borges' often cryptic work, uncovers a love-hate relationship between Borges and Shakespeare: Borges seeks to distance himself from Shakespeare imaginatively while at the same time reworking his...