A New Approach to Translatability: The Visibility of Lope de Vega’s La dama boba for Contemporary English-Speaking Audiences

This article seeks to re-assess the validity of the concept of “translatability” by challenging its long-held association with cultural commensurability, a notion that is rooted in ideas of equivalence and faithfulness, and considering it instead in terms of textual visibility, a concept that refers to the density of cultural interests instantiated by the work in question. This density conditions, in turn, the pragmatism with which the translator approaches the text in order to render it visible to the new audience. In order to demonstrate this, the article analyses two translations of Lope de Vega’s La dama boba into English from the perspective of the contingency in which this pragmatism is encased. One of the central conclusions of the article is that, in order to make a play visible, the translator, in much the same way as an actor, must be prepared to improvise.