Opening the theatre beneath the sand: Issues of translation and performance in Federico García Lorca's El publico

Abstract

Theatre studies currently lacks a concrete understanding of the translation process as applied to theatre texts, and attempts to develop such an understanding have often been affected by undue prioritisation of the written playtext, treating the translation process as the interlingual transfer simply of a written text. This is a consequence of the difficulty of explaining the relationship between a playtext and any eventual performance of it. Text-centric theories, though, are incomplete because they do not engage with the entirety of the theatre text, failing to take into account performance and the role of non-verbal sign-systems in the creation of meaning in theatre. In this study, I develop a theoretical and practical metholodology for approaching the translation of theatre texts, which I then apply to a particularly challenging text, Federico García Lorca's avant-garde play Elpublico.Chapter I surveys theoretical approaches to the translation of dramatic texts, taking account of a number of different approaches to translation and performance. Ultimately, I adopt Patrice Pavis's theory of translation through successive concretÍ2ation as a useful theoretical model. Chapter II seeks to extend Pavis's model by discussing the practical strategies of theatre translation, particularly focused on the characteristic elements of the playtext and how they are felt in performance through their use by theatre practitioners. Chapter III applies this theoretical and practical framework to El público, a text that presents a number of fascinating translation issues: cryptic, sometimes even hermeneutic, imagery; employment of visual and verbal metaphor; and an anti-naturalist approach to theatre that results in meaning being constructed through much more than just the verbal. I use the methodology developed in Chapters I and II to inform analysis of three existing translations of the work, and supplement this analysis with the development of my own specimen translation. Finally, I draw conclusions on how successfully my model of translation has been in its application.