Dear Symposium Delegates, Speakers and Participants,

2010 Symposium: ‘Spanish Golden Age Drama in Translation and Performance’

at Merton College, Oxford, 18-19 March 2010

This blog post is your one-stop-shop for everything you need to know about your journey to Oxford for the Symposium. If you require any additional information, please email me and I’ll post info as and when it’s needed.

TRANSPORTATION TO OXFORD

Airports

The easiest airports from which to reach Oxford are Heathrow and Gatwick. Luton Airport is about two hours away and Stansted is a three-hour journey from Oxford.

There is a direct bus from London Heathrow and Gatwick to Oxford.

The Airline

National Express offers bus service from Heathrow, Gatwick, Luton and Stansted.

National Express

Travel from London by Train or Bus

Oxford is one hour’s train journey from London’s Paddington station.

National Rail

For travel to London from Oxford there are two competing bus companies, the Oxford Tube and the Oxford Express (note London’s underground metro system is also called the ‘Tube’, although the Oxford Tube is a bus company, confusingly)

The Oxford Tube

The Oxford Espress

Roadways – approaching by car

Oxford is connected to London, the M25 and the Midlands by the M40 motorway. Junctions 8 and 9 link directly to the city. The Oxford ring road provides direct access to the south and west coast ports of Southampton, Portsmouth and Bristol via the A34.

ACCOMMODATION

Single ccommodation for symposium delegates, speakers and participants is available at Merton College. Registration is essential; if you would like accommodation please fill in the Registration Form and send it back to Kathleen Jeffs with payment (if applicable). Rooms for the symposium are available as ensuite rooms (£70) or with shared bath (£56.50).

Check-in is from 3pm, although your room may be available earlier, please phone the Lodge to check if you will be early: (+44) (0)1865 276310

Breakfast is included in the room rate and is served in Merton College Hall from 8-9am for guests staying in College.

Internet is available in the rooms via a data cable which is provided.  Please read the instructions in the welcome pack in the rooms or phone the lodge on the number above if you have problems connecting.

Note: The Merton College Lodge has informed me that if you are planning to arrive late (or stay out late) and would like to be let in to the college after about 11pm, it may be best to ring the Lodge to make sure that the porter has not gone on his ‘night rounds’ and will be there to let you in. They are normally there 24-hours, but just in case he goes walking to check the college etc, the phone number to call if you’re going to be late is: (+44) (0)1865 276310.

Alternative accommodation can be booked via the following links:

Official City of Oxford Tourism

Hotels in Oxford

Hostel and B&B bookings

CATERING

Breakfast is included in the room rate for delegates staying at Merton College, and is served in Hall from 8-9am. A day rate for catering will be applicable for both Thursday and Friday which will include tea and coffee during the breaks, as well as a sandwich lunch on both days.  Registration is again essential to take advantage of the Symposium catering.

CONFERENCE DINNER

There will be a conference dinner held in Merton College on the evening of Thursday, 18 April. Two rates are available:  an option with and without wine. Vegetarian options are also available; please indicate any dietary requirements on the Registration Form to join us for the Symposium dinner.

CONFERENCE PROGRAMME

Now that you know how to get to Oxford, where you’re staying, and where your next meal is coming from, you’ll be ready to take part in the Symposium! You can peruse the Provisional Programme, which, as its title suggests, might be subject to change.

REHEARSED READING

Out of the Wings is dedicated to including the practice of theatre in all our events, as our principal aim is to provide scholars and practitioners with the tools to read and stage Spanish theatre. Central to our programme is thus our rehearsed reading of Gil Vicente’s one-act play ‘Don Duardos’, in Jo Clifford’s translation, directed by Poppy Burton-Morgan. The reading will take place at the Burton-Taylor Studio at the Oxford Playhouse, located on Gloucester Street in Oxford.

Handy map of the Train Station, Merton College, and the Burton-Taylor Studio

EXTRA-SYMPOSIAL ACTIVITIES

During your stay in Oxford you may wish to take advantage of the cultural life of the city; there is much to do and see. Within walking distance of Merton College you will find a wealth of artistic and theatrical entertainments. Such as:

Our main theatre is the Oxford Playhouse, and on the Wednesday before the Symposium begins there is a one-man show about Richard Burton being staged at our Burton-Taylor studio, where our rehearsed reading will be held on the Thursday, and which was originally funded by Burton himself. In the larger, adjoining house there is another mainstage production simultaneously.

Here’s the link for what’s on Wednesday at the Burton-Taylor Studio and Oxford Playhouse

There are other theatres in Oxford, as well as a wealth of musical entertainments, most of which locals will find out about on the Daily Info website.

There are also wonderful museums in the area. Check out the:

Newly Remodelled Ashmolean Museum

Or the fascinating Museum of Natural History where they have a model of the Oxford Dodo bird

Don’t miss the idiosyncratic Pitt-Rivers Museum inside (where they have a collection of shrunken heads worth seeing just to say you’ve seen real shrunken heads)

And don’t forget to visit Oxford’s Colleges

UCL Spanish and Latin American Studies Department Presents:

El método Gronhölm

in Spanish, based on the play by Jordi
Galcerán adapted by
Mateo Gil & Marcelo Piñeyro

4th and 5th FEBRUARY 2010, 7.30pm
Tickets £7, £5 concessions
Contact: Bloomsbury Theatre Box Office
15 Gordon Street London WC1H 0AH
020 7388 8822 – boxoffice@thebloomsbury.com

EL MÉTODO GRONHÖLM Poster

Black and White Rainbow theatre company present our own David Johnston’s translation of this ‘mad’ play at the Trafalgar Studios in the New Year.

For more information see the London Theatre Guide article here.

Radio New Zealand currently has 4 short programmes on translation available to download on its website. They include items on literary, poetry, and cultural translation. There is also an item on the relationship between the author and the translator.

Click the ‘Download MP3’ link below each item if the title links don’t load.

Go to Literary Translation: Art or Echo?

Translating Golden Age drama brings up many questions of interpretation, form and meaning; but whether to translate the comedia in rhyming verse or not is still a heated debate. One translator, Gregary Racz, believes strongly that the comedia should be translated in verse, a view which has also been taken by Philip Osment in his rhyming, metrical Pedro the Great Pretender for the RSC’s Spanish Golden Age season, and by Victor Dixon in both his translations and his scholarship. Some translators, such as David Johnston, invent their own forms, keeping a regular metre but rhyming only in selected passages, such as sonnets. I invite your comments and views, readers; here is an article by Racz to get the conversation started (see p. 4-6 of this issue of ‘The Gotham Translator’).

The Case Against Preserving Meter and Rhyme in Poetic Translation: Theory or Practice?

‘Leave me in peace, brother’, begins Fergal Keane at the start of Radio 4’s ‘Taking a Stand’ this week. He suggests that this line from one of Federico García Lorca’s poems might now ‘usefully serve as a kind of epitaph’ for the poet and playwright’s family. Lorca was shot by Franco’s forces in August 1936 – at just 38 years old. His body lies, most probably, alongside tens of thousands of others in mass graves around Spain.

This week’s ‘Taking a Stand’ invites Lorca’s niece and President of the Lorca Foundation, Laura García Lorca, to explain her family’s decision to stand against the push in Spain to unearth the past – quite literally – through the disinterment of remains. For Laura and the Lorca Foundation, however, the wish to leave undisturbed the mass grave just outside Granada where Lorca is presumed to be buried is literal in another way. As she explains, it has nothing to do with a desire to forget or ignore what happened: it is quite literally a desire to leave human remains where they lie. ‘We don’t want the past to be buried’, she states, ‘we just don’t want the bones to be moved’

While some families, then, see disinterment as symbolic of reconciling past and present through the exposure and recognition of the crimes of the Francoist regime, Lorca’s family view it as a ‘very disturbing’ physical violation of the dead. Metaphor and literalism combine on the one hand; they exist in tension on the other.

‘He should not be singled’ out, Laura explains, regarding her qualms about the media’s particular focus on the Lorca family and their moral opposition to the disinterment (which seems likely to go ahead; the family never legally opposed it). Strangely, however, like the best historical theatre, the interview does give us a very visceral, yet still understated, impression of the singularity of one family’s suffering at the brutal murder of a son, brother and uncle during the Spanish Civil War.

You can listen here by clicking below for the next seven days:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/b00h6tpm

‘Picadorbooks is now following me on Twitter’ apparently, leading me to this interesting post on its blog about translating by Stephen Sartarelli. It may be about prose translation, but it gives an insight into the thought processes involved in the task.

Sartarelli writes on the difficulties of translating the language (‘linguistic stew’) used by Andrea Camillieri in his novels. Camilleri distorts Italian, distancing the native reader from the language. How to recreate this distancing effect in the foreign reader? ‘One does what one can’, Sartarelli states. Resigned to the inadequacy of his efforts, he nevertheless gives us some of his strategies for rendering this author’s idiosyncratic dialect into English. For once – he concludes – translation is ‘fun’:

my wife, I say, nearly fainted when, passing by my open study door as I was working hard on my first Camilleri novel, she actually heard me laughing.

Gives us all hope, then!

http://www.panmacmillan.com/picador/ManageBlog.aspx?BlogID=8850aef3-e0c9-46f1-81f1-13ed8092b11d

The Out of the Wings team will be presenting its work at the Association of Hispanists of Great Britain and Ireland’s conference 6-8 April of this year, at Queen’s University, Belfast. Please look for our Out of the Wings panel on the ahgbi_programme_2009. 

We will be presenting on Wednesday, 8 April, from 11:30-1:30. 

The format of our panel is as follows:

Out of the Wings: Spanish and Spanish American Theatres in Translation 

Translating Golden Age plays for Modern Performance

Jonathan Thacker and Kathleen Jeffs

Translating for Performance

David Johnston and Gwynneth Dowling

 Translation and Models of Performance

Catherine Boyle and Gwendolen Mackeith

 Performance and edition: scholarly challenges in digitising Hispanic theatre materials

Paul Spence and John O’Neill

Call for Papers

Annual Meeting of the MLA, December, 2009

The Division on Sixteenth- and Seventeenth Century Spanish Drama of the Modern Language Association is pleased to announce an open Call for Papers for the annual meeting of the MLA to be held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, December 27-30, 2009. The topics of the three sessions sponsored by the Division are as follows:

Spaces and Places in the Early Modern Public Theater

• Creation of dramatic space in the Comedia through deixis, diegesis, and visual images, within the context of the theaters’ physical spaces.

Polyphony in the Comedia

• Multiple voices, points of view, plots, forms of speech, meters, and sounds, and their relation to the organicity of comedias, their dramatic effects, reception, etc.

Early Modern Spanish Drama beyond the Public Playhouses

• Court, private, church, convent, Jesuit, university, and street theaters: their influences and dramatic traditions, theatrical assumptions, venues, audiences, etc.

One page abstracts should be sent to Donald R. Larson at: larson.3[at]osu.edu. Deadline: March 15, 2009

Here is a selection of the plays from Spanish America which we are working on:

Los siameses, Siamese Twins (1967) by Griselda Gambaro

Poor thing! His face has changed. Now no one will get us confused.

At the centre of Los siameses are Lorenzo and Ignacio, twins who form the well-known archetypes of Cain and Abel. Lorenzo, having thrown a stone at a child on the street, is being chased by the child’s father. He bursts onstage through a door, slamming and locking it behind him. Ignacio is some paces behind and when he meets the shut door, he pleads to be let in because the child’s father is getting close and will mistake him for Lorenzo. While Lorenzo is safe inside, he cruelly refuses Ignacio’s desperate appeals to be let in. Worse still, he taunts his brother from behind the door. Ignacio eventually takes the beating meant for his brother and, when Ignacio is finally admitted to the room by Lorenzo, the sadism continues. At the end of Act One two monstrous police officers arrive at the house on the trail of the man who threw a stone at a child’s head and Lorenzo sets Ignacio up as the culprit. Ignacio is arrested by these officers, and taken away.

Lorenzo subjects his more successful and independent twin to cruelty and to torture, and finally brings about his incarceration and murder, assisting with the body’s burial in an unmarked grave. With black humour, Gambaro depicts humans who are complicit in atrocities which, although they are absurd, are also frighteningly real.

This is an early, yet startling brilliant, work written by the internationally acclaimed Argentine playwright, Griselda Gambaro. To our knowledge, it has not been performed before in English translation.

El día que me quieras, The Day You’ll Love Me (1979) by José Ignacio Cabrujas

It was the 11th of June 1935 when Carlos Gardel arrived at this house and Elvira Ancízar divided her life into two stages or, better said, into two movements, and as simple as before and afterwards.

It’s 11 June 1935 and the legendary tango singer, Carlos Gardel, has come to give a concert in Caracas. This is just what some people have been waiting for. Living under a dictatorship there is dissent in the home of the family Ancízar; their house is dreamy, full of exotic and decorative objects which betray something of their romantic yearning for another way of life. María Luisa invests her hope in the first Communist state in Russia and is planning to follow her political ideals and her love of ten years, Pío Miranda, to Stalin’s Ukraine. For the other members of the family – María Luisa’s brother, sister and niece – it is not Communist Russia which represents hope, but the fact that Carlos Gardel is in town, and nothing is more wonderful than when he invites himself for dinner. Everyone behaves as if they are entertaining royalty, all except for Pío Miranda who is intent on dampening the excitement. He reminds Gardel, as well as the Ancízar family, that while Caracas is entranced by a tango star, there are innocent people being tortured and imprisoned by the regime. But does Pío Miranda really have the answers? In this Chekovian family drama, Cabrujas slices through history and offers us a view of this point in time which is fascinating to reinterpret now, over seven decades later.

Yo también hablo de la rosa, I, Too, Speak of the Rose (1965) by Emilio Carballido

Every day there is news. It takes all forms: a dream, a flash of lightening, explicit or trivial, it gets tangled in its own web, sowing its seeds.

It’s Mexico City in the 1960s and two teenagers, Toña and Polo, play truant from school and roam the streets in search of amusement. They tamper with a phone box, the fruits of which they use to gamble or spend on street food. These small pleasures compensate for a lack of privilege in life; they are poor and Polo doesn’t even have shoes. When they wander into a dump, they find a metal tub which Toña fancies as a plant pot but they soon discover the tub is filled with cement and begin to roll it along the ground until they roll it down the embankment and onto the railway tracks before an oncoming train.

A freight train is derailed and the play offers us a prismatic lens through which to interpret the event. No-one was hurt, but they could have been. Was it deliberate? To what extent should they be punished?

From this point the play is structured by reactions from all corners to the teenagers’ deed. I, Too, Speak of the Rose is a play about perception and the lenses through which we view our realities where it is possible that several converge in a single act. A newsreader asks the audience: What is a rose? Is it the whole rose, the rose petal, or the rose fibre under a microscope — which one is the real rose?

Contrapunto para dos voces cansadas, Counterpoint for Two Tired Voices (1976) by Jorge Días

An old man and an old woman meet every Saturday. Neither is sure who is visiting whom, or where they really are, or why; there is no apparent social reality to which they belong, and they share the incipient fear that they may be repeating the same conversation time after time. Distant by virtue of their age and infirmities from the possibility of action, they use the only means available to them to create a past, and to inject their present with a sense of future.

I’m a visitor too. We’re both telling the truth. Why would we want to lie? So, either we’re both inside without realising it, or we both live outside, free, and we meet here every week to exchange apples, strawberries and words of encouragement.

In this poignant and enigmatic play there is a fearful, imaginative, desperate and, above all, necessary invention of a fantasy of life.