On Saturday 1 November 2008 a symposium was held in the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry, about Lorca and his work. You can now download video and audio of our discussions during the event from the University of Warwick Capital Centre webpage.
The symposium events are also available on Itunes by clicking here.
Janet Morris, Project Associate, Out of the Wings, writes:
We were delighted to meet such a wide range of theatre practitioners and researchers at our symposium in London on 6-7 February. Some 50 dramaturgs, translators, actors, directors, theatre and literary managers, researchers and publishers braved the wintry weather to join us. With challenging ideas highlighted by the speakers, and active participation by the delegates, discussions focused on practical issues and the sharing of experiences in producing and performing translated plays.
Topics covered including commissioning translations; the translator in the theatre and the rehearsal room; managing the stages of translation; translating titles; translation and the problematic; and – at the heart of theatre practice – translation and the performable. The two-day event concluded with a rehearsed reading of Catherine Boyle’s English translation of Las brutas by Chilean playwright Juan Radrigán, directed by Sue Dunderdale. The impressive performance, and the discussion which followed, brought together many of the issues that had been considered earlier. But there is so much more to explore…
This symposium is our first in a series of events seeking to bring together the multi-faceted processes of translation for the stage. Please keep checking this website for details of future activities.
Meanwhile if you have not yet joined our email list, you can do so via the Contribute link. And you can always contact us by email on info@outofthewings.org
‘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:
‘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
We have now finalised the programme for our February symposium, aimed at theatre practitioners and researchers with an interest in the performance of translated plays. We will be looking at translation as part of the collaborative process of stagecraft, focusing on practical solutions to practical problems. The timetable will ensure that participants have ample opportunity to raise issues and share their experiences.
Details of the full programme can be found here: london-symposium-programme-feb-09
Read on for more details… Read the rest of this entry »
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
Polyphony in the Comedia
Early Modern Spanish Drama beyond the Public Playhouses
One page abstracts should be sent to Donald R. Larson at: larson.3[at]osu.edu. Deadline: March 15, 2009
The Association for Hispanic Classical Theater presents its 2009 Symposium on Golden Age Theater in El Paso, Texas, 5-7 March 2009. Among the invited speakers will be David Johnston of Queen’s University Belfast (one of the Project Directors of Out of the Wings). The Symposium runs alongside the Siglo de Oro Drama Festival held yearly at Chamizal National Memorial. For more information, see the AHCT Symposium Website
Or learn more about the Siglo de Oro festival from the Chamizal National Memorial
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.
This is a sampling of Gwynneth Dowling’s upcoming plays from the Modern period.
Hamelin by Juan Mayorga
In Hamelin a wealthy figure, Pablo Rivas, has been accused of sexually molesting a child from a deprived area. The parents of this child are suspected of ‘hiring out’ their son for money. Has Rivas acted on his confessed desires for children? Is Josemari, the child in question, telling the truth? Hamelin leaves the answers up to the audience. The investigating judge, Montero, gets no answer and neither do we. No Pied Piper saves the children in this city. The rats have multiplied, spewing forth at the end of the play from Josemari’s childish drawing as he sits alone – betrayed, not rescued, by the system. Hamelin questions the ability of systems of law, psychiatry and bureaucracy to effectively help the weak and vulnerable in modern societies.
Tres sombreros de copa by Miguel Mihura
Three Top Hats is a surreal farce full of physical comedy and colour. It is the eve of Dionisio’s wedding and he is spending it alone in a little hotel. With him he has two top hats – he must decide which to wear to the wedding. His future father-in-law has given him a third as a wedding present. As he holds them, a young woman, Paula, bursts into his room. Paula is a member of a circus troupe that is in town. She sees Dionisio holding his top hats and mistakes him for a juggler. From this point on, Dionisio is caught up in a surreal evening of debauchery and madness in the hotel. Three Top Hats presents two different existences. On the one hand, Paula lives unconventionally in a world of parties and dances. On the other, Dionisio’s married life is set to be filled with routine. Yet both characters find their respective lifestyles monotonous. The play invites us to consider whether true happiness is ever achievable, or whether the grass just appears greener on the other side.
La llamada de Lauren by Paloma Pedrero
Lauren’s Call is a two-character play featuring a man and a woman, Pedro and Rosa. They are celebrating their third wedding anniversary on the same day as the carnival comes to town. It’s an ideal time to dress up! Pedro is dressed as a woman, Rosa as a man. Whereas Rosa is uncomfortable performing her role, Pedro enthusiastically adopts the guise of Lauren Bacall. Lauren’s Call is a play that explores gender identity as Pedro expresses his sense of unease at the male role assigned to him through his pleasure at becoming Lauren.
Himmelweg by Juan Mayorga
Himmelweg has been performed in promenade style at the Royal Court theatre and also has toured Ireland. The play is based on the experience of the Red Cross investigator, Maurice Rossel, who visited the concentration camp at Theresienstadt only to be duped by the model town that had been constructed to deceive visitors. In Himmelweg a Red Cross Representative tells the audience how he too was fooled – or let himself be fooled – by surface appearances and the seductive power of performance. Later, the audience witness how the performance was construed by the Nazi Commandant. As ‘theatre director’ he forces reluctant Jewish inmates to become his actors. Himmelweg is an important play by one of Spain’s most prominent contemporary playwrights that engages with current debates about the responsibility of individuals to speak out against political atrocities.
Written by Gwynneth Dowling
