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Federico García Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba: Stage Translation and Cultural Engagement

This project derives from a commission to write a translation of Lorca’s La casa de Bernarda Alba for professional performance. The research imperatives of the project recognise that translation for performance is intimately connected with theatre praxis with particular relevance to the dramatic actions that the theatre translator re-creates if the target text is to work on stage.The translator, with director Gadi Roll, decided consequently to eschew the tendency towards exoticisation that marks many English-language productions of Lorca’s work, and to point instead to a politicised contemporary reading. The research process underpinning the translation interrogates and extends the play’s potential for performance. The aim was to realize potential, not through getting culture-specific reference ‘right’, but by applying Lorca’s own implicit performance theory, at the heart of which lies the performance of emotion, of the human non-codified. Director and translator concluded that the artistic achievement of the play is the speaking of a non-reified language, a way of communicating how the intimate, as absence, is denied and yet deeply felt, both in the individual life and as a defining feature of external realities; that is, across public and private spaces delimited by conservatism and negation. A major translation objective in this work is ‘through-routing’ — the language patterns along which the translator leads individual character strategies to the points where they intersect powerfully with broader cultural realities. It is only when stage language can be received as ‘real’, and so can be processed by the spectator as naturally occurring language, that he/she is provided with a linguistic framework for identifying and understanding the affective moments of the drama. This implementation of ‘through-routing’, as it underpins the dramatic and referential dimensions of the play, represents an innovative conceptualization of the relationship between overarching strategy and lexical choices within the translation process.