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Lope de Vega's The Lady Boba: A Woman of Little Sense: Translation, Performance and the Hermeneutics of Intervention

Since their RSC collaboration in 2006 Johnston has been discussing with director Laurence Boswell the question of how to reconcile the tension between the early-modern origins of Lope’s theatre and its impact in the present.

Johnston concludes that performability and encounter connect through a hermeneutic (rather than instrumental) model. The translation process, therefore, foregrounds the interpretative creativity of the translator as the agent through which translation may, in the least reductive way, traffic in otherness. Theatre translation, no matter how susceptible the doxa of its field to commercial pressures and stage pragmatics, is a kinetic action that is hermeneutically driven and interventionist. The theatre translator does not re-write, but rather writes forward, bringing the potentials of the original into the temporal and spatial purview of the new audience (the hermeneutic drive)— thus, engaging on behalf of the new context with the sweep of the original’s meanings. This is offset against an impulse that is protective of the original text (deriving from its right to untranslatability). The translator chooses to rupture the dominant aesthetic forms, cultural values and assumptions that are privileged within the receiving context of, and in, the present, through a writing backwards into, and of, the past; a foregrounding of difference (hermeneutic intervention). This double hermeneutic is central to the translation of La dama boba, commissioned by Boswell for Bath’s Theatre Royal. The doubleness inherent in this translation practice (writing forward and backwards) offers a more dynamic sense of the territoriality of the translator, who is traditionally conceived as inhabiting a ‘third space’, a notion frequently essentialised as an inter-textual location pre-fixed by skopos or strategy. In its search for an ‘economy of in-betweenness’ (Derrida), this translation challenges convention, conceptualizing practice not as location, but as an itinerary between source culture and text and target culture and text.