“O Brave New World”
The Tempest and As You Like It by the Latin American
translation project Shakespeare by Writers
Jelly van Rinssum 0032018
MA-Thesis English Language and Culture
Specialisation: Translation Studies
1st supervisor: dr. A.J. Hoenselaars
2nd supervisor: dr. P.J.C.M. Franssen
Contents
Acknowledgements..................................................................................................................x
Introduction..............................................................................................................................1
1. Translation and (Post) Colonialism....................................................................................8
1.1 New ideas on translation emerge........................................................................................10
1.1.1 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.............................................................................................11
1.1.2 Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi..................................................................................11
2. Shakespeare and (Post) Colonialism.................................................................................15
2.1 Shakespeare and colonialism..............................................................................................15
2.2 Race and colonialism in Shakespeare.................................................................................16
2.3 Shakespeare and the post-colonial discussion....................................................................19
2.4 Shakespeare and translation................................................................................................20
3. Latin America..................................................................................................................... 24
3.1 The “Discovery”.................................................................................................................24
3.2 Spanish colonisation...........................................................................................................25
3.3 Independence......................................................................................................................28
3.4 Latin American literature....................................................................................................29
3.5 Latin America and translation.............................................................................................32
3.6 Latin America and Shakespeare..........................................................................................34
3.7 Latin American Spanish versus Iberian Spanish.................................................................35
4. Shakespeare by Writers........................................................................................................39
4.1 The project..........................................................................................................................39
4.2 Shakespeare by Writers and the new translation politics in Latin America.......................41
4.3 Criticism.............................................................................................................................42
5. The Analysis of La Tempestad and Como Les Guste........................................................45
5.1 La Tempestad.....................................................................................................................46
5.1.1 Footnotes..........................................................................................................................47
5.1.2 Stage directions................................................................................................................49
5.1.3 Blank verse.......................................................................................................................50
5.1.4 Sounds and music in The Tempest and La Tempestad.....................................................51
5.1.5 Puns..................................................................................................................................52
5.1.6 Thou versus You...............................................................................................................54
5.1.7 Names...............................................................................................................................56
5.1.8 Specific language use in The Tempest.............................................................................57
5.1.9 Shakespeare made easy....................................................................................................60
5.1.10 The Tempest’s central characters...................................................................................62
5.1.10.1 Caliban........................................................................................................................62
5.1.10.2 Ariel............................................................................................................................64
5.1.11 Religion in The Tempest................................................................................................66
5.1.12 Cohen and Speranza’s translation strategy....................................................................67
5.1.13 Conclusion.....................................................................................................................68
5.2 Como Les Guste.................................................................................................................71
5.2.1 Footnotes..........................................................................................................................72
5.2.2 Stage directions................................................................................................................75
5.2.3 Blank verse.......................................................................................................................76
5.2.4 Sounds and music in As You Like It and Como Les Guste...............................................79
5.2.5 Puns..................................................................................................................................80
5.2.6 Thou versus You...............................................................................................................82
5.2.7 Names...............................................................................................................................83
5.2.8 Specific language use in As You Like It...........................................................................84
5.2.9 Shakespeare made Cuban.................................................................................................85
5.2.10 Sexual love in As You Like It.........................................................................................87
5.2.11 Cross-dressing and the Spanish language......................................................................89
5.2.12 Pérez’s translation strategy............................................................................................92
5.2.1 Conclusion.......................................................................................................................93
Conclusion...............................................................................................................................96
Bibliography..........................................................................................................................100
Acknowledgements
There are a few people I would like to thank for helping me with this thesis. Special thanks
goes out to Alfredo Michel Modenessi for his help and for taking the time to answer my
questions. I would furthermore like to thank my supervisor Ton Hoenselaars. Thank you for
your enthusiasm and for always starting your criticism with a positive note. I would also like
to thank my second supervisor Paul Franssen for his help. I thank Stefan Loeffen for
designing the front page in the style of the Shakespeare by Writers project. I also wish to
thank Kim van Rijssen for being so enthusiastic and supportive, and for preceding me in
writing a good thesis. Finally, I owe special thanks to Jan Hein; thank you for putting up with
me and the explosion of books and notes in our house these last few months! Even though I
complained at times, I really enjoyed writing this thesis. I hope everybody who reads it will
find the subject as interesting as I have.
Introduction
In 1999, five Spanish translations of plays by Shakespeare were published in Latin
America, with the promise that in the next five years many more would follow. The
translations were part of a project called Shakespeare by Writers, initiated by the Argentinean
Marcelo Cohen, who wanted to publish the Complete Works of Shakespeare in Spanish. In
itself the publication of Shakespeare’s plays in translation was not a particularly special event,
since his plays belong to the world’s most frequently translated works. However, in the Latin
American publishing world the publication of the Complete Works of Shakespeare in Latin
American translation was undoubtedly a unique and even revolutionary event.
In the past, the translations of Shakespeare’s work that were used in Latin America
originated in Spain, and were written in Iberian Spanish. Spain’s monopoly on the Latin
American publishing market can be seen as one of the last convulsions of colonialism on the
continent. Even though in other fields, like art or music, Latin America flourishes, in the field
of (Shakespeare) translation they continue to be overshadowed by their former colonial
oppressor. The translations by the Shakespeare by Writers project were meant to replace the
standard Iberian Spanish work used in Latin America and cause a radical change in the Latin
American publishing world. It seems that Shakespeare by Writers was precisely what the
Latin American field of translation and Shakespeare studies needed.
In 2004, the Shakespeare by Writers project printed its last translation. All of
Shakespeare’s plays and his Sonnets had now been translated by the creative writers
collaborating on Cohen’s project. A handful of reviews was published on the internet, but the
expected great (inter)national attention failed to materialise. The critics who did take notice of
the project fiercely criticised its quality and its reliance on Iberian Spanish. None of the
translations made it to the theatre and the Iberian Spanish standard work continues to be
widely used in Latin America. Shakespeare by Writers cannot be considered a success.
My intention with this thesis is to discover why the Shakespeare by Writers project has
failed (to be successful). In order to do so, I will analyse the project’s translations of The
Tempest and As You Like It. First, however, I investigate the context in which the project
came into being. I will discuss how the project can be seen in the context of post-colonialism,
Shakespeare studies, and Latin American culture.
In the first chapter of this thesis, I will show how the concept of translation interacts with
the subject of (post) colonialism. It will become clear that post-colonialism does not mean a
move beyond colonialism. In fact, postcolonial cultures are still very much affected by
colonialism. Colonialism has caused the unequal power relations that still exist in the world
today in which former colonies remain the subordinate party. Postcolonial cultures are still in
search of their own identity and Shakespeare by Writers is an example of this.
Translation is especially interesting to look at in this field of study since translations are
the products of intercultural exchange in a world of unequal power relations. Furthermore,
translation was used by the imperialists in their oppression of the colonised people. The
colonial powers forced their language on the colonised people and regularly kidnapped people
to function as intermediaries between them and the people they oppressed. The colonisers did
not only force their language on the people they oppressed; they also introduced them with a
new form of communication: written language. I will show how this caused the colonisers to
gain even more power, since now they also controlled the means of communication and thus
could influence what the colonised people learned about them.
From chapter 1, it will furthermore become clear how the European colonial powers also
controlled literary production, something that, as I will show later on in this thesis, is still the
case in Latin America. At the beginning, translation mainly was a one-way process with texts
being translated into the languages of the colonial powers. Later, when texts did begin to be
translated into the indigenous languages, the colonial powers remained the dominating force
in the translation process. When printing was introduced, the recognition of the original
authors of the texts became important. But where did this leave the translators? It was during
this discussion that the terms “original” and “copy” were introduced. These also became the
terms in which colonial countries and their oppressors were discussed, whereby the colonial
powers were the original, while the colonised countries were merely inferior copies. It was
not until the 1990s that in the field of translation the use of these terms was finally questioned
and rejected. Many other fields of study started to move away from the concepts of
“originality” and “inferiority” as well. Especially in postcolonial cultures, this change led to
some radical ideas on the subject of translation. I will discuss some of these new and
sometimes revolutionary ideas. First, I will discuss the Bengali critic and translator Gayatri
Spivak who links translation and post-colonialism to gender issues and argues that Western,
female translators should be particularly careful when translating the work of other women,
since they have another sense of identity and other experiences on which Western translators
should not impose their Western norms. Furthermore, I will discuss Susan Bassnett and
Harish Trivedi who in their book on postcolonial translation link cannibalism to translation
and show how translation has also been part of the decolonisation process. In their book, they
also discuss the radical new ideas on translation that seem to come from Latin America in
particular. Most of these radical views defy originality and give the translator a central role.
After discussing translation and post-colonialism, I will, in chapter two, focus on the role
of Shakespeare’s work in all this. Shakespeare was one of the original authors from the West
who was celebrated by the colonisers and used by them as the example of Englishness,
civilisation, and literary greatness. He was a pawn in the colonisation process and the
oppression of the colonised people. Shakespeare’s work was used as proof that Western
culture deserved its superior status. Many people tried to read in Shakespeare’s work what the
author himself thought about colonialism. Shakespeare worked in England at a time in which
nationalistic feelings and hostility against foreigners, or in fact anyone deviating from the
norm, prevailed. As a result, race and colonialism are represented in his work and the colonial
powers were eager to prove that he was their comrade in their oppression of the colonies.
They interpreted his plays in a highly conservative way to suit their own political convictions.
However, people opposing colonialism did the same. They used Shakespeare’s work to reject
colonialism and racism. They reinterpreted and adapted his plays to suit their anti-colonial
ideas.
Shakespeare’s work has always been subject to numerous interpretations, translations and
adaptations. Readers and critics are often at odds with each other on how to interpret his plays
and poems. Two plays that have provoked much debate are Othello and The Tempest. In this
thesis, I will discuss the basic points of discussion that these plays have incited.
In Othello, much debate was caused by the controversial black protagonist. Especially the
fact that he was not depicted as the stereotypical lazy, lustful and deceptive black man, as was
common in the literature in Shakespeare’s time, but as a respected military man and a loving
husband, led critics to question if Shakespeare really had intended Othello to be black.
The Tempest, Shakespeare’s alleged colonial play, provoked much discussion about
whether or not the playwright, with this play, detested or applauded colonialism. Some say the
play conveys an anti-colonial attitude while other claim it shows how colonised people
needed the guidance of the colonial powers (Mannoni in Loomba, 163).
The discussions that Shakespeare’s plays, and especially The Tempest, provoked, caused
Shakespeare to fulfil a central role in the postcolonial debate. The Tempest and its central
characters were used to reflect on colonialism. Two of the characters, Ariel and Caliban, even
became powerful cultural symbols in the colonial debate.
After discussing how Shakespeare was used by many people to suit their political ideas, I
will move on and discuss Shakespeare in translation. Shakespeare is one of the most
frequently translated playwrights. He is seen as a universal writer and one of the greatest
literary figures. This status and the alleged untranslatability of his work that follows from it,
proved to be even more difficult for translators to deal with than, for example, his flexible
iambic pentameter.
In the field of translation, Shakespeare again proved to be a good medium for the
expression of political ideas. Especially postcolonial cultures have translated the plays in
order to break free from former colonial oppression. I will discuss two examples of this: two
Scottish translations of Macbeth, and a Mexican adaptation of Love’s Labour’s Lost.
The discussion of the two Scottish versions of Macbeth shows that postcolonial translators
have an added responsibility because they have to prove that their native language and
culture, just like that of their former colonial oppressor, has the resources to translate
Shakespeare. The Mexican translation of Love’s Labour’s Lost by Alfredo Michel Modenessi
shows that Latin America does not have to depend on Iberian Spanish translations even
though the continent has been doing so ever since Shakespeare was introduced in its culture.
The latter will bring us straight to the subject of chapter three: Latin America. In order to
understand why Shakespeare by Writers came into being it is important to know more about
Latin America’s colonial history, culture, literature and its traditions concerning Shakespeare
and translation.
First, I will discuss the Spanish conquest of Latin America and its implications for the
culture and language in this continent. I will show how cruel and determined the European
colonisers were in oppressing the native inhabitants and how they forced their culture,
literature and language on them. Then, I will move on and discuss Latin America’s
independence and its continuing reliance on Europe that followed. Literary production was
controlled by Europe, and Latin American writers have struggled for a long time to break free
from former colonial oppression. It was not until the 1960s that Latin American authors
finally received international recognition, even though this was also caused by European
publishers because they awarded their literary prizes to Latin American authors.
Furthermore, I will discuss translation in Latin America. I will show how the colonial
experience caused Latin American translators to be especially sensitive about being discussed
in terms of originality and inferiority and how this led to radical ideas on the subject of
translation. Moreover, I will show how these strong ideas clearly contrast with the situation
on the Latin American publishing market because even though Latin American translators
have revolutionary views on translation and the creative freedom of the translator, Madrid up
to this day still has an unnaturally tight grip on the publishing market. This results in the fact
that most translations are carried out and published in Spain. This is also the case for
translations of Shakespeare’s work.
Shakespeare’s work came to Latin America via translations produced in Spain. Today,
there is even a standard version of Shakespeare’s Complete Work in Latin America, made by
the Spaniard Luis Astrana Marín. There are some Latin American translations but they are
largely overlooked by readers as well as directors. This is a highly curious phenomenon since
even though all Latin American people can read and understand Iberian Spanish, it is not their
language. On stage it is particularly unnatural for a Latin American actor to adopt Iberian
norms when performing Shakespeare. In order to show this, in the last part of the chapter, I
will discuss the main differences between Iberian Spanish and Latin American Spanish.
In these first three chapters I set out the context in which the Shakespeare by Writers
project must be seen. I show how new and sometimes radical ideas on translation, especially
in Latin America, were bound to go against the practise of Latin America depending on Spain
for Shakespeare translations. However, I also hope to show that even though Shakespeare by
Writers came into being at the right time in the right place, the project cannot be regarded a
success. In the field of translation as well as in Shakespeare studies there does not seem to
exist a notable interest in the project. The translations have not in the least achieved the status
of a standard work and sadly enough, none of the translations have made it to the theatre. By
looking at the project’s translation of The Tempest and As You Like It I will try to explain why
the project has failed. However, in chapter four, I will first discuss the project more
profoundly. I will talk about its initiator, the Argentinean Marcelo Cohen, and his intentions
with the project. I will show that his main goal was to make a truly Latin American translation
of Shakespeare’s Complete Works to replace Luis Astrana Marín’s translations. It will
become clear that Cohen wanted the translations of the project to be readable and enjoyable
for speakers of all varieties of Spanish. It will also become clear that these two above
mentioned goals contradict each other and throughout the analysis of The Tempest and As You
Like It this will prove to be one of the reasons for the project’s failure. How can Cohen
possibly strive to make a truly Latin American translation when at the same time he also
wants Iberian Spanish readers to understand the plays? As a “solution,” with one exception,
the translations of the project have all been carried out in Iberian Spanish. However, in their
attempt to still hang on to the idea of creating truly Latin American translations, the
translators often have come up with the most deplorable and unfortunate solutions, as
Modenessi’s criticism of the project and to a lesser degree my analysis of the translation of
The Tempest will indicate.
In addition to Cohen’s intentions with Shakespeare by Writers, I will explain how he
organised the project, why he decided to use writers for the job and how this does not prove to
serve as an advantage to the quality of the translations. Furthermore, I will discuss the
criticism the project has received, since this criticism will be used again in my analysis of The
Tempest and As You Like It. Lastly, I will explain in greater depth how the project can be seen
in the context of postcolonial translation discussed in chapter one and the new translation
politics in Latin America discussed in chapter three.
In the last and most important part of the thesis, I will analyse the project’s translations of
The Tempest and As You Like It; respectively La Tempestad by Marcelo Cohen and Graciela
Speranza and Como Les Guste by the Cuban Omar Pérez. I have chosen these two plays
because the first is widely known as Shakespeare’s colonial play and translated by Cohen
himself, while the latter is the only translation of the project that is carried out in Cuban
Spanish as opposed to Iberian Spanish.
Both translations will be analysed separately. I will look at how the translators have dealt
with typical Shakespearean translation problems like the blank verse, the songs, the puns and
the use of thou versus you. The use of the same criteria in the analysis of both plays will show
the project’s lack of stylistic uniformity. Cohen let the collaborators of his project each deal
individually with the difficulties Shakespeare’s texts offer. Even though the project is
presented as a Complete Works, the individual translations are so different in style and quality
that they can hardly be seen as a unity.
Furthermore, it will become clear that the lack of critical footnotes in both translations is
also in contrast with the project’s aim of becoming the new Complete Works of Shakespeare
and a work of reference for contemporary Latin America. Moreover, it deprives the reader of
the play’s deeper layers, textual nuances and interpretative possibilities.
After discussing the more general Shakespearean difficulties the translators are faced with,
I move on and discuss the way they have dealt with the specific use of language in the plays.
For The Tempest, this will be the use of repetition, unusual compounds and the compressing
of the language. With respect to As You Like It, I will discuss the play’s tendency to reverse
normal word order, and its use of repetition, compounds and stopgaps.
Lastly, I will discuss those aspects of the plays to which my attention was drawn during
the analysis of the translations, and the way they are reflected in the translations. For example,
the analysis of La Tempestad presented me with an interesting depiction of the characters of
Ariel and Caliban and their relationship to their master Prospero. Furthermore, my attention
was drawn to Shakespeare’s frequent references to religion. In Como Les Guste, the way the
translator dealt with the cross-dressing of the protagonist Rosalind proved to be particularly
interesting. Furthermore, I will discuss the theme of sexual love in As You Like It and the way
Pérez made the references to this theme more explicit in his translation.
From the analysis of all the above mentioned, it will, I hope, become clear that the
translators used vastly different translation strategies. The strategy of Cohen and Speranza can
be called a “simplifying” strategy, whereas I will call Pérez’s strategy a “cubanising” strategy.
I will discuss the effects of these strategies and show how the latter can be considered more
successful.
The analysis of both plays ought to show that local translations are more successful and
more interesting than those striving for universality and timelessness, like Cohen and
Speranza’s translation of The Tempest. Furthermore, I hope to show that Cohen’s translation
mainly relies on Iberian Spanish and thus Cohen, with his own translation, failed to deliver a
truly Latin American translation. His project cannot be seen as a Latin American version of
Shakespeare’s Complete Works. The project’s translations, with the exception of Pérez’s
translation, are thus not vastly different from the Iberian Spanish translations that prevail in
Latin America. Therefore, it can be argued that the project endorses the dependence of the
Latin American publishing world on the use of the language of its former colonial oppressor
Spain. This despite the fact that individual translations, like Modenessi’s translation of Love’s
Labour’s Lost, show that this does not have to be the case. The only difference is that Cohen’s
project was published in Argentina and not in Spain. From this it can be argued that Cohen
succeeded in doing something unique in the Latin American publishing world. However,
because of the project’s lack of success and (inter)national attention, I doubt if it has caused a
significant or lasting change in the Latin American publishing market.
1.
Translation and (Post) Colonialism
In order to fully appreciate how and why a project like Shakespeare by Writers came
into being it is essential to know more about its context, which is a post-colonial one.
Firstly, one has to be aware of the fact that post-colonialism does not entail a move
beyond colonialism. Bill Ashcroft, who was one of the first theorists to tackle the question
of post-colonialism, defines the term post-colonialism as: “all the culture affected by the
imperial process from the moment of colonisation to the present day” (2). Throughout this
thesis I will show that the effects of colonialism on post-colonial cultures are in fact
enormous and still very conspicuous. Post-colonial cultures are still in search of their own
identity knowing that even if they have been freed from their original conquerors, they
remain the subordinate party.
In this chapter, I will focus on the role of translation in a (post) colonial context.
Translation is particularly interesting to look at when it comes to imperialism. Not only
was it made to play an active role in the colonisation process; it also gives us an entry
point into the formation of cultural identity in post-colonial cultures, since translations are
the product of intercultural exchange in a world of unequal power relations. Throughout
this chapter, I want to explain the relationship between translation and (post) colonialism
and show how the two concepts interact. I want to show how, in the past, translation was
used by the colonisers for political purposes and how these practices influenced the ideas
of postcolonial cultures on translation, which eventually led to some new and sometimes
very radical views on translation.
From the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries European powers, including Spain,
Portugal, the Netherlands and England, ruled the oceans with their fleets and conquered
new territory in North and Latin America, the coasts of Africa and South-East Asia. Their
motives were economic as well as religious. The countries wanted to have access to new
kinds of merchandise and convert the native inhabitants of the new territory to
Christianity. The relation between the colonisers and the people they oppressed was
unequal from the start. The colonisers saw themselves as the superior people who felt
called upon to assist the native inhabitants of their newly acquired territory to become
civilised human beings. The colonisers forced their culture as well as their language on to
the native inhabitants. In the opinion of the settlers it was their job to teach the colonised
peoples because, as Columbus once wrote, talking about the Indians in the Americas,
“[they] need to learn to talk” (Qtd. in Chefitz, 109). The colonisers operated from the
belief that their language and culture were superior and that all other civilisations simply
had to become like them. They denied the individual identity of the colonised people
which led to “the fiction of the Other” whereby the colonised people were only looked at
in terms of the language and culture of the colonisers (Cheyfitz, 105).
Translation and the colonisation process went hand in hand. “Translation was, and still
is, the central act of European colonization and imperialism in the Americas” (Cheyfitz,
104). “From its beginning the imperialists’ mission [was], in short, one of translation: the
translation of the ‘other’ into the terms of the empire” (Cheyfitz, 112). The colonisers used
translation for their own political agenda. At the beginning, they used it primarily in the
form of interpreters who were sometimes kidnapped and forced to function as
intermediaries between the colonisers and the colonised. The task of these interpreters was
a highly ambiguous one, because according to Ashcroft, they had to “acquire the power of
the new language and culture in order to preserve the old, even whilst it assist[ed] the
invaders in their overwhelming of that culture” (80).
Not only did the colonisers force their language on the inhabitants of the countries they
conquered, they also introduced a new form of communication, namely the written
language, which many cultures had not been acquainted with until then. In doing so, the
colonisers gained power over the means of communication and this, according to
Ashcroft, is “the empowering factor in any colonial enterprise” (79). Now that they had
power over the communication system, they could also control the information that others
had about them. Since language constructs the “truth,” the settlers could create their own
truth and impose their own reality on the rest of the world. They created a new image of
themselves and of the colonised peoples. The translator and critic Tejaswini Niranjana in
her work Siting Translation: History, Post-structuralism, and the Colonial Context, notes
that translation into English has been used by the colonial power to construct a new image
of the “East” that has then come to stand for the truth (in Munday, 134). Writing culture
created a new history that was in many ways different from the original oral tradition.
The introduction of a writing system by the colonisers also had another consequence.
Ashcroft explains how the oral societies were particularly vulnerable to the intrusion of
literacy controlled as it was by the imperial power. For a very long time, and one could
even argue up until this day Europe dominated literary production. This also meant
Europe, and especially the colonial powers Great Britain, Spain and France, controlled
translation. For a long time, translation was a one-way process with texts being translated
into European languages like English, French and Iberian Spanish, for European purposes.
During the period of colonial expansion, printing was introduced and, with this, the
recognition of the author became more important. While authors were claiming their rights
to the texts, where did this leave the translator? It was during this period that the terms
“original” and “copy” were introduced and translations were discussed in terms of
faithfulness and loss. It was the colonising west that gave these texts their high status and
authority and they were seen as fixed, while translations were considered “wholly
derivative forms of writing whose impact was rather negative” (Viswanatha and Simon,
162). A translation was seen as something that devalued the original. The colonised
peoples were discussed in these same terms. They were also merely copies of a higher
original, namely Europe, and the now frequently used metaphor of the colonies as
translations of the colonisers is not a surprising one. The colonisers also used this in the
education of the colonised peoples. European missionaries, who appointed themselves to
educate the colonised people, in their lessons discussed English authors, like Shakespeare,
as examples of Englishness and came to interpret the relevant works to match their own
ideas and to justify imperialism. I will return to this in chapter two where I will discuss
Shakespeare and the notion of colonialism.
1.1 New ideas on translation emerge
In their book Post-colonial Translation: Theory and Practice, which includes a number
of valuable essays on the role of translation in colonialism as well as in post-colonial
cultures, Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi explain how this “the shameful history of
translation,” discussed above, eventually led to new views on translation. Especially in the
1990s, a change occurred in the field of translation studies that questioned the
longstanding idea of the translation as inferior to the original and as something that could
only be discussed in terms of what had been lost. Many other fields of study, like cultural,
literary and gender studies also started to move away from the idea of “universal literary
greatness” and questioned the “politics of canonization” (Bassnett and Trivedi, 2).
Especially in countries with a colonial background, this change led to some radical ideas.
In the following paragraphs, I will discuss some of these ideas starting with the Bengali
critic and translator Gayatri Spivak who links post-colonialism and translation with gender
issues.
1.1.1 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Spivak takes as her starting point the notion that language creates identity and that, as a
consequence, female translators in particular should be especially careful when dealing with
the works of other women who have other experiences and another sense of identity. She
thinks female translators have a tendency to impose Western norms on the translation out of
some misplaced solidarity with and a lack of sincere interest in the text and its author. In her
essay “The Politics of Translation,” Spivak says:
the task of the translator is to facilitate the love between the original and its shadow, a
love that permits fraying, holds the agency of the translator and the demands of the
imagined or actual audience at bay. The politics of translation from a non-European
woman’s text too often suppresses this possibility because the translator cannot engage
with, or cares insufficiently for, the rhetoricity of the original. (398)
Spivak also accuses western and especially English-speaking feminists of forcing the
English language on non-western feminists. They make it seem like a democratic decision
but in fact it is only “the law of the strongest” that is at work here. This practise leads to
all the literature of the Third World getting translated into a sort of “with-it translatese”
which makes “the literature by a women in Palestine begin to resemble, in the feel of its
prose, something by a man in Taiwan” (Spivak, 400). This causes readers of the
translation to have a decreasing appreciation for the writer of the original in comparison to
the English translator. In other words, even though in this situation the former coloniser is
the “copy,” it still manages to be regarded as the superior one. According to Spivak,
women have to get rid of the notion that they are all alike; real solidarity has got nothing
to do with alikeness. In Spivak’s opinion, if Western feminists want to declare their
solidarity to non-western feminists they should learn to speak their language (407). As
long as we keep on learning only the “powerful” languages of Europe, solidarity and
equality do not exist. My reason for discussing Spivak’s argument here is twofold. First, it
is an example of how especially translators from countries with a colonial past have
extreme ideas when it comes to translation. Secondly, her argument shows how, even
today, (former) colonial powers remain the superior force in the translation process.
1.1.2 Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi
Spivak’s argument shows that the emancipation of the colonies and the end of
imperialism in some areas did not also lead to the end of asymmetric power relations. This
is also the basic assumption of Bassnett and Trivedi’s book on translation and postcolonialism.
Bassnett and Trivedi start their book with a story from the sixteenth century about a
Catholic priest who was devoured by members of a Brazilian tribe. This act shocked the
Western world and led to the change of the meaning of the word “cannibal”, from a group
of Caribs in the Antilles to “an eater of human flesh.” What Western people did not see is
that the act of eating the priest was actually an act of homage and respect. According to
Bassnett and Trivedi, “in some societies the devouring of the strongest enemies or most
worthy elders has been seen as a means of acquiring the powers they had wielded in life”
(Bassnett and Trivedi, 1). This story helps to understand translation and colonialism in two
ways. First, it is an example of how the West, at times, failed to understand the cultures of
the colonies. It seems like the Western imperialists simply wanted “the others” to become
westernised. It also shows how superior the European people felt because they were
horrified by this story when in fact cannibalism was also known in their own culture. For
instance, one only has to think about Christian symbolism of eating the body and blood of
Christ. Secondly, as Bassnett and Trivedi put it: “the cannibalistic metaphor has come to
be used to demonstrate to translators what they can do with a text” (5). The eating of the
priest was necessary for the oppressed tribe because “only by devouring Europe could the
colonised break away from what was imposed upon them” (Bassnett and Trivedi, 4-5).
My reasons for mentioning this story in this thesis is twofold. Firstly, it has become a very
important and frequently used metaphor in this field of study whereby cannibalism has
come to stand for the experience of colonisation and translation. Secondly, it can help in
understanding a project like Shakespeare by Writers. As Bassnett and Trivedi note, the
story shows what a translator can do with a text. Maybe the only way for Latin America to
break away from Europe and European norms is to devour Shakespeare, the canon of
Western literature, and come up with a version of his work that is completely theirs and
that they can read in their own language and not the language of the coloniser. I will come
back to this idea in chapter 3, devoted to Latin America and post-colonialism.
As said before, Bassnett and Trivedi’s book focuses on how translation played a central
role in the colonisation process, but their work also discusses the role of translation in the
de-colonisation process. Ashcroft questions if de-colonisation even exists or can exist
because the changes that have occurred in post-colonial languages and literatures cannot
be reversed (29-30). However, post-colonial cultures are trying to break away from their
colonial past by searching for their own identity and going against Western norms, which
could also be seen as a form of de-colonisation. Radical ideas on imperialism and
translation emerging in countries with a colonial past are a result of this. Bassnett and
Trivedi mention a number of these ideas. For example, they mention how the Mexican
diplomat, poet and essayist Octavio Paz sees translation “not as a marginal activity but as
a primary one” (3). Paz claims that translation
is the principal means we have of understanding the world we live in. Each text is
unique, yet at the same time it is the translation of another text. No text can be
completely original because language itself, in its very essence, is already a
translation.
(Qtd. in Bassnett and Trivedi, 3-4)
There is a clear contrast between this idea and that of the past colonisers, who insisted on
the originality of texts. However, Paz’ ideas are common in the former colonies and
especially in Latin America. The writer Carlos Fuentes even called “originality a sickness”
(Qtd. in Bassnett and Trivedi, 3). Similar to other Latin American writers like Gabriel
García Márquez and Jorge Luís Borges, Fuentes has strong views about translation and the
relationship between writer/reader and translator that have been caused by years of
oppression of their language and literature. Another radical attitude towards translation
comes from the Brazilian translator Harold de Campos who compares translation to a
blood transfusion in which the health and nourishment of the translator are central. In his
view, the translator is no longer a violator of the original. In fact, he or she is the very
opposite, namely a writer in his own right and an “all-powerful reader” who can do with a
text what he or she wants. I will come back to this development of new and radical ideas
in Latin America in greater detail in chapter 3.
This new way of thinking in the former colonies and the search for their own identity
here not only limited itself to new ideas but has also given rise to new literary expressions.
As Viswanatha and Simon say in their essay “Shifting Grounds of Exchange: B.M.
Srikantaiah and Kannada Translation,” in colonised areas “the massive influence of the
West created heavily imitative forms of expression” but it also “had the effect of
provoking the emerge of totally new forms” (162-63). This “counter-force of resistance
working to produce original forms of the local” in India for example, led to renewed forms
of Bengali narrative and especially the novel in Bengali (Viswanatha and Simon, 163)
In this chapter, it has been established that translation has played an active role in
colonisation. It was used as a tool to oppress the native inhabitants of the colonised
countries and as a means of establishing Western superiority. These asymmetric power
relations still exist and have led to new ideas in the field of translation studies and postcolonialism. In the next chapter I will discuss the role of Shakespeare’s work in
colonisation, translation and post-colonialism.
2.
Shakespeare and (Post)Colonialism
In the previous chapter the relation between translating and (post)colonialism has been
discussed. This chapter will deal with the role of Shakespeare in (post)colonialism as well as
translation. The chapter will be divided into four parts. First, I will discuss how Shakespeare
was used as a pawn in the colonisation process and the oppression of the colonised people.
Secondly, I want to look at how colonialism and race are represented in Shakespeare’s plays
and the discussions this provoked. Furthermore, the role of Shakespeare’s plays in the postcolonial debate will be discussed and finally, I will deal with Shakespeare and (post-colonial)
translation.
2.1
Shakespeare and colonisation
In the previous chapter, I briefly discussed how the colonisers used their writers and artists
as the model of civilisation and as implicit proof of their superiority over the colonised
peoples. In this chapter, the focus will be on the English colonisers and the way they used
Shakespeare to claim their authority in their territories and create a national identity at home,
in England.
In the sixteenth century in England, a new class of people emerged that consisted of
writers and artists whose work was all in English and about England. According to Leah
Greenfeld, this reinforced England’s feeling of superiority and it justified the inferiority of
“the Other.” “Everything English became an object of attention and nourished a new feeling
of national pride” (qtd. in Loomba, 9). This proto-nationalism went hand in hand with feelings
of hostility against outsiders and foreigners. The English had always differentiated themselves
from other people, like Jews, dark-skinned Africans and homosexuals. Contact with these
people and the way they were portrayed in English literature shaped and defined a new
national and Christian identity in England as well as Europe. It was in this period of time and
this atmosphere that Shakespeare wrote and staged his plays and it was therefore inevitable
that foreigners played a role in his plays. The English population had never been one to travel
much; English people would rather stay at home and learn about the outside world in the
theatre. Shakespeare’s plays were highly influential at that time and they “deeply shaped
English imagining of outsiders” (Loomba, 8). On the other hand, they also shaped the view
the colonised people had on England and Europe. The colonised people learned about
Shakespeare from their colonial masters, who interpreted Shakespeare’s plays in a very
conservative way so that the plays were seen as “endorsing existing racial, gender and other
hierarchies, never as questioning or destabilizing them” (Loomba and Orkin, 1). This
Shakespeare who in the interpretations of the colonising west “celebrated the superiority of
the ‘civilised races’” was used in the education of the colonised people. “Colonial
educationists and administrators used this Shakespeare to reinforce cultural and racial
hierarchies” (Loomba and Orkin, 1). First, by portraying him as “the quintessence of
Englishness and a measure of humanity itself” and secondly, by reading and interpreting his
plays in such a way that they justified and encouraged colonialism and the oppression of the
colonies (Loomba and Orkin, 1). These practices eventually gave rise to three different
reactions from intellectuals and artists from the colonised worlds. There were those who
echoed their oppressors by praising Shakespeare’s genius. But, there were also many people
who did the exact opposite: they challenged the cultural authority of Shakespeare and the
colonial regimes by praising their own bards. Finally, some used Shakespeare in their struggle
against colonialism by reinterpreting and adapting his works to suit their anti-colonial ideas.
Whatever their reaction was, it became clear that when the colonial masters “imposed their
value system through Shakespeare,” in response the colonised people “answered back in
Shakespearean accents” (Loomba and Orkin, 7).
2.2
Race and colonialism in Shakespeare
As became clear in the previous paragraph, the colonisers as well as the colonised people
used Shakespeare as their comrade in their struggle for or against colonialism and racism. It
seems as if everybody interpreted Shakespeare to fit their own convictions. Shakespeare
became one of the most widely read and performed playwrights in the world and the majority
of his readers or spectators did not read or see the English originals but translations in other
languages1 which inevitably had been subject to the interpretation of the translator. “There is
no single ‘Shakespeare’ that is reproduced globally” (Loomba and Orkin, 7). Instead, as
Dennis Kennedy says, “almost from the start of his importance as the idealized English
dramatist there have been other Shakespeares, Shakespeares not dependent upon English and
often at odds with it” (Kennedy 1993, 2). The fact that Shakespeare’s work had been subject
to numerous interpretations, adaptations and translations also meant that his readers and
critics were often at odds with each other about how to interpret the plays. Was Shakespeare,
Shakespeare’s plays came to Latin America for example, in translations that had originated in Spain and were written in
Iberian Spanish.
1
as the colonisers claimed, a racist man who thought black people needed to be rescued by
Christians or did he write about these subjects to ridicule and undermine the ideas of the
colonising regimes? To this day, the critics still do not seem to have reached agreement on the
matter. Fact is that Shakespeare lived in a biased society where feelings of proto-nationalism
and hostility against foreigners predominated and this is reflected in his plays. Shakespeare
did not hesitate to write about racism, colonisation and nationalism but what his precise
intentions were has been the subject of many discussions among the critics. In this part of the
chapter I will discuss how themes like race and colonialism are represented in Shakespeare’s
plays and the discussions they have provoked.
One play that has provoked much debate is Othello, with the Moorish general as its main
character. Ever since the beginning of the slave trade in the 1560’s, Africans had been present
in London. Dozens of sixteenth-century theatre productions made use of African settings and
characters. However, most of the plays created a highly inaccurate picture of Africa and were
blatantly racist in their depiction of the African people, describing them in simple stereotypes
as lazy, lustful and likely to be deceptive. Shakespeare’s Othello was one of the first
sympathetic black characters in English literature. “Black skinned people were usually typed
as godless, bestial, and hideous, fit only to be saved (and in early modern Europe, enslaved)
by Christians” (Loomba, 91). Blackness was often a sign of evil. In Othello, however,
Shakespeare created a character that was a black man but also a leading figure in the Venetian
society, a respected military man as well as a loving husband. However, at the end of the play
Othello “embodies the stereotype of Moorish lust and violence – a jealous, murderous
husband of a Christian lady” (Loomba, 95). Even though Shakespeare did not depict Othello
as a stereotypical black man, he did use the prejudices there were against black people in his
play, “giving us a black Moor who has both a slave past and a noble lineage, a black skin and
thick lips as well as great military skill and rhetorical abilities, a capacity for tenderness as
well as a propensity to violence” (Loomba, 92). Although Othello is a respected man there are
some characters with biased attitudes against the black general and especially against his
marriage to the white Desdemona. In the play, Othello is called an “old black ram” (1.1.88), a
“Barbary horse” (1.1.111) and a “lascivious Moor” (1.1.126). All these names associate
Othello’s race with animals, sex and the devil, which even today are characteristically racist
ploys. However, despite the racist attitudes of certain characters in the play, on the whole, the
play does not follow the stereotypical depicting of black people that was most common in that
time. This has led some people to believe that Shakespeare’s Othello was not a black man.
They claim that Shakespeare could not have seen a black man when he wrote the play and
therefore his main character must have been more brownish than black (Loomba, 2). Since
Othello’s sympathetic character did not fit the ideas which the critics in the earlier periods had
about black people, they were eager to prove that Othello was not a Negroid. The skin colour
of the black villain Aaron in Titus Andronicus was never debated simply because this
character did represent the stereotypical image of an evil black man. G.K. Hunter was the first
theorist who took as a starting point the fact that Shakespeare intended Othello to be black
and thus “moved the play’s racism more centrally into critical discussion” (Honigmann, 27).
According to Hunter it was “obvious that Shakespeare did not wish the audience to dismiss
Othello as a stereotype nigger” (140). Today the question of Othello’s race is still up for
debate. Some critics say the question of Othello’s skin colour is irrelevant, they find it more
important to find out the meaning of Othello’s alleged blackness in early modern English
culture. On this matter, the critics also disagree. Some say people saw blackness as the
ultimate sign of degradation while others claim that blackness only began to be viewed as a
negative quality much later. Furthermore, the question arose whether people in Shakespeare’s
time saw blackness only as skin colour or as something entailing inner traits (Loomba, 2).
Besides Othello’s skin colour, there is also much debate about his religion; despite the fact
that Othello is a convert to Christianity, modern critics are trying to draw attention to the
Muslim aspect of Othello (Loomba, 92).
As one can see, Shakespeare’s use of a black character in his play has led to some heated
discussions. The Tempest, Shakespeare’s play about colonialism, achieved something similar.
In the play, the magician Prospero takes over a remote island, enslaving the original
inhabitant Caliban. Over the centuries critics have interpreted this play to suit their own
political ideas about colonisation. To some people The Tempest “confirmed that there is a
natural inequality between human beings which justifies colonialism.” To others “the play
conveyed the miseries of colonial oppression” (Loomba, 5). Octavio Mannoni read the play to
suggest that “all colonized people suffer, like Caliban, from a ‘dependency complex,’ which
is to say that they need a firm hand of the ruler to keep them from insanity” (Loomba, 163).
This play is the perfect example of how people read and interpret literary texts to fit their own
ideas and their own world. Caliban’s skin colour for example is not mentioned in the play, yet
in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries people simply assumed he was black because
“colonial history made blackness synonymous with bondage and inferiority” (Loomba, 168).
Since then, Caliban’s blackness has been taken for granted, even though there are no
references to his colour in the play. I will come back to the different interpretations of The
Tempest in my discussion of the plays’ translation by the Shakespeare by Writers project.
2.3
Shakespeare and the post-colonial discussion
What becomes clear from the discussions Shakespeare’s plays provoked, is that they had a
huge influence on people’s thoughts. Because they were read by so many people all over the
world, Shakespeare’s plays became a powerful medium between generations and cultures.
“Shakespeare has shaped the views of readers across many cultures and ages on questions of
racial and colonial difference” (Loomba, 5). Even in the twenty-first century, Shakespeare’s
plays still affect our thinking about these issues. “Shakespeare’s plays form a bridge between
the past and us: even as we read in them the stories of a bygone world, we also continually
reinterpret these stories to make sense of our own worlds” (Loomba, 4). This also led to
Shakespeare’s involvement in the post-colonial discussion centuries after he wrote his plays.
Shakespeare’s plays “regularly provided a vocabulary for theorizing the colonial encounter
and psyches” (Loomba and Orkin, 10). Many people have used Shakespeare’s The Tempest
and its characters to reflect on colonialism. There are many intellectuals who have interacted
with each other via The Tempest. Many Latin American intellectuals at first identified with
Ariel, but soon the attention shifted to Caliban. Octavio Mannoni, who has been mentioned
before, used the relationship between Prospero and Caliban in The Tempest to suggest that
there are tremendous psychological differences between the colonisers and the colonised. This
philosophy triggered many reactions from Caribbean intellectuals, all contesting Mannoni’s
ideas. Roberto Fernández Retamar “appropriated Caliban as a symbol of oppression as well as
rebellion of the Americas against colonialism” (Loomba, 163). This appropriation became
well recognized and Caliban also became a symbol of the cultural hybridity that resulted from
colonialism and racial intermixture. Furthermore, Caliban became a symbol of black power
and he began to be used by people who did not engage with Shakespeare’s play anymore, but
simply used him as a powerful cultural symbol to be employed for their own ends. In the end,
the appropriation of Caliban went beyond Shakespeare and even beyond Europe. This to the
displeasure of Shakespeareans like Ania Loomba, who says Caliban is not an adequate
symbol for encounters of colonialism in the entire world. She believes “the Caliban-Prospero
relationship needs always to be set against other representations, rather than taken as
symbolizing the entire encounter between Europe and its ´others´” (Loomba, 165).
2.4
Shakespeare and translation
So far it has become clear that Shakespeare was used by many people to suit their personal
political agenda. He was used by the colonial regimes as well as the colonised people. He
became the comrade for people justifying as well as people opposing racism and he became a
central figure in the post-colonial discussion, especially in the Caribbean. In this final part of
the chapter, I am going to discuss how translators in the past and present have dealt with
Shakespeare’s plays, the difficulties they have experienced and the way in which they also
used Shakespeare for political purposes.
Translation with respect to Shakespeare, is not only interesting because of its alleged
difficulty or because Shakespeare is among the most frequently translated writers in the
world; it also fulfilled many unique cultural functions. Many people still look upon translation
as an inferior discipline within the field of Shakespearean studies when in fact “translation
marks an area of interest which overlaps with nearly every imaginable Shakespearean
subdiscipline, thus deserving the status of an equal partner in the academic debate”
(Hoenselaars, 2). Shakespeare’s plays, the originals as well as the translations, “helped shape
cultural identities, ideologies and linguistic and literary traditions” (Delabastita, in Baker,
222).
Although translators of Shakespeare come across many difficulties like the obscure
cultural allusions, his contrastive use of words of Anglo-Saxon and Romance origin, the
personifications, his use of “you” versus “thou” or his flexible iambic pentameter and
metaphors, these difficulties are not the be-all and end-all of translating Shakespeare.
Translators of works other than Shakespeare’s will confirm that they have stumbled upon the
same problems. Shakespeare translators seem to have more difficulties with the alleged
untranslatability of Shakespeare and the critical attitudes towards their work as translators.
Many Shakespeareans have taken on a normative attitude towards translations of
Shakespeare; they have strong views about how his plays should be translated. Especially in
the past, the more creative or theatrically suitable translations or those by translators who tried
to bring the play closer to the target language and culture, were not as popular as the more
favourable “faithful” translations. Interestingly, the original quartos and folios were not used
as the starting point for many translators. Most of them used either critical editions of
Shakespeare’s texts, like the Arden Shakespeare, or intermediate translations in their own or
even another language. There are even some translators who have been known to have little
knowledge of the English language or none. In the late eighteenth century, Shakespeare was
translated into many European languages via a French version of Jean François Ducis. Later
on, European translators turned to the, in their eyes, “more faithful” German translations.
Shakespeare traditions in Europe clearly reflected the power relations that existed between its
countries. For a long time, the status of English, French and German as lingua franca
determined the spread of Shakespeare. The dominance of these languages eventually caused
the immense popularity of the untranslated Shakespeare in the (British) colonies. This way,
“the relative stability of the sacrosanct originals [could] be used to serve Western imperialism
and avert the danger of Shakespeare being appropriated by the local cultures” (Delabastita in
Baker, 224).
Shakespeare’s authority and popularity eventually began to appeal to many people who
started to translate and adapt his plays for their own purposes. Where people in the past
adapted Shakespeare by “fitting [him] into the straitjacket of existing neoclassical rules,
precisely to make him more canonical” (Hoenselaars, 8), modern day adaptations of
Shakespeare often seek to do the opposite. These adaptors of Shakespeare want to liberate
their culture from (former) imperial oppression by creating their own version of the canon of
Western literature. Later on in this thesis, I will show how the Shakespeare by Writers project
is a clear example of this. For now, I will briefly discuss two other examples of how
postcolonial cultures have created their own translations or adaptations to free themselves
from the still existing oppression of their former colonisers. I will discuss two Scottish
translations of Macbeth and a Mexican translation of Love’s Labour’s Lost.
Ever since their loss of independence in 1707, the Scottish have striven for political
autonomy as well as the preservation of their own national language, culture and literature. It
was especially important for the Scottish that their language was recognised as a separate
language from English. Scotland has always had a particularly rich literature. However,
curiously enough, the Scottish national literature does not include many translations of
Shakespeare. Although English is spoken and understood by all Scottish people, and therefore
the reason for translating Shakespeare can only be political, it is curious that even though “in
Scotland as in England Shakespeare’s plays represen[t] the unchallenged benchmark against
which all other dramatic works [are] measured” and “Shakespeare translation is seen as an
integral part of the national poetic achievement” (McClure in Hoenselaars, 218), only a
handful of efforts have been made to translate Shakespeare into Scottish. There are two
complete renderings of Shakespeare’s Scottish play Macbeth by David Purves and Robin
Lorimer. Furthermore, there is a short extract from Macbeth by Edwin Morgan, some sonnets
and part of Macbeth has been translated by Martin Allen, and finally, sonnet 29 has been
translated by Bill Smith (McClure in Hoenselaars, 219).
Purvis and Lorimer, who both translated Macbeth, and did so in two vastly different ways,
believed the Scottish culture should not have to depend on the English version of
Shakespeare. Just as any other country and culture they felt they also had the right to their
own Shakespeare and not the Shakespeare forced on them by their English oppressor. Purves,
who besides a poet and a dramatist also is a controversialist and an activist in the cause of
improving the status of Scots, chose to translate Macbeth by using the traditional vocabulary
of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Furthermore, he chose “a register suggestive of the
rural vernaculars of the South and South-East” (McClure in Hoenselaars, 228). Lorimer, on
the other hand, who did not have such a close connection with the Scottish language, used
archaic Scots. Furthermore, Lorimer’s translation is the more source-text-orientated of the two
(McClure in Hoenselaars, 229-30). Lorimer’s approach turned out to be the more successful
and impressive one. By successfully translating Shakespeare into Scots, Lorimer has proven
that the Scottish language can restate the content of Shakespeare’s plays. It seems that
postcolonial translators have to be especially aware of the implications of their roles as
translators. A ‘bad’ translation can unjustly be taken as proof that Scots lacks the resources to
provide a Shakespeare translation. Postcolonial translators have a bigger responsibility
because they have to protect the status of their native language.
A Mexican translator of Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost Alfredo Michel Modenessi
also felt that he had to break with the tradition of reading and performing Shakespeare in the
language of the former colonial oppressor. Therefore, in 2001, he appropriated Love’s
Labour’s Lost for the Mexican stage, to prove that it is possible to stage Shakespeare for a
Latin American audience, without the production depending on an Iberian Spanish translation.
Shakespeare came to Latin America in the beginning of the nineteenth century via translations
and productions that originated in Spain. These texts have since then dominated the Latin
American market and the Latin American translations were largely unknown or simply
overlooked. This is a curious phenomenon because Iberian Spanish is highly unsuitable for a
Latin American audience. Modenessi made a translation using Latin American Spanish
throughout. He also included local norms, puns and verbal jokes, gave the characters typical
Latin American names and thereby created a stage production fit for a Latin American
audience. Clearly, his motives were also political. He wanted to prove that Iberian Spanish
translations were not suitable for a Latin American audience and he wanted to show that there
is no need for Latin American producers to depend upon Iberian Spanish translations because
Latin America is perfectly capable of creating its own translations and break free from its
former coloniser who still dominates the translation market.
This chapter has shown how Shakespeare was used by many people throughout history for
political purposes. The British colonisers used him to assert their authority and superiority
over the colonised people, who in their turn, used him to contest colonialism. Shakespeare
became a central figure in the post-colonial debate and was used by many post-colonial
cultures to break free from their colonial oppression. In the next chapter, I will come back to
Shakespeare and the Latin American situation, when I discuss Latin America’s postcolonial
culture and its traditions regarding Shakespeare.
3.
Latin America
1492 is a year everybody has locked in their brain as one of the most important dates in the
history of the world. It is the year a new continent was discovered and a new world came into
view in which power relations shifted which have remained unequal up to this day. In this
chapter I will discuss Latin America from this point of view. I will discuss the colonisation
process and its influences on today’s Latin American society, focussing on the fields of
literature, translation and Shakespeare. In this chapter I want to give a concise and selective
overview of Latin American society and culture from 1492 to the present, in order to place the
Shakespeare by Writers project in its appropriate contexts.
3.1
The ‘Discovery’
In the fifteenth century the Iberian sailors had come to be the best ones in Europe and on
their journeys they had conquered many new territories in North Africa and the Canaries.
Several times, the Genose sailor Columbus had asked the Catholic Kings of Spain, Isabella of
Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon permission to travel to India via the west, to conquer new
territory for the Spanish crown, but the Spanish royals had always refused. In 1492, the same
year in which Granada, the last Islamic bulwark in Spain, collapsed and the Muslims were
defeated, the Spanish royals looked at their Portuguese neighbours and envied the gold and
wealth they had obtained from their new territories in Africa. That is why in 1492 the Spanish
crown gave Columbus permission for his journey to India, hoping that he would bring back
gold and other resources (Hintzen, 23-25).
Thinking that he had arrived in India when in fact he had reached an archipelago in the
Bahamas, Columbus called the original inhabitants “Indians,” the name that has continued to
be used for the indigenous people of Latin America, in spite of the discovery that the country
Columbus had stumbled on was nowhere near India. Some historians like Peter Hintzen say
Columbus died, still under the impression that he had been in Asia (28). Others claim that on
his second and third journeys, Columbus realized that he had discovered a new world. I
believe the latter is more convincing since Columbus died in 1506, 13 years after Pope
Alexander VI, at the Castilian government’s request, in the Treaty of Tordesillas declared that
all the countries west of the Azores would belong to Spain. Portugal then demanded territory
as well and as a result the earth was divided between these two nations: Spain received
America and Portugal Asia, Africa and as became clear after its discovery, the country of
Brazil (Vogel, 16). Apparently, only a year after Columbus’ first journey to the New World,
they distinguished the American from the Asian countries. Moreover, Columbus had made
two other visits to America before he died, so he must have known it was not India that he
had reached on 3 August 1492.
3.2
Spanish colonisation
After the Spanish discovery of America, it was not long before other European countries
started to gain interest in the New World as well. In the 1550’s and 60’s the first French ships
arrived in the Americas, later followed by the English. In this paper, however, the focus will
be on the Spanish colonisation of America.
The indigenous people that Columbus and other sailors that went to the New World
encountered were described as friendly and good-natured people. Américo Vespucio, who
sailed to the Americas after Columbus and discovered more islands and also explored the
interior parts of the continent, even went so far as to describe the “Indians” as “unspoiled,
naked humans who do not think in terms of property, everything they have is shared and they
do not know any greed” (Hintzen, 29). Thomas More later read this description and it inspired
him to write Utopia, a treatise on a non-existing ideal world. The image Columbus and
Vespucio gave of the original inhabitants of America is a highly implausible one. The Aztecs
in Mexico for example, or the Incas in Peru were highly cultivated tribes, yet the Spanish
conquerors preferred to see them as innocent, helpless and naïve creatures. The native
American tribes had fought many wars among each other (Keen, 25-28). Furthermore, they
“had technological and organisation skills that Europeans could recognise and admire”
(Greenblatt, 9). The “Indians” were neither naïve nor innocent and helpless. Yet the
Europeans felt far superior. According to Stephen Greenblatt, the fact that the Christian
conquerors thought they possessed “an absolute and exclusive religious truth” must have
played a major part in their feelings of superiority to virtually all the people they encountered
(Greenblatt, 9). Later on, in literature there were still mainly two ways of depicting the
original inhabitants of the Americas, either as the “noble savage” or as the “wild cannibal”
(Lasarte and Wellinga, 15). Apparently, the western world rather created a distorted image of
the victims of the colonisation process, than seeing them as normal human beings. The
depiction of the “Indians” by the western world is the beginning of the paternalistic attitude of
the colonising west towards the inhabitants of their colonies.
However, the question remains how it was possible then that these highly cultivated tribes
were conquered and subordinated in less than half a century after Columbus’s discovery, or,
as Latin American people prefer to put it, his encounter with the New World. As has been said
before, the Spanish conquerors came to America to find gold for the Spanish crown, yet the
amount of gold that Columbus brought back from his first visit was disappointing. He had
received a small quantity from the “Indians” in exchange for western goods. The apparent
lack of gold in the Americas did not in the least hinder the Spanish hunger for wealth and on
the following Spanish visits the search for gold did not pass off as friendly anymore (Hintzen,
27). The “Indians” were extorted or forced to find gold and it was then, that the colonisers
began to use their cruel subjection methods. The torturing of “Indians” and the use of
bloodhounds was a common practice, and killed many ‘Indians’. However, there are many
other theories to explain the success of the European conquerors in the submission of the
indigenous people. According to historian and Latin America expert H. Ph. Vogel their main
advantage lay in the Spanish attitude. They were confident and determined and this would
have overwhelmed the original inhabitants. Moreover, the Spanish had superior metal
weapons, whereas the “Indians” fought with strings and bows and arrows (Vogel, 36).
Another explanation for the Western superiority comes from Bill Ashcroft, who says that
because the western colonisers brought with them the written language they automatically, as
has been explained in chapter 1, gained power over the means of communication and thus
could construe how the “Indians” saw their conquerors (79). The “Indians” were superstitious
people and the Spanish conquerors took advantage of this. For example, there was a myth
among the Aztec tribes that one day the Aztec god Quetzalcóatl would send men with beards
on horses to conquer the Aztec realm in the name of their Saviour. They mistook the Spanish
conquerors for the envoys of the Aztec god and therefore did not offer much resistance. As a
consequence, the Spanish could easily overpower them (Vogel, 21-2 and Hintzen, 45). The
Spanish conqueror Hernán Cortes also used the Indian superstition to his own advantage; he
buried the horses that were killed in the battle so that the “Indians” would think they were
supernatural. The “Indians” took horsemen for supernatural centaurs. If they would see the
dead horses they would know the Spanish settlers were not supernatural, and this would
weaken the position of the Spaniards (Ashcroft 1989, 81). From the beginning, the colonisers
controlled what the “Indians” knew about them. They censured books so that the colonised
people would not find out about things like the Inquisition. I will come back to this and other
kinds of censorship later on in this chapter. In addition to the superiority of the conquerors
caused by their advanced weaponry, their attitude and the god-like image they created of
themselves, another reason why such a small number of western people could submit
thousands, or even millions of “Indians,” is the fact that they brought with them many
contagious diseases that killed and weakened many native Americans.
From the beginning of the Spanish colonisation, natives from all over the Americas were
forced to work as slaves for the settlers under poor circumstances. When the Spanish clergy
found out about these practices, they were shocked and in 1512 they regulated by law that the
“Indians” could not be kept as slaves. Instead, the conquerors each got a number of “Indians”
under their care who had to work for these so-called encomenderos (a word that stems from
the Spanish verb for to entrust) in exchange for good care and protection (Vogel, 19) The
Spanish colonisers were convinced that the “Indians” needed guidance and schooling and
again this is an example of how from the beginning the Western colonisers took on a
paternalistic attitude towards non-European people.
One of the goals of the Spanish conquerors was to get complete control over the “Indians”
and turn them into civilised, European-like human beings. They forced on them their values,
their way of life, their catholic religion and their language. The conversion of the “Indians” to
the Christian faith went fairly smoothly. According to Vogel, thanks to their religion and
philosophy, the “Indians” could easily fit the new religion and bureaucracy into their own
tradition (37). However, the settlers succeeded so less rapidly in the main aspect of the
submission process, namely the forcing of their language on the “Indians.” The “Indians,” and
especially the Inca and Aztec tribes, were well aware of the fact that they could preserve their
own identity by means of keeping their own language. They refused to speak Castilian in the
privacy of their homes and it was not until the nineteenth century that the Spanish language
dominated in Latin America (Vogel, 38).
The resistance to the new language was not the only way in which the “Indians” rebelled
against their oppressors. The “Indian” slaves also annoyed their masters by working very
slowly which made the encomenderos believe that Indian people were weak and lazy.
Therefore, and because they had almost entirely extirpated the “Indians,” the Spanish and
Portuguese conquerors decided to turn to Africa for slaves. They moved thousands of
involuntary African slaves to the New World which eventually resulted in Latin America
becoming the largest racial melting pot in history (Vogel, 38). Racial intermixture in Latin
America caused a hierarchy in society based on skin colour and ethnic origin. The
peninsulares, the people that were born on the Iberian Peninsula, were at the top of the
hierarchy. After them came the creoles, the second generation of Europeans born in the New
World. They were the ones who strove to look and act as European as possible since they
were always suspected to have mixed blood. Third on the social scale came the “Indians” and
the people of mixed race. Black people occupied the lowest position in the hierarchy, they
were poor and had to work in the mines (Keen 1996, 113-14).
Besides the racial intermixture, the colonisation of Latin America had many other farreaching consequences. A large number of new species of flora and fauna were imported into
Latin America from Europe and the other way around. However, most important and
deplorable was the demographic disaster caused by the colonisation; the destruction of the
environment, the ravaging of the landscape, the depopulation of the countryside, and the death
of millions of “Indians.”
3.3
Independence
From the beginning, the colonisers in the New World were faced with resistance on the
part of the enslaved “Indians.” Slave uprisings and other revolts were very common, but it
was not until the eighteenth century that some of these riots resulted in wars of independence
and led to the rise of new independent states. Especially the French occupation of Spain in
1808 gave rise to social unrest in the Spanish colonies. Particularly the Creoles were afraid
that the ideas of the French Enlightenment would also dominate the Spanish colonies and that
this would end slavery for example. That is why they tried to come to power, an attempt in
which they largely failed. When the French were defeated, the new Spanish king Ferdinand
wanted to reclaim Spanish authority over the colonies but the colonial power had already been
too heavily undermined and the liberation armies had achieved great successes. Haiti was the
first country to regain its independence. In the following years many other countries got rid of
their oppressor up until the liberation of Uruguay in 1828, when most of Latin America had
been delivered from foreign oppression. However, Latin America has never been completely
liberated. Puerto Rico is still an American colony just like the Antilles still belong to the
Netherlands. It is safe to say, however, that in 1828, the Spanish no longer controlled Latin
America. What followed were years of civil war. Latin America had to find its own identity.
The individual countries needed political, economic and cultural models and strangely enough
they turned to Europe to find them. Instead of diminishing, the dependency on Europe grew
after the gain of independence. Many Latin American countries started to depend on England
in economic terms because it invested vast amounts in Latin America. As a result the Latin
American prosperity improved. Latin America also started to attract European immigrants,
and foreign influence and interference grew stronger. All these developments gave rise to
many nationalistic movements that were afraid Latin America would be ruined by materialism
and lose its national identity (Vogel, 178). The intellectual José Enrique Rodó used
Shakespeare’s The Tempest to express his worries about Latin America’s future. In his essay
Ariel (1900) he uses Caliban and Ariel to show the contrasts in Latin American society. For
him, Ariel represented absolute good, beauty, love and aversion to financial gain and
materialism. Caliban on the other hand represented the sinister desire to gain more and more
money and goods and the urge to shut out the human and valuable aspects of human beings.
With this comparison, Rodó expressed his fears that Latin America was focussing too much
on prosperity when it should be focussing on culture and beauty (Vogel, 179-80). Many
intellectuals agreed and more attention was devoted to Latin American culture and the
national identity of the different countries within the continent.
3.4
Latin American literature
Although economically, Latin America never contributed much to the international trade,
its influence on contemporary culture and society has grown considerably in the last century,
especially in world music and literature. In the following part of this chapter I will discuss
Latin American literature. I will deal with the influence on it of the colonisation process and
discuss how after a long struggle, the boom in the 1960’s caused Latin American literature to
finally gain international recognition.
Although, as I have explained before, experts on colonisation, like Bill Ashcroft, say
that the colonised people did not have a written language like the Europeans did, they did
have some sort of writing. The Maya and Aztec tribes had a form of writing which was not
alphabetical, but consisted of a combination of pictography, ideograms and phonetic symbols.
With this writing, they created Codices, which were holy books (Hart, 8-10). I think many
researchers dismiss such literary works because they discuss literature from a European point
of view. Just because the “Indians” did not know our alphabet, does not mean they did not
know writing or books. I believe the Spanish conquerors did not bring the written word to the
Americas, they brought their own written word and dismissed the written tradition of the
indigenous people. According to Stephen M. Hart, in his book on Latin American literature,
any expression of Amerindian culture was prohibited during the colonial era (Hart, 10). The
Codices as well as Aztec poetry were burned and destroyed. According to Lasarte and
Wellinga, 1492 did not entail the end of Indian literature. Although many valuable things
were destroyed, what survived the destruction of the Spanish colonisers was the oral culture,
which was particularly rich among the Indian tribes. Unfortunately, the mestizaje or racial
intermixture, later also put an end to this tradition. It was not until the twentieth century that
Indian literature could flourish again (Lasarte and Wellinga, 14-15).
Printing came to Spain in 1470 and the Spanish colonisers used this as a tool in the
colonisation process. During the colonial period there was a great appetite for reading.
However, the Spanish crown determined which books were allowed to be exported to the
colonies. Books on the Inquisition or the colonisation were banned. The books that did
manage to reach the Latin American continent were written in Spanish and read by many
people, which contributed to the establishment of Spanish as the national language (Baker,
508).
Bill Ashcroft in his book on post-colonial literature describes the influence the colonisation
processes have on the native language and literature of the colonies. He focuses on the
English language and says that the colonial power “installs a ‘standard’ version of the
metropolitan language as the norm, and marginalizes all ‘variants’ as impurities” (Ashcroft,
7). Ashcroft furthermore refers to standard British English as English and to the language
spoken in the colonies as english. The English dialect spoken for example in India or Jamaica
would be called english whereas a speaker from London speaks English. The language of
these english speakers would be seen as inferior to English. According to Ashcroft English is
the centre and english the periphery (8). I believe the same distinction can be made between
Spanish and spanish, whereby Iberian Spanish would be called Spanish while the language or
dialects spoken in Cuba or Venezuela would be called spanish. According to Mona Baker in
the Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, the Spanish colonisers saw the diversity
of the languages as the greatest obstacle in the evangelisation process. That is why at first they
introduced a general language to intermediate between the Spanish and the indigenous
languages. The latter were highly neglected and this eventually resulted in the loss of many
languages and dialects (507). Just like the English colonisers, the Spanish conquerors’ main
goal was to make Spanish the only language spoken in their colonies. Ashcroft also explains
how these practices influenced the literature in the colonies. He says the development of postcolonial literatures goes through a number of stages. First, the literature is written in the
language of the coloniser and usually produced by representatives of the colonial power. Then
it is produced by people the coloniser approves of and on subjects the imperial power
consents to. It takes a long time for post-colonial culture to get to the last stage in postcolonial
literature where they finally break free from their oppressor and their colonial past (Ashcroft
1989, 4-6).
I think the stages that Ascroft describes in English post-colonial literatures, can also be
applied to the situation in Latin America. At first, the literature of the indigenous people was
prohibited and destroyed. The colonised people were only allowed to read books that came
from the imperial world and were written in the language of the coloniser. Until 1535, nothing
was published in Latin America and after that, the book industry and in fact the whole
intellectual industry depended on Madrid. Even when literature on the Spanish conquest was
no longer prohibited, the intellectual traffic on the subject was still largely one-way, namely
from Spain. According to Hart, there are only twelve known texts that deal with the
colonisation in the Americas from an Indian perspective (Hart, 21). This proves that Madrid is
still largely in charge when it comes to the publishing industry. Lawrence Venuti in his book
Rethinking Translation, discusses the hegemony of the American and British publishing
houses. He says they are the ones that decide what books are translated and they are also the
ones that decide that most English works are translated into other languages and that not many
foreign books are translated into English. According to him: “it can be said that AngloAmerican publishing has been instrumental in producing readers who are aggressively
monolingual and culturally parochial while reaping the economic benefits of successfully
imposing Anglo-American cultural values on a sizeable foreign readership” (Venuti, 6). Much
of this can also be said of the Spanish publishing world. To this day, Spain still holds an
unnaturally tight grip on the publishing market in Latin America. According to Laura
Calabrese in her article on translation politics in Latin America, neither the Latin American
national identity nor the varieties of Spanish spoken there are given much attention. Any
writing that deviates from what is done in Madrid is condemned, not openly but in such a way
that it simply remains unpublished. This has caused many Latin American writers to apply
some sort of neutral language which in fact is a form of self-censorship in order to get
published (Calabrese, 14).
The fact that Spain’s influence on Latin American literature was not always to the
disadvantage of Latin America, became clear in the 1960s. The Spanish publishers brought
Latin American fiction to the attention of the rest of Europe by awarding their literary prizes
to Latin American writers. For example, the Barcelona publishers Seix Barral awarded their
literary prizes to Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes and Guillermo Cabrera Infante.
Furthermore, in 1961 Jorge Luís Borges received the Formenter prize, which he had to share
with Samuel Beckett (France, 433). Latin American works gained huge popularity all over the
world and flourished, especially in English translation. Many writers moved to English
speaking countries and also became near-native speakers of English. Eventually, this caused
them to also have an influence on literature written in English. They encouraged authors to
experiment with the narrative and this led to the construction of a canon of Latin American
works in English that had a considerable impact on writing in English (France 2000, 434). It
was during this period that the role of the translator was discussed again. A role that had been
particularly
important
throughout
Latin
American
history
but
remained
largely
unacknowledged until a few decades ago. The following paragraphs will deal with the role of
translation in Latin American history and contemporary culture.
3.5
Latin America and translation
On the continent that Columbus arrived at in 1492, there were about 1000 languages of
which only half survived the Spanish colonisation. This great variety of languages in the
Americas entailed the need for interpreters from the onset of the Spanish conquest. In the
beginning the Spanish settlers used interpreters to communicate with the ‘Indians.’ Later on in
the colonisation process they mainly used interpretation as a tool in the evangelisation
process. Sometimes, interpreters were kidnapped and brought to Spain to learn Spanish
(Baker, 506). The role of the interpreters was taken seriously by the Spaniards and in 1563
they received a professional status. Interpreters had to take an oath and there were laws to
assure their honesty. Interpreters could also be accused of perjury and get fined (Baker 1998,
508). Translation in the first years of the Spanish conquest did not solely consist of
interpreters, there were also some cases of written translations. The settlers translated some
indigenous works, but later these translations were destroyed again as part of the Spanish
campaign to Europeanise Latin America. It was not until after the gain of independence that
translation flourished again in the Americas.
As I said before, the search for a new identity that followed after the successful struggle
for independence led to the growing interest of Latin America in Europe and North-America.
Everything Spanish was rejected and this led to an increase of interest in other cultures. An
era of cultural exchange began, so it is not surprising that in this period translation bloomed
again and many translations and translators acquired a high status (Baker 1998, 509). At first,
mostly French works were translated, later English became the main language out of which
translations were carried out. The translations were usually very close to the source text and
according to Alfredo Michel Modenessi, this is still the case in modern day Latin America. He
says: “many Latin Americans still regard ‘original’ texts as immutable authority. This
provokes an abundance of literal translations whereby ‘global’ linguistic and cultural praxis
penetrates daily experience in its original syntax but in the native lexis, often distorting and
overwriting our efforts at constructing identity” (in Hoenselaars, 242).
The practise of translation was further stimulated in Latin America by the establishment of
newspapers, publishing houses and universities. Today, Latin America is still very active in
the field of translation. There are some but not many training centres for translations and since
1980 there has been an increase in the number of national and international events dealing
with translation. The profession, however, lacks status throughout the continent and this has
given rise to an intense struggle for recognition by Latin American translators. I believe this is
also one of the reasons why the radical views on translation, discussed in chapter 1, came into
being in Latin America. All the radical views discussed by Bassnett and Trivedi seem to have
to do with originality. Some Latin American translators reject originality as a whole, others
just stress the fact that originality does not mean superiority. The imperial powers always saw
themselves as the original and thus better version of mankind, while their colonies were
merely inferior copies. The practise of translation is also discussed in these terms and
therefore translators from a country with a colonial background are bound to be more
sensitive about being discussed in terms of inferiority and the high status of the original
because their country has been discussed in these terms for centuries. Furthermore, there
seems to be another factor at work. In any translation situation there are usually two
languages involved. In Latin America, however, there seems to be a third player: Spain. The
Latin American translator has a low status in three respects: they were the inferior party in the
colonisation process, as translators they are inferior to the ‘original’ author and lastly, their
language is inferior to Iberian Spanish. There was bound to come a time when Latin
American translators revolted against their triple inferior status. Latin American translators,
from the twentieth century up to this day, have put great emphasis on the creative freedom of
the translator. Especially in the 1970s, they have become “confident in asserting their right to
discuss their creative role in the imaginative transformation of the texts they have translated”
(France, 434).
Latin America’s contribution to the field of translation studies is modest. There are a few
Latin American theorists in this field and I will briefly discuss the most important ones. The
Cuban Miquel Teurbe Tolon (1820-1870) was the first Latin American to write a didactic
work on translation, named Elementary Spanish Reader and Translator. Furthermore, there
are the ones discussed in chapter one because of their radical views on translation, like
Octavio Paz, Harold de Campos, and Carlos Fuentes. Another Latin American translation
‘theorist’ is Jorge Luís Borges. This well-known Latin American writer was also a prolific
translator and wrote several articles on the translation process, like “The Translators of The
Thousand and one Night” (1963). Translation is also a recurrent motif in his literary work; his
fictions include actual or imaginative translations and his characters are frequently
translators.2 Borges translated the works of Poe, Kafka, Hesse, Kipling, Melville, Gide,
Faulkner, Whitman, Woolf, Chesterton and many others. Borges held that translation can
improve an original and that an original should be allowed to be unfaithful to a translation.
According to Borges, a work of art has as many possible translations as it has possible
readings. He sees translation as “part of an endless cycle of infinite possibilities where the
idea of a ‘definitive text’ only appeals to the weary or religious” (France, 433-34). Borges is
also one of the few Latin American writers who wrote about Shakespeare. He never translated
the Bard but he did write the famous essay “Everything and Nothing” about him. In the next
part of this chapter I will discuss Shakespeare in Latin America. I will give an overview of
what has been done and make clear that Madrid is also dominant in this field which leads to
unnatural practices in Shakespearean performance.
3.6
Latin America and Shakespeare
They say every country has its own Shakespeare but this is not the case for Latin America.
They do not have their own Shakespeare, they have Spain’s. A few of Shakespeare’s plays
were already well known in the Latin American theatres at the beginning of the countries’
independence, either in their original or in French or Italian translations. Hamlet was the first
play to reach the Latin American continent. In Argentina and Uruguay, productions already
began in the 1810’s, by which Hamlet was translated and produced by Luis Morante. In 1821,
Hamlet was first staged in Mexico, soon followed by Othello, Macbeth and King Lear. At the
beginning of the twentieth century interest in other plays also began to grow. In 1903 The
Taming of the Shrew was first staged in Mexico by Emilio Thuillier and other plays like A
Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Merchant of Venice made their way to the stage (Dobson
and Wells, 251). Spanish translations of Shakespeare came to Latin America in the beginning
of the nineteenth century via translations and productions that originated in Spain. These
versions were already in print and are nowadays still used by publishers or directors either
because they do not have enough money or because they are just ignorant of the fact that there
2
In The Immortal the protagonist who has lived for many centuries regains knowledge of poems he had once written, and
had almost forgotten, by reading modern translations. Furthermore, in the short story Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote
the central character is a translator. According to George Steiner, this story is “the most acute, most concentrated commentary
anyone has offered on the business of translation” ( http://www.vanderbilt.edu/vupress/kristal2.htm ).
are other options. Just like elsewhere, in Latin America Shakespeare’s plays have been the
subject of adaptation and experimentation. For example, Mary Vázquez adapted Hamlet for
the company El Galpón in the early 1990’s. Recently, there have also been translations and
performances of Shakespeare in indigenous languages.3 However, many Latin American
adaptations or even translations remain largely unknown. Many productions still rely on
Iberian Spanish translations. There is a “standard” version of Shakespeare’s complete works
by the Spaniard Luis Astrana Marín, printed in the early twentieth century (Modenessi in
Hoenselaars, 246-48). Even if people do use other translations, these usually also come from
Spain. Several Latin American writers have translated Shakespeare to show that it is possible
to read and perform Shakespeare without having to rely on Iberian translations. Only some
have become well-known like the Chilean Pablo Neruda’s Romeo and Juliet or Mexican
novelist Luisa J. Hernández’s King Lear. None have approached the task systematically
(Dobson and Wells, 252). There are only two large projects that have aimed at producing the
entire canon. There is the Proyecto Shakespeare by the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de
México and of course the subject of this thesis, the Shakespeare by Writers project by the
Argentinian branch of the publishing house Norma Editorial. Both have received much
criticism and have been unable to change the fact that Latin American stage productions of
Shakespeare still mainly rely on Iberian Spanish translations. In the last part of this thesis, I
will try to analyse why Shakespeare by Writers has not succeeded in changing this curious
phenomenon. I call it a curious phenomenon because especially on stage it is very unnatural
for a Latin American actor to adopt Iberian norms, forms and rhythms. Modenessi calls this
practise of employing the “colonial” language “futile, non-creative, and unjust to the talent of
a live playwright” (in Hoenselaars, 243). I agree with him that it is a very unnatural practise
and to prove this, I will discuss the main differences between Latin American Spanish and
Iberian Spanish in this last part of this chapter.
3.7
Latin American Spanish versus Iberian Spanish
The Spanish that was spoken in Spain during the colonisation of Latin America was
Castilian. Spain had been conquered by Muslims who were defeated in 1492 by speakers of
different varieties of Spanish Romance. These speakers could not all understand each other,
3
For example, in Mexico in 1990 Juan Carlos Arvide directed a production of Hamlet translated into the Purepecha
language. The play was performed entirely by members of the native community of Zacán (Dobson and Wells, 251).
so it is thought that a levelling process took place whereby regional differences were
abandoned and linguistic elements were fused into a new manner of speaking which could be
understood by all. This language became the language of the court and thus the language of
the Spanish conquerors of Latin America. However, there were also many people from
Andalusia that moved to the New World and therefore, there are linguists who argue that
there are two major categories of Latin American dialect: those resembling Castilian (spoken
in Mexico and Guatemala for instance) and those resembling Andalusia (spoken in the
Caribbean and the costal zone of Latin America) (Greet Cotton and Sharp, 81).
According to the linguists Eleanor Greet Cotton and John M. Sharp, languages that have
been transplanted to other countries all go through similar patterns. First, they go through a
stage of levelling. Speakers of the Iberian dialects will erase differences for a better
understanding in the New World and the result of this is that the colonised people learn to
speak the simplified version of the standard language of the coloniser. In Latin America, this
was Castilian and later also the Spanish from Andalusia (Greet Cotton and Sharp, 83).
Secondly, transplanted languages also share their propensity to retain traditional forms
long after these have been abandoned in their country of origin. Latin American Spanish for
example has a number of archaic features that phonetically resemble sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century more than present day Spanish. An example of this is the adding of an –s
to the second person singular in the Indefinido (a Spanish past tense). Dijiste (you said) in
Latin American Spanish becomes dijistes. A similar process occurred with many nouns. In
Latin America many words still have the original meaning from centuries ago whereas in
Spain these words are no longer used in their original senses (Greet Cotton and Sharp, 85).
Thirdly, transplanted languages are also influenced by the fact that they have to be spoken
in a new environment. In Latin America, therefore, they had to borrow words from the
indigenous languages for, for example, plants and animals that were unknown in Spain
(Greet-Cotton and Sharp, 86).
Lastly, transplanted languages differ from their original source because they are isolated
from it. Every language is subject to drift and when a group of speakers is cut off from the
linguistic mainland, this tendency is increased. The lexicon changes to the local demands. For
example, in Argentina people used to depend on their horse for their livelihood and social
prestige. That is why over 500 terms existed to describe a horse in detail. These words came
into being because the local society needed them. In Spain these words were not necessary
and therefore modern Iberian Spanish does not know them (Greet-Cotton and Sharp 1988,
87).
After explaining how differences between Iberian Spanish and Latin American Spanish
came into being, it seems worth investigating the main differences. I will refer to Latin
American Spanish as LAS and Iberian Spanish as IS.

LAS is a more homogeneous language than IS, especially among educated classes. In
IS there are more differences between the dialects.

There is a wide variety of intonational patterns in LAS, none of which correspond to
those in Spain. Linguists still disagree on the origin of these patterns but they all seem
to agree that it must come from the influence of several Indian languages. I believe this
difference is one of the most important ones when it comes to stage performances of
Shakespeare. Since the intonation is so different in LAS it is very unnatural for a Latin
American actor to read poetry in IS intonation.

Where IS uses tú for “you,” LAS uses vos. You talk in IB is tú hablas while in LAS it is
vos hablas. In some countries vos is used by all classes and it has replaced tú all
together, in others it is seen as uncultured or not used at all.

With regard to morphosyntax, periphrastic constructions are more popular in LAS.
LAS prefers the simple past (I went – Fui) whereas IS prefers the present perfect (I
have gone – He Ido).

Some verbs are intransitive in Spain that can be reflexive in LAS. Enfermar (to get ill)
becomes Enfermarse.

There are some minor differences when it comes to nouns. LAS for example prefers the
plural in the expression Qué horas son? (What time is it?, literary which hours are it?)

The most important difference between LAS and IS can be found in the lexicon. LAS
lexicon is unique in so many ways and the reason for this is the excess of indigenous
words used throughout Latin America that are unknown in Spain. Furthermore, there
are many words from IS that have received a different meaning in LAS. For example,
the word boda means wedding in IS whereas is LAS it now means a party held at
home.
(Greet-Cotton and Sharp, 145-51).
With this list of differences I hope to have made it clear that Latin American Spanish and
Iberian Spanish are no longer the same. There are some major differences that make it very
unnatural for a Latin American speaker to adopt the Iberian norms, something they are forced
to do on stage when performing Shakespeare.
In this chapter I have discusses a range of features of Latin American culture, society and
history, all of which I find important for a better understanding and appreciation of the project
Shakespeare by Writers. In the next chapter I will explain the project in greater depth, before I
go on to discuss two of its translations in chapter 5.
4.
Shakespeare by Writers
Before analysing the project’s translations, I will first provide some more information
about the Shakespeare by Writers project. I will discuss its initiator Marcelo Cohen, his
intentions with the project, his collaborators, their results and the criticism the project has
received. Furthermore, I will explain how the project can be seen in the context of
postcolonial translation, discussed in chapter two, and the new translation politics in Latin
America, discussed in chapter three.
4.1
The project
During the twenty years that the Argentinean Marcelo Cohen worked as a journalist and
translator, he regularly stumbled upon quotations from Shakespeare. It became clear to him
that the English playwright still had a considerable influence on present-day culture and
society, even in Latin America. Cohen wanted to gain more in-depth knowledge about what
had been done in the field of Shakespeare translation in Latin America and, unsurprisingly, he
very soon came across Luis Astrana Marín’s translations. Cohen soon found that Astrana
Marín’s translations were no longer suitable for contemporary Latin American readers.
According to him, Astrana Marín paid too much intention to the sound and rhyme of the plays
and not enough to the storylines. Furthermore, Cohen believed that so much had happened in
the field of Shakespeare studies that Astrana Marín’s translations had become old-fashioned.4
Other, less well known, Spanish versions of Shakespeare’s work did not satisfy Cohen either
because they had been mostly published in Madrid, and were therefore mainly in Iberian
Spanish. Cohen concluded that somebody had to come up with a new Latin American
translation of Shakespeare’s complete works and he decided to take on the job himself,
though not alone. In the short introduction Cohen added to the project’s translations he says
that he thought creative writers would be the most suitable to translate Shakespeare because
they were the ones that are most interested in Western literature, which still has an influence
on Latin America. Moreover, they have a sense of poetry, which is essential when translating
Shakespeare (Cohen, 3).
After a long and difficult search, Cohen finally found nine Spanish, eight Argentinean,
seven Columbian, four Mexican, four Chilean, four Uruguayan, three Cuban, one Bolivian,
4
www.territoriodigital.com/Notas/SED/modelo.asp?2000/03
one North-American and one Venezuelan writer, who were prepared to collaborate with him
on the project which was named Shakespeare por Escritores / Shakespeare by Writers
(Calabrese, 17). Cohen translated a few works, but he mainly acted as the project’s editor.
Cohen edited every play and according to him there was much debate about the interpretation
of each play. However, each translator was allowed the freedom to create his or her own
Spanish Shakespeare and therefore the project’s translations have become separate works.
The only thing all translations have in common is the fact that they are all written in
varieties of Spanish. With the project Cohen wanted to achieve a number of goals. First, he
wanted to create contemporary and readable translations which were also suitable for stage
productions. Secondly, he aspired to stay close to Shakespeare and make faithful translations
without losing any of the play’s content. Cohen stresses that the translations are not
adaptations of any sort. Thirdly, Cohen wanted to bring Shakespeare closer to contemporary
Latin American readers without turning the plays into fast-food Shakespeare; the plays still
had to challenge the readers and make them think about what they read. Shakespeare had to
remain difficult.5 Lastly, and maybe most importantly, with the project Cohen wanted to show
that Spanish is a coordinating term for many varieties (Calabrese, 18). In the opening pages of
the translations, Cohen says he wanted to demonstrate the Spanish language as a whole at the
end of the twentieth century (Cohen, 3). That is why Cohen also used translators from Spain.
Although the project is Latin American and Cohen wanted to challenge the idea of Iberian
Spanish as the standard language, he felt that by ruling out Iberian Spanish he could not create
a truly Spanish project suitable for all speakers of Spanish, a decision that in my opinion may
have contributed to the project’s lack of success. I will come back to this thought later in this
thesis.
As has been said above, Cohen gave the translators the freedom to create their own
Spanish Shakespeare. The use of regional dialects was stimulated, yet restricted when it came
to the lexis because the translations had to stay readable to all speakers of Spanish and as has
been explained in the previous chapter, the meaning of a word can differ considerably from
one Spanish-speaking country to another. Cohen wanted the translators to approach
Shakespeare with an open mind, without prejudices. He wanted them to let go of what they
knew about Shakespeare and focus on the text. A good translator of Shakespeare, in Cohen’s
eyes, understands poetry and studies it closely. He or she has to try to find a pattern even if
5
www.territoriodigital.com/Notas/SED/modelo.asp?2000/03
this seems to missing.6 In 1999, the project’s first translations were published by the
Argentinean branch of the publishing house Norma Editorial. Within 5 years more than forty
of Shakespeare’s works, including all the plays, the Sonnets and Venus and Adonis were
published.
4.2
Shakespeare by Writers and the new translation politics in Latin America
As became clear in the previous chapter, the Shakespeare by Writers project is unique in
its attempt to translate the complete works of Shakespeare for a Latin American audience, yet
the fact that it came into being at the end of the 1990s is not altogether surprising. In chapter
one, which discussed post-colonial translation, it became apparent that especially in the
1990’s a change occurred in the field of translation studies by which the high status of the
original in comparison to the translation was challenged and many fields of study started to
move away from the idea of literary greatness and defied the canonization of Western writers.
This change led to the radicalisation of the ideas on translation in countries with a colonial
background, and particularly in Latin America. I believe the fact that the Shakespeare by
Writers project came into existence in this decade is not a mere coincidence but a result of the
new ideologies that arose in postcolonial cultures after centuries of oppression by the West.
Many things Cohen says coincide with the radical ideas of the Latin American intellectuals
discussed by Bassnett and Trivedi. For example, the translators Cohen used for his project
were all creative writers because he thought they were the most suitable to translate
Shakespeare and thereby create their own Shakespeare. This links up with Harold de
Campos’s belief that a translator is not a violator of the original but a writer in his own right
and an “all-powerful reader” who can do with a text what he or she wants. Furthermore,
although Cohen wants to stay close to Shakespeare and even uses the term “faithfulness” in
describing his goals for the translations, his view that each generation needs to translate
Shakespeare anew and that a literary work needs translations to remain timeless, clearly
coincides with the ideas of Carlos Fuentes and Octavio Paz and their aversion to the original
as superior to the translation. These ideas probably weighed even more heavily in Cohen’s
decision that Latin America needed a new Shakespeare translation than his personal interest in
the English playwright. In an interview, Marcelo Cohen admits to this ulterior motive for the
6
On-line interview with Marcelo Cohen
http://educ.ar/educar/superior/guia_de_estudios/verdoc.jsp?url=S_B_P_PENSAR/COHEN.HTML
project.7 He says he wanted to effect a change in the translation practice in Argentina.
According to Cohen, there is almost no local production in the field of translation in
Argentina. Practically all the translations that come out in Argentina are published in Spain or
by foreign publishing houses in Argentina. Argentinean publishers do not have the resources
to buy books, let alone translate them. With the Shakespeare by Writers project, Cohen
wanted to stir something up in the Argentinean and possibly Latin American publishing
world. He wanted to prove that Latin America does not depend on Spain for translations. Who
could be more appropriate for the task than Shakespeare, an author so central to the canon of
Western literature? It is almost as if Cohen felt that only the grandest gesture could bring
about a change in Latin America and therefore chose to translate the most famous Western
writer. The cannibalistic metaphor used by Bassnett and Trivedi comes to mind here. With his
project, Cohen devoured the canon of Western literature in order to break free from Western
oppression, or, in this case, Spanish domination of the translation field.
4.3
Criticism
Even though Cohen’s intentions sound utterly noble and deserve much respect, the project
did not come close to achieving a status similar to the Shakespeare translations of Astrana
Marín. The translations can be easily obtained from the Norma editorial website and are
relatively cheap, yet there does not seem to be a notable interest in them. Information about
the project on the internet, as well as in other areas, is scarce. The information that is available
is either promotional, found on the few websites that also sell the translations, or rather
critical and of a more journalistic nature. Especially Shakespeareans are particularly critical
about the project. In the last part of this chapter I will discuss some of the criticism that has
been expressed about the Shakespeare by Writers project.
Alfredo Michel Modenessi, who has been mentioned in chapter two as a Mexican
translator of Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost, finds the translations “conventional and
uneven,” and says that “despite claims to the contrary,” the translations are “hardly fit for
stage delivery” (in Hoenselaars, 247). Moreover, he denounces the translations’ lack of
scholarship. He says about the project’s translations:
introductions are limited to five pages, notes kept to absurd minimums
7
On-line interview with Marcelo Cohen
http://educ.ar/educar/superior/guia_de_estudios/verdoc.jsp?url=S_B_P_PENSAR/COHEN.HTML
source-texts unacknowledged, textual issues ignored, and nuances and
simple passages more than occasionally misinterpreted.
(in Hoenselaars, 247)
Furthermore, Modenessi also criticizes the unsuccessful interpolation of local norms by the
Latin American contributors to the project in, for example, Romeo and Juliet. The translators
of this play, like most translators of the project, used Iberian Spanish, yet at some places in
the translation they ineffectively employed Latin American norms. For example, in the
translation Montague says to his wife “¡Déjame, no me agarres!” (27) (“Leave me, let me
go!”). The verb “agarrar” which means “to hold” is widely used in Latin America because the
original meaning of the word “coger” (“to hold”) in many Latin American countries has been
replaced by the sense of “to fuck.” In some countries, like Argentina and Chile, this has even
become the only meaning. The translators of Romeo and Juliet wanted to avoid the use of this
word, and used the Latin American verb “agarrar,” which is a particularly unrefined
expression. As a result, the refined Montague’s exclamation to his wife sounds particularly
out of character, since the rest of his speech is highly elaborate and refined. (Modenessi, some
notes). This example shows that the translators wanted to make a translation suitable for a
Latin American audience, yet because they, curiously enough, mainly used Iberian Spanish,
the interpolation of Latin American norms is highly ineffective, out of place and sometimes
even deplorable.
Laura Calabrese in her article about the project, mainly focuses on the project’s
difficulties. Firstly, she mentions the fact that there is no stylistic or linguistic unity between
the different varieties of Spanish in which the translations have been written. She compares
the project’s attempt to trying to translate Shakespeare’s work into French, using translators
from France, Quebec, the Maghreb, Francophone Sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean (1718). With this comparison she wants to illustrate that Cohen’s intentions with the project are
particularly difficult if not impossible to realize.
Articles on the internet reflect rather similar opinions. There seems to be overall respect
for Cohen’s courage to translate Shakespeare, but much attention is paid to the project’s
flaws. Silvio Mattoni says that the translations have been carried out with such freedom that
only at their best moments, can they match the creativity of the original. He further mentions
the project’s difficulties with translating Shakespeare’s blank verse. There are various
solutions, ranging from free verse to the eleven syllable line, yet only the latter is successful,
according to Mattoni.8
In addition to the lack of information about the Shakespeare by Writers project, an
explanation for the project’s lack of international success can also be found in the fact that the
little information that can be found about the project is almost entirely written in Spanish and,
if in English, by Latin American authors. There does not seem to be a notable interest in the
project outside Latin America. Apparently, Shakespeareans did not consider the translations
an important contribution to their field of study.
In the next and last part of this thesis, I will study two of the project’s translations and try
to discover why the project may not have been successful in achieving its goals. Furthermore,
I will sketch some parameters in order to discover what the international lack of interest in the
project is based on and if it can be justified.
8
www.lamaquinadeltiempo.com/temas/traducc/shakes02.htm
5.
The Analysis of La Tempestad and Como Les Guste
In this final part of the thesis I will analyse two translations by the Shakespeare by Writers
project. Firstly, I will discuss La Tempestad, the translation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest by
Marcelo Cohen and Graciela Speranza, who are both from Argentina. In the second part, I
will discuss Como Les Guste, Shakespeare’s As You Like It by the Cuban Omar Pérez. My
intention with the analysis of the translations is twofold. First, I want to look at them from a
descriptive point of view. I want to know what the translators have done with the plays and to
what effect. Secondly, and more importantly, the analysis will uncover the cause of the
project’s lack of success. In addition, without ignoring the severe criticism the project has
received, I intend to turn the focus from what has been lost in the translation into what can be
gained from these translations. Especially translators of Shakespeare’s work have to deal with
critics that have a particularly normative attitude towards the translation of Shakespeare.
“Many studies of Shakespeare in translation are normative in that their perception of existing
translations is determined by a predefined concept of what translation is or should be” (Baker,
222). I believe it is more interesting to focus on the positive and interesting features of a
translation, than to discuss it only in terms of its inability to live up to the original.
The analysis of the two plays will be carried out in the same order. Firstly, I will look at
how the technical problems, which (Spanish) translators of Shakespeare generally come
across, have been dealt with. I will analyse how the translators handled typically
Shakespearean difficulties, like Shakespeare’s puns and ambiguities, the blank verse, the use
of thou versus you and the names of Shakespeare’s characters. Moreover, I will discuss the
specific use of language in The Tempest and As You Like It and the way this is reflected in the
Spanish translation. After discussing the more textual issues, I will proceed to focus on the
play’s plots, themes and central characters and the way they are portrayed in the translations.
Lastly, I will the discuss the translation strategies that have been used by the translators.
It will become clear that the two translations differ considerably, not in the least in quality,
and that the project can thus not be seen as a stylistic unity. Furthermore, I will show how the
analysis of these differences can help define what makes a translation (of Shakespeare)
successful. Moreover, it will become clear that Como Les Guste is the only translation of the
project that does not rely on Iberian Spanish, which is particularly curious for a translation
project that wants to defy the still existing dominance of Spain in Latin America.
Furthermore, the analysis will show the project’s lack of a scholarly approach, and lastly, it
will lay bare Cohen’s contradictory goals with the project.
5.1
La Tempestad
The Tempest is a play that, since its first performance in 1611, has confused and fascinated
its spectators. Prospero, the play’s central character, is the ruler of an island he stranded on
twelve years earlier after his brother Antonio usurped his dukedom. The magician Prospero
had been duke of Milan until Antonio, with help of Alonso, the king of Naples, arranged a
palace coup and abandoned Prospero and his then two-year-old daughter Miranda at sea.
Fortunately, the kind Gonzalo gave them supplies to survive and they found an island they
have lived on ever since. On the island they found two inhabitants, the deformed savage
Caliban and Ariel, an airy spirit, the latter imprisoned in a tree by Caliban’s mother, the witch
Sycorax. Both creatures were subsequently enslaved by Prospero.
When Prospero’s old enemies from Naples and Milan are nearby at sea, the magician
arranges for the ship to sink and its passengers to strand on his island to teach them a lesson.
The court party then splits into three and each group goes through different adventures on the
island. Sebastian, Alonso’s brother, and Antonio are waiting for an opportunity to kill
Gonzalo and Alonso and make Sebastian king. Ferdinand, Alonso’s son, thinks that all the
others are dead, and wanders around the island alone, until he meets Miranda. They fall in
love. The court jester Trinculo and the butler Stephano, both drunk, meet Caliban who
mistakes them for Gods and convinces them to kill Prospero and take over the island.
Meanwhile, Prospero has plans with each one of them and confronts them with the magic of
the island. At the end, Prospero confronts the court party with their sins, forgives everybody
and regains his dukedom. He is ready to leave the island and his magic behind, set Ariel free
and return to Milan. In his final words, he asks the audience to set him free with their
applause.
Especially the apparently light and happy ending to a play that seems to be about
vengeance, is something that has surprised its readers and spectators for centuries. The play
seems to generate more questions than it answers. Is it about Shakespeare saying farewell to
the theatre, or about the impossibilities of society? Has Shakespeare written a gloomy fable
about cultural differences? Or is the play perhaps essentially about colonisation? According to
Marcelo Cohen, The Tempest is all of these things. It is a play that can appeal to people of all
ages and ideologies, especially because there are so many blank spaces and unanswerable
questions. Whereas in the past Shakespeare had created many characters we can still relate to,
like Hamlet, it is difficult to see Shakespeare’s goal with this fantastic play and its ambiguous
characters (Cohen, 10).
I have chosen to discuss The Tempest because it is seen as Shakespeare’s colonial play and
I think it can be very interesting to see how Marcelo Cohen, the initiator of a project that is
trying to use translation as a means of breaking away from former colonial oppression, deals
with the play. The Tempest has been used by various Latin American intellectuals to suit their
political convictions and therefore I think a Latin American translation of the play can
generate some interesting ideas. It will be interesting to see how the play has been interpreted,
since, as was discussed in chapter two, this can be done in various and sometimes completely
opposite ways. Besides the general Shakespearean traits, the language in The Tempest is
characterised by repetition, the use of apostrophes to omit syllables and words in order to
compress the language and express emotion, and by compound words with the joined words
lacking any syntactical relationship. Another distinctive trait of the play is its reliance on
sounds, music and songs. After the discussion of the textual issues of the play, I will move on
and focus on certain interesting aspects of the play that came up in the analysis of the
translation. First I will discuss the play’s most important characters: Prospero, Caliban and
Ariel and their relationship with each other. It will be interesting to see how the characters
from Shakespeare’s “American” play are represented in a Latin American translation.
Furthermore, I will discuss Shakespeare’s references to religion in The Tempest. Lastly, I will
discuss Cohen and Speranza’s translation strategy.
5.1.1
Footnotes
The first thing I noticed when analysing Cohen and Speranza’s translation of The Tempest,
was the fact that they have not used any footnotes, line-numbers or indicators of the acts and
scenes on each page. The omission of footnotes in some cases can be explained by the
translators’ simplifying translation method, which will be discussed later in this chapter.
Frequently, the difficult word in the original which required an explanation in a footnote, has
in the Spanish translation been replaced by an easier and less ambiguous word. Secondly, in
other cases, the whole sentence has been altered in the translation, in order to clarify obscure
meanings of the original. Therefore, footnotes for clarification are no longer necessary. For
example, when Caliban is cursing Prospero he says: “A southwest blow on ye, and blister you
all o’er”(1.2.324-25). In the footnote in the Arden edition, it is explained that “winds from the
south-west often brought warm, damp air, with implications of unhealthiness” (173). Cohen
and Speranza, however, decided to explain Caliban’s obscure wish for a south-west wind in
the text itself, in contrast to in a footnote. In the translation Caliban says: “¡Que una racha de
viento calcinante les ampollo todo el cuerpo! (p.43) (“I wish a gust of burning wind would
blister all of your body”). In other cases, however, where the translators did not explain the
meaning of a word or sentence, the absence of footnotes can be considered a loss. Textual
nuances are not explained and this can result in misunderstandings on the part of the readers.
For example, Trinculo calls Caliban a “puppy-headed monster” (2.2.151), which has led some
people to believe Caliban’s has a dog-like head. The Arden edition, therefore, has placed a
critical note, saying that “puppy-headed” can also mean “stupid-looking” and that this is most
likely the meaning Shakespeare intended here (216). In the Spanish translation, however,
“puppy-headed” has been translated as “con cabeza de perro” (83) (“with a dog’s head”).
Without an explanation that this description should not be taken literally, the Spanish reader
could think that Caliban looks like a dog. Furthermore, when Prospero calls for Caliban to
come out of his cave, he calls him “thou tortoise” (1.2.317). This has led to the misconception
that Caliban should be visualised as a giant turtle, when Shakespeare is here referring to
Caliban’s slowness. Therefore, in the Arden edition, a critical note has been added to explain
this and to prevent readers from thinking that Caliban is not human (172), when there is
sufficient evidence in the text to assume that Caliban is essentially human.9 The omission of
footnotes not only leads to misunderstandings,10 but the reader is also deprived of the play’s
numerous multiple layers and double meanings. For example, Shakespeare intended a parallel
in the play between Stephano’s liquor and Prospero’s magic, both spirits. It might be hard to
recognise this parallel and, therefore, the Arden edition points it out by means of a footnote.
In Cohen and Speranza’s translation there is no footnote to explain the parallel and therefore
their target audience is likely to overlook this double layer.
In addition to the omission of footnotes, the translation’s lack of line-numbers and the fact
that the acts and scenes are only indicated once, at the beginning of each act or scene, and not
at the top of each page, also shows the project’s lack of scholarship. Now, an unscholarly
approach to Shakespeare is not necessarily a wrong approach. It would not be a problem if the
translator’s main goal was to simply tell Shakespeare’s story and his main focus was on the
play’s plot and storyline. In such instances, a scholarly approach to the play is not necessary.
However, as became apparent in chapter four, Cohen did strive for the translations of his
project to become the new complete works for this generation of Latin American readers.
9
For more information on textual evidence for Caliban’s humanity, see Vaughan and Vaughan’s Shakespeare’s Caliban 7-15
Julia Reinhard Lupton also stresses how important it is to realise that Caliban is human, especially since the play’s other characters
and even the readers exclude him from the common lot of humanity. According to her, Caliban’s “creaturely monstrosity foils any
normative readings of this humanity which would raise Caliban into an exemplar of basic drives.” Caliban is the monstrous
exception to the human norm (3).
10
With his project, he wanted to replace Astrana Marin’s work, which is the standard version of
Shakespeare’s complete works, used by scholars and directors throughout Latin America.
Knowing that this was the purpose of Cohen’s project, critical footnotes, concerning textual
nuances and interpretation possibilities, should not have been discarded from the translations.
5.1.2
Stage directions
A second striking aspect of Cohen and Speranza’s translation is the fact that they added
numerous stage directions to the play. These additional stage directions, for example, clarify
to whom a certain line is spoken: “a los cortesanos” (22) (“to the courtiers”). Furthermore,
they indicate the specific way a phrase is uttered: “le susurra” (42) (“he whispers”). There are
also some stage directions regarding the play’s setting: “La Isla” (25) (“The Island”). Finally,
there are some additional stage directions that clarify what would happen on stage: “Miranda
ayuda a quitarse la capa” (26) (“Miranda helps him take off his cape”).
By analysing the translation’s additional stage directions, it became clear that there are
three main reasons why Cohen and Speranza added them to the play. First, some of the stage
directions function as a replacement of a footnote. For example, when Alonso, on the sinking
ship, exclaims “play the men” (1.1.10), he could be addressing the boatswain and urging him
to set the mariners to work, yet, in a footnote, the Arden edition explains that it is more likely
that he is speaking directly to the mariners, pressing them to act like men (144). Therefore, in
the Spanish translation the stage direction “a los marineros” (21) (“to the mariners”) is added
to prevent the audience from thinking that Alonso is speaking to the boatswain, without
having to use a footnote. Secondly, the additional stage directions are used to clarify an
obscure line. For example, when Trinculo and Stephano are putting on Prospero’s clothes,
which were hanging on a tree, Stephano says “Now is the jerkin under the line” (4.1.237),
indicating that the jerkin is no longer hanging in the tree because he took it off the branch. It
is an ambiguous line that has puzzled many editors and this is probably why Cohen and
Speranza chose to change the line into the stage direction “la descuelga del árbol” (121) (“he
takes it off the tree”). Thirdly, as has been said before, Cohen and Speranza added numerous
stage directions to visualise for the audience what would happen on stage, should the play be
performed. All these reasons seem to have one thing in common: they make the play easier
for the readers by clarifying and visualising certain aspects of the play. One of Cohen and
Speranza’s goals seems to be to help the reader understand Shakespeare and increase the
play’s readability as part of a simplifying strategy. This strategy throughout the analysis, will
prove to have produced a less intellectually challenging and less interesting translation.
5.1.3
Blank verse
The Shakespeare by Writers project’s lack of stylistic uniformity is most obvious in the
way the individual translations deal with Shakespeare’s blank verse. This is an aspect of
Shakespeare’s work that has troubled many translators. Yet, as Marcelo Cohen also says in
the preface to his translation of The Tempest, it is an essential part of Shakespeare’s plays and
therefore also an essential part of translating Shakespeare (14-15). The only apparent advice
Cohen gave the collaborating translators of the project on how to deal with the blank verse
and iambic pentameter, seems to be just that. He did not tell them how he wanted the blank
verse to be translated and this has resulted in a range of different solutions to the problem.
Some have translated it into the eleven syllabic line of Catalan Renaissance literature while
others have opted for a translation in free verse. Cohen himself, in the translation of The
Tempest chose the latter. He found the iambic pentameter not as fixed as the Catalan eleven
syllabic phrase. Furthermore, he believed that the eleven syllabic phrase was too stiff. In
addition, translating English poetry into Spanish always causes problems because the Spanish
translation seems to demand more syllables, so Cohen found a translation in free verse with a
flexible stress pattern the best solution. However, he did not force this solution onto the
translators of the other plays. Instead, he let everyone decide which solution they found most
suitable for the problem.
In The Tempest, blank verse is not only a stylistic trait, it is also used to stress certain
characteristics of the play’s characters. For example, Sebastian and Antonio’s playful banter
and sometimes rude comments are not written in blank verse but in prose, to stress the fact
that they are characters of questionable morality. Caliban, on the other hand, speaks in blank
verse, something that is surprising considering the fact that Prospero and Miranda see him as
highly uncivilised. The fact that Caliban speaks in blank verse shows that he learned Prospero
and Miranda’s language and some might say it is also proof that Caliban has adopted his
master’s language too quickly. Cohen’s use of free verse is understandable, yet it has the
disadvantage that it is not as poetic as Shakespeare’s blank verse and it sometimes reads like
prose. As a consequence, the transitions from blank verse to prose in the passages spoken by
Antonio and Sebastian (2.1.10 and 2.1.158) are not sufficiently clear. On paper, it is more
noticeable because the lines spoken by Antonio and Sebastian are longer and uneven.
However, a play is also meant to be performed and I am not sure the transition from verse to
prose will be effective in such cases. The free verse is too irregular, and stylistic traits typical
of verse, like alliteration and rhyme, have often been discarded in favour of a more precise
reproduction of the content. Although Cohen believes the stylistic characteristics of
Shakespeare’s plays are as important as the storyline, when it comes to the translation of
Shakespeare’s poetic language he seems to have a preference for translating what is said
rather than how it is said, which leads to a less poetical translation.
5.1.4
Sounds and Music in The Tempest and La Tempestad
The Tempest is one of Shakespeare’s most musical plays. Not only are there many stage
directions asking for music and sounds, there are also a number of songs incorporated in the
play. The songs and music in The Tempest are essential to the play’s atmosphere. With this,
Shakespeare created a magical island full of “sounds and sweet airs” (3.2.136). Cohen clearly
understands the importance of the musical elements in the play and it is here that the
translators’ creativity is best represented. Whereas some songs only rhyme if the content can
also be preserved, like the beginning of Ariel’s song to Ferdinand (1.2.376), others were
slightly altered in order to preserve the stylistic characteristics, in particular the rhyme, instead
of the content. In Stephano’s song in act two for example, the translators managed to create
their own song with its own style, rhyme scheme and alliteration different from the original
song while only making slight alterations to the content.
The master, the swabber, the boatswain and I;
The gunner and his mate,
Loved Mall, Meg, Marian and Margery,
But none of us cared for Kate.
(2.2.45-48)
El capitán, el pilote, el artillero,
el grumete, el mozo, yo y mi compañero
amábamos a Carlota y a Cristina,
a Mariana y a Marina,
pero nadie amaba a Catalina
(78)
The captain, the steersman, the gunner,
The cabin boy, the servant, me and my friend
We loved Carlota and Cristina,
Marian and Marina,
But nobody loved Catalina
(trans. Van Rinssum)
Unlike the translation of the blank verse, I believe the songs of the Spanish translation are fit
for stage performance.
5.1.5
Puns
Another problem which every translator of Shakespeare’s play has to deal with is
Shakespeare’s punning. The Collins Cobuild English Dictionary defines a pun as “a clever
and amusing use of a word with more than one meaning, or a word that sounds like another
word, so that what you say has two different meanings” (1333). According to Dirk
Delabastita, the discussion of the translation of puns is always accompanied by the question of
translatability (171). Is the translation of puns possible? Even though it is a controversial
issue,11 for the discussion of Cohen and Speranza’s translation of Shakespeare’s puns I will
take as a starting point Delabastita’s answer to this question. He says that “as it happens,
translations of punning (texts) do exist, so that the translatability of puns and texts can be (and
has to be) accepted as a matter of fact” (172).
In The Tempest, in particular the language use of Sebastian and Antonio is characterised by
puns which serve to ridicule the other characters and especially Gonzalo, again indicating
Sebastian and Antonio’s questionable morality. They have a number of puns whereby
someone utters a word which they dilate upon, often stressing another meaning of the word
than was originally intended. For example, in the second act when Alonso asks the men to be
quiet, they turn his request into a pun:
ALONSO
Prithee, peace
SEBASTIAN (to Antonio) He receives comfort like cold
porridge.
(2.1.9-11)
J. House for example believes that “puns or intentional ambiguities, [are] so closely tied to the semantic peculiarities of a
particular language system that they cannot be translated” (Delabastita, 174).
11
Sebastian here makes a pun on the expression “peas-porridge hot, peas porridge cold.” In the
Spanish translation they also made a pun here, in which a word uttered by Alonso is turned
into a word joke because it looks like another word:
ALONSO
Calla, por favor.
SEBASTIAN Callos para el consuelo, parece que tuviera.
(55)
ALONSO
Quiet, please.
SEBASTIAN
Insensitivity as comfort, I thought he already got that.
Tener callos means to be insensitive or be hardened. Delabastita calls this type of solution a
semi-parallel pun translation: the first meaning of the word in the source text is in a
relationship of relative equivalence with the first meaning of the word in the target text,
whereas the second meaning of the word is not (195). The shift in the translation occurs on a
semantic level. The translation of this pun is a model for the way in which, in the rest of the
translation, Cohen and Speranza dealt with the puns. They look for a word that also has a
double meaning and pun on that, sometimes effectively, at other times not as amusingly as the
original. It is interesting to see that nowhere in the translation have they used the puns to
insert norms of the target culture or jokes that are widely known in the target culture. Perhaps,
this has to do with the fact that the target culture of the project is not a unified culture, but
consists of many different cultures. Word jokes are usually culturally bound and therefore, the
understanding of the jokes is limited to that specific culture only. They are, nevertheless,
perfect for making a translation of a play with many word jokes appealing to the target
audience. Cohen and Speranza’s translation of the puns, however, seems to be tending
towards a foreignisation strategy. This is a translation method whereby dominant cultural
values of the target culture are excluded from the translation (Venuti in Munday, 147). I will
discuss Cohen and Speranza’s translation strategies in greater detail in 5.1.12.
The way in which the puns are translated by Cohen and Speranza furthermore shows that
their primary goal was not to gain or show new insights in Shakespeare’s play. They prefer to
focus on the readability of the text rather than on trying to offer solutions to the problems
which Shakespeare’s text generates. A good example of this can be found in Act four, scene
one, when Stephano and Trinculo are putting on Prospero’s clothes they found hanging in a
tree. In line 236 “Stephano begins a series of puns that has defied satisfactory explanation,
largely because ‘line’ has a remarkable range of meanings, several of which may be evoked
here” (Vaughan and Vaughan 1999, 259). There are also references to a jerkin going bold
which can be explained as a loss of hair in the pubic region caused by syphilis. In the
translation, the meaning of line as a linden tree has been chosen and all other meanings and
possibilities have been ignored. The reference to baldness is related to the tree which is said to
have gone bald because Stephano and Trinculo have taken the clothes out of the tree. Cohen
and Speranza did not translate the pun as a clearly recognizable pun, but as a word-play
related device referred to by Delabastita as a punoid (207). In this case, Cohen and Speranza
replaced the pun with imagery. The solutions by Cohen and Speranza are no doubt creative,
yet they do not offer any new insight into what Shakespeare could have meant. The fact that
Cohen and Speranza ignored a number of Shakespeare’s other puns on “line” can be seen as
an instance of “underreading.” One speaks of underreading when the translator:
neglects to use to the full the scholarly aids so badly needed to bridge the
historical gap of four centuries, [and thus] automatically creates an
interpretative margin allowing [him] to ignore many of Shakespeare’s puns
with a sense of legitimacy (Delabastita, 160)
The translation of the puns by Cohen and Sperenza seems to indicate that they simply wanted
to tell Shakespeare’s story and did not contemplate the difficult interpretation problems. Just
like his unscholarly approach, this is in contrast with Cohen’s aim to produce a standard work
of Shakespeare which will serve as a work of reference for a new generation in Latin
America.
5.1.6
Thou versus you
Shakespeare’s archaic language, for translators in particular, generates most problems
because of its different forms of address, namely thou versus you. In various languages,
including contemporary English, there are no equivalences that make the same distinction
between you and thou. In Shakespeare’s time, you was used by upper-class speakers when
addressing each other, whereas thou was used by lower-class speakers when addressing
members of the same social class. However, there were numerous exceptions to this rule and
special situations whereby another personal pronoun than expected was applied (Brook, 73).
For example, thou is used to express any emotion, varying from friendly to hostile. It is used
between friends as an indication of affection. The shift from one personal pronoun to the other
usually marks an “important change of mood” (Brook, 74). Furthermore, thou is used between
lovers, yet only after they are certain of each other’s affection. Miranda and Ferdinand for
example, use you for each other since they have not known one another long enough.
Moreover, a master uses thou to address his servant as an indication of his good-humoured
superiority, like for example in Prospero’s relationship with Ariel. Lastly, thou is an insult
when it is used for strangers (Brook, 74).
Cohen signals the problem of the personal pronouns, yet his solution is one that triggers
many questions. He chose to translate both you and thou with tú, the Spanish colloquial
equivalence of contemporary English you. In the preface to La Tempestad, Cohen says he
realises that by doing so, he took the liberty of modernising the play. The only other option he
saw was to use the old-Castilian form vos, which he considered less suitable because of its
stiffness (15). It is surprising that this was his only reason for discarding vos, since it is still a
common form of address in contemporary Latin American Spanish. As has been explained in
chapter three, in some Latin American countries vos is used by all classes and it has replaced
tú all together. The fact that Cohen does not mention this in his explanation of his choice not
to use vos, to me shows that despite his intentions to represent all Spanish accents in his
project, his translation method is mainly focused on Iberian Spanish. Furthermore, Cohen says
he chose to use only the tú form because he wanted to make a timeless translation for which
this form of address was better suitable than the polite form of address usted. As a
consequence, all the characters in the play address each other in the second person singular.
For Iberian Spanish, this might be a successful solution, since in Spain tú is the most common
form of address. However, in Latin American Spanish, the polite forms of address usted and
ustedes are still widely used and an important part of social behaviour. It is highly
inappropriate, for example, in a teacher-student situation, for the student to address the
teacher with tú. For a Latin American audience it would therefore seem very curious for
Gonzalo to address the king of Naples with tú. Furthermore, by discarding the polite form of
address, Cohen deprives his readers of the second dimension that the alternation of the polite
and the colloquial form of address can give to the play. For example, the way Miranda, Ariel
and Caliban address Prospero can trigger some interesting questions. Miranda always uses
you, whereas Ariel and Caliban use thou, even though Prospero is their master and therefore
their superior. As far as Caliban is concerned, it could indicate his rebellious nature and his
lack of respect for his master. In the case of Ariel, it provokes questions as to why the spirit
does not use the same form of address as Miranda since Ariel’s relationship with Prospero
also reflects that of a parent and a child. Ariel’s use of thou indicates a closeness to Prospero
that is more than that of a master and a servant. I will come back to the ambiguities of Ariel’s
relationship to Prospero later in this chapter. Cohen and Speranza’s choice for limiting the
forms of address in the play to the use of tú in more than one way, shows that their translation
mainly relies on Iberian Spanish. Furthermore, I think the restriction of the use of usted is a
missed opportunity for the audience or readers of La Tempestad to enjoy some interesting
aspects of Shakespeare’s play.
5.1.7
Names
In the introduction to the translation, Cohen says he found the names of the play’s
characters difficult to deal with because their origin is particularly diverse and original.
Shakespeare used many names that come from Latin or Italian. In The Tempest many of the
characters have Italian names carrying hidden meanings. For example, Trinculo comes from
the Italian verb trincare which means to drink greedily (Vaughan and Vaughan, 142 n9).
Furthermore, Miranda’s name comes from the Latin verb miror which means to wonder or be
astonished at (Vaughan and Vaughan, 142 n14). For a translator it can be difficult to deal with
these names. However, for a Spanish translator the task seems to be considerably less difficult
because many Italian words are similar to Spanish words in form and meaning. For example,
in the Spanish language the verb trincar exists, which also means to drink greedily.
Furthermore, the verb prosperar has the same meaning as the English verb to prosper. In
Spanish even the word próspero exists, which means prosperous.
In the translation by Cohen and Speranza, most names have remained the same. Only a
few names have undergone some slight alterations to make them more Spanish. For example,
Ferdinand became Fernando. As has been explained above, the Spanish audience has the
benefit of being able to recognise certain words from their own language in the names.
However, the translators do not seem to use this to their advantage in the rest of the text. For
example, during the play Sebastian says “we prosper well in our return” (2.1.73), which is a
reference to Prospero’s hand in their fate. In order to keep this reference in the translation, it
would seem logical for the translators to use the verb prosperar in their translation. However,
they have chosen to translate the sentence as “el regreso venturoso” (60) (“a happy return”). It
is as if Cohen and Speranza did not find the double and hidden meanings in the play
important. Even though Shakespeare’s choice for Italian names seems to be to the advantage
of the Spanish target audience, Cohen and Speranza have not used it to the benefit of their
translation.
5.1.8
Specific language use in The Tempest
In addition to the general Shakespearean traits, The Tempest is also characterised by its
own distinct language use. The first distinctive mark of the play’s language use I will discuss,
is its reliance on repetition. Words are repeated throughout a sentence in order to stress
something important. For example, when Prospero explains his plans with the court party to
Miranda he says: “I have done nothing but in care of thee, of thee, my dear one, thee my
daughter” (1.2.16-17). He repeats “thee” three times to stress that he will do anything for
Miranda and that she is his main motivation for carrying out his plans. Other instances of
repetition are used to increase the dramatic effect on stage. For example, when the passengers
on the ship in the first act think they are going to sink, the mariners yell: “All lost! To prayers,
to prayers! All lost!” (1.1.50). Furthermore, the repetition in the play’s language stresses the
repetition that is also present in the play’s storyline. There are a number of themes that are
repeated throughout the play, for example, usurpation, murder plots and supernatural events.
According to Russ McDonald, it is a “fundamental stylistic turn” in the play, which “serves to
tantalize the listener, generating expectations of illumination and fixity” (17).
The Spanish translation only makes use of repetition when it does not create unnatural use
of language. In the Spanish language it is common to repeat words in order to stress
something. For example, if someone on a train were to ask a fellow passenger if it is alright to
open a window, a common response would be “¡sí, abrela, abrela!” (“sure, open it, open it”).
It is in these instances that the translators adopted the repetition of the original. In most other
cases, however, they omitted the repetition. In the opening scene on the sinking ship,
Shakespeare used repetition to increase the dramatic affect. The boatswain urges the mariners
by saying: “Heigh, my hearts; cheerly, cheerly, my hearts! Yare! Yare!” (1.1.5-6). In
translation this became: “Vamos, muchachos. ¡Ánimo! ¡Ánimo! ¡De prisa! ¡De prisa!” (21)
(“Come one boys. Courage! Courage! Hurry! Hurry!”). Here, repetition is also found in the
translation, but only in the cases in which it would be normal in every day use to repeat the
words as well, in this case while giving orders, whereas “my hearts” is not repeated by Cohen
and Speranza. In many other instances, the repetition is omitted from the translation as a
whole. For example, the mariners’ panicking exclamation “All lost! To prayers, to prayers!
All lost!” (1.1.50), is translated as “¡Estamos perdidos! ¡A rezar, que no hay salida!” (24)
(“We are lost! To prayers, there is no way out!”). As a consequence, the translation sounds
considerably less dramatic than the original, which is disadvantage should the play be
performed on stage. Furthermore, the omission of repetition causes the language to be less
poetic, since the repetition is often characterised by a certain pattern. In the exclamation of the
mariners, there is an A BB A pattern in the repetition, which contributes to the play’s poetic
language. The fact that Cohen and Speranza only adopted those instances of repetition which
would sound normal in every day Spanish, seems to indicate that they wanted to make
Shakespeare easier and more familiar to their target audience. This coincides with one of
Cohen’s goals with the project; he wanted Latin American people to be able to read and
understand Shakespeare (in Calabrese, 17). However, by omitting numerous instances of
repetition, Cohen and Speranza have discarded an important characteristic of language use in
The Tempest. McDonald notes that “lexical repetition is largely responsible for the incantatory
appeal of The Tempest” (20). According to him, the effect of repetition is dreamlike (24).
Because most instances of repetition are discarded from Cohen and Speranza’s translation,
their target audience is not pulled into this dream world.
Besides repetition, The Tempest’s language is also characterised by a considerable number
of irregular lines, the frequent use of apostrophes to omit syllables from words and the
omission of entire words, to “compress the language and reveal the emotions boiling beneath”
(Vaughan and Vaughan 1999, 21). Anne Barton, in her introduction to the Penguin edition of
The Tempest, says the reduction of the language is a mode of expression “more meaningful in
its very bareness than anything a more elaborate and conventional rhetoric could devise” (1314). For example, in Prospero’s speech to Miranda recounting the past, words and syllables
are left out to the effect that his speech sounds nervous and tense. A few examples of this are:
“out o’th’ substitution” (1.2.103), “wi’th’ King of Naples” (1.2.112), “to th’ purpose” and
“there is no soul” (1.2.29) instead of “there is no soul perished”. In Cohen and Speranza’s
translation there are no instances of apostrophes used to omit syllables. In addition, words that
were omitted by Shakespeare, have been put back in the translation. Furthermore,
Shakespeare also interrupted certain sentences by complex dependent clauses in order to
delay the key message of the sentence, thus creating more suspense. In the Spanish
translation, this discontinuous structure is “corrected” to increase the play’s readability, yet
discarding an important part of The Tempest’s characteristic language. For example, when
Prospero describes Caliban’s mother, Sycorax, he says:
This damned witch Sycorax,
For mischiefs manifold and sorceries terrible
To enter human hearing, from Algiers,
Thou knowst, was banished.
(1.2.263-64)
To make the sentence complete, “too” should be added between “sorceries” and “terrible,”
because what is meant here is that Sycorax’ sorceries are too terrible to enter human hearing.
Furthermore, the essential message here, that Sycorax was banned from Algiers, is interrupted
by other information about the witch. In the Spanish translation, Cohen and Speranza added
the missing word and changed the structure so the main message is not interrupted by a large
and complex clause:
Sabes bien que Sicorax,
esa maldita, fue expulsada de Argel a causa
de mil infamias y embrujos demasiado horribles
para el oído humano.
(p. 39)
You know that Sycorax,
the cursed, was banned from Algiers because
of thousands of dirty tricks and spells too horrible
for human hearing.
As a result of this translation, Prospero’s language is not characterised by compression and
therefore, his strong emotions are not expressed through his use of language and thus less
visible to the Spanish target audience. Again, Shakespeare’s language seems to have been
made easier in Cohen and Speranza’s translation.
Finally, the play’s language contains a considerable number of compound words, often
consisting of two words that are joined without having a syntactical relationship. In a
significant number of the compound words, one of the words relates to the sea. According to
the Arden edition, the compound words “add to our sense of the play’s compression,
collapsing several sentences of meaning into two or three words” (22). Furthermore, they
make the reader think about what has been said; they have to work harder to work out the
meaning of the complex combination of words. Although these unusual compound words,
“sea-sorrow” (1.2.170), “sea-storm” (1.2.176), “Hag-seed” (1.2.367) and “sea-swallowed”
(2.1.251), to name a few, have been widely recognized and accepted as being an essential part
of The Tempest’s language, Cohen and Speranza have not translated any of them into Spanish
compounds. Some of the English compounds became just one word in Spanish. “Sea sorrow”
for example became “infortunios” (34) (“misery”) and “sea-storm” “tormenta” (34) (“storm”).
In other cases the two words were both translated, yet not joined together, for example “hagseed” became “simiente de bruja” (45) (“seed of a witch”). Finally, there were those that were
translated into a sentence, in order to explain the sometimes obscure meaning of the
compound, for example, “sea-swallowed” was translated as “nos tragó el mar” (71) (“the sea
swallowed us”). I do not know if Cohen and Speranza have overlooked Shakespeare’s
unusual use of compounds in The Tempest, or if they did not consider it to be an essential part
of the play, nevertheless, as a result of their choice not to incorporate compound words into
the translation, Shakespeare’s play has become easier for the Spanish target audience. They
do not have to think about the complexities of the compound words, nor about Shakespeare’s
possible intentions with them; furthermore, if it is true that Shakespeare used the compound
words to stress the play’s compression, then this compression is less felt by the target
audience of Cohen and Speranza’s La Tempestad.
5.1.9
Shakespeare made easy
The simplification of Shakespeare’s language by Cohen and Speranza is not merely
evident in the way they translated the specifics of the play’s language, discussed above.
Throughout the analysis of the translation, it became clear that this was a structural approach.
In many instances Shakespeare’s complex and sometimes obscure language has either been
simplified or modernised, in order to increase the play’s readability. The fact that in doing so,
Shakespeare’s double meanings, deeper layers and interesting choice of words are withheld
from the target audience, is something that cannot be ignored. For example, in The Tempest
Shakespeare frequently makes use of nautical language. For a layman, these terms can
sometimes be difficult to understand. Therefore, Cohen and Speranza explained the terms,
rather than giving a literal translation of them. As a result, there is not much nautical language
left in the translation. For example, in the previously discussed sentence, uttered by the
boatswain in the opening scene: “Heigh, my hearts; cheerly, cheerly, my hearts!” (1.1.5-6),
“my hearts” in nautical language means “man of courage or spirit.” In La Tempestad “hearts”
is translated as “muchachos” (21). Firstly, this word is by no means an example of nautical
language and secondly, it does not capture the meaning of the term “hearts.” It is in fact more
of a pet name for a young man, than a reference to the mariners’ courage. Another example of
a translation in which nautical language has been omitted can be found in the translating of
“two glasses” (1.2.240) indicating that it is two hours past twelve o’clock. Sailors in
Shakespeare’s time usually used an hourglass to indicate the time, so two glasses would mean
two hours. In the translation “two glasses” has become “dos horas” (37) (“two hours”). The
language (perhaps understandably) has been simplified and modernised, since nowadays
nobody uses hourglasses anymore. As a consequence, in the translation there is no trace of the
nautical language used in the original.
In other cases, the translators added some extra information to the sentences in order to
clarify their meaning. For example, “As fast as millwheels strike” (1.2.281), becomes “Como
un molino palas al agua” (40) (“the way a millwheel strikes the water”). Moreover, when
Antonio refers to a sentence used for pirates, whereby they were hanged at water’s edge and
their bodies would remain there for three tides so they would drown (Vaughan and Vaughan
1999, 148), he says: “would thou mightst lie drowning the washing of ten tides” (1.1.56-57).
In the translation the punishment is clarified: “que te cuelgen, bocón desgraciado, y te
ahogues bañado por diez mareas” (24) (“Would they hang you, big mouth, and would you
drown bathing in ten tides”).
In addition to the simplifications in the translation, there are also a number of
modernisations, whereby archaic language has been translated into contemporary and,
therefore, also simplified, expressions. For example, “O that you bore the mind that I do”
(2.1.266-67), becomes “¡Ah, si pensaras como yo” (72) (“oh, if you would think like I do”).
Furthermore, the boatswain’s question “Have you a mind to sink?” (1.1.38), becomes “Que
nos vayamos a pique?” (23) (“Do you want us to go down the drain?”). By clarifying the
play’s ambiguities and simplifying and modernising the play’s language, the play’s
readability is increased and it can be said that in doing so, Cohen has succeeded in one of his
goals, namely making a more readable translation, better suited for a contemporary audience.
However, it must be said that Cohen perhaps went too far in this. His modernising and
simplifying translation method resulted in a less intellectually challenging version of The
Tempest, as deeper layers and intended ambiguities are also lost.
5.1.10
The Tempest’s central characters
The most intriguing part of The Tempest is its ambiguous triad of central characters:
Prospero, the benign magician or despicable imperialist; Ariel, the loyal or resentful servant;
and Caliban, the immoral beast or noble slave. Their contradictory character traits have led to
the belief that Shakespeare’s play is essentially about the possibilities and contradictory
nature of the human character (Boyce, 634). According to Cohen and Speranza, the different
character traits in the play are emphasised because each character is identified by a certain
illusion that suits his or her character. For example, Gonzalo, the good character and the
dreamer, sees an utopia in the island. The greedy characters planning a conspiracy see a
banquet and Caliban who wants to get rid of his master sees a god in a drunkard (Cohen, 11).
The way the audience sees the characters determines the way they will see the entire play
and therefore their ambiguous nature has led to much debate over the past century, whereby
each era seemed to focus on a different character. In the eighteenth century, Prospero was
seen as an enlightened magician, whereas in the twentieth century, the focus shifted to
Caliban and Prospero became the detestable imperialist (Vaughan and Vaughan 1999, 24-36).
As a result of the play’s apparently infinite possibilities and debatable meaning, it has had a
particularly rich afterlife, varying from adaptations and translations to political essays. As has
been pointed out in chapter two, especially in Latin America, Ariel and Caliban have been
used as part of a political discussion on colonisation. This is one of the reasons why, in my
analysis of the play’s translation, the focus will be on these two characters and their
relationship with their master Prospero. I will look at how, in the translation, these characters
have been depicted and see if this can yield some interesting ideas about the entire play.
In the preface to La Tempestad, Cohen says that he had trouble understanding
Shakespeare’s intentions with the play, partly because one cannot easily identify with its
central characters, as was the case with many of Shakespeare’s other creations, like Hamlet
(10). As a result, Cohen seems to be particularly careful with his interpretation and depiction
of Prospero. He calls the magician a changeable character: sometimes Prospero is a guardian
angel, at other times an authoritarian technocrat (11).
5.1.10.1
Caliban
When in the twentieth century, the conviction grew that The Tempest was essentially
Shakespeare’s colonial play, this particularly influenced the way audiences and readers saw
Caliban. “[He had] come to be identified as a far from neutral European construction of the
racial Other” (Franssen, in Lie and D’Haen, 23). In the preface to La Tempestad, Cohen
seems to endorse this idea, when he says that Prospero confronts his old enemies with
numerous things unknown to them, like Caliban, the monster that is the complete opposite of
a European (9). Furthermore, some translational choices that Cohen and Speranza made
support (perhaps unintentionally) the depiction of Caliban as a victim of colonisation. For
example, Miranda says to Caliban that she taught him her language because when they
encountered him on the island he would “gabble like a thing most brutish” (1.2.357-58).
Cohen and Speranza have translated “gabble” as “balbucear” (44), which means “to stutter”
or “to stammer.” Thus, whereas in the original “gabble” implies that Caliban spoke a
language that Miranda could not understand, in the translation it is implied that Caliban,
according to Miranda, could hardly speak at all. Furthermore, when Caliban refers to the fact
that Miranda taught him her language, he says: “the red plague rid you / For learning me your
language” (1.2.365-66). In the translation, the second part of this sentence has become “a ti
que me has dado palabras” (45) (“for you who gave me words”). This translation again
implies that Caliban did not have his own native language, and that Miranda had to give him
the words to speak. The last example I will mention here, is part of the same discussion
between Miranda and Caliban. She says that when he spoke his own language, he did not
know his “own meaning” (1.2.356), in other words, he did not know what he was saying. In
the translation, this has become “Mientras tú, salvaje, no sabiendo ni quien eras” (44) (“while
you, savage, did not even know who you were”). Miranda thus says, that he did not know his
own meaning, implying that he did not know who he was before Prospero and Miranda came
into his life. As a result of these subtle differences, in the translation, Miranda’s superior and
imperialistic attitude towards Caliban is reinforced. It is, furthermore, stressed that Miranda’s
superior attitude towards Caliban is not only a result of his attempt to rape her, but has been
there from the start of their encounter. In the translation, Miranda seems to be operating from
the belief that there is only one universal language, just like the colonisers of the Americas
did. Furthermore, she and her father also seem to think that the native inhabitant of the island
they have taken over, needs their help in becoming civilised. These observations show how
the afterlife of a play can often generate interesting interpretations that make you look at the
play again and rethink Shakespeare.
5.1.10.2
Ariel
As we have seen in the previous paragraphs, some translational choices that Cohen and
Speranza made, have endorsed the image of Caliban as a victim of colonisation. Surprisingly,
the translation does the opposite for the play’s other enslaved character, Ariel. In the original,
his12 relationship with Prospero is friendlier than that of Caliban and his master, yet Ariel
clearly is deprived of his freedom by Prospero, as is made evident by Prospero’s reaction to
Ariel short-lived rebellion:
PROSPERO: If thou more murmur’st, I will rend an oak
And peg thee in his knotty entrails till
Thou hast howled away twelve winters.
ARIEL:
Pardon, master,
I will correspond to command
And do my spiriting gently.
(1.2.294-98)
Their relationship is highly ambiguous, and much debate has arisen about whether Ariel is
such a loyal servant because he loves Prospero or because he is afraid of him. In Cohen and
Speranza’s translation, the first option seems to be endorsed and Prospero has become an even
more amiable father-like figure to Ariel. For example, in the original Prospero calls Ariel
“spirit.” In lines 1.2.193 to 1.2.215, he uses this name for Ariel three times. In the translation
however, in the same passage, Prospero has two different names for Ariel; “genio” (35) and
“duendecito” (35), the latter clearly connoting a pet-name for a spirit. Furthermore, where in
the original Prospero asks Ariel “But are they, Ariel, safe?” (1.2.218.), in the translation this
has become “Y están a salvo, mi Ariel?” (36) (“And are they safe, my Ariel”). In the
translation, Prospero is not only friendlier to Ariel in the way he speaks to the spirit, it has
also become less evident that he has deprived Ariel of his freedom. In the original, Prospero
says “I will free thee / Within two days for this” (1.2.421-22). It is clear that Prospero is the
one in control of Ariel’s freedom. Because of a subtle change, this became less clear in the
translation. Prospero here says: “por esto, en dos días serás libre” (48) (“for this, in two days
12
Although Ariel gender is debatable, for convenience and in accordance with the Arden edition and Cohen and Speranza’s
translation, I will refer to him as being male.
you will be free”). “You will be free” puts less stress on the fact that it is Prospero who
controls Ariel’s freedom. Moreover, in the translation Ariel seems to suffer less under his
slavery. During the play, Ariel asks his master not to forget his promise to release him:
Is there more toil? Since thou dost give me pains
Let me remember thee what thou has promised.
(1.2.242-43)
In Cohen and Speranza’s translation this became:
Algo más que hacer? Ya que me das trajines
déjame recordarte lo que habìas prometido
(38)
Is there something more to do? Since you give me activities
Allow me to remember you what you have promised
The word “toil” is defined as “unpleasant work that is very tiring physically” (Sinclair, 1762).
In the translation Ariel’s toil has become “something to do” which sounds significantly less
tiring or unpleasant. Furthermore, whereas the word “pains” has particularly negative
connotations, “activities” is much more neutral and can even be meant positively.
The above mentioned examples all seem to result in the Spanish target audience getting a
significantly more amiable image of Prospero as well as a less negative impression of Ariel’s
slavery. This contrasts with the outcome of the analysis of Caliban’s relationship with his
master in the Spanish translation. In relation to Caliban, the image of Prospero as the
authoritarian imperialist is reinforced, whereas his relationship to Ariel depicts the magician
as an amiable father-like figure. The fact that these two extremes are represented in one
character endorses the interpretation of The Tempest as being essentially about the
possibilities of the human character. However, the translation also made me think about
whether Prospero’s character traits are really as contradictory as they seem to be. If one
assumes that the play is about colonialism Shakespeare could have also intended Prospero to
represent both sides of the imperialists, that is to say, the cruel and enslaving coloniser in
contrast to the paternalistic coloniser who thinks he knows what is right for the colonised
people.
5.1.11
Religion in The Tempest
As I have explained above, the analysis of a play’s translation can generate some
interesting ideas about the original and its author. Through translations, new interpretations
arise which can shed light on the complexity of the original. As I discovered during the
analysis of La Tempestad, even a translator’s choice to omit something from the translation
can trigger some interesting questions. While reading The Tempest for the first time, I did not
see the religious undertone in many of the words used by Shakespeare. It was not until I found
a few cases whereby a word with a religious undertone had been translated as a word not
bearing the same connotation, that I realised how many words and utterances there are in The
Tempest that refer to religion and Christianity, like “I pray now” (1.1.11), “To prayers! To
prayers!” (1.1.50), “vouchsafe my prayer” (1.2.423), “now, good angels, preserve the king”
(2.1.307), “Oh, the heavens!” (1.2.116) and “chiefly that I might set it in my prayers”
(3.1.35), to name a few. Many of these examples, in the translation, lost their religious
undertone. For example, the frequently uttered plea “pray thee” in most cases has been
translated as “por favor” (please) or a conjugation of verbs like “suplicar” and “rogar,” both
meaning “to beg.” In other cases, however, for example when the characters refer to Christian
themes like heaven, the devil and angels, the translators did give a literal translation and the
religious connotations remained part of the play. Since it is not a structural translation choice,
the fact that some religious words have become more neutral in the translation does not have
serious implications. Nevertheless, it made me look back at the original and think about the
importance of religion in The Tempest.
While thinking about what religion could represent in The Tempest, the first thing that
came to mind, was the importance of religion in the colonisation process. As has been
described in chapter three, European colonisers felt superior because of their Christianity. In
the case of The Tempest, this could explain why Prospero and Miranda, as well as the court
party have such a superior attitude. Caliban on the other hand, is much more humble, perhaps
not towards his master, but towards nature. He has a bigger appreciation for the island’s
beauty and resources and this is especially expressed in the way he speaks. “His words
express unique apprehension of the natural world, gleaned from his physical experience of
island life in the sound of storms, the sting of porcupines, the hiss of adders and the music of
the wind” (Vaughan and Vaughan 1999, 23). Furthermore, the Christianity of the Europeans
in the play does not only explain their superior attitude, it also generates some questions about
their immoral behaviour. Despite Miranda’s naïve exclamation “O wonder! How many
goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is!” (5.1.181-83), the people she
encounters here for the first time are all murderers, thieves and avaricious human beings.
Caliban, on the other hand, who is depicted throughout the play as immoral and beast-like, is
the one who, at the end of the play, learns from his mistakes, asks for forgiveness and
promises to behave better:
I’ll be wiser hereafter
And seek for grace. What trice-double ass
Was I to take this drunkard for a god,
And worship this dull fool!
(5.1.295-98)
The comparison between Caliban and the Christian Europeans endorses the play’s assumed
theme of natural man versus civilised man. Especially the end of the play makes one wonder
what is worse, natural man following his instincts, or civilised man misbehaving despite his
civilised and Christian upbringing.
Finally, one last observation caused by a closer study of religion in the play, also has to do
with Caliban. We learn from Caliban that his mother worshipped the Patagonian god Setebos,
when he refers to “my dam’s god Setebos” (1.2.374). In addition, Caliban’s father is said to
be the devil. Nevertheless, sometimes Caliban uses words that have a Christian connotation,
for example, he asks Stephano “Hast thou not dropped from heaven?” (2.2.134), and when he
begs Prospero not to use his magic on him, he says “pray thee” (1.2.372). The verb “to pray”
in most instances in the play means “to beg,” yet I believe Shakespeare’s choice of a word
with religious connotation here, when he could have easily used some of its unreligious
synonyms like “to beg,” is not entirely coincidental. Perhaps, the Shakespearean text reveals
that not only did Caliban take on his master’s language, he also adopted some of Prospero’s
religion. This interpretation would again endorse the play’s colonial theme, as well as stress
how fast Prospero’s language and norms have been adopted by Caliban.
5.1.12
Cohen and Speranza’s translation strategy
A translator’s strategy already begins with his choice for the text he is going to translate,
but it also involves developing a method for translating it. Although Cohen’s choice to
translate Shakespeare was well-considered, from the analysis of his translation of The
Tempest it can be concluded that he did not give his translation method as much thought. His
various translation choices do not seem to reflect one particular strategy. According to Mona
Baker, there are two major categories of translation strategies: domestication and
foreignisation (240). Cohen and Speranza’s translation reflects both strategies, but neither has
been applied structurally.
Domestication indicates that the translator “[conforms] the translation to values currently
dominating the target-language culture” (Baker, 240). This strategy entails the insertion of
explanatory phrases as well as the modernisation of the foreign text. Foreignisation on the
other hand “is motivated by an impulse to preserve linguistic and cultural differences by
deviating from prevailing domestic values” (Baker, 240). According to Lawrence Venuti, by
foreignising a text, the reader is sent abroad (Munday, 147).
The way the translators dealt with the puns seemed to imply a foreignisation method,
because dominant cultural values of the target culture were excluded in the translation of the
puns. However, the translation of the compounds, the omission of repetition and the
“improvements” made to Prospero’s confusing syntax in Cohen and Speranza’s translation,
imply a domesticating strategy. By foreignising a translation, the author of the original is left
alone and the reader is moved towards the author (Schleiermacher in Munday, 147). Cohen
and Speranza do the opposite: they make Shakespeare’s language easier for the audience.
They leave the reader alone and move the author towards the reader. The fact that Cohen and
Speranza chose to translate both thou and you as tú, also implies a domesticating strategy
because the foreign characteristics are taken from the text.
Cohen and Speranza did not stick to one translation method. At times, this seems to
indicate that the translators have not given their translation method much thought. In the
following chapter it will become clear that Cohen and Speranza’s choice, or rather lack of
translation method, made their translation less successful than the translation of As You Like It
by Pérez, who did seem to have given his translation strategy considerable thought.
5.1.13
Conclusion
With La Tempestad, Cohen and Speranza made a translation that is readable and modern,
but also stays close to the original storyline. Unfortunately, I must admit that, on the basis of
my findings with regard to this particular translation, I have to agree with most of the
criticism the Shakespeare by Writers project has received.
The translation’s lack of scholarship cannot be seen as anything other than a loss,
especially since, with his project, Cohen strove to create a complete works of Shakespeare in
Spanish that could replace Astrana Marín’s, which in Latin America has been widely
acknowledged as the standard work. The omission of footnotes in some cases can cause
misinterpretation on the part of the reader and in general, it deprives the reader of some of the
play’s deeper layers and interpretive possibilities.
Furthermore, I have to agree with Modenessi, when he says that the translations still
mainly rely on Iberian Spanish (Hoenselaars, 247). Cohen and Speranza have not included
any Latin American words or expressions and the grammar used in the translation is also
Iberian Spanish. Moreover, the translator’s choice to make all the characters address each
other with the typically Iberian Spanish form of address “tú”, also shows Cohen and
Speranza’s reliance on Iberian Spanish. This is in contrast with Cohen’s goal to produce truly
Latin American translations of Shakespeare. Furthermore, it contradicts the fact that with his
project Cohen wanted to defy Spain’s dominance in Latin America.
One of Cohen and Speranza’s other goals seemed to be to create a universal and timeless
translation that can be read and understood by speakers of any variety of the Spanish
language. Even though Cohen said the interpolation of local norms was stimulated as part of
the project, Cohen himself incorporated hardly any cultural aspects of the target culture into
the translation of The Tempest. It has been said before that this may have been caused by the
fact that the target audience is too diverse. Even the translation of the puns has not been used
by the translators as an opportunity for the interpolation of local norms. Together with the fact
that the translation mainly relies on Iberian Spanish, the translation can hardly be said to be
Latin American. Striving for universality and timelessness did not prove to produce a
successful translation.
Probably the most severe criticism the project has received is that in several translations
textual nuances have been overlooked and passages have been misinterpreted. When it comes
to La Tempestad, I agree with this only in part. There are some instances where the lack of a
footnote causes readers to miss certain textual nuances and interpretation possibilities.
However, the translation seems only to contain one severe error and that is the fact that
Sebastian’s sarcastic line “Save his Majesty” (2.1.170) has mistakenly been given to Gonzalo.
This could, however, be an editorial mistake instead of a textual error. Other than that, Cohen
and Speranza’s translation is not characterised by any mistakes. However, I think this is not
just caused by their knowledge of the play, but also by their heedful approach. Cohen and
Speranza are particularly careful in their interpretation. They clearly did not mean for their
translation to help clarify some of the play’s ambiguities and thus their translation stays a little
superficial. Their main goal seems to be to make a fluent, readable and easily understandable
translation. Their “solution” to some of the difficulties in the play is not to tackle, but to omit
them. Of course, they have every right to do so, yet I do not think Shakespeare is meant to be
that easily understandable. The ambiguities and obscure passages are what makes the play
interesting and challenging. Although the analysis of the translation has generated some
interesting questions about the original and Shakespeare’s intentions, I think the translators’
careful approach to the play, as well as their intention to simplify it, has made the translation
less interesting. La Tempestad did not show me many new aspects of The Tempest.
To conclude, I think La Tempestad will prove to be an enjoyable experience for those
readers who are mainly interested in the play’s storyline. It tells the story of The Tempest in a
clear and modern way. However, for those readers who are interested in learning more about
Shakespeare’s play and look at it with a more scholarly approach, I think La Tempestad is
considerably less suitable. Furthermore, those who think there finally is a Latin American
counterpart to Luis Astrana Marín’s translation, will be disappointed by the translation’s
reliance on Iberian Spanish. The translators’ main virtues lie in the fact that they have
managed to create a modern and highly readable version of The Tempest. Unfortunately,
Cohen and Speranza sought to do so much more. Perhaps, herein lies the main reason for the
Shakespeare by Writers project’s lack of success: the fact that Cohen strove to achieve too
many things with his project. Because of Madrid’s dominant position in the publishing
market, it seems that Latin American translators of Shakespeare always have two options.
They can make a truly Latin American version and receive only minor attention and success.13
Or they can adjust the play to Iberian norms and get a bigger change at being sold and
recognised. Maybe in striving to do both lies the main reason for the project’s lack of success.
13
As Modenessi says about his translation of Love’s Labour’s Lost, “only a handful of critics” took notice of it
and there are probably going to be only few readers that will look at the paper version (in Hoenselaars, 253).
5.2
Como Les Guste
As You Like It is a comedy with little action. Atmosphere and language are more important
than what actually happens. The Cuban translator Omar Pérez calls it a “dream of a comedy”
(10, my translation). The play for the most part takes place in the forest of Arden, where the
usurped Duke Senior has resided ever since his brother Duke Frederick took over the court:
“many young gentlemen flock to him every day, and fleet the time carelessly as they did in
the golden world” (1.1.117-19). The elder Duke’s daughter Rosalind stayed behind at court
with her cousin Celia, since “never two ladies loved as they do” (1.1.112). However, when
Orlando, a young man who appears to be the son of a friend of Duke Senior, wins a wrestling
competition and Rosalind is clearly charmed by him, Duke Frederick banishes Rosalind from
court. She and Celia flee to the forest to find Rosalind’s father. They disguise as brother and
sister, and call themselves Ganymede and Aliena. Rosalind, being the taller, takes on the part
of the boy. They take the court jester Touchstone with them on their journey to Arden. Once
there, they buy the cottage of a Shepherd and lead a pastoral life. One day, they find love
poems addressed to Rosalind hung on trees. It turns out, Orlando is also in Arden, fleeing
from his hostile brother Oliver. Orlando and Ganymede meet and “he” promises Orlando to
cure him from his love for Rosalind by posing as her. Orlando can woo her and Ganymede
can make clear how ridiculous his love is. Many other pastoral characters enter the stage, new
relationships come into being, brothers reconcile and in the end four marriages are to be
conducted in the forest of Arden, among them the marriages between Rosalind and Orlando
and Celia and Oliver.
As You Like It is a play about love and the pastoral life and about the contrast between the
simple life in the forest and the rich life at court. As the title already indicates, the play has
something to offer for everyone. The reason I have chosen to discuss the translation of this
play, is that its translator Pérez is said to have used Cuban Spanish throughout and I was
curious to see what the effect of this would be. As with my analysis of La Tempestad, I will
first look at how Pérez handled typically Shakespearean difficulties, like Shakespeare’s puns
and ambiguities, the blank verse, the characters’ names and the use of thou versus you.
Furthermore, as these things particularly provoked my interest, I will discuss the theme of
sexual love and cross-dressing in the original as compared to the translation. Moreover, I will
shed light on Pérez’s translation strategy. I will show that this strategy produced a “local”
translation, and I will argue that as a consequence Pérez’s translation is more successful than
the one by Cohen and Speranza, who strove to make a universal and timeless translation. With
the analysis, I intend to discover why the Shakespeare by Writers project has not been as
successful as everyone had hoped and what positive things can be learned from the project.
5.2.1
Footnotes
Like most translations in the Shakespeare by Writers project, Como Les Guste does not
include footnotes, line-numbers or indicators of the acts or scenes on each page. Especially
the omission of footnotes has considerable consequences for the way Shakespeare’s play is
presented to the target audience. There are a few cases in which the use of a footnote is no
longer necessary since the ambiguity for which an explanatory note was needed, has been
resolved in the translation. For example, after Rosalind hears about the love poems that have
been written for her by Orlando, she expresses her amazement to Celia by saying: “I was
seven of the nine days out of wonder before you came” (3.2.171-172). The footnote in the
Arden edition of the play by Agnes Latham explains that this phrase comes from the
proverbial expression “a wonder lasts but nine days” (69). This expression does not exist in
Spanish. Hence, a literal translation would require a footnote to explain to the target audience
what Rosalind means. However, Pérez chose to replace the sentence with an expression that
the target audience is familiar with. In Como Les Guste, Rosalinda says “Iba por la quinta
maravilla de las siete antes de que legaras” (85) (“I went to get the fifth out of the seven
Wonders of the World, before you came”). The seven Wonders of the World is a concept that
a contemporary Latin American or Spanish reader is familiar with and an explanatory note is
therefore no longer necessary.
Although Pérez, without the use of footnotes, quite successfully solved the translation
problem mentioned above, this solution forms an exception to his general translation method.
In As You Like It, there are numerous references to mythological figures, the bible, literary
works and other culturally specific matters. These include “Juno’s swans” (1.3.71),
“Atalanta’s heels” (3.2.272), “Sad Lucretia” (3.2.144), “Gargantua’s mouth” (3.2.221),
“Ovid” (3.3.6), “Judas” (3.4.6), “Lips of Diana” (3.4.14) and “Diana in the fountain”
(4.1.146). In most critical editions of the play, these references and their meaning within the
context of the play are explained in footnotes. Because Pérez did not use any footnotes, these
references often leave his readers puzzled. Furthermore, their omission at times, makes the
play more superficial. There are a few instances where Pérez added explanatory information
to the text. For example, Celia compares Orlando to Judas because, in her eyes, they are both
deceivers. She says: “[his hair] is something browner than Judas’s. Marry his kisses are
Judas’s own children” (3.4.6-7). In the translation this becomes: “un poco más pardos que los
de Judas. Vaya, y sus besos son hijos de los del traidor” (104) (“and a little browner than
Judas’s. Well, and his kisses are children of the traitor”). Instead of repeating Judas’s name, in
the translation Celia refers to Judas as “the traitor.” For the target audience, it becomes clear
why Celia compares the two men, and thus a footnote explaining this is no longer necessary.
However, in most cases, Pérez included the references in his translation without giving the
reader any further information. As a result, some of the references are unintelligible to the
target audience, which does not contribute to the comprehensibility of the play and deprives
the reader of the play’s deeper layers. For example, Shakespeare refers to the “trice crowned
queen of night” (3.2.2), meaning the moon goddess who was known under various names in
heaven, on earth and in the underworld. Firstly, Pérez’ translation - “tres veces reina de la
noche” (78) (“three times queen of the night”) - supplies the reader with insufficient
information to understand that he is talking about the moon goddess. Secondly, as the Arden
edition explains, the reference to the moon goddess alludes to the comparison between the
moon’s influence on earthly things and Rosalind’s over Orlando (Latham, 61). The omission
of a footnote leaves the readers puzzled as to what is meant and deprives them of a deeper
layer in the play.
Another example of how the omission of a footnote can make the play less understandable
for the target audience, can also be found in act three. There, Jaques exclaims “O knowledge
ill-inhabited, worse than Jove in a thatched house” (3.3.8-9). Pérez translated this sentence
literally, and although the readers will understand the meaning of the sentence, without a
footnote they will miss how it refers to one of the play’s most important themes. As the Arden
edition explains in a footnote, Jove and Mercury in disguise were looking for a place to sleep
but were turned from all doors, until a poor couple allowed them to stay. According to the
Arden edition, “it was a favourite instance of the simple life being the good life” (Latham,
80), which is a motto that is questioned throughout the play; the simple life in the forest often
seems to be better than the rich life at court, yet in the end, the banished Duke and his party
are happy to return to court. The readers of Como Les Guste will miss this reference and will
therefore also miss how strongly the comparison between the rich and the simple life is
incorporated in the play.
In addition to these examples, there are two instances in the translation where punctuation
alarms the reader that something is going on. However, since there are no footnotes, these
instances are not explained, which again results in the fact that the target audience misses
important information about the play and about discussion among scholars regarding the play.
For example, the reply “my father’s love is enough to honour him” (1.2.77) to Touchstone’s
“One that old Frederick your father loves” (1.2.76), in the Folio has been given to Rosalind,
while it is more logical, since Celia’s father is named Frederick, that the line is spoken by
Celia. Pérez also gave the line to Celia and put her name in brackets indicating a disparity to
the original. However, since there is no footnote explaining the brackets, the Spanish reader
must be puzzled as to what the difference with the original is. The second example is a
reference to the playwright Christopher Marlowe. Shakespeare cites a line from one of
Marlowe’s poems as a tribute to his deceased friend (3.5.81). In the translation, the phrase is
put in inverted commas, but there is no reference to its source, so the reader is not likely to
recognize Shakespeare’s allusion to Marlowe.
As I have shown, Pérez’s unscholarly approach expects too much from the target audience.
Although some scholars are in favour of such an approach because they believe Shakespeare
deserves curious, imaginative and well-informed readers (Byatt, in Hoenselaars, 19), I think it
is rather unrealistic to presume that a contemporary reader knows what every reference to a
Greek god or a sixteenth-century literary work means in the context of the play. Furthermore,
the fact that most references are not explained in a footnote, does not contribute to Cohen’s
goal of making the contemporary Latin American reader like and understand Shakespeare
(Cohen in Calabrese, 17). I am not arguing in favour of a simplifying or even a modernising
translation method, but I do believe that if a translator wants to keep mythological and biblical
references in the translation as an act of cultural transmission, explanatory notes are
indispensable.
As was the case with Cohen and Speranza’s translation, the lack of footnotes in Pérez’s
translation must be considered a missed opportunity. Where Cohen and Speranza opted for a
simplifying translation method in order to make up for the lack of explanatory notes, Pérez
made a more intellectually challenging translation which often leaves its readers in the dark as
to what certain complex textual passages mean. Neither option can be regarded as successful,
considering that the Shakespeare by Writers project is meant to be the new Complete Works
of Shakespeare for contemporary Latin America, in replacement of Astrana Marín’s
translations. Both translation methods deprive the reader of the play’s deeper meaning and
double layers. Since Cohen with his project wanted to offer a contemporary standard version
of Shakespeare’s Complete Works in Spanish translation, in other words, a work of reference
used by scholars, students and directors, critical footnotes, concerning textual nuances and
interpretation possibilities, should not have been discarded from the translations.
5.2.2
Stage directions
As You Like It is a play that is characterised by a particularly small number of stage
directions, all “expressed in the briefest imperatives” (Latham, xii). The same, however, does
not go for Pérez’s translation. He has added numerous stage directions, often expressed in
complete sentences.
The stage directions concerning the characters’ entrances in As You Like It are
accompanied by announcements in the text, like “Here comes Monsieur le Beau” (1.2.85) or
“Look you, who comes here / A young man and an old solemn talk” (2.4.17-18). According to
the Arden edition, there are 10 instances in which the stage direction follows the
announcement, and 13 instances where the stage direction comes before the announcement
(Latham, xiv). The editor of the Arden edition has chosen to put all the stage directions after
the announcement, so that the characters are not interrupted while they speak (Latham, xiv).
Pérez has opted for another solution. Most of the stage directions in Como Les Guste come
before the announcement. This choice does not seem to have any significant implications,
since as the Arden edition explains, the place of the stage directions “seems to be without
significance” (Latham, xiv).
Besides changing the placement of some of the stage directions, Pérez also added a
considerable number of stage directions of his own. Most of them clarify to whom a certain
line is spoken. Most of these additional stage directions, however, are rather redundant. For
example, Pérez puts “a Celia” (110) (“to Celia”) before Rosalind’s line “Come sister”
(3.5.77). Since the target audience knows Celia and Rosalind are pretending to be brother and
sister, the utterance “come sister” is not likely to be intended for anyone other than Celia.
Furthermore, when Rosalind shows Celia the poems Orlando has written, she says “look here”
(3.2.172). This line clearly indicates that she is showing the letter to Celia. Pérez, however,
still felt the need to add a stage direction clarifying this. He adds “mostrándole los versos a
Celia” (85) (“showing the verses to Celia”).
In addition to the stage directions that explain to whom a certain line is spoken, there are a
number of stage directions that visualise what happens on stage. In this category, Pérez not
only added a few stage directions, like “los caballeros colocan alimentos y bebidas” (65) (“the
lords put down food and drinks”), but he also expanded the stage directions from the Folio.
For example, “they wrestle” (1.2.200) becomes “Charles y Orlando luchan” (37) (“Charles
and Orlando wrestle”), and “Charles is thrown” (1.2.203) becomes “Orlando derriba a
Charles” (37) (“Orlando throws down Charles”). Again, the information Pérez adds to the
stage directions is rather superfluous, since it is already clear that it cannot be anyone other
than Orlando who throws down Charles.
Pérez’s main reason for adding stage directions seems to be the visualisation of what
happens on stage, should the play be performed. Furthermore, they seem to make the play
read more like a prose text, more like a novel than a play. Unlike Cohen and Speranza’s
additional stage directions that are used to clarify obscure passages or replace footnotes,
Pérez’s additional stage directions do not seem to be part of a simplifying translation method.
This could also be caused by the fact that in The Tempest there are more obscure passages that
can be clarified by means of an added stage direction. As was explained in 5.2.1, most
obscure passages in As You Like It are caused by references to for example mythological and
biblical figures, whereas in The Tempest there are many obscure passages caused by archaic
language and words carrying double meaning.
5.2.3
Blank verse
As You Like It is a play with a particularly high proportion of prose. Furthermore, the blank
verse passages are characterised by a significant degree of metric freedom and irregularity. At
times, Shakespeare shifts to blank verse in the middle of a prose scene, at other times editors
are not entirely sure whether prose or verse was intended. This is not to say that the verse in
the play is not important and can be easily discarded by the translator. In As You Like It, the
blank verse stresses the importance of certain matters, it is considered “proper for high and
grave matters” (Latham, xix). Therefore, Duke Frederick for example speaks verse when he
banishes Rosalind and dismisses Orlando, but prose when he watches the wrestling.
Moreover, “the effect of prose is one of informality, of people talking rather than actors
declaiming” (Latham, xx).
Pérez chose to translate Shakespeare’s blank verse into free verse which, as can be seen in
Cohen and Speranza’s translation, can lead to a text that reads more like prose than verse.
However, by paying special attention to other stylistic traits typical of verse, Pérez managed
to create a highly poetic translation that closely resembles the creativity of the original. In
many instances, Pérez followed Shakespeare’s rhyme scheme closely. For example,
Rosalind’s exclamation “Jove, Jove! This shepherd’s passion is much upon my fashion”
(2.4.57-58), is translated as “Júpiter, Júpiter! La passion de este pastor, mucho recuerda a mi
amor” (61) (“Jupiter, Jupiter! The passion of this shepherd reminds me of my own love”). At
other times, Pérez preserved the rhyme, yet switched to another rhyme scheme so he did not
have to alter the meaning too much. A good example of this is to be found in the translation of
the poem Touchstone improvises:
If a hart do lack a hind,
Let him seek out Rosalind.
If the cat will after kind,
So sure be will Rosalind.
Winter’d garments must be lin’d,
So must slender Rosalind.
They that reap must sheaf and bind,
Then to cart with Rosalind.
(3.2.99-106)
In Pérez’s translation this became:
Ciervo que de cierva prescinda,
que se busque a Rosalinda,
Cuando el gato ansía gata,
Rosalinda se arrebata.
Cuando el verano rescinda
que se abrigue Rosalinda.
En el tiempo del acopio
Rosalinda hará lo propio.
(82)
The hart that has to do without the hind,
must look for Rosalind.
When the cat longs for the puss,
Rosalind takes him away.
When the summer is gone,
Rosalind must cover herself
When it is time to hoard
Rosalind does the same.
There are also a few cases where Pérez’s translation rhymes where the original does not. A
case in point are the following lines from Shakespeare’s play:
The melancholy Jaques grieves at that,
And in that kind swears you do more usurp
Than doth your brother that hath banish’d you
To-day my Lord of Amiens and myself
Did steal behind him as he lay along
(2.1.26-30)
In Pérez’s translation this became:
que el melancólico Jaques se lamenta por ello;
y afirma que así es usted más usurpador
que su propio hermano que lo desterró.
Hoy mi señor de Amiens y un servidor
Nos apostamos sigilosos a sus espaldas
(52)
The melancholy Jaques grieves at that;
and claims you are more of an usurper
than your own brother who banished you.
Today my lord of Amiens and yours truly
Secretly followed him behind his back
Pérez made this passage more poetical by choosing to use the word “servidor” because it has
a similar sound to “unsurpador.” The alternative was a simple “y yo” (“and I”).
Pérez seems to find rhyme just as important as the meaning of the words. Therefore,
sometimes the meaning is altered in order to preserve the rhyme, at other times the rhyme is
discarded in favour of a more literal translation. The same goes for alliteration. Just like the
original, Pérez’s translation is characterised by a high alliteration rate. For example, “churlish
chiding of the winter’s wind” (2.1.7) becomes “el rústico regaño de viento invernal” (51)
(“the rustic gumbling of the winter’s wind”). “Tongues in trees, books in the running brooks”
(2.1.16), becomes “lenguas en los árboles, libors en los arroyos” (51) (“tongues in the trees,
books in the brooks”).
Although at times, the difference between verse and prose is hard to see, Pérez made up for
this by paying great attention to the preservation of rhyme and alliteration. As a consequence,
his translation became more poetical than was the case with Cohen and Speranza’s
translation, even though they both used free verse to replace Shakespeare’s blank verse. It
seems that rhyme and alliteration are important factors of Shakespeare’s plays. The
preservation or rejection of these stylistic traits in a translation, can make the difference
between a Shakespeare translation that reads like prose or one that sounds like poetry. In this
sense, Pèrez’s translation can be considered more successful than the one by Cohen and
Speranza. Furthermore, it indicates the difference in quality between the translations, which
are supposed to form a uniform collection.
5.2.4
Sounds and music in As You Like It and Como Les Guste
Just like The Tempest, As You Like It is a particularly musical play. It contains more songs
than any other play by Shakespeare and most of the songs are provided by the character of
Amiens. The songs “evoke a carefree mood and conjure up a woodland on a bare stage”
(Latham, xxiii-xxiv). Furthermore, they “dwell very forcefully on the cares from which the
singers have freed themselves” thus establishing one of the play’s themes; the pastoral life
that is depicted as carefree and better than court life (Latham, xxiv). Furthermore, some of the
songs have a more practical task; they are a way to pass the time or give the actors the chance
to do something. For example, “Blow, blow, thou winter wind” and Hymen’s song fill the
time while the actors on stage can tell each other their adventures, which are already known to
the audience. Moreover, “What shall he have that killed the deer” was put in to pass the time
“between Orlando’s promise to return to Rosalind ‘at two o’clock’ and his failure to keep that
promise” (Latham, xxiv).
In the preface to his translation, Pérez says that he wanted to breathe new life into
Shakespeare’s songs. However, he did not want to make songs that are suitable for a violin or
a countertenor. Instead, he wanted to make indigenous music, suitable for drums and maybe
even panpipes (Pérez, 11). In doing so, Pérez suited the songs to a contemporary Latin
American audience and reinforced the forest atmosphere of the play. Pérez’s preference for
drums over the violin also shows that his main intention was to create his own Shakespeare, a
Cuban Shakespeare.
The way Pérez dealt with the songs is similar to the way he translated the play’s verse and
poetic language. However, with regard to the songs Pérez seems to have had an even greater
preference for preserving the form instead of the meaning. Furthermore, whereas in the
translation of verse passages, Pérez often changed the rhyme scheme, with regard to the songs
Pérez very closely followed it, even when it was highly irregular, like Amiens’ song in
2.7.174-193. At times, Pérez altered the meaning or changed the order of the words in order to
maintain the rhyme scheme of the original.
Many Latin American translators have been severely criticised because of their reliance on
Iberian Spanish. The use of this form of Spanish is highly unnatural for Latin American actors
and therefore many of these translations are unsuitable for stage production. Pérez, however,
as will become more clear later in this chapter, did not make a translation relying on Iberian
Spanish. He made a Cuban translation, and this is also reflected in the way he translated the
songs. Especially when it comes to songs and poetical language, rhythm and intonation are
particularly important and Pérez made sure that Cuban actors performing Como Les Guste
would not have to sing in an accent unnatural to them. For example, the lines from one of
Amien’s songs “Take thou no scorn to wear the horn / It was a crest ere thou wast born”
(4.2.14-15) became “no te avergüencen los cuernos / que son un adorno eterno” (127) (“do
not scorn the horns / they are an eternal adornment.” For a speaker of Iberian Spanish,
“cuernos” does not rhyme with “eterno.” Cuban speakers however, as well as many other
Caribbean speakers, have a tendency of not pronouncing an –s ending, and therefore, once the
lines are uttered by a Cuban actor, they do rhyme.
This is an example of how Pérez used Cuban Spanish in the translation to make the play
more suitable for a Latin American audience as well as for stage production by Latin
American actors. Unlike Cohen and Speranza, he was not afraid to interpolate Cuban
characteristics to the play, an attitude that proved to further the quality of his translation.
5.2.5
Puns
As Pérez notes in the preface to his translation, As You Like It may be considered a play
about fools and foolishness. According to Pérez, it is a comedy in which most central
characters have a certain amount of foolishness in them (11-12). It is therefore not surprising
that As You Like It is characterised by a significant number of jokes and puns, especially by
the motley fool Touchstone.
Pérez seems to have adopted an overall translation strategy for the puns. In most cases, he
made a pun in the translation on the same word as in the original. However, since it is
particularly difficult to find a Spanish word that has the same two meanings as the English
word, Pérez used another word, similar in form to the first word, to cover the second meaning
of the word that in the original is punned on. Delabastita in his book on the possibilities
translators have to translate Shakespeare’s puns, explains how puns may owe their existence
to phonological, lexical or grammatical features (192). Pérez translated the “lexical” source
text pun as a “phonological” pun. The target text pun is thus based on sound similarity
whereas the source text pun explores the literal and figurative meaning of a word (Delabastita,
193). For example, in the conversation between Touchstone and Rosalind:
TOUCHSTONE: If I keep not my rank
ROSALIND:
Thou losest thy old smell.
(1.2.99-100)
Rosalind puns on the word “rank” which means both “smell” and “high position.” In the
translation, Pérez used the words “rango” (“high position”) and “rancio” (“disgusting”) (32)
to cover both meanings of “rank.” The joke thus became:
PIEDRA DE TOQUE: Si no conservo mi rango
ROSALINDA:
Rancio es tu olor y ya lo sueltas.
(32)
If I keep not my rank
Rank is your smell, and you are already losing it.
Another example of where Pérez applied a similar translation strategy may be found in act
two, when Jaques says to Orlando “And you will not be answered with reason” (2.7.101).
Jaques uses reason, implying they will not answer Orlando’s rage with common sense.
However, an Elizabethan audience would immediately recognize the allusion to “raisin.” In
the translation, Pérez again used two words, similar in sound, to capture both meanings of the
source text pun. Jaques’ exclamation became “ni la razón ni la ranción lo satisfacen” (72)
(“reason nor ration satisfy him”).
In addition to the puns that Pérez translated by using the above mentioned tactic, there are
also a number of puns in the original that are no longer present in the translation. For
example, when Jaques talks about the stages a man goes through in his life, he describes how
a man in the sixth stage “shifts into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon” (2.7.157-158).
“Pantaloon” here refers to the comic old merchant from Commedia dell’arte (Hattaway, 125).
Pérez translated this word as “el magro pijama” (74) (“the lean pyjama”). Pérez opted for a
more literal translation where the target audience is not reminded of a traditional comic
character, for example from their own culture or literature. It is common practice that when
translators do not translate the source text pun with wordplay they “distinguish hierarchically
between the two linguistic meanings implied in the [source text] pun on the basis of their
relative prominence in their contextual setting” (Delabastita, 206). Pérez thus found the literal
translation more important than the reference to a traditional comic character.
The pun translation discussed above also shows that, just like Cohen and Speranza, Pérez
did not use culturally specific matters from the target culture in his translation of the puns. In
5.2.12, where I discuss Pérez’s translation strategy, I will show how this choice of translation
deviates from Pérez’s overall translation strategy. For now, I only want to note that it seems
as if Pérez did not particularly try to achieve the same effect of the puns for the target
audience as they had on the sixteenth-century English audience.
5.2.6
Thou versus you
A good example of how Pérez’s translation consists of a mixture of sixteenth century
English Shakespeare and twenty-first century Cuban Shakespeare, is the way he dealt with the
complex issue of thou versus you. As became clear in 5.1.6, “you is the usual pronoun used by
upper-class speakers to one another” while thou is used by members of the lower class when
they speak to other people belonging to the same social class (Brook, 73). However, there are
multiple exceptions and situations that require the use of the opposite pronoun. For example,
lovers use you, yet as they become more certain of each other’s affection, they switch to thou.
When a master and his servant have a good relationship, the master will use thou, yet when a
master is angry with the servant he will switch to you. Thou can be used to express any
emotion, friendly as well as hostile, and a switch in form of address usually indicated an
important change in mood (Brook, 74-75).
Pérez made his own distinction between thou and you, using tú (the colloquial form of
modern English you) and usted (the polite form of modern English you). In most instances,
Pérez followed the original closely, using tú for thou and usted for you. However, he also
deviated from this. For example, when Orlando in the original is extremely angry with Oliver,
he switches from you to thou (1.1.56). In the translation, Orlando consistently calls Oliver
usted. In Latin America, in contrast to Shakespeare’s time, people generally do not switch
from usted to tú to indicate how angry they are and thus Pérez does not follow the original’s
switch in personal pronoun. Furthermore, whereas in Shakespeare’s time, the use of thou to a
stranger was considered an insult, the use of tú in Cuba is not, in fact it is actually considered
a sign of friendship and closeness. This is why Duke Frederick in the original uses thou when
he threatens Oliver, whereas in the translation he uses usted.
These examples show how Pérez, unlike Cohen, was aware of Shakespeare’s grammar and
the way he used it to stress certain things, like people’s feelings and their relationship with
others. By using tú and usted and plural ustedes as translations of thou and you and plural you,
Pérez first of all showed how his translation relies on Latin American Spanish grammar and
not on Iberian Spanish grammar, which would use second person plural vosotros instead of
ustedes. Secondly, Pérez showed that he realises the importance of the distinction between
thou and you. Lastly, it proves that Pérez was not afraid to deviate from the original in order
to make the play more suitable for the target audience. Pérez created his own local text, where
Shakespearean traits are combined with typically Cuban and Pérez characteristics.
5.2.7
Names
As became clear in the discussion of The Tempest, much can be derived from
Shakespeare’s choice of character names. In The Tempest as well as in As You Like It certain
character names have their origin in the Italian language, which can work to the advantage of
Spanish translators of Shakespeare. Unlike Cohen, Pérez seemed to be particularly aware of
this and the possibilities it offers.
The first thing one sees when looking at the list of characters of Como Les Guste, is that
Pérez changed the order. He grouped all the families together, first naming Duke Senior and
his family, than Duke Frederick and his family, followed by Rowland the Bois and his family
and lastly, the people from the forest. Many of the names have undergone slight alterations to
make them more suitable for the Spanish target audience. Rosalind, for example, became
Rosalinda, Frederick became Frederico and Silvius became Silvio. In the preface, Pérez
mentions how he handled the translation of the names. He says that because so much can be
derived from the English names, he decided not to change them to much. For example, the
name Silvius for a Spanish audience or reader alludes to the forest, an important concept in
the play, because selva means “forest” in Spanish, and silvestre is Spanish for “savage.” The
same goes for the name “De Bois.” It reminds the target audience of the word “bosque”
(forest) (Pérez, 12).
The only exception to the way Pérez dealt with the Shakespearean names, is his translation
of the name Touchstone. In the preface, Pérez explains that this name has so many
connotations that he had no choice but to translate it into a Spanish name with similar
allusions. Touchstone thus became Piedra de Toque, a name that is clearer to the target
audience, without it being fully domesticated. According to Pérez, the name still fits into the
world of Shakespeare (12).
It seems that, in contrast to Cohen and Speranza, Pérez is fully aware of the possibilities
the Shakespearean names may offer the translator. Before he started the translation, he
thought about what Shakespeare had intended with certain names and used this to the
advantage of the Spanish-speaking target audience.
5.2.8
Specific language use in As You Like It
As You Like It, like many other plays by Shakespeare, is characterised by a specific use of
language. Some of these characteristics are especially common in this particular play, like the
reversal of normal word order, as in “they have their exits and their entrances” (2.7.141) and
“dies and lives”(3.5.7). However, most of the stylistic traits can also be found in
Shakespeare’s other plays, like the use of repetition, compounds and stopgaps.
Pérez treated the specific characteristics of the play’s language in a highly unstructured
way. Either he did not see a pattern in the recurrence of certain stylistic traits, or he did not
consider them an essential part of the play. For example, the word “marry” is repeated
meaningfully throughout the play, but Pérez chose a different translation for almost each
occurrence: “claro” (25) (“of course”), “vaya” (27) (“come”) and “dale” (30) (give in). There
are many more examples of words or expressions that are repeated throughout the play but
that are translated differently each time. For example, Jaques twice says “God buy you”
(3.2.253 and 4.1.25), from “god be with you” meaning “goodbye.” In the translation, these
two instances respectively became “Adiós” (90) (“goodbye”) and “quede con diós” (116) (“go
with God”).
In addition to the repetition of certain words or expressions, the play’s other stylistic
characteristics are also absent from Pérez’s translation. The compounds have been translated
by several words, not joined together, that explain the meaning of the compound. For
example, “fellow-fault” (3.2.346) became “otro similar” (95) (“similar other”), “love-shaked”
(3.2.357) became “afectado de amor” (96) (“affected by love”), and “point-device” (3.2.372)
became “de punto en blanco” (96) (“at one’s Sunday best”). Furthermore, the reversal of
normal word order has been restored in the translation; “dies and lives” (3.5.7) became “vive
y muere” (108) (“lives and dies”) and “exits and entrances” (2.7.141) became “entradas y
salidas” (74) (“entrances and exits”). Finally, the instances in which repetition is used in one
sentence to create more drama or a more poetic effect, are not found in the translation either.
For example, “therefore my sweet Rose, my dear Rose, be merry” became “Alégrate, pues
dulce, querida Rosa” (27) (“Cheer up, sweet, beloved Rosa”). Because the repetition of Rosa
does not occur in the translation, the utterance loses its emphasis.
Just like Cohen and Speranza, Pérez did not see a pattern in the recurrence of certain
stylistic traits in the play’s language use, and therefore did not include them in his translation.
However, in contrast to Cohen and Speranza, Pérez did create his own specific use of
language, with stopgaps from the target culture, in places where the original does not use any.
Thus, he discarded Shakespeare’s specific use of language, but added his own, Cuban use of
language. In the next part of this chapter, I will discuss this in greater detail.
5.2.9
Shakespeare made Cuban
From the analysis of Cohen and Speranza’s La Tempestad it became clear that they had
adopted a simplifying translation strategy. The analysis of Como Les Guste, however,
presented me with a different strategy which I like to call a “Cubanising” translation strategy.
Pérez made Como Les Guste suitable for a contemporary Cuban audience. To achieve this, he
modernised certain passages, used Cuban lexicon and grammar, and Cuban and Latin
American stopgaps.
Pérez’s modernising tactic is very subtle and mostly aimed at adapting the play to the
perception of a contemporary audience. For example, when Orlando is late for his meeting
with Ganymede, he says he comes “within an hour of [his] promise” (4.1.40-41). In other
words, he is only an hour late. For a sixteenth-century audience this might be acceptable, but
for a contemporary audience, in possession of watches or even mobile phones to tell the time,
it can be unacceptable for someone to be an hour late. Therefore, Pérez translated Orlando’s
sentence as follows; “he faltado a la cita sólo por unos minutos” (117) (“I was only a few
minutes late”). Pérez’s modernisation of the play limits itself to subtle alterations like this. He
did not apply a structurally and rigorously simplifying strategy like Cohen and Speranza.
The translation’s title is the first of many instances of Pérez’s “Cubanising” strategy. It also
shows how Pérez’s translation is a protest against the dominance of the former colonial
powers over Latin America. Most translators choose to take over Astrana Marín’s
Shakespeare titles, since these are the titles Shakespeare’s work is known under in Latin
America and the titles publishing houses therefore prefer14. Astrana Marín’s translation of As
You Like It is A Vuestro Gusto. “Vuestro” in this title, is a form of the second person plural
“vosotros,” which is mainly used in Spain and not in Latin America. The “mechanical
adoption of a Spaniard’s choice for the title of As You Like It automatically binds the entire
process to the use of European Spanish norms in denial of native linguistic, cultural and
literary history – let alone creative writing” (Modenessi, 156). By choosing a different title
for his translation, Pérez indicated that his text was not ruled by Astrana Marín or other
European norms. Pérez’s title was thus a clear indicator of his anti-colonial attitude and a
forerunner of his translation strategy with regards to the rest of the text.
To make the play more suitable and readable for the Cuban target audience, Pérez
frequently used Cuban vocabulary, such as “tierno” (21) (“unripe”), “opacado” (26)
(“overshadowed”), “papaya” (60) (“vagina”), “canillas” (61) (“shinbone”) and “sabrosura”
(75). Some of these words do not exist in Spain, others are known there, yet have a different
meaning. For example, when Orlando says to his brother “está muy tierno para estas cosas”
(21) (“you are too tierno for these things), as a translation of “you are too young in this”
(1.1.54), an Iberian Spanish audience will understand that Oliver is “too soft” for this,
whereas a Cuban audience will read it as Oliver being “too immature, too unripe” for it.
Furthermore, in one of the songs, Pérez translated “life is most jolly” (2.7.183) as “esta vida
sabrosura” (75) (“this life is sabrosura”). For an Iberian Spanish reader this would mean “life
is valuable and tasteful.” Cuban readers, however, would understand that “life is pleasant and
melodious.” In both examples, the translation is understandable for both European and Cuban
speakers of Spanish, yet for the latter group, the translation better suits the original meaning.
In addition to the use of Cuban vocabulary, Pérez also used words known and used
throughout Latin America, though not in Spain, like the word “nana” (74) (“nanny”).
Speakers of Iberian Spanish would use the word “niñera.”
Besides using Cuban and Latin American lexicon, Pérez also interpolated numerous
typically Spanish stopgaps. As was explained before, As You Like It is characterised by a
considerable number of stopgaps which Pérez did not translate structurally. Instead, he added
stopgaps familiar to the target audience, in places where he found them suitable. As a result,
there are stopgaps in places where in the original there are none and the other way around. In
For example, Alfredo Michel Modenessi, who translated Love’s Labour’s lost for the Mexican stage, had given his
translation a different title than Astrana Marín’s yet was asked to advertise and publish the play, using its “original” title,
meaning Astrana Marín’s title (Modenessi in Hoenselaars, 254 note 15).
14
doing so, Pérez made the translation come across as more natural for the target audience.
Examples of Spanish stopgaps in the translation are; “caramba” (20), “vamos”(25), “¡Como!”
(55), “vaya” (25, 84, 111, 117 etc.) and “bien”(111).
5.2.10
Sexual Love in As You Like It and Como Les Guste
In addition to “Cubanising” the play, Pérez also made his translation more sexually
explicit. He obviously intended for the target audience to be more aware of the sexual
references in the play so that their reaction would equal that of the audience in Shakespeare’s
time.
Although some critics say that As You Like It is “so busy with love that it has little or no
time for sex” (Latham, Ixxii), I will argue that sexual love is one of the play’s themes. There
are numerous references to sex and male and female gentiles. For example, when Orlando
says:
Can I not say, ‘I thank you’? My better parts
Are all thrown down, and that which here stands up
Is but a quintain, a mere lifeless block.
(1.2.239-41)
“The pun on ‘quintain’ as female pudenda would have been picked up by the audience at
once” (Ward, 20). Furthermore, in the conversation between Rosalind and Celia:
CELIA: You have simply misused our sex in you love-prate. We
must have your doublet and hose plucked over your
head, and show the word what the bird hath done to
her own nest.
ROSALIND: O coz, coz, coz, my pretty little coz, that thou didst
know how many fathom deep I am in love! But I cannot
be sounded. My affection hath an unknown bottom, like
the Bay of Portugal.
CELIA: Or rather bottomless, that as fast as you pour affection
In, it runs out.
(4.1.191-200)
according to Martha Ronk, there are clear references to “male and female genitalia and to
vaginal depth and male ejaculation” (Ronk, 261). Moreover, the fact that Rosalind puts a
chain around Orlando’s neck can be considered a sexually symbolic act (Ward, 19). Lastly,
the theme of sexual love can be found in references to “rose” and “prick” (3.2.109-110), “the
copulation of cattle” (3.2.78), questions such as “wilt thou have me?” (4.1.111) and utterances
as “I will satisfy you, if ever I satisfied a man” (5.2.115-16).
In his translation, some of the sexual references are more explicit. For example, in a
speech by Touchstone (2.4.43-48) that is full of sexual references, Touchstone is wooing a
peascod. The indirect sexual reference lies in the fact that peas are associated with fertility
(Hattaway, 109). Pérez, however, makes the reference more explicit and vulgar, by turning
the “peascod” into a “papaya” (60), the Spanish word for the fruit which in Cuba also means
“vagina.” Furthermore, “wilt thou have me” (4.1.111), became “harás el amor conmigo” (120)
(“will you make love to me”). Touchstone’s reference to the “copulation of cattle” (3.2.78),
becomes “la fornicación de ganado” (81) (“sexual offences by the cattle”). Again, in the
translation, Touchstone’s words are more vulgar. As a result, his words are more suitable for
the target audience. Cuban culture is very open about sex and references to sex in Cuban
literature are usually highly explicit and many times even vulgar. The word “coito” for
example, which is a literal translation of “copulation” does not suit a Cuban audience because
it is too decent and indirect, compared to what they are used to in their own culture and
literature.
The last example of a more explicit sexual reference in the translation is the translation of
Orlando’s question “and will you preserve to enjoy her?” (5.2.4). Pérez translated this as “y
que tú persistas en gozar de ella ?” (141) (and will preserve to gozar de ella”). “Gozar” means
both “to enjoy” and “to use sexually.”
Pérez’s translation of As You Like It is thus more sexually explicit. Sexual love is part of
the play’s love theme, just like Petrarchan love, love at first sight, lovesickness and romantic
love. I think the fact that the references to sexual love are more explicit does not make it the
most important theme. It rather draws more attention to it because implicit sexual references
might not be recognised by the target audience. It seem as if Pérez thought the alterations
made to the play might create a similar effect on the target audience as the source text had on
the sixteenth-century English audience. For example, one of the reasons why the sexual
references in the play uttered by Ganymede are meant to shock the audience is the fact that
they know it is uttered by a woman and not by the boy Orlando sees. The fact that Rosalind as
Ganymede makes sexual references is an indicator of how women disguised as men can speak
more freely. According to Jean Howard, a number of feminist critics believed that Rosalind
and Celia had an ulterior motive for their disguising, namely the fact that dressed as men, they
are liberated to speak freely, as men already are (Howard in Ward, 39). Thus, the references
to sex in the speeches of Rosalind as Ganymede are meant to shock the audience. In the
translation, more explicit sexual references are necessary to create the same effect.
5.2.11
Cross-dressing and the Spanish language
In several plays, like Twelfth Night, Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Merchant of
Venice, Shakespeare had already made female characters disguise as men. In As You Like It,
however, there is an added dimension since Rosalind as Ganymede in front of Orlando
pretends to be a woman again. As Susan Bassnett argues, in plays involving disguise “the
audience is constantly reminded of the gender gap between actors and their roles”
(Hoenselaars, 58). In Shakespeare’s time, a boy actor would be playing the part of Rosalind
and thus the reception of an Elizabethan audience of the gendered meanings would be totally
different than that of a contemporary audience, which is used to women acting in the theatre.
For example, at a political level, “if the very presence of the boy-actor reminded women in
Shakespeare’s Elizabethan audience of their own suppression more generally, then that
dimension has now departed, to some degree at least, when we see [a woman] play the role
today” (Ward, 41). Furthermore, because of the emancipation of women and the different
social attitudes towards women, they have a different kind of “gendered consciousness that
renders aspects of the plays more problematic than they might have been in [Shakespeare’s]
time” (Bassnett in Hoenselaars, 59). There are several ideas as to why Shakespeare made his
women characters disguise as men; some say it shows his plays support female
emancipation,15 while others claim it displays Shakespeare’s silently subverting genderequality (Ward, 39-40). Cross-dressing in Shakespeare’s plays has become an especially
fierce subject of debate among feminists16 and scholars interested in the homoerotic nature of
Shakespeare’s plays. On a non-political level, I think Shakespeare, being a man of the theatre,
used disguise to create a suspenseful situation for the audience: “the small tension between
what a person is and what they pretend to be, keeps the watching mind in gear” (Ward, 41).
Ward notes that the more radical feminist view is that “male Shakespeare can only go so far with this” (34).
Clara Claiborne Park for example, argues that Shakespeare’s Rosalind is indeed a powerful and autonomous woman, but
that because the male characters in the play, and presumably in the audience, cannot deal with too much feminine
assertiveness and thus the heroine in the end submits to men and is brought back to marriage (100-116).
15
16
My reasons for discussing disguise in As You Like It here, is that when a text involving
disguise is translated into Spanish, another dimension is added, since the actress playing
Rosalind as Ganymede must not only change her appearance, she also has to change her
language. The Spanish language is far less neutral than the English language. Adjectives for
example, usually have female or male endings, depending on who or what they refer to. The
distinction between male and female language also exists in many other languages, like
Japanese. In his article “Our Language of Love,” Tetsuo Kishi explains how a Japanese
actress deals with the male disguise in a performance of As You Like It. Since in Japanese,
there are female, male and neutral first-person pronouns, the actress could simply use neutral
pronouns. However, this would make her character “bloodless and less real than Shakespeare
would seem to have conceived her” (Kishi in Hoenselaars, 77). Therefore, she uses feminine
personal pronouns when she plays Rosalind and masculine personal pronouns when disguised
as Ganymede, except when she is alone with Celia. Pérez seems to have opted for the same
solution when it comes to Rosalind using adjectives referring to herself. He could, for
example, have changed her sentences in order to avoid the use of adjectives, but this would
have made her language rather artificial and unnatural. Instead, Celia and Rosalind use
feminine adjectives for Rosalind when they are alone, and masculine adjectives when in the
presence of other people. However, when Rosalind as Ganymede plays Rosalind again, they
use feminine adjectives again. For example, in the presence of people other than Celia,
Rosalind says “seguro estoy” (96), as a translation of “I am sure” (3.2.361). “Seguro” has an –
o ending, meaning it is a masculine adjective, the female counterpart would be “segura.”
Rosalind as Ganymede as Rosalind again, says “voy a ser más celosa” (123), as a translation
of “I will be more jealous” (4.1.142). The –a ending in “celosa” shows that it is a feminine
adjective. When Rosalind as Ganymede tells Orlando about the way ‘he’ once cured a lovesick person and thus refers to ‘himself’ as acting as a woman, Pérez alternates between
feminine and masculine adjectives. Rosalind’s passage:
At which time would I, being but a
moonish youth, grieve, be effeminate, changeable
longing and liking, proud, fantastical, apish...
(3.2.397-399)
Thus becomes:
Situación en la cual yo, siendo soló una joven
lunática, debía lamentarme, ser afeminado, voluble,
anhelante y gustoso ; altivo, caprichoso, burlón...
(97, my emphasis)
Situation in which, being but a moonish youth,
I would complain, be effeminate, changeable,
longing and liking, proud, fantastical, a jester...
This is the only instance in which feminine and masculine adjectives are both used. In other
cases, Rosalind always uses the right form of the adjective. To a Spanish audience it could
come across as slightly unnatural that Rosalind never mistakenly uses the wrong adjective.
Furthermore, as Kishi argues, the actress playing Rosalind would, when in disguise, also use
bodily movement, gesture and voice to act as a man and “to act physically the masculinity that
is already expressed verbally could make her performance too obvious, redundant and
superficial” (Hoenselaars, 77). Furthermore, in As You Like It, “Rosalind’s language is neither
particularly feminine nor particularly masculine, and the ambiguity is retained throughout the
play” (Kishi in Hoenselaars, 78). In the translation, however, the shift from masculine to
feminine language use is more obvious. Whereas Kishi sees these things as disadvantages for
the Japanese or Spanish actress, I think it could also work to her advantage. Because the
audience knows language can also give away her identity, the tension is raised and the play
can be even more exciting for a Japanese or Spanish audience.
Kishi fears that the Japanese language can even create a slightly different ending to the
play, and this is exactly what happens in Pérez’s translation. When Rosalind as Ganymede
faints after seeing the bloody napkin, Celia as Aliena exclaims “Cousin Ganymede!”
(4.3.157). It could be that the shock of her cousin fainting caused her to fall out of her role,
which is a particularly natural reaction. However, “cousin” can also be used as a term of
affection and thus Oliver does not have to assume that Ganymede is in fact a woman (Latham,
110). Pérez, on the other hand, has translated “cousin” as “prima” (135), which is not only
strictly used in the family meaning, but also has a feminine ending. Oliver would thus be
particularly stupid if he did not at this point suspect Ganymede to be a woman and see
through his disguise. His lines in the rest of the play, “you lack a man’s heart” (4.3.165-66)
and “and you fair sister” (5.2.18), gain an entirely different meaning because of this. The
ending can thus be different from what Shakespeare intended, or it can “offer at least a
tentative answer to the age old question about the exchange between [Rosalind and Oliver] in
Act 5 scene 2” (Kishi in Hoenselaars, 79-80).
Pérez’s choice of dealing with cross-dressing and the Spanish language shows that, unlike
Cohen and Speranza, he is willing to offer new insight into Shakespeare’s intention. Unlike
the Argentinean translators he does not opt for the neutral solution, so he does not have to risk
doing something Shakespeare had not intended. He creates his own Shakespeare, which
makes his translation more interesting, not least for the field of Shakespeare studies.
5.2.12
Pérez’s translation strategy
As I explained in 5.1, there are two translation strategies: domestication and foreignisation.
According to the few scholars that have looked into Pérez’s translation, his strategy can be
called “full-domestication” (Modenessi in Hoenselaars, 247). Although there are certain
things in the translation that point in the direction of a domesticating strategy, Como Les
Guste is not an instance of “full-domestication.” The main reason is that Pérez’s translation is
also characterised by certain foreignising strategies. Firstly, as I discussed in 5.2.1, there are
many references in the text to mythological and biblical figures, literary works and other
culturally specific matters. Pérez not only kept these references in the translation, but also
decided not to insert explanatory phrases in the translation in order to simplify it for the target
audience, something that in a “fully-domesticated” translation would occur (Baker, 241). A
foreignising strategy implies registering “the linguistic and cultural differences of the foreign
text, sending the reader abroad” (Schleiermacher in Baker, 242). By referring to “lobos de
Irlanda” (146) (“Irish wolves”), “la boca de Gargantúa” (88) (Gargantua’s mouth), “mil
coronas” (19) (thousand crowns) instead of Cuban currency, by keeping the play’s setting in
the forest of Arden, a clearly exotic place for Cuban readers, Pérez sends his readers abroad.
In Pérez’s translation, the cultural other is not erased,17 as would have been the case in a text
of “full-domestication.” Clearly, there are features of a domesticating strategy in Pérez’s
translation, yet not enough to refer to the text as an instance of “full-domestication.”
Instead of discussing the translation in terms of domestication and foreignisation, I prefer
to discuss it in the terms of Eugene Nida’s theory of dynamic equivalence, which focuses on
way the translation is received by the target audience. Nida sees the translation process as one
of “adapting the source-language text to a different social group” namely the target audience
(Baker, 121). A translator, in order to be successful, has to aim at achieving an equivalent
response, which Nida calls “dynamic equivalence” (in Munday, 41-42). Nida distinguishes
17
The French theorist Antoine Bergman notes here, that even though the “cultural other is not erased but manifested, [...]
this otherness can never be manifested in it’s own terms, only in those of the target language” (Bergman in Baker, 242).
between two forms of equivalence: formal equivalence, which means the message of the
translation should match the source text message as closely as possible, and dynamic
equivalence, which means that both texts should have the same effect on their readers (in
Munday, 41-42). Even though the whole question of equivalence is highly subjective and to
some even unscientific,18 if there exists such a thing as “equivalence of effect” I think this is
what Pérez tried to achieve. According to Pérez, what he wanted to achieve with his
translation was to make the target audience undergo the same experience as the audience of
the source text. He wanted to create a similar atmosphere. This was a particularly difficult
task, since “Shakespeare lived in a time when they did not know much about dictionaries but
did believe in the unicorn: our time believes in dictionaries, even in Shakespeare dictionaries,
but it has lost contact with its unicorns” (13, my translation). Furthermore, his translation of
the songs, the way he made a more sexually explicit translation, his translation of
Touchstone’s name, and the interpolation of local lexicon, are all indicators of how Pérez
tried to create his own local Shakespeare in order for the contemporary Cuban audience to
understand and like Shakespeare as much as the sixteenth-century English audience did. He
wanted to bring Shakespeare back to life for a new audience. This was what Cohen wanted to
achieve with his project, the irony being that Cohen failed at it in his own translation.
Pérez created his own local Shakespeare because according to him, there is no universal
Shakespeare. When it comes to the Bard there is not one truth, and too many times translators
are accused of changing Shakespeare and deviating from the “true” meaning of his work (9).
Pérez says he believes in Socrates’ theory of the three roles in the theatre: the poet, the actor
and the audience. It is thus particularly difficult for a translator to fit in somewhere without
changing the poet. A translator needs freedom (Pérez, 10-11). Pérez’s advice for translators is
“love Shakespeare and do what you want” (11, my translation).
5.2.13
Conclusion
It can be concluded that Pérez made a successful translation of As You Like It, if only
because of the fact that the translation does not rely on Iberian Spanish and shows how postcolonial cultures do not have to and should not rely on their former coloniser when it comes to
the field of translation, or any field for that matter. Furthermore, Pérez’s translation is
18
Many critics strongly disagree with Nida on the possibility of equivalence in effect. M.L. Larose for example, believes it
to be impossible. He questions how the effect can ever be measured and by whom and how a text can possibly have the same
effect and evoke the same response in two completely distinct cultures and times (in Munday, 42).
successful because it is enjoyable for the target audience as well as interesting for the field of
Shakespeare studies.
However, an unscholarly approach, again, proved to be a significant loss. The lack of
footnotes was a missed opportunity to help the reader gain a better understanding of
Shakespeare’s play, its deeper meanings and themes, which must be any translator’s goal,
especially if the translator makes a translation that has to be part of Shakespeare’s Complete
Works and has to become the new work of reference for a whole new generation and culture.
The way Pérez dealt with the translation of the blank verse and the songs showed his
preference for rhyme and other forms of poetical language over the “exact” meaning, thus
indicating his preference for “dynamic equivalence” over “formal equivalence.”
However, Pérez’s translation of the puns deviates from the prevailing translation strategy
in the rest of the translation. He does not seem to have paid much attention to the puns, which
can be considered a form of loss.
Furthermore, the analyses of the thou versus you issue, the language use and the
characters’ names in Como Les Guste in comparison to As You Like It, in addition to Pérez’s
“Cubanising” strategy, showed how Pérez tried to create his own Shakespeare. He wanted to
answer the question he himself poses in the preface to the translation: who and what is our
Shakespeare, our Latin American Shakespeare (10)?
Pérez’s translation is interesting for the field of Shakespeare studies in that it draws
attention to certain aspects of As You Like It. It makes one reconsider Shakespeare’s
intentions. Furthermore, it shows how a translator’s strategy can determine the success of the
translation, and it thus shows which translation strategy is most or least successful when
translating Shakespeare. I believe Pérez’s translation strategy and the way he saw the
translation process is what made his translation much more successful than Cohen’s. Pérez
was focussed more on creating his own local Shakespeare, while Cohen was stuck in his
attempt to try and create a universal and timeless translation, while Shakespeare himself, as
the English themselves had experienced when they desperately tried to hang on to the
“original” Shakespeare19, is not even timeless. It is through translation that he is still alive and
read around the world. Translations revive Shakespeare for a certain audience at a certain
time, but in the end, they are also replaceable and therefore, translators should not strive for
timelessness or universality. The most successful and most interesting translations are the
19
Hoenselaars argues that “by desperately clutching the ‘original’ Shakespeare like a household god, the English had really
become alienated from his work, written in a language that ceased to be spoken almost 350 years ago, and hence (accepting
the metaphor that the past is like another country) really a foreign language, in need, like all other languages, of translation”
(21).
“local” Shakespeares in contrast to what Modenessi calls “straight” Shakespeares (2005, 104).
Proof for this argument can be found in the practice of Shakespeare translation in Mexico.
Modenessi argues that in Mexico a translation cannot be successful “without the tactical
transformations interpolated by its local operators” (2005, 105). In other words, in Mexico,
and, as I am willing to argue, in the rest of the world, local versions of Shakespeare are bound
to be more successful than translations striving for universality.
Conclusion
From this thesis, it has become clear that the practice of translation strongly reflects the
unequal power relations in the world that have been caused by colonialism. Especially by
looking at the translation of Shakespeare’s plays, which have been widely used by all kinds of
people, and especially by the imperial powers, to suit their political agenda, it can be
concluded that post-colonial cultures are still not completely freed from former colonial
oppression, even though they regained independence centuries ago. In particular, the fact that
the colonisers forced their language on the people they oppressed, yet later regarded the
dialect spoken in these former colonies as inferior to their own “original” form of this
language, has had a considerable impact on the formation of the post-colonial cultures. The
Shakespeare by Writers project is a good example of how post-colonial cultures through
translation want to free themselves from former colonial oppression. However, from this
thesis it can be concluded that the project largely failed at this. Even though it strove to
release Latin America from the oppression of the former coloniser Spain, in the end it did the
opposite and showed that for the translation of Shakespeare, Latin American translators still
turn to the language of their former coloniser. It has become clear that the project failed in
many more ways. As far as I could tell, it did not cause a significant or lasting change in the
Latin American publishing world, since it was ignored throughout the continent. Moreover, it
did not replace Astrana Marín’s translations. The project has not come close to reaching the
status of a standard work.
My analysis of two of the project’s translations, namely Cohen and Speranza’s translation
of The Tempest and the translation of As You Like It by Pérez, shows that there are a couple of
reasons why La Tempestad can be considered less successful than Como Les Guste. More
importantly, the analysis revealed four major reasons why the project as a whole has failed to
be successful.
The most obvious difference between La Tempestad and Como Les Guste is the fact that
Cohen and Speranza used Iberian Spanish whereas Pérez used a Latin American dialect,
namely Cuban Spanish. It can thus be said that Pérez has been more successful in proving that
Latin American translators do not have to rely on the language of their former coloniser to
produce a successful translation. Pérez created a local translation of Shakespeare’s play while
Cohen and Speranza tried to make a translation that as many people could read as possible.
Cohen admitted that he wanted the translations of the plays to be universal and timeless, yet
Pérez proves that creating a translation that is suitable for a more specific audience, results in
a more successful and more interesting translation.
Furthermore, Cohen and Speranza’s simplifying translation strategy is not particularly
successful either. It is obviously part of their goal to make the play understandable for a
contemporary audience, yet it resulted in a translation that is intellectually less challenging
and less interesting than Pérez’s translation.
Moreover, whereas Cohen and Speranza as well as Pérez, strove to make a translation in
prose, the fact that Cohen and Speranza often omitted stylistic characteristics in favour of a
more literal translation of the meaning, caused their translation to sound more like prose than
verse. Pérez succeeded in making a verse translation by using stylistic traits similar to
Shakespeare’s.
From the analysis, it furthermore became clear that Cohen and Speranza did not strive to
shed new light on Shakespeare’s intentions with the play. They avoided difficult interpretation
problems like the puns or the use of thou versus you. Moreover, they did not seem to see the
possibilities that Shakespeare’s use of names with Italian origin offered them as speakers of
Spanish. Pérez did use the Italian names to the play’s advantage and he was also not afraid to
interpret the play as he saw fit. Pérez’s approach resulted in an interesting translation that can
be considered more successful than Cohen and Speranza’s La Tempestad.
As I noted before, my main aim with the analysis of the Shakespeare by Writers project
was to discover why the project as a whole has failed to be a success. Throughout the
analysis, I discovered four reasons for the project’s failure.
First, despite Cohen’s promise to deliver truly Latin American versions of Shakespeare,
the project’s translations mainly rely on Iberian Spanish. The translations can thus not be seen
as vastly different from the Iberian Spanish translations that have been used on the continent
for centuries. The attempt to make the translations more suitable for a Latin American
audience by interpolating local norms into the translations cannot be considered an overall
success. By using mainly Iberian Spanish, the project as a whole has not been successful in
doing something revolutionary in the field of Shakespeare translation in Latin America.
Secondly, by not giving his translators any guidelines on how to translate certain
difficulties that Shakespeare’s plays generally offer their translators, Cohen caused the project
to lack stylistic uniformity. This is in contrast with Cohen’s aim to produce a Complete
Works of Shakespeare. As my analysis of two of the project’s translations alone has shown,
the translations differ so much in quality and style that they cannot be seen as a unity and this
will lower the project’s chance of reaching the status of a standard Complete Works.
Thirdly, the project’s lack of a scholarly approach, in order words, its omission of
footnotes concerning interpretation possibilities and textual nuances, is also in contrast with
Cohen’s aim to create a new work of reference for a complete generation in Latin America.
The analysis of La Tempestad and Como Les Guste showed that translations of Shakespeare’s
plays that lack footnotes for the contemporary reader either become too simple and thus less
intellectually challenging, or too difficult because there are too many obscure references.
Lastly, the main reason for the project’s lack of success has to be found in Latin America’s
traditions concerning Shakespeare translation, as well as Cohen’s contradictory goals with his
project. The analysis of the project showed that Latin American translators, at least with
respect to Shakespeare’s texts, still struggle with the eternal triangle they find themselves in.
Most translators find it difficult enough to deal with the untranslatability of Shakespeare’s
texts, but for Latin American translators there is also a third party involved, namely Spain.
Not only do they have to compete with the original text, they also have Spain’s and especially
Astrana Marín’s translations to live up to. It seems that Latin American translators always
have to choose between making a successful translation into Iberian Spanish or a widely
ignored translation into Latin American Spanish. Iberian Spanish translations have a much
larger audience than those carried out in the local Spanish accents of Latin America.
However, if Latin American translators want to get rid of their triple inferior status they have
to start on a small scale. Cohen’s intentions were so ambitious that his project was bound to
fail. Moreover, his intentions contradicted each other. He wanted to reach all speakers of
Spanish and make truly Latin American translations. He wanted to change the Latin American
tradition of relying on translations coming from Spain, yet, with one exception, all the
translations of his project rely on Iberian Spanish. Furthermore, Cohen wanted to create a
Complete Works of Shakespeare, yet gave his translators too much freedom to speak of a
uniform collection of translations. Moreover, he wanted the project to replace Astrana
Marín’s work and become a widely used work of reference in Latin America yet the
translations of the project almost completely lack a scholarly approach.
Even though I have found it particularly interesting to discover why Shakespeare by
Writers was not successful, my intention was not solely to find enough evidence to back up all
the criticism the project has received. I also intended to get something positive out of the
project. Even though my findings did compel me to agree with most of the criticism, it also
allowed me to gain greater insight into what makes a certain translation more successful than
others. From the comparison between La Tempestad and Como Les Guste, it became clear
that local translations can be considered more interesting and more successful than global
translations striving for universality and timelessness. The fact that Cohen is a translator
striving for the latter, caused him to take on an especially heedful approach to the translation
which does not contribute to its quality.
In conclusion, I would like to express the hope that the project’s failure does not withhold
any Latin American translator from trying to dethrone Astrana Marín’s translations. Latin
America is still in need of someone who is wiling to approach the task of translating
Shakespeare’s Complete Works, for an exclusively Latin American audience, systematically.
However, as this thesis has proven, much has to happen before the unequal power relations
are resolved and former colonies are no longer the subordinate party, in any field.
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