The following piece was written as the introduction to the bilingual edition of La Golondrina/The Swallow (Guillem Clua), published by Ediciones Antigona. The English version of the play is on at the Cervantes Theatre, London, from 8 to 26 May, 2018.
If you compare the original Spanish text of La Golondrina with its English translation, The Swallow, the first thing you’ll notice is that the protagonists of La Golondrina are called Ramón and Amelia, while their counterparts in the English version are Ray and Emily. But their names are not the only thing about them that is different: Ray and Emily don’t just speak English, they are English. That might seem obvious. What else could they be? Well, they could be American or Scottish, for a start. But they aren’t. Or they could be Spanish – after all, when we watch Lorca’s House of Bernarda Alba, we don’t have a problem with the notion that its Spanish characters are speaking English. Or they could be from anywhere and nowhere, like the tramps in Waiting for Godot (En attendant Godot in its original, French version).
So why did I transfer the action of La Golondrina from Spain to England, and what effect did this have on the translation? The first thing to realise is that La Golondrina itself is based on action that has been transferred. In this case, a real world event – an attack on a gay nightclub in which those who died were the victims not just of a terrorist atrocity but of a homophobic hate crime – is relocated from Florida, USA, to an unspecified provincial Spanish city.
In a sense, then, the original play has two locations: it is set in Spain but also in the USA. And the effect of this shift, paradoxically, is to emphasise the universal nature of the themes explored in the play (homophobia, gay love, mother–son relationships, misunderstandings, truth and lies), because the action is at once anchored in the local setting and refers to an international event. If you transfer this play to the London stage, then, it makes sense to replace the ‘local’ setting of the original script with the local setting of the English-language production.
What impact does this decision have on the translation? We’ve already seen perhaps the most obvious effect: the protagonists’ names are changed. But the decision to relocate a play, once taken, ripples all the way through the translation. Potentially, it influences every single line of the text. Here, I will identify a few of these changes.
Despite its universal feel, La Golondrina contains plenty of references to Spanish culture. Where possible, I adapted these to make them feel more ‘British’. Amelia cooks paella and cannelloni for her son, while Emily prepares roast chicken and spaghetti bolognaise; Amelia refers to watching an episode of Masterchef, while Emily watches Great British Bake-Off; Amelia and her son dance at a Verbena (a traditional Spanish open-air festival to celebrate a local holiday), while Emily and her son attend a Summer Fair, and so on.
Some of the references are more subtle. When Ramón reveals that he studied translation and interpreting before completing a master’s or two, I decided that Ray would have a degree in Spanish. I didn’t have to change his qualification, but sticking with the original had a distractingly technical ring in English. The modification also allowed me to acknowledge the Spanish origins of the text and – perhaps most importantly of all – by introducing the idea that Ray was familiar with Spanish culture, it helped me to keep one cultural reference that I had no intention of changing, an issue to which I will return at the end.
If it is fairly obvious why relocating the play will affect how the translator deals with cultural references, another effect of the decision not just to have Emily and Ray speak in English but to make their characters English is that the translator has to strive for a fully idiomatic translation. (If our characters are ‘foreigners’ speaking English – perhaps Olga, Masha and Irina in an English-language production of Chekhov’s Three Sisters – then not only do we not expect them to speak highly idiomatic English; we might find it distracting if they did so.)
Some of these differences are reasonably easy to identify. When Ramón refers to the bar as el bar de moda (literally, the fashionable bar), Ray calls it the ‘in’ place. And I deliberately opted for contractions (it’s, I’m etc.) and colloquial words and phrases – wad of cash (rather than bundle of notes), telly (and not just TV or television) – wherever possible.
Less immediately noticeable, perhaps, but arguably more important is the effort to ensure that the translation doesn’t bear the scars of the source language. For example, Ramón and Amelia use the word sí nineteen times in the original script. In the translation, the equivalent word – yes – appears a mere three times. Near the start of the play, when Ramón asks Amelia if she knows the play’s title song La Golondrina, Amelia answers Me es familiar, sí. (I’m familiar with it, yes.) But when Emily is asked the same question by Ray, she simply replies I’m familiar with it. I could have kept the yes or perhaps moved it to the start of the sentence, but it felt far more natural in English to omit it altogether.
And on the subject of omissions, although I changed Amelia to Emily, you wouldn’t know unless you read the programme or the script. In the original play, Ramón addresses Amelia by name no fewer than twelve times. In the English version, Ray doesn’t use Emily’s name once. Why? Because Spanish allows Ramón to protect himself against the charge of over-familiarity by prefacing the first name with Señora. I could have had Ray address his boyfriend’s mother as Mrs Emily but it would have sounded rather stilted. The more natural choice, particularly in a one-to-one dialogue, was to drop the name altogether.
I’ve talked so far about some of the many ways in which the decision to relocate the action from Spain to England influenced my translation. However, the play is still very identifiably the same: almost every line in the English matches an equivalent line in the Spanish text, in effect if not in literal meaning. And there is also one key cultural reference that remains unchanged in both versions. Without giving too much away, a key moment in the play revolves around a volume of poetry that Ramón/Ray has given to his boyfriend Dani/Danny, some years earlier. The book is by Federico García Lorca. But Lorca is there not simply as a cultural reference point to anchor the action in Spain but also because of how he lived and how he died: a gay poet and playwright who was unable to declare his sexuality in public, he was assassinated by right-wing nationalists in the wake of the military coup that brought General Franco to power in 1936. He was, in other words, the victim not just of a political assassination but of a homophobic hate crime.