Abstract
The interplay between private desire and ingrained codes of a public morality centred on honour, shame, and retribution lay at the heart of how Spanish Golden Age theatre performed community to itself. Translation, in terms of its activities as a historicizing mode, is well placed to trace the development of the coercive components of this morality across time and space. But, as a re-creative mode, translation also enables audiences today both to understand the moral weight that such terms exercised in their own context, and to relate them to the different moral observance of our contemporary moment. In that way, this article proposes a theory of translation for the stage that refuses to bifurcate between past and present, that is both historicizing and re-historicizing.
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Notes
- 1.
Benjamin discusses aura in the context of the inevitability of interaction between the work of art and technologies and processes of reproduction—of which, translation may be considered a part. The aura of a text, in that sense, may only be achieved through illusion, as any encounter with that text inevitably takes place through conditions of difference.
- 2.
Kierkegaard’s ‘Life may only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards’ perfectly captures translation’s deeply rooted hostility to fixity of interpretation (see Cappelorn 2002).
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Johnston, D. (2016). Translating the Past: The Moral Universe of Calderón’s Painter of Dishonour . In: Blumczynski, P., Gillespie, J. (eds) Translating Values. Palgrave Studies in Translating and Interpreting. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54971-6_12
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