SQN - Sine Qua Non - Issue Two - Journal - Page 18
SINE QUA NON
city, whose story has inspired granaínos (natives of Granada) down the ages—and the site
of her public execution. I haunted the bookshops and bought the collected works, but I
struggled to comprehend—the poetry of the plays but not the rhythms of the place. So, I
started to translate. For myself. To understand. What so many translators will tell you is how
it gets under your skin and into your blood: gradually and then suddenly (to borrow from
Hemingway, another American who had a certain fondness for Spain).1
And I kept watching, and listening, and translating. I listened to my students as I
helped them learn English—and onally got a handle on the very particular and diocultto-understand phoneme-and-syllable-dropping accent naunted and favored by granaínos.
(Even their endonym granaíno is diferent from how other Spaniards refer to them, which
is granadino.) And I translated bits of the newspaper, advertisements plastered on shop
windows, menus, and all manner of realia wherein I didn9t expect to ond large doses of
poetry and metaphorical imagery as I did in the plays. But, again, as with the production of
Blood Wedding many years earlier, this was only a moment on the way, not the destination. I
certainly didn9t have the audacity yet to tackle a great like García Lorca, but I suppose I was
getting there.
In the Middle …
When I decided to actually study translation formally, I moved back to Paris. To translate
García Lorca. In an American university. Taught largely by British scholars. |at recipe is
probably far more typical of a translator9s paella than at orst may seem obvious. But, of
course, I got many a question in the vein of: You9re translating from Spanish in France? Why?
To which the only proper response is: Paris is always a good idea (to borrow from the remake
of Sabrina).2 And I went to Paris with all the intention of staying a practicing and practical
translator, a practitioner not a theorist. But then those pesky British scholars got their mitts
on me, plying me with interesting reading, fascinating conversation, and not a little bit of
going to the theater—in all kinds of languages. So, in the end, Paris was a good idea, just not
quite the one I thought I was having when I moved there for the second time.
When I wrote my master9s thesis at the end of my studies in Paris, I started it with an
epigraph from the eminent translation scholar Susan Bassnett (as used again at the beginning
of this essay).
