On the Translation of Verse Form: Shakespeare's Sonnets into Spanish

Abstract

This work, which seeks to escape the frequent and defeatist idea of translation as loss and to avoid the prescriptivism attached to it, examines the translation of the poetic form from a broad perspective, starting from a corpus of 69 Spanish translations of Shakespeare's Sonnets published in Latin America and Spain between 1877 (when the first translation appeared) and 2018. The study primarily addresses three aspects, which can be summarised in three basic questions regarding the translation of poetic form: What do the translators say about it? What do they actually do? How do they do it? The thesis is divided in four chapters, as follows:

The first chapter examines the voice of the translators in their prefaces and introductory notes to describe how they express their view of poetic translation. As their discourse often rests on recurrent topoi or ‘translation memes’ (Chesterman 1996; 1997) espoused by translators and scholars alike for centuries, it offers an interpretation of these recurrences and of the possible discord that arises between the analyses of the paratexts and the translated texts by resorting to the notion of ‘symbolic capital’ coined by Bourdieu (1984). This work considers that some of these commonplaces function as a mechanism to grant prestige and respectability to a given translation both for translators and readers.

The second chapter studies the outer form used in translations and, taking a sonnet as a prototype, provides a quantitative and qualitative analysis based on five parameters, namely the use of prose or verse; the syllabic count; the regular rhythm (stress pattern); the rhyme type (consonant, assonant or hybrid); and the rhyme scheme. The results of the analysis will serve as a basis for classifying these translations according to Holmes' metapoem forms (1994) and proposing a revision of this model.

The third chapter addresses the translation of the mechanisms of repetition (mainly, parallelism, anaphora and alliteration). The goal is to observe the significance of these formal elements that, while less obvious than those constituting the outer form of the poem, still belong to its rhythmic dimension. For this purpose, several translated verses of sonnets 18, 27, 29, 66 and 106, including one or more mechanisms of repetition, are analysed.

Lastly, the fourth chapter provides a rationale for the process of poetic translation, particularly of formal poetry, i.e. that which employs formal patterns throughout the poem (whether it be metre, rhythm, rhyme or a combination of some of these elements). This reflection, built upon the interpretation of the results obtained in the previous chapters and the discourse on poetry translation found in scholarly papers is based on the notion of recreation—i.e. the creation of a new poem arising from the interpretation of a previous one. It concludes that accepting that the translator must have the freedom to play with a poem’s elements in the same way that the source poet did is one way—perhaps the only way—of freeing us from the hackneyed conception of

poetic translation as inevitable failure.