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Every year, on World Theatre Day, a leading Spanish playwright is elected to drape a white scarf round the statue of Ramon Maria del Valle-Inclan, which stands on one of Madrid's main thoroughfares, the Paseo del Prado. It is a simple ceremony, emphasising the special place held by Valle in that process of the rehabilitation of the neglected figures of the past, which has been the principal saving grace of the theatre of post-Franco Spain. Here was a dramatist who declared himself as "outside the theatre," who insisted that he wrote his plays without a thought for whether they were performable or not, and much of whose work, for nearly forty years after his death in 1936, was condemned to almost inevitable silence. But a swirl of recent productions of his plays, both inside and outside Spain, along with dramatisations of the odd novel, have belatedly confirmed Valle-Inclan's reputation on stage as one of the most innovative of twentieth-century playwrights.
The would-be translator of Valle-Inclan is therefore confronted with a series of immediately daunting prospects. Foremost among these is the fact that while Valle-Inclan's name is now beginning to filter through to the cognoscenti, he is still a virtually unknown quantity in performance for an English-speaking audience.1 The translator of plays is of course frequently called upon to play the crucial role of cultural enabler, but in the case of Valle this process of willing enablement is hampered by the fact that the cruelly tragifarcical sense of life that gives his work its unique flavour does not find a ready echo in English theatre. It is important to remember, in this respect, that translators who prepare a version of a foreign-language play with production rather than publication in mind are engaged in a process more akin to that of director than that of author. Theirs is the task of mediating between text and audience, of creating a stage language that is simultaneously a textual and paralinguistic equivalent of the original as well as a vehicle through which the stage-audience complicity of the original work may be similarly regenerated. Valle is a dramatist whose best work, as I have noted elsewhere,2 marauds in and through conventional linguistic frontiers and whose impact in performance is virtually unique,...