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Translating for the stage is one of the most challenging tasks for the translator. The text has to convey both the meaning of the original and the complexities of the world devised for a particular theatrical audience. This roundtable will discuss issues of translating theater, the solutions that open up when rehearsing the translated text, and the temptation to rewrite. Panelists in this roundtable will also reflect on the process of staging a translation of the award-winning play Los nadadores nocturnos (The Night Swimmers) by José Manuel Mora. He is the first recipient of the Spanish Playwright-in-residence at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, a new initiative by the Cultural Office of the Embassy of Spain in Washington DC to promote Spanish playwrights and theater in the U.S.

José Manuel Mora is a playwright and director of the Escuela Superior de Arte Dramático of Castilla y León, in Spain. Some of his recent works with Draft.Inn, the company he co-founded, are Esta no es La casa de Bernarda Alba/This Is Not The House of Bernarda Alba and El último rinoceronte blanco/The Last White Rhinoceros. Elena Igartuburu, translator of Mora’s Los nadadores nocturnos, is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. David Rodríguez-Solás, Assistant Professor of Spanish at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, is a specialist in modern and contemporary Spanish and Catalan theatre, cultural memory, and visual and performance studies.

 

Photo gallery: https://cervantesobservatorio.fas.harvard.edu/en/galleries/photos/staging-spanish-theater-translation-roundtable-jose-manuel-mora

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