Life is Not a Dream: Traducir a Calderón para la escena anglosajona contemporánea.

Abstract

In the last few years Spanish seventeenthcentury drama has aroused the interest of a group of translation scholars and practitioners, both in Great Britain and America. This article is intended to show some of the procedures used by contemporary translators of the most international Spanish classical play: La vida es sueño. For this purpose, and thanks to a brief corpus of plays translated into English that have been first staged in the last two decades, attention will be paid to how some of the most recurrent topics of our comedia (that is, honour, decorum and the view of women) are transferred to a different period, culture and space. Thus, an analysis of the target texts reveals the use of a wide range of translation mechanisms to guarantee a favourable reception of the final product.