““A grammar of images” – Stephen Spender’s translations of Lorca’s homoerotic poetry.”

Abstract

La comunicación analiza las traducciones que el poeta inglés Stephen Spender hizo de la obra de Federico García Lorca, y cómo específicamente Spender abordó la cuestión delicada de los elementos tabúes de la poesía lorquiana, sus contenidos homoeróticos. Spender también era gay y un simpatizante con la causa republicana y, a la luz de estos dos hechos, esta comunicación examinará su acercamiento a la traducibilidad esencial y de la obra lorquiana que publicó en 1939 con el título de Selected Poems, la primera antología en inglés de la obra del poeta español y un volumen que Spender consideraba una manifestación de su apoyo a la España democrática amenazada por el fascismo..

The paper analyses Stephen Spender’s translations of the work of the poet most closely associated with the Spanish Civil War, Federico García Lorca, and how Spender approached the delicate question of the taboo elements of Lorca’s poetry, specifically its notably homoerotic contents. Spender was both gay and a Republican sympathizer and, in the light of these two facts, I will examine his approach to the essential translatability and universality of Lorca’s poetry, its “grammar of images”, to use the memorably apposite phrase that Spender coined to refer to the key to translating his work. The paper will analyse how Spender resolved the taboo of homosexuality in his 1939 translation of Lorca’s Selected Poems, the first anthology in English, along with the manner in which he saw translation as a way of expressing his allegiance to a democratic Spain attacked by Fascism.