While there is no reason to doubt that Villar Ponte was the author of the
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Manent (1898-1988) was a Catalan author, literary critic and translator of poetry into both Catalan and Spanish. His version of Yeats’ play, under the title ‘La Mendicant’, appeared in La Revista 128 (January 1921), 39-43. Like in Nós, the text was surrounded by Irish-related content, indicative of an interest in political developments in Ireland.
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Galician language version, it was clearly not translated directly from Yeats’ original text but extensively using Marià Manent’s Catalan version of the play, as numerous instances of intertextuality and shifts corroborate.66 Both from the cultural and political point of view, many a parallel could be drawn (and could indeed have been drawn then) between the Catalonian and the Galician situations. However, the two nations followed different paths in the pursuit of the consolidation of their respective differential identities. Whereas in Catalonia the interest in Ireland was also at its height, the racial and historical argument used by the Galician nationalists was not applicable. Under the influence of Noucentisme, and in particular the ideal vision developed by Eugeni d’Ors before his defection to Madrid, Catalonia was regarded as a Mediterranean nation, far removed from the ideal of Atlanticism the Grupo Nós had in mind for Galicia. The Galeguistas knew and benefited from Catalan-language sources, as proven by the derivative relationship between Villar Ponte’s Cathleen Ni
Houliha and Manent’s La Mendicant. Thus, the total exclusion of the Catalan
translator’s name has to be seen as a response to the strategic muting of mediation processes in the incorporation of cultural products into the Galician system. This disregard is more poignant since connections to Catalonia and Catalan theatre abound in the works of Villar Ponte.67
In the case of Villar Ponte’s Cathleen Ni Houlihan, the silencing of the Catalan mediation does not, then, derive from a prejudice against the Catalan system. Instead, it stems from translation being seen as a means to legitimise the Galician language as a vehicle for cultural production, and the internationalist vocation of the
66
I presented extensive evidence of this mediation in my paper ‘Ten ar de forasteira’: Villar Ponte’s Galician translation of W.B. Yeats’, at the symposium The Speckled Ground: Hybridity in Irish and Galician Cultural Production, NUI Galway, 30 March 2012. Furthermore, in her 2013 thesis,Vázquez Fernández corroborates these findings in her textual analysis of the Villar Ponte translation. Vázquez Fernández, Translation, Minority…, pp. 146-197.
67 Not only did Villar Ponte dedicate one of his early plays, A patria do galego, to Santiago Rusinyol
but he also presented Catalonia and Valencia as an inspiration, in particular for future theatre practice in Galicia in a number of articles for El Pueblo Gallego, such as ‘O espiritoalismo catalán’ (26 October 1928), p. 1; ‘Lembranza de Ignacio Iglesias’ (14 October 1928), p. 1; and ‘Vendo como progresa o teatro valenciano’ (23 November 1928), p. 1.
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Revista Nós stated clearly the need to eliminate intermediaries in this process.
Moreover, the idea of Ireland as a sister nation utilised by the Galician nationalist movement was incompatible with the admission of a mediator between the two. The perception and reception of Irish culture had to adhere to this target culture- generated agenda and its strong political ethos. Nevertheless, reading Villar Ponte’s version through the prism of the Catalan intermediary version brings to light further aspects central to the appropriation of Irish cultural values for the Galician contexts, as well as alerting us to norms and functions governing translation activity at that time. It also helps us to identify the provenance and significance of the particular translation strategies followed by Villar Ponte, which can be interpreted in line with cultural and political positioning as outlined earlier. Here, it will also be clear how far his translation negotiates perceived linguistic, cultural and theatrical needs.
In Cathleen Ni Houlihan, Yeats presents allegorically the theme of the fight against the British power. It is thus in many ways an obvious choice for translation in the context of revival and defence of a minorised culture. In the original, the action is set in Killala, coinciding in time and place with a key episode of the Irish Rebellion of 1798: the arrival of French ships in support of the Irish rebels. Yet in both the Catalan and Galician translations, focus on this historical episode is blurred. It is instead the allegorical nature of the play that allows for an easy transposition of the situation from Ireland in the dawn of independence to early-twentieth-century Iberia. The Old Woman who seeks refuge in the Gillane’s cottage on the night before their eldest son’s wedding speaks of ‘Too many strangers in the house’ (l.140, p.88),68 her ‘four beautiful green fields’ (l.146, p.88) stolen from her and of those who died for her sake (‘He died for love of me: many a man has died for love of me’, l.171-2, p.89). She identifies herself as Cathleen, daughter of Houlihan, a name taken
68
David R. Clark and Rosalind E. Clark (eds.), The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats. Volume II: The Plays (New York: Scribner, 2001), p. 834. All text quotes of English-language versions of Yeats’ plays given throughout this thesis correspond to this edition, unless otherwise specified.
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from a William Heffernan poem.69 To an Irish audience, she is identifiable as a personification of Ireland, rejuvenated in the end by virtue of Michael Gillane’s decision to follow her and join the fight. The play fits in with the dramatic models supported by Antón Villar Ponte, who favoured historical theatre as a means to spark a revalorisation of national spirit (‘llegar al fin de despertar en el alma de las gentes la emoción de nuestro pasado’).70 However, his suggestions that historical theatre should become a fundamental part of the Galician repertoire were met with pragmatic concerns by representatives of the coros, called by Villar Ponte to embrace a change in repertoire and to contribute to the renovation of Galician theatre activity:
¿Con qué apoyo oficial o particular contamos, para vestir y decorar, lo que tan maravillosamente han forjado ustedes en su obra? […] También sentimos el dolor agudo de la indiferencia de los organismos oficiales que tienen el deber – al igual que las diputaciones Vasca y Catalana – de proteger cuando fuere necesario, estas manifestaciones de cultura regional.71
Cathleen Ni Houlihan offered political weight as well as production viability,
requiring of no grandiose means or a large cast. The historical frame of the original is blurred in favour of more straightforward identification and the rural setting facilitated the incursion into ‘folkloric’ theatre, according to Antón Villar Ponte, an area worthy of exploration:
ese teatro que podríamos llamar ‘folk-lórico’ i que es el teatro con que iniciaron el resurgir de su personalidad todos los pueblos célticos todavía, para nuestra desgracia, está casi inédito en Galicia, pero más que por falta de cultivadores por carencia de estímulo en los que cabría fuesen sus cultivadores.72
Though hidden at the time of publication, an analysis of the Galician language
69 David R. Clark and Rosalind E. Clark (eds.), The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats. Volume II: The
Plays (New York: Scribner, 2001), p. 834.
70 Villar Ponte co-wrote with Ramón Cabanillas O Mariscal, based on the mystified figure of Pedro
Pardo de Cela (1425-1483), Galician nobleman executed by order of the Catholic King and Queen.
71 Agrupación Gallega Emilio Nogueira, ‘Sobre el teatro gallego. Una carta abierta’, addressed to
‘Antonio Villar Ponte’, El Pueblo Gallego (10 January 1928), p. 2.
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text produced by Antón Villar Ponte will lead us inevitably to Marià Manent’s La
Mendicant. That is not to say that the norms governing the translation into Galician
are the same as those affecting the Catalan text but, since the former served as bridge between Yeats and the Galician target system, the treatment of cultural references, the lexical choices, and the rhythm are inexorably marked by the mediation process.
The Galician version reflects and often augments the inflationist trend and the shifts present in Manent’s version, resulting in a considerably longer end product than Yeats’ original. However, Villar Ponte preserves the original title, Cathleen Ni
Houlihan, which foregrounds the Irish origin of the play and suggests some direct
knowledge of Yeats’ works. When published in Catalan, the title of W.B. Yeats is just a subtitle to Manent’s La Mendicant (meaning ‘beggar’), whereas in Antón Villar Ponte’s version it is the only title present, converted into Catuxa de Houlihan in the 1935 volume, introducing a degree of localisation. In the latter, the name appears in the body of the text as follows: ‘[…] e outros chámanme Cathleen (Catuxa), a filla de Houlihan’.73 This explanatory strategy would present some difficulties in performance, affecting the flow of the text and confusing the identity of the character, and indicates the tensions between the ideological and the aesthetic traversing the translation process. It also places the emphasis on the symbolic, allegorical persona of Cathleen Ní Houlihan.
The relationship of the text with Manent’s Catalan translation uncovers a political reading of the play in the Iberian context, as illustrated on a micro-textual level by the translation into Catalan of the terms ‘strange’ and ‘stranger’ as ‘foraster’ (‘forasters’, ‘forastera’), which appear throughout the play. Both in their functions as noun and adjective, they are used to refer first to the ‘Poor Old Woman’, then to the invaders and, finally, to Delia, abandoned by Michael when he leaves to fulfil his patriotic duty. In terms of meaning, ‘the strange woman’ differs from ‘la forastera’:
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the former can denote mystery, weirdness, unusual behaviour or simply lack of familiarity, while the latter is restricted to geographical origin, indicating alterity. Manent introduces a network of signification absent in Yeats, which then materialises in the relationship between land and belonging, motherland and otherness in Villar Ponte’s version. This shift contributes to a more markedly political reading of the play. ‘Stranger’ is consistently translated in the Catalan version as ‘foraster/a’, and as ‘forasteiro/a’ in Villar Ponte, whose choices show a concern with lexical variation and enrichment, and a tendency towards explicitation through the text. The influence of ‘outsiders’ is intensified in the Galician version through the use of further synonyms indicating foreigness and the addition of explanatory phrases, translating Manent’s ‘forasters’ as ‘xentes alleas’ (p. 10) or ‘aos forasteiros, aos alleos’ (p. 11).74
Cultural references
Villar Ponte also clearly follows Manent’s lead in the interpretation of culturally coded terms that are not familiar in the target system. This can work in favour of the underlying agenda of identification and racial affinity with Ireland and the Irish, such as the explanatory footnote included in the Catalan text: ‘Els O’Donnell i els O’Sullivan són antiquissimes families irlandeses de raça cèltica’/ ‘Os O’Donnell e os Sullivan son antigas familias de raza céltiga’.75
However, there are also occasions where Manent’s choices erase cultural elements that denote traditional Irish mores and, therefore, contribute to the Irish character of the setting, with the subsequent loss of references to tradition. Such is the case with his translation of ‘oat cake’ as ‘galeta’, which Villar Ponte renders as
74 For additional examples, see Appendix C. Examples from the texts hereon are followed by the page
numbers in brackets corresponding to the previously referred editions ‘Cathleen Ni Houlihan’, in Yeats, The Collected Works…; ‘La Mendicant’, in La Revista; and ‘Cathleen Ni Houlihan’ in Nós.
75
Manent p. 42; Villar Ponte, p. 11. It is worth noting here that Villar Ponte calques ‘cèltica’ instead of using ‘celta’, introducing associations with referents in all likelihood familiar to the Revista Nós readership, such as the journal Céltiga and the collection of books of the same name, and the nineteenth century tertulia ‘A Cova Céltiga’ that gathered many key figures of the Rexurdimento.
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‘galletas’. A more radical semantic shift occurs in the translation of ‘hurling’ in the following exchange, which also illustrates the extent to which Villar Ponte relied on Manent’s translation:
PETER: It might be a hurling.
PATRICK: There’s no hurling to-day. It must be down in the town the cheering is.
(p. 83)
PERE: Hum! Hi deu haver agun avalot… PATRICI: No, avui no n’és dia d’avalots. Deu ser allà baix, a ciutat, que fan aquesta cridòria. (pp. 39-40)
PEDRO: ¡Hui! Débeche sere algunha gresca. PATRICIO: Non, hoxe non é día de rifar ninguén. Cecais d’aló embaixo, da cidade, veñen esos berros. (p. 8)
Here, Yeats features the Irish traditional sport in order to reinforce the characters’ national identity. The game becomes a riot in the Catalan translation and then a street fight in the Galician version with a consequent loss of a significant reference to the source cultural context.76 Villar Ponte’s use of Manent’s Catalan version as his source text led to a number of mistranslations that prove beyond doubt the derivative relationship between the two texts. An example of these is the translation of the Catalan ‘Heu fet un camí llarg, avui?’ (p. 41), from ‘Have you travelled far to-day’ (p. 87) as ‘Traguedes un camiño longo, aboa?’ (p. 10), with the remarkable transformation of an adverb of time into an appellative denoting the old age of the listener and adding a colloquial quality to the text.
In the Galician translation, the term ‘cottage’ of the opening lines is explained in brackets as ‘casiña aldeán’, that is ‘small country house’, providing a rural setting for the action from the very first moment. This contradicts the later translation choice
76
The reference to the sport would evoke the Bloody Sunday events in Dublin on 21 November the previous year, when the Royal Irish constabulary opened fire against the crowd at a Gaelic football game in Croke Park, causing the death of fourteen Irish civilians and injuring dozens more. The mediation of the Catalan version results also in other misinterpretations of the text. For instance, Manent converts ‘There are ships in the Bay’ into ‘Són gent de les naus a la Baja’, which Villar Ponte preserves (‘Son Mariñeiros da Baja’) in line with his strategy of adhering to the toponym found in the Catalan, even though the grapheme ‘j’ was rarely used at the time and has been eliminated in contemporary standard Galician.
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of ‘town’ as ‘ciutat’ and ‘cidade’ respectively, which suggests an urban setting. Whereas for Manent the shift may not be very relevant, any transposition from a rural to an urban milieu would carry greater implications in the Galician context. The use of Galician language was generalised in the rural areas, while Spanish was favored by city dwellers and therefore, the rural setting was a key component in the characters’ verisimilitude.77
The language of Villar Ponte’s Cathleen Ni Houlihan
The language of Villar Ponte’s text cannot be ascribed to a specific dialectal block, although it exhibits many features of Occidental Galician consistent with oral production of the A Coruña and Pontevedra regions. Some of the dialectal forms used in the translation correspond to very restricted diatopic variants, but Villar Ponte’s choices are not consistent and markers from different dialectal areas alternate through the text, in all likelihood to display a wider range of possibilities and highlight the literary potential of the Galician language.
Despite the oral character of the text, Villar Ponte does not reproduce one of the distinctive traits of spoken Galician that is the gheada, a phonetic modification of the soundless occlusive velar consonant /g/ onto a fricative /X/. Since the nineteenth century, the phenomenon had been associated with a lack of culture or sophistication and, until very recently, considered to be the result of contagion from Spanish. Precisely this common assumption is likely to have caused Villar Ponte to reject the representation of gheada in his work. His aim was to emphasise the unique qualities of Galician that would place the language on a par with any other mode of expression, specifically distancing it from Spanish; to include gheada would have
77 The use of language as a characterisation element in texts and performances was a feature of late
nineteenth and early twentieth century Galician drama, where onstage reflections of the diglossic situation were commonplace: the middle-class characters used Spanish, the peasants used Galician. For a cultural historical perspective on this, see Iolanda Ogando and Laura Tato, Textos recuperados. De Galo Salinas a Castelao (A Coruña: Biblioteca-Arquivo Teatral Francisco Pillado Mayor, 2012). Whereas this convention was challenged, and progressively overcome, we can find certain traces up to recent times, specifically in relation to Irish drama, as I will demonstrate in subsequent chapters.
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achieved just the opposite.78
Carvalho Calero described the language of Ramón Villar Ponte’s work as ‘nacionalista’ and ‘diferencialista’ and plagued with ‘hiperenxebrismos’.79
Although these descriptors could be equally applied to Antón Villar Ponte’s language, his ‘differentialist’ strategy is predominantly based on the incorporation of a range of synonyms throughout the text. The emphatic lexical diversification is evident from the offset: in fifty lines of his Cathleen Ni Houlihan translation, we can identify two different verbs for ‘to look’, ‘ollar’ and ‘alucar’, instead of the more obvious and neutral choice, ‘mirar’, which of course would coincide with the Spanish word.80 Similarly, the translator uses ‘rubir’ instead of ‘subir’, the latter meaning simply ‘to go up’ and the former having connotations closer to ‘to climb’. This shift ultimately results in a narrower range of signifiers as it restricts the interpretation of the sentence. It is evident that accurate meaning is a secondary matter for Villar Ponte, whose priority is to demonstrate the expressive possibilities of the Galician language and to contribute to the creation of a literary standard. These examples corroborate the derivative relationship between Villar Ponte’s and Manent’s versions, since some of the verbs used were not present inYeats’ original but had been introduced into the Catalan version. The inserts were subsequently translated into Galician by Villar Ponte, with the addition of lexical variation, in response to the previously discussed agenda of norm creation.
Another example, where lexical diversification is given priority over form, is
78 The use of gheada in performance and character construction is also discussed in Chapter Four.
79
Carballo Calero, Historia da literatura…, p. 613. ‘Hiperenxebrismos’, words that differ from their Spanish counterpart, are favoured in much of the written production of the period. These over- galicianised versions of many terms are used to avoid coincidence with the Spanish and are often generated by arbitrarily applying etymological changes idiosyncratic to Galician. For instance, the Latin ‘duplare’ gives ‘doblar’ (Spanish) and ‘dobrar’ (Galician and Portuguese), so ‘public’ is galicianised as ‘púbrico’*.
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In his quest for variants, Villar Ponte uses the verb ‘alucar’ (‘Xa vai para tempo que alucabamos pol-a fenestra para te ver chegare’), which incidentally reflects the sounds of the English ‘to look out’ but introduces the idea of surreptitiousness. ‘To see’ is on one occasion ‘ver’ but on another ‘fitar’, a verb which corresponds with ‘to stare’, indicating intentionality, and therefore, an intensification of the source text choice.
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Villar Ponte’s rendition of the Old Woman’s song. The four verses end with the words ‘for ever’ in the English language original, which Manent translates as ‘sempre’ (‘always’), creating a rhythm by means of the anaphorical structure. In the