The unauthorized shaw: non-official translations in the Spanish-speaking world.

Abstract

As we have seen in the previous chapter, the best-known translator of Bernard Shaw into Spanish during his lifetime was the Luxembourgian Julio Broutá, whom Shaw himself named his “official translator” in 1907.1 Broutá corresponded with Shaw and later acquired the rights2 to the works he would translate (see the Appendix). He was even acknowledged by the press as the “only” translator of Shaw into Spanish, as can be seen in the following excerpt from the newspaper El Sol on April 5, 1928: Q: Which are the best translations of Shaw’s plays into Spanish? A: There are no other translations than those by Julio Broutá. Visit the General Society of Authors of Spain. This statement, however, does not reflect the real situation of Shaw’s Spanish translations. In fact, the rendering of Shaw’s works into Spanish during his lifetime went well beyond Julio Broutá, not only after Broutá’s death in 1932, but also previously. Unfortunately, works translated by people other than Broutá are frequently deemed incidental, as if they were the exception that proves the rule. With helpful but misguided outlooks, the few academic works touching upon these translations have considered them subsidiary.3 This chapter seeks to redress the imbalance between the scholarly attention paid to these translations—virtually non-existent—and those by Broutá. Specifically, I will examine those translations by translators other than Broutá up to 1956, thereby covering Shaw’s lifetime and also the years leading up to the centenary of his birth. My purpose is twofold. First and foremost, I intend to compile the first-ever bibliographical record of these translations. This will provide a more comprehensive view of the translations of Shaw’s works into Spanish, thereby completing and complementing the analysis of Broutá’s translations discussed in the previous chapter. Second, I will discuss the circumstances under which some of the translations were carried out, thus adding depth to our understanding of Shaw’s reception in the Spanish-speaking world. The compilation of the different translations listed here will also open new research avenues in the study of Bernard Shaw’s works from a traductological point of view.