Finished from the Start and Other Plays (review)

Abstract

SPRING 2010 221 height of the vanguardia movement and how its international success put Cuba on the theatre map. Without La noche de los asesinos, he argues, the Cuban stage would not have seen Los siete contra Tebas by Arrufat, or Dos viejos pánicos. Montes Huidobro’s vast knowledge of Cuban theatre and his talent as a playwright are undeniable. In Volumes I and II of Cuba detrás del telón he has amassed what amounts to a life’s work in the theatre and as a critic, but most importantly, he gives us insight into what it has been like as a man of letters to live through and succeed in that momentous and tumultuous period in history, but also the alienation that comes with exile. To be able to revisit Cuban theatre through Montes Huidobro’s personal and intellectual lenses is a privilege, and these volumes constitute a unique and necessary contribution to criticism on post-revolutionary Cuban drama. Bretton White University of Wisconsin-Madison Radrigán, Juan. Finished from the Start and Other Plays. Trans.Ana Elena Puga with Mónica Núñez-Parra. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern UP, 2008: 193 pp. In the opening paragraph of her “Translator’s Note,”Ana Elena Puga articulates her dilemma: “as a translator, do I too have a duty to bear witness...or would feeling such an obligation encumber productions with so much moral freight that they would sink to didacticism?” (xi). Puga´s translation of six of the most powerful works by Chilean playwright, Juan Radrigán, strikes that important balance between introducing these now canonical texts to English-speaking audiences and interpreting their context so that these same receptors might reflect upon and react to the political, social, and human injustices they portray. With solid grounding in literary, cultural, and translation theories, the “Translator’s Note” explains the deliberate and often difficult choices that translators must make to remain true to the playwright’s intentions while they work to please their “foreign” audiences. “When faced with specific challenges in translating Radrigán, I found myself trying to create an accessible, entertaining play for a U.S. reader/spectator without falling into the easy trap of effacing the characters’ nationality, which I felt would perpetuate the kind of cultural colonialism that Radrigán so opposes” (xiii). Thus, Puga describes how she transformed “the thick slang of the Chilean underclass,” so predominant in Radrigán´s works, into “an argot of underclass usage common to any number of ethnicities” (xiv), while simultaneously embedding the Chilean in a way that would not allow “the play(s) to be mistaken for nothing more than a protest against poverty” (xxi). Through a process of trial and error, the translator wrestled with words, speech types, and cultural information, always conscious of maintaining the integrity of Radrigán’s text and trying “to preserve the rhythm of the original” (xv). She decided that an occasional Spanish word left untranslated, for example, “adds a welcome 222 LATIN AMERICAN THEATRE REVIEW level of complexity to representation” and might serve to “dislodge English from its position as dominant language, so that those who comprehend only English would at least very temporarily experience the sense of disorientation and powerlessness that subordinates, in terms of linguistic and often related economic disadvantage, live with every day” (xxv). Puga’s “Introduction” details Radrigán’s personal life and sets it against a succinct, well-researched and meticulously footnoted history of the Chilean politics that frame his works, giving the reader a great sense of the man, the playwright, and his context. Continuing with her challenge to “bear witness,” Puga reads Radrigán’s plays as Latin American testimonio. “Though rooted in actual political injustice, testimonio may be fictional: it may take narrative or theatrical form, and it may use poetic language to help position the individual character as a synecdoche for his or her community” (xl). Puga reviews accepted and sometimes contradictory definitions of testimonio and analyzes its specific implications in theater, maintaining that “when testimonio is performed,... the confrontation between actor and spectator provides greater opportunity to challenge and subvert the official stories propagated by dominant elites” (xli) because it...