Killing Bill

Abstract

The works of William Shakespeare—unstable originals in their own right—have given rise to hundreds of translations into Spanish over the years. Chapter 15 begins by exploring several key projects from the twentieth century that sought to loosen the grip of formal, peninsular Spanish on the corpus and create a visceral, accessible, and at times transgressive Shakespeare by and for Latin America, including Marcelo Cohen’s series “Shakespeare por escritores,” which invited writers from a dozen Spanish-speaking countries to inflect the Bard’s plays with their regional sensibilities; Pablo Neruda’s Romeo y Julieta ; and two very different versions of King Lear penned by Nicanor Parra and Jesusa Rodríguez. The chapter goes on to explore another form of translation: Matías Piñeiro’s “Shakesperiadas,” a series of films in loose dialogue with the Shakespearian comedies they invoke, with emphasis on Hermia & Helena (2016), in which an Argentinean theater director attends an artist residency in New York City to render A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Spanish. As this chapter argues, Piñeiro’s representation of her translation process leverages scholarship on Shakespeare to upend conservative notions of fidelity. Through their distinct but interrelated approaches to the practice and representation of translation, each of these cultural objects—from an anti-neocolonial series bent on pluralizing Shakespeare in Spanish to versions that reimagine, rephrase, and reframe the texts on which they draw—not only explore the limits of linguistic exchange, but also challenge notions of textual proprietorship and authoritative interpretations.