Abstract
T. S. Eliot wrote The Family Reunion (1939) while he composed the Four Quartets, twelve years after his conversion to Anglo-Catholicism in 1927. The play erects a bridge between the author’s early stage productions (Sweeney Agonistes, The Rock and Murder in the Cathedral) and the later society plays (The Cocktail Party, The Confidential Clerk and The Elder Statesman). Moreover, in his 1951 essay “Poetry and Drama,” Eliot delves into the strengths and weaknesses of The Family Reunion and links this play with his own experiments with a “conversational line” which introduces popular theatrical conventions wrapped in the patterns of poetry that may appeal to theatre-goers. This paper deals with Eliot’s proposals for verse drama present in an incipient form in The Family Reunion, and explores the possible ways of translating these resources into Spanish. It focuses on Eliot’s own explanations in “Poetry and Drama” about the way in which to adapt blank verse to the stage. Furthermore, this essay explores metrical concepts such as stress and caesura and applies them to wider aspects concerning dramatic patterns and inner/outer voice in characters.
Highlights
Compared to his poetry and essays, T
I intend to contribute to a closer appreciation of this drama through one of his plays, The Family Reunion, which marks an unmistakable turning point in his dramatic career
I consider The Family Reunion a bridge between Eliot’s earlier and later dramatic experiments, a fact which Eliot himself discusses in his essay “Poetry and Drama (1951);” I analyze the way in which Eliot’s characters embody simultaneously real and transcendent voices, a technique which he developed in later plays; and, lastly, I assess the choices for a viable translation into Spanish of Eliot’s verse form, especially the “conversational line” which he introduced in The Family Reunion
Summary
Compared to his poetry and essays, T. In terms of methodological focus, this article follows Merino Álvarez’s textual approach to drama translation (1994b, 127-138). From this standpoint, I deal with The Family Reunion as a whole unit of language—the micro level of drama translation—, from which I depart in order to analyze both the specific utterances within the whole—the macro level—as well as their relationship with former translations and other plays by the same author—the intersystemic level—. Jones’s approach to poetry translation which encourages the use of “recreative translation,” that is, a middle point between literal translation and the creation of a new poem Within this recreative translation, I choose the analogical mode, defined by Jones as “a target form with a similar cultural function to the source form” (2012, 126).
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