The Generation of Meaning in Performance

The question that preoccupies me here regarding the performance of Los empeños de una casa / House of Desires has its roots in a pervasive situating of Sor Juana within a specific field of meaning that has the potential to close off some of the most radically gendered resonances in her writing. The attraction of Sor Juana for the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) for their Spanish Golden Age Season in 2004 was manifold: on one level, the play was a “find”; it had added value by virtue of its being written by a Mexican nun; and it was a bold, outspoken comedy that leaned in its playfulness more towards Molière than its immediate antecedents of Calderón de la Barca and Lope de Vega. It was apparent to the creative team from the first reading that the author was playing some interesting games with the codes of honour that were manifestly central to all the plays.

During the season, one well-respected broadsheet asked me to write an article that would tell the life of Sor Juana, and that would be accompanied by the translations of her love poems by Joan Larkin and Jaime Manrique. The interest in the poetry was not in presenting her work, nor was it in these particularly daring translations (which seek to bring out the sexual word play of the originals); it was, rather, in the perceived lewdness of the poems, rendered extra-titillating by the fact of their being written by a cloistered nun. It takes no leap of the imagination to see where that particular journalistic interest was coming from, and it is not surprising that this was not the only occasion on which this approach was adopted; the marketability of “obscene” poems is, obviously, much greater than the reflections of an academic. In the context of the re-enactment, the revitalising, of Sor Juana's writing in a modern context, we come face to face with a core problematic of theatre translation, and one that cannot be answered purely through linguistic solutions: the question of how the source culture is situated in the target culture. What space can be found for it?