Our Translation Notes series invites translators to describe some element of their process for a recent translation. This week Michael Kidd discusses the challenges of translating racialized language and the effects of contingency on translators and their work through a look at his recent translations of three examples of 17th century Spanish drama.

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Translating Blackness in Three Early Modern Spanish Plays

A Black scholar, mocked for his teaching ambitions. A Black soldier, denied a position in the army. A Black prince, imprisoned at birth for the color of his skin. These are the remarkable characters at the center of the early modern Spanish plays Juan Latino by Diego Jiménez de Enciso, The Brave Black Soldier (El valiente negro en Flandes) by Andrés de Claramonte y Corroy, and Virtues Overcome Appearances (Virtudes vencen señales) by Luis Vélez de Guevara, all written around 1620. For rhetorical convenience, I refer to these plays as the Triad, by which I mean three loosely related works that lack the common authorship or continuous story arc of a trilogy. In each case the protagonist, shunned for his appearance, overcomes color-based obstacles and injustices to attain the pinnacle of success in his vocation. While a contemporary film structured around such a plot would be unremarkable, it bears remembering that early modern Spain was a slave-owning society. In cities such as Seville, which was home to all three Triad authors at one point or another, the population of unfree Black Africans reached as high as 10 percent. Even more striking in this context are the plays’ endings, which, without exception, enact marriages between the main characters and women of the white nobility. In contrast to the murder-suicide at the conclusion of Othello, for example, the Spanish protagonists do not appear to suffer punishment for shattering the taboo of interracial marriage.¹

My English translation of the Triad is available in the volume Black Protagonists of Early Modern Spain: Three Key Plays in Translation (Hackett, 2023), which includes a critical introduction, bibliography, glossary, translator’s preface, and title support webpage. My intention in this space is to focus on the challenge of translating the plays’ complex racial and ethnic dimensions for today’s readers (and perhaps audiences).²

I want to begin with the idea of contingency. I started this project in earnest in the summer of 2019 and concluded in the summer of 2023. In that short span of time, it felt as if civilization came unglued three times over. First, the Covid-19 pandemic shut down the planet in March of 2020; even as I write these words, it has not fully released its grip. “My house arrest prevents me from coming,” Don Fernando laments to the duke in Juan Latino (135). Indeed. I have offered many variations of that statement since March 2020 to explain the drop in my productivity as a scholar and translator, and this book, when it finally saw the light of day, was a year behind schedule as a result.

But Covid was the easy part. On May 25, 2020, the pandemic became an afterthought as three words rocked the planet: “I can’t breathe!” The murder of George Floyd took place less than four miles from my house, and my neighborhood became ground zero of the protests that engulfed Minneapolis before spreading around the world. All as I translated lines such as “So this is what it means to be black? These are the consequences of color?” (The Brave Black Soldier 220) and “Oh, color, what I suffer because of you!” (Juan Latino 144).³

Finally, on January 6, 2021, as electoral votes from the presidential contest were being counted, a violent mob stormed the U.S. Capitol in Washington. Not long before watching the events unfold on live television, I had translated the first scene of Virtues Overcome Appearances, in which a heated dispute erupts over the issue of succession to the throne of Albania. As diplomacy deteriorates into insults and threats of defenestration, the Sicilian ambassador fumes to the Albanian king: “This crown is [the king of Sicily’s] by birthright” (273). The king rejects the ambassador’s argument, leading to fears of a Mediterranean war that is averted only by the astounding revelation of a native-born Black prince in the all-white Albanian kingdom.

The earthshaking events of 2020-21 may be judged irrelevant, their uncanny parallels to the world of the Triad nothing more than coincidence. But I believe the “coincidence” reveals a deeper truth that was easier to see in this case because it surfaced so often: translators are deeply embedded in the world in which they translate and always susceptible to its contingencies. Agency, voice, and objectivity are inevitably impacted by external realities. I cannot say exactly how my translations would be different had I approached them during a different course of events, but I am certain they would be, and I think that is an important conclusion in itself. I hope the examples that follow will shed some additional light on this question.

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The Triad protagonists are not only Black; they are all touched, to some degree or another, by the institution of slavery.⁴ Additionally, Juan Latino features a number of secondary characters, both Black and white, who are of Muslim background. How to translate the racialized and often bigoted language of a seventeenth-century, slave-owning society for a post–George Floyd, twenty-first-century world thus became a critical issue for me in this project, if not the critical issue. Three examples I will review here are (1) specific racial and ethnic terms, (2) wordplay, and (3) the Spanish dialect known as bozal. In each case, the challenge springs from a tension between two key principles of literary translation: accuracy, which pulls in the direction of the author, and readability, which pulls toward the audience. Regarding the latter, I would argue that a text whose language repels or disengages a majority of readers is unreadable by definition. In the case of the Triad, I decided that readable texts must anticipate audience sensitivities shaped by the real-world events outlined above. At the same time, the idea of censoring the language, especially in a translation as opposed to an adaptation, offends against the goal of accuracy and faithfulness to the author. Below I explain my attempts to strike an appropriate balance between these principles.

Regarding specific racial terms, I felt it was important to give readers a feel for the language in unvarnished form, so in many cases I leaned toward accuracy. For example, the most common racial slur in Juan Latino and The Brave Black Soldier is perro, applied to Black characters in the plays but historically aimed at Jews, Muslims, and their descendants as well. Despite the obvious offensiveness, I consistently translate it as “dog,” while I render the augmentative variation, perrazo, as “dirty dog” and the more literary can as “canine.” While not on the same level, two ethnic terms from Juan Latino that present a challenge are moro and morisco: references to the large populations of Muslims and Muslim converts to Christianity in medieval and early modern Spain.⁵ The traditional English form of the first, Moor, has accrued a vague and sometimes pejorative meaning in popular usage, perhaps already present in Shakespeare’s references not only to the “noble Moor” Othello (Oth. 2.3.122) but to the “barbarous Moor” Aaron, chief villain of Titus Andronicus (Tit. 5.3.4). As the pejorative meaning is sometimes present in the Spanish as well, it proved to be the best option for translating moro as a noun. The second term, morisco, when used as a noun, has no single-word anglicized form, and compound terms that get at the meaning, such as “Christianized Moor” or “Converted Moor,” would be too awkward in dialogue. I thus leave morisco untranslated, with capitalization and without italics, when it is a noun; I use “Moorish” when both morisco and moro occur as adjectives.

The two racial terms that perhaps represent the greatest challenge for contemporary audiences are negro and moreno. Negro in Spanish, somewhat like nègre in French, has a wide and ambiguous semantic field ranging from the neutral “black” to “slave” to the taboo N-word. Moreno means “dark,” “brown,” or “brunette” and is often a polite substitute for negro in the Triad; it is not normally offensive, though it is derived from moro, which can be. An additional issue is grammatical: in Spanish, one can use almost any nominalized descriptive adjective in direct address. In English, conversely, we do not normally say, “Hello, short,” or “Hey, blond”; instead, some modification to the adjective, such as the addition of an -ie suffix, is required for the word to function as a vocative. Considering all these factors, I typically translate moreno as “dark” or “brown” when it appears as an adjective and as “darkskin” in nominalized form. Negro as an adjective I translate as “black.” In nominalized form, when the meaning is deliberately offensive, the N-word is an obvious option; but this is a case where I believe a desire for accuracy would cross too many lines for contemporary audiences. In such cases I have chosen to leave it as negro in italics, intended to be pronounced with the short e of next. In less offensive contexts, I translate it as “black man” or “slave,” as appropriate.
A final term for dark skin, limited to The Brave Black Soldier, is the Spanish word prieto (or preto in the character Antón’s speech), which appears to carry the more innocent connotation of moreno, perhaps with a slight comic intent. I have consistently translated it as “swarthy.” Conversely, when Spanish blanco or Portuguese branco refer to people in nominalized form, I translate them as “paleface.”

The context of slavery that informs all three plays leads to an additional complication. In Juan Latino, several characters, including the protagonist, earn the title of maestro, a university rank indicating the bearer of a master’s degree as well as the general title of a teacher. The most logical English equivalent, master, is a synonym of slave owner: an unfortunate ambiguity that does not exist in Spanish and that could lead to considerable confusion in this context. I have thus translated maestro as “tutor” when appropriate or with the Latin term for master or teacher: magister. I reserve master in the sense of “slave owner” for certain instances of the word amo, which I also translate as “lord” when it means the master of servants rather than of slaves.

The translation of racialized language is complicated further by wordplay, a pervasive feature of the comic genre to which the Triad belongs. While puns are typically clever and amusing, some can take a surprisingly serious turn. One in particular strikes at the heart of the themes of race and slavery, playing on the double-meaning of blanco in Spanish: “white” and “target.” In his triumph over the white Captain Agustín, the Black Juan de Mérida says he wishes to be gracious and reward his rival with a promotion to colonel so that he will take him for a Black man who is white (blanco) on the inside and who “a los blancos afrenta,” which means both “hits his targets,” that is, accomplishes his goals, and “offends white men.” To capture the double-meaning and veiled threat, I have translated the passage as follows: “I wish to honor your person so you’ll see me as a black man who both acts white and targets whites… for promotion!” (The Brave Black Soldier 264). Vélez de Guevara uses the same pun in reverse, so to speak, making the Black protagonist describe himself as a “blanco de los rayos de sus cielos” with respect to the woman he loves, meaning both “target of her heavenly rays” and “whitened by her heavenly rays.” My translation aims for a similar double-meaning by putting in play a different set of words: “Tell her that a black man, breached by… bleached by her heavenly shafts, is being driven mad by the sight of her” (Virtues Overcome Appearances 288).

A final and particularly difficult translation issue appears in the dialect of Spanish known as bozal, spoken only by Antón in The Brave Black Soldier. Characterized by fragmented syntax, distorted phonology, and exaggerated Portuguese calques, the dialect is meant to represent the Spanish of foreign-born Black slaves such as Antón. Carefully studied by linguists, bozal Spanish was initially thought to be a mainly literary creation employed to humorous and usually demeaning ends. Recent studies, however, suggest that the dialect bears traces of the lived experiences of early modern Afro-Spaniards.⁶ I thus decided it was important to signal the difference, which is unmistakable in Spanish, between Antón’s speech and that of the other characters. The challenge was to do so in a way that maintained the marked, humorous quality of the dialect without slipping into a version of African American Vernacular English, which would be not only ahistorical but deeply offensive. Building on the fact that Antón’s garbled language is laden with scatological humor, malapropisms, and unintentional truths that do not always reflect kindly on either the protagonist or other powerful characters, my solution is a scrambled, zany, and deliberately inaccurate version of the Elizabethan idiom associated with Shakespearean texts, including invented words such as twere and meesieur. I conclude my examples with a passage that marks Antón’s first appearance in the play:

I translated these plays because I believe they reflect an overlooked process of social reckoning that was taking place in seventeenth-century Spain, as writers and artists took small yet significant steps toward the humanization of Afro-Spaniards. (For an example from the visual arts, see Diego Velázquez’s stunning portrait of Juan de Pareja.) While by no means revolutionaries or abolitionists, the Triad authors participate in this reckoning, to varying degrees, through the creation of three highly compelling Black protagonists. To honor their creations, I wanted authentic-sounding scripts that would be potentially playable to today’s audiences. The goal demanded a rational process with a consistent application. I hope to have illuminated my approach in this essay.

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Notes

[1] While not prohibited, interracial marriages were extremely rare in early modern Spain. Most Blacks were slaves who, if they married at all, showed a strong preference for other Black slaves. Figures from seventeenth-century Granada, for example, reveal that of all marriages involving at least one slave, 91 percent were between two slaves, 5.9 percent were between a male slave and a free woman, and 1.3 percent between a female slave and a free man; moreover, when marriages between slave and free did occur, the free party was usually destitute (Martín Casares 363-64). On the slave population of Seville, see Domínguez Ortiz 9.

[2] References in the translations that follow are to the page numbers of the Hackett edition.

[3] In my commentary, I capitalize black when referring to people, but I follow the lowercase style of the originals in my translations.

[4] Juan Latino, like the real-life historical figure he is modeled on, is unquestionably a slave. Juan de Mérida of The Brave Black Soldier is the son of slave but probably free himself (though the question is dealt with ambiguously). Prince Filipo of Virtues Overcome Appearances is free, but the twenty years he spends in prison for nothing other than his skin color suggest a metaphorical slavery.

[5] The terms moro and morisco were originally interchangeable, as documented in the thirteenth-century Poem of the Cid. But after the forced conversions of the 1500s, morisco came to designate those Muslims who remained in Spain, now presumably baptized. Moro is derived from Latin Maurus, which named any inhabitant of the ancient, pre-Muslim Berber kingdom of Mauretania. Curiously, the feminine counterpart of moro is also the word used for the dark-colored mulberry or mora, though the latter derives from the Latin nouns mōrus (mulberry tree) and mōrum (fruit of the tree) and thus appears to have a development distinguishable from (though possibly entangled with) moro < Maurus.

[6] The earliest surviving bozal texts come from late fifteenth-century Portugal, reflecting that country’s importance in the Atlantic slave trade. The convention then spreads to a series of Spanish poems by Rodrigo de Reinosa from the late 1400s or early 1500s, and from there to influential Spanish-language authors such as Gil Vicente, Lope de Rueda, and Lope de Vega. Early scholarly studies of the phenomenon include those by Weber de Kurlat and Lipski; Jones and Santos Morillo represent more recent approaches.

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References

Domínguez Ortiz, Antonio. La esclavitud en Castilla en la Edad Moderna y otros estudios de marginados. Comares, 2003.

Jones, Nicholas R. Staging Habla de Negros: Radical Performances of the African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain. Pennsylvania State UP, 2019.

Kidd, Michael, translator. Black Protagonists of Early Modern Spain: Three Key Plays in Translation. Hackett, 2023.

Lipski, John. “‘Black Spanish’: Existence and Coexistence.” Afro-Hispanic Review, vol. 5, no. 1/3, 1986, pp. 7-12.

Martín Casares, Aurelia. La esclavitud en la Granada del siglo XVI: género, raza y religión. Universidad de Granada y Diputación Provincial de Granada, 2000.

Santos Morillo, Antonio. ¿Quién te lo vezó a decir? El habla de negro en la literatura del XVI, imitación de una realidad lingüística. Iberoamericana, 2020.

Shakespeare, William. The Norton Shakespeare. Edited by Stephen Greenblatt et al., Norton, 1997.

Weber de Kurlat, Frida. “El tipo cómico del negro en el teatro prelopesco: fonética.” Filología, vol. 8, 1962, pp. 139-68.

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Michael Kidd is Professor of Languages and Cross-Cultural Studies at Augsburg University. His previous translations include Life’s a Dream by Pedro Calderón de la Barca (UP Colorado, 2004; and Aris & Phillips, 2011) and Four Key Plays by Federico García Lorca (Hackett, 2019). An earlier piece of his – fiction, this time – appeared in our pages in 2014, Point Past Which.