A comparative study of Roy Campbell's translation of the poetry of Federico Garcia Lorca

Abstract

Roy Campbell (1901-1957), who ranks among South Africa's leading poets, was also a gifted and skilled translator. Shortly after the Second World War he was commissioned by the Spanish scholar Rafael Martinez Nadal to supply the English translations for a planned edition of the complete works of the Spanish poet and dramatist, Federico Garcia Lorca, to be published by Faber and Faber, London. However, most of these translations remained unpublished until 1985, when the poetry translations (but not the translations of the plays) were included in Volume II of a four-volume edition entitled Campbell: Collected Works, edited by Alexander, Chapman and Leveson, and published in South Africa. In 198617, Eisenberg published a collection of letters from the archives of the Spanish poet and publisher Guillermo de Torre in a Spanish journal, Ana/es de Literatura Espanola, Alicante, which revealed that the politically-motivated intervention in 1946 of Arturo and Ilsa Barea, Republican supporters who were living in exile in London, prevented the publication of Campbell's Lorca translations. These poetry translations are studied here and compared with the work of other translators of Lorca, ranging from Lloyd (1937) to Havard (1990), and including some Afrikaans versions by Uys Krige (1987). For the analysis an eclectic framework is used that incorporates ideas from work on the relevance theory of communication (Sperber and Wilson 1986) as applied to translation theory by Gutt (1990, 1991) and Bell (1991), among others, together with Eco's (1979, 1990) semiotic-interpretive approach. The analysis shows that although Campbell's translating is constrained by its purpose of forming part of a Lorca edition, his versions of Lorca' s poetry are nevertheless predominantly oriented towards the target-language reader. In striving to communicate Lorca's poetry to an English audience, Campbell demonstrates his skill and creativity at all levels of language. Campbell's translations that were published during his lifetime earned him a place among the best poetry translators of this century. The Lorca translations, posthumously added to the corpus of his published work, enhance an already established reputation as a fine translator of poetry.