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Gender dynamics in theatrical retranslation: women’s roles in English versions of Fuente Ovejuna:

Paper · 2025 · Braga Riera, Jorge

Summary

The paper asks how English stage versions of Lope de Vega's Fuente Ovejuna (1619) treat its women, especially Laurencia. In the play she is assaulted by the Commander and then pushes the village to kill him. Theatre is unusually prone to retranslation, yet retranslation research has mostly ignored drama, and this study helps fill that gap. Braga Riera compares four British performance-oriented retranslations:

  • Fainlight and Sillitoe's All Citizens Are Soldiers (1969)
  • Adrian Mitchell's Fuente Ovejuna (1989)
  • Daniel Goldman's unpublished Fuente Ovejuna (2010)
  • April De Angelis's The Village (2018)

The analysis covers the texts themselves, including the treatment of key passages such as Laurencia's monologue. It also covers paratexts (reviews, posters, photos) and the socio-political setting of each version. Over time, the versions move away from a focus on collective justice and toward readings that put women at the centre. Only The Village is explicitly driven by a feminist agenda. Even so, none of the four versions ignores female oppression. The study shows how translators, directors and political moments reshape a classic, and how agency can be redistributed among characters.

Key points

  • The corpus is four UK retranslations (1969, 1989, 2010, 2018). US versions were excluded because of socio-geographical differences.
  • The first British translation was Stanley Harrison's Spanish Village (Unity Theatre, 1943?). Earlier, in 1936, Joan Littlewood and Ewan MacColl staged the play with Theatre Union in Manchester to raise funds for the Spanish Republic.
  • Each version is tied to its moment:
    • Fainlight/Sillitoe: Francoism, with the Commander aligned with Franco's supporters.
    • Mitchell: Thatcher-era unrest, with the rape named openly (National Theatre 1988-9 season).
    • Goldman: audience cast as villagers, with humour and music (Southwark Studios, August 2010).
    • De Angelis: the Me-Too era.
  • Laurencia's role differs across versions:
    • Fainlight/Sillitoe frame her as a voice of the community.
    • Goldman's humour dilutes her role as a catalyst.
    • De Angelis presents her more as a victim than as a rebel.
  • The author admits a limitation: performance recordings could not be accessed, so gesture, tone, dialect and costume were left unanalysed.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Treating several retranslations of one source as parallel readings shows how interpretation drifts, beyond simple accuracy.
  • I2. Anchoring the comparison on one pivotal passage (Laurencia's monologue) keeps a cross-version analysis concrete and manageable.
  • I3. The core analytic question is who holds agency (individual heroine, community voice, or victim), which amounts to reassigning roles between versions.
  • I4. The versions differ in whether sexual violence is stated outright or only implied. Mitchell names the rape; the source leaves it as alleged.
  • I5. The author openly notes that a whole modality (the recorded performances) was missing from the evidence.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (back): Several English renderings of one meaning graph could be compared to see which frame elements stay stable and which ones drift.
  • I2 (learn): Evaluation sets could fix a few "pivot" sentences and track parser and frame output on them across model versions.
  • I3 (frames): Comparing agent/patient assignments between paraphrases of the same event could flag shifts in who is framed as acting versus acted upon.
  • I4 (frames): Implicature handling should mark events that are inferred rather than asserted, so the world model can separate stated facts from implied ones.
  • I5 (learn): Evaluation reports could list which signal sources were unavailable, as an explicit caveat next to the results.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓Universidad Complutense de MadridMadrid · Spain9 works · 63 citations

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 3The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 17,450 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 17,296 worksLiterature and Literary Theory · 541 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 2,379 works

Cite

Cite as Braga Riera, Jorge. 2025. Gender dynamics in theatrical retranslation: women’s roles in English versions of Fuente Ovejuna:. MonTI. Monografías de Traducción e Interpretación.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.6035/monti.2025.17.09

@inproceedings{jorge2025gender,
  title = {{Gender dynamics in theatrical retranslation: women’s roles in English versions of Fuente Ovejuna:}},
  author = {Braga Riera, Jorge},
  booktitle = {MonTI. Monografías de Traducción e Interpretación},
  year = {2025},
  doi = {10.6035/monti.2025.17.09},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.6035/monti.2025.17.09}
}

References

8 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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  7. BIONOTE / NOTA BIOGRÁFICA J orge B raga R iera (PhD) is Associate Professor in the Department of English Studies at Universidad Complutense de Madrid, where he teaches modules related to translation at undergraduate and master’s degree level. His research focuses mainly on literary translation (principally drama) and contrastive studies. Within this area he has published, among others, Classical Spanish Drama in Restoration English (1660-1700) (John Benjamins 2009) and “Theatre is different”: la traducción de la experiencia dramática (Guillermo Escolar 2024), and co-edited the Diccionario de la recepción teatral en España (Antígona 2020). He is a member of INTRAL (Research Group for Literary Translation) and the CONSTEMAD-CM Project (funded by CAM/EU). He has worked as a professional translator for major Spanish publishing houses (Gredos, Alianza Editorial, Fundación Universitaria Española) and is currently the editor-in-chief of the journal Estudios de Traducción. find
  8. Dr. J orge B raga R iera es profesor titular del Departamento de Estudios Ingleses de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid, donde imparte docencia relacionada con la traducción en cursos de Grado y Máster. Su labor investigadora se centra fundamentalmente en la traducción literaria (en especial la dramática) y en los estudios contrastivos. Dentro de esta línea ha publicado, entre otros, los libros Classical Spanish Drama in Restoration English (1660-1700) (John Benjamins 2009) y “Theatre is different”: la traducción de la experiencia dramática (Guillermo Escolar 2024), y ha coedi-tado el Diccionario de la recepción teatral en España (Antígona 2020). Forma parte del grupo de Investigación en Traducción Literaria INTRAL y del proyecto CONSTEMAD-CM (financiado por la CAM y la UE). También ha colaborado como traductor profesional para algunas editoriales españolas (Gredos, Alianza Editorial, Fundación Universitaria Española) y en la actualidad es director de la revista Estudios de Traducción. find

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