Cruising Andalusia: a critique and experimental translation of Gypsy Ballads by Federico García Lorca

Author

Olive Esther Kuhn, Bard CollegeFollow

Date of Submission

Spring 2018

Academic Programs and Concentrations

Foreign Languages, Cultures, and Literature; Written Arts

Project Advisor 1

Robert Kelly

Project Advisor 2

Nicole Caso

Abstract/Artist's Statement

In this reading and translation, I situate Lorca’s homoerotic sensibility within a broader landscape of queer theory. The definition of queerness which I find most useful in relation to Lorca comes from Jose Esteban Muñoz’s book Cruising Utopia: the then and now of queer futurity. Muñoz writes that “Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer… Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world.” (1) Using Muñoz’s theory, I propose and enact a queer methodology of translation. Muñoz discusses the ability of queer art to transform quotidian objects and acts into “a vast lifeworld of queer relationality, an encrypted sociality, and a utopian potentiality,” using the examples of Andy Warhol’s Coke Bottle and Frank O’Hara’s “Having a Coke With You. In this spirit, rather than think about translation as a useful process which yields a useful product, I want to think about translation as a joyful and experimental process which yields joyful and experimental products. The first, “faithful” translation strives to recreate an analogous metrical scheme, while conveying a clear sense of what happens in the poem. The second, “impressionist” translation focuses on capturing the poem’s sense, at the expense of all else. The third and final “translation” is my original poem, written in dialogue with the ballads.

Open Access Agreement

On-Campus only

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

Recommended Citation

Kuhn, Olive Esther, "Cruising Andalusia: a critique and experimental translation of Gypsy Ballads by Federico García Lorca" (2018). Senior Projects Spring 2018. 176.
https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/senproj_s2018/176