The Duende in England: Lorca’s “Blood Wedding” in Translation

Abstract

Transporting the passionate instinctual world of rural Andalusia onto the cold rational terrain of modern-day England would seem to be a feat fraught with difficulties. The ‘conceptual grid’ is so different, that we might expect most of the symbolic depth and intensity of the play to be lost. Yet, in recent years, there has been a massive interest in Lorca’s works, and in this play in particular, with numerous translations and productions. How can we account for this? Does the tale of a blood feud in Andalusia really have something to say to a British audience, or is Lorca’s work being appropriated to serve some other purpose on the home agenda? And above all, what happens to the duende - that ‘mysterious power which everyone senses and no philosopher explains’ - in a society where the dark forces of nature have been almost entirely tamed by the Apollonian power of human reason?