Translating Seán O’Casey: Bringing Dublin’s Voice to Life in Spanish

Author and translator, Marta Callava, explains how she took on a unique challenge to introduce an Irish literary giant into the Spanish language

When I arrived in Dublin on an August rainy day of 2008, I thought it the dullest city in the world. Little did I know that that grey city would become my home sweet home for the next 15 years and little did I expect the discoveries that I would make there.

I first encountered Seán O’Casey’s plays at the Seán O’Casey Theatre Festival, held annually in September in the namesake theatre hall in the humble and proud neighbourhood of East Wall. My drama ensemble, Firedoor Theatre, had been invited to perform a staged reading of a few extracts of Three Dublin Plays.

As I was rehearsing for the reading, I was immediately fascinated by how the playwright used language to instil life to his characters. They were so authentic, so true, so funny – real Dubliners of that time. Of course, I only got to understand many of the sentences and idioms after reading each dialogue intently a couple of times. It was then when I became increasingly interested in his work, and later I would go see many of his plays in the Abbey and other venues.

Years later, as a professional translator I found myself wondering whether O’Casey’s work had ever been staged in Spain or translated into Spanish. I did some research, and to my surprise, I could only find a version of The Shadow of a Gunman and Red Roses for Me that Spanish theatre-maker Alfonso Sastre had staged and published decades ago. I immediately seized the opportunity. At that time, I was fighting the idleness of Covid by doing a course on literary translation and, as part of a practical exercise, I drafted a translation proposal of Three Dublin Plays. Four years later, and after several rejections, I found publisher Ybernia and the rest is history.

Huge responsibility

Although I started such an enterprise with enthusiasm, sometimes I found myself taken aback by the sheer responsibility of translating arguably the most prominent Irish playwright of all times. I was nothing but an unknown translator passionate about Irish history and theatre. Would I live up to the expectation? But I knew what I ultimately wanted to achieve: I wanted to draw a parallel between the Dublin working-class society of the early 1900s and its Spanish counterpart. In my mind, those colourful characters could very well sound as if they were “chulapos” from the beginning of the 20th century – earthy, witty, sharp, bold, emotional, and alive.

O’Casey’s writing is as musical as it is political and translating that combination was a constant balancing act. His characters move all the time between rough banter and moments of lyrical poetry filled with alliteration and rhythm. I focused on how the dialogue sounded – after all, theatre is to be seen and heard. I would read the lines aloud over and over again, and if they didn’t sound natural in Spanish, I reworked them. Fidelity to not only to message but also tone was my guiding principle.

There were many challenges, of course. But that also meant that I could let loose and let my creativity do its best. One of my favourite examples is when Rosie the prostitute calls Covey “Jiggs” – a reference to the protagonist of an Irish American comic strip. In this and other cases, and because O’Casey’s work is so deeply rooted in Irish history, I added brief footnotes to guide readers through the political and cultural references of the 1916 Easter Rising. Other times, I had to accept that O’Casey deliberately left certain lines ambiguous. Some of Bessie Burgess’s dialogue barely makes sense even in English, which, I believe, was part of his genius – maybe he trusted language to mirror the chaos of life itself.

Still relevant

Another truly remarkable thing about The Plough and the Stars is its relevance. Beneath the specifics of the Irish struggle for independence lies a universal tension: the conflict between idealism and survival. Spain, too, has lived through internal divisions, wars, and questions of national identity. O’Casey’s characters are ordinary people swept up in extraordinary times. They could easily belong to Madrid or to another Spanish city under different historical skies. His critique of how political causes can overshadow real lives feels just as timely today as it did a century ago.

Working with Ybernia Books has been one of the most rewarding parts of this journey. Enda and María gave me total creative freedom and treated the text with the care it deserved. Their commitment to Irish literature is admirable. Few publishers are brave enough to publish theatre, let alone Irish theatre. And acclaimed Irish theatre-maker Denis Rafter was kind enough to write the introduction. For all this, I feel genuinely fortunate to have found them all.

As I looked at the printed book on my desktop, I realised that what began as curiosity had become something larger: a conversation between Dublin and Madrid, between two histories and ways of surviving through words. If this work helps even one Spanish reader hear O’Casey’s heartbeat as I did, every hour spent reading, reworking, and whispering his lines aloud was worth it. And if a theatre producer became interested in staging this classic, then it would have gone well above and beyond its original purpose.

Do not miss the book launch on November 14th at Tipos Infames for a taste of how the father of Irish contemporary theatre sounds in Spanish, or the second launch, in the Irish Embassy, on November 27th at 7pm