The Translator’s Ideology in the Poetic Text. Homoeroticism in Shakespeare’s Sonnets

Abstract

This paper tries to contribute to research in the field of poetry translation regarding ideology by studying a very controversial and immensely translated work, Shakespeare’s Sonnets. It has been broadly accepted by the critics that the first 126 sonnets are addressed to a young man, but the nature of the relationship between the speaker of the poem and the addressee is not clear, nor, despite all the theories, is the correspondence between the speaker and Shakespeare himself. From a corpus consisting of thirty-one Spanish translations of Shakespeare’s Sonnets and the prologues written by the translators themselves, we analyse how ideological boundaries can influence the translators’ decisions. Their values and beliefs are, sometimes, quite evident. Such is the case of Fernando Maristany (in Las cien mejores poesías (líricas) de la lengua inglesa. Editorial Cervantes: Valencia 1918) or Tomás Gray (in Sonetos de Amor de William Shakespeare. Al Margen Editores: Santiago de Chile 2002), who have clearly changed the gender of the addressee. There seems to be, on their part, a determination to move Shakespeare’s image away from this young man at the slightest sign of ‘homosexuality’.