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Finea’s “desván famoso”: Approaches to Translating the Untranslatable

The attic in Finea’s house serves an important dramatic function in the climax of Lope’s La dama boba, but Finea and Clara’s extended discussion of it earlier in Act 3 seems enigmatic. This article interprets their conversation in the context of the seventeenth-century performance space, arguing that there are at least five different ways that Lope meant for his audience to understand the word “desván,” including as a reference to the seating arrangements in a corral de comedias. Such site-specific wordplay is inevitably lost in translation, so this study evaluates several translators’ approaches to rendering this scene into English. It finds that early versions either eliminate most of the scene or translate it so literally that it no longer makes sense. More recent translators, however, have adopted a more creative approach that allows for new forms of site-specific wordplay that work outside of a corral. Based on these findings, the article argues that in some cases a creative translation can breathe new life into a play whose cultural references make it partially inaccessible in its original language.