Sonetos, William Shakespeare ( Nivola, 2008 )
Prize "Esther Benítez de Traducción 2009"
There have been numerous approaches to translating William Shakespeare’s Sonnets into Spanish. As there is still some room for improvement, I decided to do my own translation. I consider poetry to be the result of expressing a state of mind in poetic language. The state of mind, the feelings (content) and the expression of it in words (form) are inseparable. The feelings are (or may be) common to every single person. The Muses and God (in this case William Shakespeare) give them freely. But only the poet can express them in words because poetry is the effect of words.
The translation was done following a holistic approach, paying attention to the fact that translation has to be ‘adequate’ and ‘acceptable’. Content and form are inseparable; therefore, the perception of the poem by the translator must be adequate because if defective, the outcome would be missing the point. Hence the importance of research previous to translation. Special attention has been paid to wordplay and double meaning. Since I consider that stylistic features in both the source text and the translated version have to be equivalent, I maintain the structure of the Shakespearian sonnet with its three quatrains and its final couplet and also its rhyme scheme: ABAB CDCD EFEF GG.
The iambic pentameter is not in the Spanish tradition but we have its equivalent in our “endecasílabo” which has the same number of metrical syllables and it has become customary in Spanish for this kind of poem. This is the reason why I use the “endecasílabo” with a rhytmic stress on the sixth syllable in most of the sonnets.
Pedro Pérez Prieto
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