Translating Quotidian Humor for the Contemporary Stage: José Luis Alonso de Santos's La estanquera de Vallecas

Abstract

José Luis Alonso de Santos is the most commercially successful Spanish playwright of the post-Franco period in Spain. Although he has written across a wide range of dramatic forms and genres, he is best known for his modern comedies that have frequently been inspired more by cinematic than theatrical forms. On the one hand, a number of critics have accused him of playing to the gallery and repeating himself; conversely, however, his capacity to imbue conventional forms with contemporary characters and concerns has not only endeared him to a broad range of audiences but also warrants his inclusion within the canon of twentieth-century Spanish theater. Having previously translated his most popular and endearing play, Bajarse al moro, into English, I will begin this article with a discussion of the tragicomic humor in La estanquera de Vallecas, his first success, whose colloquial street dialogue marked a controversial break with the prevalent strain of literary and rhetorical theater in Spain. I will focus my discussion on how and why the humor derives from the play's intersection with quotidian urban concerns (rising crime, unemployment, etc.) and a dialectical interplay between imported cinematic forms and national theatrical traditions. This will pave the way for a discussion of the translation of theater into and out of Spanish on the page and stage in both pedagogical and professional environments.

Keywords:

• Alonso de Santos
• film adaptations
• humor
• La estanquera de Vallecas
• Spanish transition

Notes

¹In recording dates for plays, I have noted the year of their theatrical debuts rather than the year in which they were originally written.

²In the film, the sacking of a kindly bank manager who gives advances and lends money to customers, to be replaced by a mean-spirited bureaucrat, provides the pretext for the employees to fake a robbery, which is doomed from the start: one by one they are all injured in the planning and rehearsing of the heist. It is evidence of a certain anti-comic bias that the influence of Italian neo-realism in Spanish film production is noted far more regularly than the influence of highly successful comedies in films such as this and, to cite another iconic example, Las chicas de la cruz roja (Dir. Rafael J. Salvia, 1958).

³This is the logo of His Master's Voice records (HMV).

⁴As the playwright himself has commented, “yo cuando empecé a escribir publiqué algunas cosas antes de estrenar. Jamás volveré a hacerlo. Ya no publico nada antes de estrenarlo porque cuando lo veo, lo cambio” (Amorós and Alonso de Santos 29).

⁵When I last had lunch with Alonso de Santos and his family in Madrid to discuss a potential translation project of La estanquera de Vallecas into English, the dramatist was initially somewhat distracted because he was so fixated by television news footage of “El pequeño Nicólas,” a young man who, living with his grandmother, was nevertheless able to infiltrate the highest levels of Spanish political and economic power, going as far as to impersonate a member of the CNI (the Spanish intelligence agency), and being a guest at the coronation of Felipe VI.

⁶Having said this, Goicoechea has claimed somewhat bitterly that the task of preparing the script for the cinema fell almost exclusively to him. In a series of interviews with Alejando Melero, he says that Alonso de Santos had the rights to the script but pretty much delivered a carbon copy of the play-text, while Eloy de la Iglesia was too engulfed by his heroin addiction to play an active role in its elaboration (Melero 96–100). For my comments on the film, I am very much indebted to Carlos Alberto Gómez Méndez, who came to the University of Leeds for a three-month study period under my supervision, as part of his European doctorate on the subject of Eloy de la Iglesia at the Carlos III University. Many of my observations are informed by a guest undergraduate lecture he delivered on La estanquera de Vallecas, alongside a digital archive of reviews and interviews that he selflessly shared with me.

⁷It was, for example, broadcast, on 29 May 2012, in a slot known as Versión Española in which a classic film is complemented by a discussion, in this case between Alonso de Santos and critic Andrés Amorós.

⁸I would like to express my gratitude to Willy Russell and his literary agent, Charles Negus-Fancey, for providing details of translations into Spanish and sending me unpublished translations of his works into Spanish.