Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy about two young lovers whose deaths ultimately reconcile their feuding families that is believed to have been written sometime between 1591 and 1595 by William Shakespeare. However, while most readers are under the impression that Shakespeare is the author (or at least one of the main authors) of the play, not all are aware that his classic was actually based on those of several other writers before him. Shakespeare’s play is directly based on Arthur Brooke’s The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet (1562), which itself is a translation of a tale that dates all the way back to the story Historia novellamente ritrovata di due Nobili Amanti by the Italian writer Luigi da Porto (1485-1529). However, the roots of the play trace back even farther in time; the theme of lovers whose families despise each other is seen as early as the story of Pyramus and Thisbe in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (8AD). We thus see that as much as Romeo and Juliet is a classic, it can also be said to be a translation or even adaptation of sorts.
While Romeo and Juliet’s roots date back to antiquity, its effects continue to live on in the present and promise to extend indefinitely into the future. The drama has been translated and adapted in a variety of ways over time, from William Davenant’s revision in 1662 during the English Restoration to the musical adaptation West Side Story in the middle of the 20th century. However, transadaptations, which are the middle-ground between a translation and an adaptation that attempt “to freely re-create an established narrative in a new context” according to Professor Stavans, have become increasingly more common in recent reproductions of Romeo and Juliet. Successful transadaptations of Shakespeare’s drama have included basing the play on the rivalry between different Hasidic groups in New York, as well as setting the play in China during the early 1900’s in order to represent the Westernization of the country (please see the sidebar icon titled “Reviews of Transadaptations” in order to read more about these reproductions).
In my own transadaptation of the classic, I attempt to re-write the play in Spanish and Spanglish in order to make a comparison between the rivalry of different families and the rivalry of two different cultures: mainland Puerto Ricans and Nuyoricans (Puerto Ricans living in New York). In my play, Romeo is a lower-class Nuyorrican who has moved back to Puerto Rico after some time with his family, as well as his Chicano and Spaniard-Chicano friends Benvolio and Mercucio, respectively. There, he meets Julieta – a young Puerto Rican girl from a rich family – and falls in love with her. However, members of Julieta’s family do not like Romeo or other Nuyoricans because they believe that they are inferior to mainland Puerto Ricans both in class and language. Nonetheless, I attempt to question this notion in my translation by commenting on the dire social situations of Puerto Rico that likely caused so many U.S. Puerto Ricans to have fled from their home country in the first place.
Another goal of my translation is to provide glimpses of the vast diversity of Spanglish in order to demonstrate its validity as a language that merits being studied. Spanglish is the hybrid language of English and Spanish, and for years it has been seen as the language of the uneducated. In the U.S., many English speakers associate Spanglish with lower class Hispanic immigrants, while many Hispanics in Hispanic America and Spain see Spanglish as an adulteration of their mother tongue. However, this paradigm has recently been challenged by cultural commentators such as Ilan Stavans, one of the professors of this course. Spanglish is no longer being universally seen as the language of the uneducated nor as an adulteration of the Spanish language, but rather as a valid language that expresses itself in ways that neither English nor Spanish can achieve solely. By translating sections of dialogue between the Nuyorican Romeo, Chicano Benvolio, and Spaniard-Chicano Mercutio into Spanglish, I hope to demonstrate to readers that Spanglish is a global phenomenon that is as rich and complex as any other language.
Lastly, perhaps the hardest, yet most rewarding aspect of this transadaptation (besides the audio recordings – see “Translation Diary” on sidebar) was the fact that I was commenting on a phenomenon that I was both a part of and yet also an outsider to. While I am a Puerto Rican who has lived in the states for my entire life, I certainly do not fit the “Nuyorican” stereotype; I don’t dress in baggy clothes or wear flat-rimmed hats, and certainly don’t have any tattoos or ear piercings. Furthermore, there are several other Puerto Ricans, Nuyoricans, and Hispanics that do not fit the stereotype of their respective ethnic group as well and I didn’t want to fall into the trap of stereotyping all Hispanics in my transadaptation. My first thought was thus to make the characters in the translation more like myself: educated, soft-spoken, and well-mannered in order to show that not all Hispanics fit the uneducated and bad-mannered stereotypes that society has of them. I quickly realized that this was a selfish motive; omitting characters that embody the stereotype of U.S. Hispanics effectively silences the voices of individuals within this stereotype that have already been silenced by society.
I came to the conclusion that the reason why I didn’t want to portray this stereotype in my translation was that I, myself, had negative prejudices against the people of my own ethnicity. Every time I go to the Holyoke Mall or Springfield I see Puerto Ricans with neck tattoos and baggy clothes, swearing and yelling in public, and I get mad at my own ethnic group: Why do they have to be so loud and uneducated? You guys are the ones that are responsible for the negative impression that society has of us today. When Professor Stavans asked that I incorporate more aspects of Hip-Hop in my translation and be more bold in exposing life in Puerto Rico as it really is, I grew a bit uneasy since I didn’t want to vouch for the negative stereotype that had plagued so many other Hispanics like myself. But I am so glad that I was encouraged to do so by Professor Stavans, because I actually came to understand and even admire the stereotypical Spanish culture. Researching the reasons why so many Hispanics move to the U.S. in the first place and the struggles that they encounter once doing so – as much of an identity struggle as an economic one – helped to humanize the people that I had lamented for so much of my life. Their culture and modes of expression were just as valid as those of any other ethnic group, so I decided that rather than excluding the Hispanic stereotype in my transadaptation of Romeo and Juliet, I would embrace the stereotype and show that it is not necessarily a bad thing. The scene between Romeo, Mercutio, and Benvolio was (hopefully) comical in a light-hearted sense, but amidst the swearing, it should have also helped to humanize Hispanics and show that they, too, have feelings and values.
As an afterthought, the following Reggaeton song “Romeo y Julieta” by Puerto Rican artist Jory is certainly relatable to my own project since it demonstrates not only how Romeo and Juliet continues to influence music and film to this day, but also how it has become appropriated by Spanish – and Puerto Rican – culture as well. Reggaeton is a music genre that actually evolved in Puerto Rico and combines elements of several other music genres, such as hip-hop, reggae, and other Latin American music genres (e.g. salsa, bomba, etc.)
Brian Malavé is a member of the class of 2017 pursuing a double major in Spanish and Biology. He became interested in language from both a biological and sociological perspective when he wrote a research paper on the neurological benefits of multilingualism during his freshman year at Amherst. He has lived in Massachusetts for his entire life, but his family is from Puerto Rico and thus he has experienced the conflicting sense of identity that many other U.S. Hispanics feel at one point or another. He hopes to become a doctor and “translate,” so to speak, medical information to patients who speak either Spanish, English, or – of course – Spanglish.