“Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow” or, Tomorrow to the power of three

If you missed the intro to this series, check it out here. Lots of useful context for what I’m about to discuss. But for today, let’s kick things off with Felipe. This is by far the text I spend the most time on, so it will be broken into smaller chunks, and today is mostly about tomorrow. Like the word tomorrow. Anyway, here’s the start of the interlingual translation section.

The most glaring difference between León Felipe’s 1950s Macbeth o el asesino del sueño and Shakespeare’s 1600s Macbeth is that they are in different languages, but that’s not my point in this moment because that is, as I say, obvious. I instead focus  more on the non-linguistic differences between his text and Shakespeare’s, though I will obviously nerd out about Spanish, so fear not. As a reminder, only spectators familiar with the source (or knowing audiences) would note these differences and experience the resulting gossiping effect. I also pointed out in the last entry that audience knowledge is complicated by translation, and I won’t spend time speculating on the likely level of awareness of specific readers or audience members. I will simply point out that Macbeth has existed in the Castilian language since the beginning of the nineteenth century,^[1] and even those with indirect cultural knowledge could possibly experience the work as a palimpsest because of its international,  canonical status. For those who do see them, however, I believe these changes are rendered especially meaningful by palimpsestic doubleness. That means that by focusing on these features, we can speculate as to Felipe’s priorities in  translating/writing his text. What’s more, these are still prominent features of Felipe’s play, regardless of whether the audience is knowing or unknowing, so parts of this could be taken as a monolingual literary analysis.

So, bringing it back to Genette; aside from translation, what transformations has Felipe’s Macbeth o el asesino del sueño undergone? The play’s subtitle, paráfrasis de la tragedia de Shakespeare [paraphrase of the tragedy by Shakespeare], already sets up an expectation of interpretive intervention between source and target; paraphrase is defined as “A rewording of something written or spoken by someone else, esp. with the aim of making the sense clearer.”[2] As rewording is necessitated by translation, however, my focus was the thematic elements that the text highlights instead. I would argue that most of the  non-linguistic shifts employed by Felipe fall under Genette’s category of “aggravation,” which serves to “emphasize its hypotext’s secret bent.”^[3] Hypotext is Genette’s very fancy term for the source text for an adaptation (and the adaptation, in turn is called a hypertext, but I won’t get in to all that because it doesn’t really matter what I call it). In fact, Felipe, in the play’s introduction, specifically mentions an enthusiasm to “subrayar y prolongar los gritos y los ecos [underline and stretch the cries and the echoes]” of the original.^[4] Both Genette and Felipe describe how elements have been taken from the original and imbued with added weight and significance. And the key elements that Felipe aggravates? The concept of time, the presence of the supernatural, and the play’s circular structure. 

In their introduction to the Arden third series Macbeth, Sandra Clark and Pamela Mason note the play’s preoccupation with time: “its delineation in action and its conceptualization, has a special role in Macbeth.”^[5] Felipe aggravates this preoccupation, and most specifically the sense of temporal uncertainty. This definitely comes from the original play.  Shakespeare includes a wealth of language regarding the indistinguishability of night from day: “By th’ clock ‘tis day,/ And yet dark night strangles the travelling lamp./ Is’t night’s predominance, or the day’s shame,/ That darkness does the face of earth entomb/ When living light should kiss it?” (II.iv.6-9). Macbeth later asks his wife, “What is the night?” to which she replies, “Almost at odds with morning, which is which” (III.iv.124-5). The word time itself is used on forty-six occasions in Shakespeare’s text. But Felipe extends the play’s temporal uncertainty by adding in a fixation with the idea of tomorrow, too. For example, when the witches first greet Macbeth with their prophecies in Shakespeare, they state that Macbeth “shalt be king hereafter” (I.iii.50, emphasis mine). In Felipe’s version, it’s “¡Salve Macbeth, que mañana serás rey! [Hail Macbeth! Who will be king tomorrow!]”[6] Suddenly it’s not you’ll be king someday, but you’ll be king in the next 24-48 hours, which definitely adds urgency to the prophecy.

But Felipe does not stop there. He complicates this urgency in Macbeth’s next soliloquy. When considering the witches’ prophecy after his sudden promotion to Thane of Cawdor, Macbeth asks:

Mañana… ¿Cuándo es mañana? En la historia se dice mañana/ sin precisar el tiempo…
como se dice ayer… Se dice ayer/ para indicar algo que sucedió hace años,/ y
mañana… algo que no se sabe cuándo pudiera suceder./ Ese mañana,
entonces, no es mañana mismo./… ¿Cuándo es mañana?… Dentro de
cuántos años es mañana?/ Qué quiere decir ‘mañana serás rey’? Los presagios son
tres./ Y el segundo se ha cumplido en menos de una hora…/ ¿Cuánto debo
esperar para ser rey?/ ¡Mañana! ¡Mañana! ¡Mañana! ¿Cuándo es mañana?/ ¿Mañana
es dentro de diez años o cuando cante el gallo en el primer amanecer?/ Y si
mañana es mañana mismo… de dentro de unas horas…/ para que se cumpla el
presagio… ¿qué debe acontecer?

[Tomorrow… When is tomorrow? In history tomorrow is spoken/ without specifying the time…
like yesterday… Yesterday is used/ to indicate something that happened years
ago,/ and tomorrow… we don’t know when that something could happen./
That tomorrow, then, is not tomorrow itself./… When is tomorrow?…
How many years away is tomorrow?/ What does ‘you will be king tomorrow’ mean?
The premonitions were three./ And the second has come true in less than an
hour…/ How long will I wait to be king?/ Tomorrow! Tomorrow! Tomorrow! When
is tomorrow?/ Is tomorrow in ten years or when the cock crows at dawn?/ And if
tomorrow is actually tomorrow… within a few hours…/ for the premonition to
come true… what will happen?]^[7]

This speech alone, which has no corresponding segment in the source, includes the word mañana [tomorrow] sixteen times. What’s more, the constructed polysemy (which describes words with two meanings depending on context) of tomorrow – its literal meaning as the following day and its metaphorical meaning as analogous with hereafter – heightens the sense that the play’s timeline is at once urgent and indeterminate. It also shifts the way we read lines like that of Lady Macbeth when she comments on Duncan’s planned departure from Inverness on the following day: “Oh never/ Shall sun that morrow see” (I.v.60-1). Felipe translates this – quite literally – as “¡Oh! Jamás verá el sol esa mañana…”[8] In light of Macbeth’s doubts about the  concept of tomorrow, we know that this is doubly true: Duncan will neither leave tomorrow nor hereafter. It should also be noted that, in Castilian, mañana’s semantic range includes both tomorrow and morning. In a world where night has overtaken the day, one can easily read this as “never shall sun that morning see” rather than tomorrow.[9] (Told you I’d nerd out about Spanish). So here we can see how Felipe expands upon the original play’s preoccupation with time both from a literary and linguistic  standpoint, creating a world in which the future is both immediate and distant and events are uncertain even as they are predestined.

Another example of the replacement of “hereafter” with “tomorrow” occurs after Lady Macbeth’s death is announced. In Shakespeare, Macbeth responds, “She should have died hereafter,” and launches into the famous “tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow…” speech (V.v.17-9), which is then immediately followed by the news that Birnam wood is approaching Dunsinane. In Felipe’s play, he instead learns of the moving grove before learning of his wife’s death, to which he responds, “Debería haber muerto ayer o mañana [She should have died yesterday or tomorrow].”[10] Remember, for this Macbeth,  yesterday does not necessarily mean the day before today and tomorrow, not necessarily the following. Where Shakespeare’s Macbeth wishes to postpone his wife’s death, Felipe’s Macbeth wants her death to occur anytime other than the present. He claims that, “Tal vez entonces hubiese habido tiempo para entender esas palabras./ ¿Ahora qué significa decir: la reina ha muerto? [Perhaps then there would have been time to understand those words./ Now what does it mean to say: the queen has died?]”[11] For Felipe’s Macbeth, those words, in this moment, signify nothing. (Classic Macbeth joke.) In fact, by inverting the order of the revelations of Birnam wood’s approach and his wife’s death, Felipe basically gives Macbeth no time to mourn her because of his growing awareness of his own inevitable demise, as predicted by the equivocating weird sisters.

A final example of the aggravation of tomorrow occurs in the very scene in which the witches give Macbeth those misleading predictions that warn of this defeat. In response to his question about whether Banquo’s progeny will every rule, one of the prophetic spirits tells him, “Su hijo [de Banquo] tal vez cruce mañana por la historia, cabalgando en tu cetro./ Pero eso es historia nada más… y la tragedia, este poema trágico, no tiene que ver nada con eso [His (Banquo’s) son will perhaps tomorrow cross into history (or the story because polysemy), riding your scepter (lol)./ But that is history, nothing more… and tragedy, this tragic poem, has nothing to do with that].”^[12] The witches assert that, while it is true that the seeds of Banquo may indeed be kings, this occurrence is outside of the scope of this tragic poem, located in the indefinite tomorrow. This statement also creates a moment of stark meta-textuality and –theatricality (I had to do it) as it delineates the narrative and thematic parameters of the play. The yesterdays of the distant past and the tomorrows of the indeterminate future are not relevant to this story; all that matters is now (no time like the present). In this way, Felipe effectively uproots Macbeth from the Scottish history that inspired it and makes it more universal: a tragic poem that does not belong to history, but rather to literature itself.

This makes sense considering Felipe’s assertions in the play’s introduction that poetry knows no nation and that with such additions, omissions, and changes:

Se subraya así, de este modo, la eternidad del tema, viniendo a decir con nuestra
intervención lo que nos concierne a nosotros: que no solamente es de todos los
tiempos y de todas las latitudes la fábula que se relata, sino que está en
nuestra propia sangre también y que podemos articularla y completarla con
nuestra propia palabra… Entonces nos atrevemos a interpolar nuestro verso.

[The theme’s eternal nature is thereby highlighted. We intervene to clarify a
fundamental truth: not only does this story belong to all times and places, it
is also in our very blood. We can articulate and complete it with our own
words, and so we dare to inject it with our verses.][13]

The audience is told, along with Macbeth, that whether or not Fleance fulfills the prophecy that tells Banquo, “Engendrerás reyes, pero no serás rey como Macbeth [You will get kings, but you shall not be king like Macbeth]”[14] is none of our concern. This play is not about the throne of Scotland, but rather about the tragic fate of one man. Next time, we’ll look at the other  aggravations before I go on a tangent about dramatic irony and historical context. Things to look forward to, no? Hasta mañana/Until tomorrow (which, as we now know, is not actually tomorrow). But it’s available for you now!