“Their teeth like fistfuls of hardened snow”: the duende, somatic response, and writing forward as forces of translationality

This chapter begins with a reconstruction of the circumstances around David Johnston’s debut as theatre translator – the production of Federico García Lorca’s <i>Blood Wedding</i> at the Edinburgh Festival in 1988 – and moves on to trace the various conceptual threads emerging from this formative experience and subsequently developed in Johnston’s scholarly work. It gives special prominence to Lorca’s notion of the duende, theorised here in terms of somatic response and related to Johnston’s influential idea of “writing forward”. The chapter argues that writing forward calls for immersing oneself in an experience of translationality prior to any attempts to (re)create this experience for a theatre audience – with all the uncertainties, anxieties, and contingencies that necessarily accompany such hermeneutic, representational, and mediating endeavours.