This review focuses on the translation of a selection of poetry written by
Federico García Lorca entitled “Alle cinque della sera. Lamento per Ignacio e
altre poesie”. The translations themselves provide excellent examples of bad
translations. Though translating is never an easy task, it is even more taxing
when the text is poetry. In this particular example, the source and the target
languages come from the sarne family. The distortions apparent here, both
formal and semantic, demonstrate how superficially certain translators have
judged their understanding of the language they were translating from.
Moreover, they appear to have been unaware that it is, in fact, the affinity
between the two languages which lulled them into a false sense of security. The
paper highlights a number of these infelicities, inappropriacies and complete
errors which have been brought about by an excess of imagination, carelessness
or plain ignorance. It also highlights some of the more surprising and
unfounded comments and cultural information offered to the target text reader.
