Translating the armed struggle: Alfonso Sastre and Sean O’Casey in Spain

Abstract

This article considers why the controversial Spanish playwright Alfonso Sastre, working within the constraints imposed by the Franco dictatorship (1939–75), chose to create versions of two plays by Sean O’Casey, an Irish dramatist who made his name in Dublin’s Abbey Theatre in the 1920s. It argues that Sastre’s adaptations of Red Roses for Me and The Shadow of a Gunman were his way of evading censorship and calling for political change in Spain, and thus constitute clear examples of translation as political activism and cultural resistance.