I decided to incorporate this in the first Lorca Lecture...

One misunderstanding that I have found on one or two occasions is the claim that I attempt to show how Americans have gotten Lorca wrong. In 2016, a scholar from the Netherlands wrote an article in which he used my book as a negative example of an old-fashioned paradigm, according to which the translation is always condemned to be a shadow of the original. Mayhew, according to this critic, even invokes the notion of a “real Lorca.” It is laudable to see translation as a creative act rather than a mere attempt to create an equivalence with the original. In fact, my entire study is devoted to this proposition! In a blanket prohibition of all negative critique of translation, however, Steenmeijer leaves himself no way of discerning between the creativity and mere incompetence. Truly engaging adaptations stand out against a backdrop of mediocrity, as might be expected in virtually any human endeavor. The celebration of the translator’s creativity, logically speaking, requires the same critical acumen used to evaluate a translation in the first instance. Without discernment, a seemingly sophisticated theory of translation simply provides carte blanchefor a variety of practices that might not even be comparable to one another.

Steenmeijer also objects to my use of insulting and tendentious words like apocryphal, parody, and kitschin the title of my book. Yet surely only kitschfall into this category. Perhaps a Dutch scholar, writing in Spanish about a book written in English, is not attuned to the connotations that these words would have for my intended audience.. Among the adaptations of Lorca that interest me the most, after all, are the apocryphal ones, like Spicer’s, and the parodic ones, like Koch’s. As for kitsch, it is difficult to write intelligently about Lorca’s reception without some awareness of aesthetic degradation and of the prevalence of easily digested clichés. Lorquian kitsch is prevalent American reception, but is also present in Spain itself, and thus is not a byproduct of translation per se.