'Navaja', 'knife', is a continually recurring sign in Lorca's poetry, plays and drawings, taken, as are so many of his motifs and icons, from a reality that is both observed and part of a recognised cultural tradition. The word is invested here with an elemental force that is operative both within the experience of the character herself and within the collective imagination of the audience. If one were translating the force of the word into an Irish situation, then its direct equivalent would be the gun. Knife and gun are both readily intelligible correlatives for a certain type of social and historical violence, both potent agents and harbingers of a destruction whose causes are known to all. In other words, the first mention of the 'navaja', leading as it does into this list of dangerous weapons and implements, creates a moment of expectation and of recognition; the audience begins to confront the tragedy of a relentless chain of cause and effect that it recognises as being its own trauma. It is this act of complicitous recognition that the Irish poet Brendan Kennelly seeks to re-create by broadening his references to include 'rifles' and 'machine guns'. Indeed, his sense of the parallel between the violent divisions of Irish history and this community that bays for its own blood in Lorca's play, is reinforced by the new lines with which he has his version end. In the closing lines of the play, the Mother's references to 'this blood-haunted place' and her 'dream of peace', with their overtones of the Northern Irish peace process (the play was performed in 1996), bring his version full circle, and re-create a sense of the cultural utility of the Lorca original within Kennelly's own commitment as an Irish writer (Kennelly, 1996).8 Clearly, however, it would be impossible to translate 'navaja' as 'gun', and Kennelly is sensitive to the fact that one of the principal strands in the play's grammar of imagery is that of images of cutting, pinning, slicing and piercing. Moreover, while, admittedly, it may speak of a similar macho-style response to historical dislocation, the gun does not have the specifically phallic overtones of the knife, and the sexual connotations of the death of the two men in Act Three would be lost. In this particular case, Kennelly points up connections between Lorca's project, and his own, without allowing the play to be flooded with a spurious Irishness. The spectator's imagination is located precisely where it should be: not in Hickey's Andalusia or in the comfortable familiarity of Ramsden's England, but in the theatre, the liminal space between stage and auditorium, where it belongs.

Having started with the most emotionally loaded motif, the 'navaja', the Spanish can afford to bring in less elemental items – the 'azadas' and the 'bieldos de la era'. Clearly, the issue that the translator requires to negotiate here is whether the specificity of reference should be retained in order, presumably, to mark the difference of the play’s setting (and implying, in the process, that this is the sort of thing that goes on in the Spanish countryside), or whether the referents should be strengthened in order to reinforce the energy surrounding the knife. This issue, moreover, cannot be considered in isolation from the cultural play of language that gives Lorca's plays what Kennelly (1996: 11) calls their quality of 'rhythmical and emotional revolution'. Their characteristic linguistic actions – rhythm / repetition, the use of anticipatory poetics, kinetics, kinesics, language that is simultaneously located and dislocated – all need to be considered as an informing aspect of the overall process of cultural negotiation so that the play can be understood without being normalised. Stage language does not simply mean: it does. Indeed, this is surely what 'performability' is all about – giving actors lines that are speakable and that, at the same time, recreate the stylistic marking and cultural significance of the original. Lorca almost certainly chose 'azadas' from the bewildering array of rural cutting tools at his disposal because of its assonant relationship with the preceding 'hasta las' and, more crucially, with the word 'navaja' itself. Moreover, the falling rhythm of 'los bieldos de la era' allows the actor in question to vary the emotional stress of the phrase so that it ends on a note of apparent helplessness in the face of omnipresent destruction. In terms of sound patterns, therefore, the specificity of these items is expendable. My own solution emphasises the rhythmical nature of the language:

I hate knives ... [...] Knives, guns ... sickles and scythes ...10 (Johnston, 1988/2003)

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