Mi Bella Dama

"Den spanska raven rev en annan rav," chirruped Stockholm's Eliza Doolittle as Professor Henry Higgins looked on approvingly. And in Monterrey, Eliza warbled: El rey que hay en Madrid se fue a Aranjuez." Translations: 1) The Spanish fox scratched another fox; 2) The king who was in Madrid has gone to Aranjuez. In each case, the line represented the best that beleaguered translators could do with "The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain," and in each case, it was knocking audiences over last week as the show-stopper of the first two foreign-language editions of My Fair Lady.

The main problem in translating Lady was simply that it is untranslatable. Old Phoneticist Bernard Shaw himself, attempting to set down Eliza's cockney, accent, gave the whole thing up as a bad job after four lines, and implied that the reader should use his imagination. When Producer Lars Schmidt (husband of Cinemactress Ingrid Bergman) decided to do Lady in Swedish, he had to use even more imagination. With Translator Goesta Rybrandt, he substituted a sloppy South Stockholm accent as a national approximation of cockney, went to work with equal abandon on the book and lyrics. Asked if she will have a cup of tea, Sweden's Eliza replied: "Thanks, preferably a gulp of dark beer from a birch mug."

In Mexico, the American producers of Mi Bella Dama were faced not only with the question of whether they could approximate cockney in Spanish but also which approximation to use. Argentina has its Italianate curbside slang, Mexico has its Indian, and a native of Patagonia is unintelligible to a native of Pamplona. Lerner's solution: "We wrote the show in neutral bad Spanish and neutral good Spanish of our own."

The lingo is not too neutral to duplicate the original where it does the most good. Example: at the end of the Ascot scene, when Liza cheers on her horse, she yells: "Vamos a Dover, Mueve mas las nalgas!", which is entirely in line with the English appeal to Dover to "move your bloomin' arse!" Audiences cheered the musical in Monterrey as well as in Stockholm (where the King and Queen turned out for the occasion). By any other name, Lady is a bloomin' winner.

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