A frenzy, an illusion, / A shadow, a delirium, a fiction - Calderón de la Barca's Life Is a Dream

After reading one of the best plays of Lope de Vega I turned to the greatest play of the Siglo de Oro, Life Is a Dream (1635) by Pedro Calderón de la Barca.  Having read a dozen plays from the period, I am just parroting other critics who have read many, many more.  Geez, I hope they have.  Maybe they are bluffing.  Regardless, Life Is a Dream is the only one of those dozen that rivals Shakespeare in originality and imagery, if not in depth of character or language.

If it were a Shakespeare play, it would be housed with the late romances like The Winter’s Tale and Cymbeline.  It is similarly free-ranging, loose, and weird.  The setting is Poland, a country as familiar to Calderón as Bohemia was to Shakespeare.  The king has locked his son in a remote tower, guided by omens suggesting that he will grow up to be Hitler.  The play occurs at the moment the king decides to test his son’s character by actually allowing him to be a prince, remembering that the fellow has spent his entire chained up in a secret prison.  The king’s failsafe is that if the prince turns out to be a monster, the king can whisk him back to the prison, allowing the prince to believe that everything he experienced had been nothing but a dream.

This play is as oddly modern as Fuente Ovejuna, except here the modern part is the bizarre psychological experiment, which is obviously insane and will have catastrophic results.  The really brilliant idea of Calderón is to have the prince actually believe that the vivid, lifelike episode was a dream.  Many rich ideas, dramatic and poetic, follow.  Metaphysically, Life Is a Dream rivals Shakespeare.

What man is there alive who’d seek to reign
Since he must wake into the dream that’s death.
The rich man dreams his wealth which is his care
And woe.  The poor man dreams his sufferings.
He dreams who thrives and prospers in this life.
He dreams who toils and strives.  He dreams who injures,
Offends, and insults.  So that in this world
Everyone dreams the thing he is, though no one
Can understand it.  I dream I am here,
Chained in these fetters. Yet I dreamed just now
I was in a more flattering, lofty station.
What is this life?  A frenzy, an illusion,
A shadow, a delirium, a fiction.
The greatest good’s but little, and this life
Is but a dream, and dreams are only dreams.  (end of Act II)

Calderón was a careful reader of Don Quixote.  The play has its Sancho Panza, too, a stock clown figure who is transformed – who is abused – in ways that are as original as the rest of the play.  As with most clowns, he is rarely funny, but he has the misfortune to be the only true empiricist in a dream play. If only he knew he were a fiction.  I have had the luck to see a good staging of Life Is a Dream, and the fate of Clarion the clown was a real shock, however well it reinforced the dramatic metaphysics.

I read the lively Roy Campbell translation.

All right, that was probably Spanish Literature Month for me.  Thanks to Richard and Stu.

plays as doughnuts - Lope de Vega's revolutionary Fuenteovejuna

Spanish Literature Month is here as decreed by Caravana de Recuerdos and Winstonsdad’s Blog.  I am lucky enough to have a vacation coming up, so I needed something short and punchy.  I revisited a couple of plays, Siglo de Oro masterpieces.

Now, Fuente Ovejuna (1619) by Félix Lope de Vega, author of five hundred plays, among other works.  Author, reputedly, of fifteen hundred plays – see Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer for evidence: “I could gobble up the fifteen hundred plays of Lope de Vega in one sitting.”  But that number is a myth.  A mere five hundred, just ten a year if he started young.  Not even one a month, for his entire adult life.  I have read three, I think.

I have never come across a critic who has read enough of them to deliver much of a judgment.  There must be some real duds among the five hundred, although what I really wonder is how deeply I could go before they became too repetitive or obscure.  Thirty more?  A hundred?  This passage from Fuente Ovejuna, which is otherwise not about play writing, may be instructive:

Talking of poets, have you not
Seen doughnut-bakers at their toil
Chuck chunks of dough into the oil
To fill their cauldron on the boil?
Some come out cooked, some come out charred,
Some come out soft, some come out hard.
Well, that’s how poets (I suppose)
Deal with the poems they compose.  (Act II, p. 109)

Fuente Ovejuna is one of the soft, well-cooked doughnuts, often called Lope’s greatest play, although who would really know?  The title (which is really Fuenteovejuna, the two word version being a kind of translation) is the name of a town, Sheep Fountain, which is being terrorized by a nobleman who is riding high as a war hero.  Whatever his knightly virtues, he cannot keep his hands off of the women. In the fast-paced final act, the villages rise against the knight, murdering him and – in the most shocking part of the play – maintaining their solidarity in the face of torture.

JUDGE: No scrap of writing can I bring in proof
Because, with one accord and single valour,
When to the question racked, they all reply:
“Fuente Ovejuna did it” and no more.
Three hundred of them, tortured on the rack
With terrible severity, replied
No other answer.  Little boys of ten
Were stretched yet it was useless.  (134)

There were passages that had me murmuring the date – 1619, no kidding.  The play was once a favorite of Marxist revolutionaries.  If it has not had a feminist revival, it should (the following characters are all women).

LAURENCIA.  Halt at this door.  You are no longer women
  But desperate legionnaires.
PASCUALA.                               Those poor old pansies
  We once called men, it seems, are men once more
  And letting out his blood!
JACINTA.                               Throw down his body
  And we’ll impale the carcass on our spears.

Wild.  There are some limits in the text, as one might expect, on how far a 17th century Spanish play can really go as early 20th century agitprop – I assume the Communists omitted certain parts – but still, wow, that last act.

The page number refer to Eric Bentley’s Life Is a Dream and Other Spanish Classics (1985), a great book that also includes The Trickster of Seville, Life Is a Dream, and a Cervantes play I do not think is that interesting.  The translator is the South African poet Roy Campbell.

The Trickster of Seville by Tirso de Molina - The sumptuous Tagus swirls its train - in which I emphasize the wrong parts of the play

Caravana de Recuerdos invited people to read the great 1630 play The Trickster of Seville and His Guest of Stone by Tirso de Molina, so I thought I would revisit it.  I am glad I did.  Tirso de Molina is hardly an artist at the level of his contemporary Pedro Calderón de la Barca, but he managed something rare.  He was the first person, apparently, to write down the story of the womanizer Don Juan, one of those unusual fictional characters who has had a long metaphorical life outside of any particular text.

Simpler Pastimes, who read the play in Spanish, writes that the play is “not perhaps the best known” version of the story, which is “likely” the Mozart and da Ponte opera Don Giovanni (1787).  Very droll!  The Trickster of Seville is no better than fourth, discounting film versions, also trailing Molière’s brilliant 1665 version and Byron’s glorious, enormous reconfiguration of the character (1819+).  Well, maybe not so many people read Byron anymore.

Tomorrow I will write a bit about a Selma Lagerlöf booj which, to my surprise, turned out to be another Don Juan retelling.

This first version, more than that of Molière or da Ponte, is not just a seducer but a sociopath, not just chaotic but evil.  Maybe not a lot more.  He is irresistible to some women, but delights as much in tricking them into sex – impersonating their lovers, for example.  He not only has no interest in the consequences of his sexual affairs, but seems to actively enjoy the damage.  He is for a time protected from the consequences by his powerful patrons, until, as was inevitable, he is burned to death by a vengeful statue.

Readers of English plays contemporary with Tirso de Molina will likely be amazed, as I am, by the looseness and rapidity of the play, even compared to Marlowe or Shakespeare.  They may also be surprised by the intrusions of early modern erudition.  I did not remember this stuff at all.

DON GONZALO:  Why, Lisbon is the world’s eighth wonder!
Cleaving the heart if her asunder
To travel half the breadth of Spain,
The sumptuous Tagus swirls its train
And through the ranges rolls its thunder
To enter deep in to the main
Along the sacred wharves of Lisbon
Of which it laves the southern side. (Act I, p. 156)

None of the play’s scenes are set in Lisbon, yet this speech about the city goes on for four pages, covering Lisbon’s ships, fortifications, religious institutions, and royal court.  When I last read this play I must have been baffled, but now I at least know that this is a city encomium, a genre popular, if that is the right word, with early modern humanists, but that has not survived so well.

A bit earlier, a shipwrecked Don Juan washes ashore and into the arms of a fisher girl who talks like this:

THISBE:  Here where the slumbrous suns tread, light
And lazy, on the blue waves’ trance,
And wake the sapphires with delight
To scare the shadows as they glance;
Here by white sands, so finely spun
They seem like seeded pearls to shine,
Or else like atoms of the sun
Gilded in heaven;  [etc. etc. etc.]  (Act I, pp. 148-9)

In other words, the play suddenly turns into a pastoral poem – other characters do not talk like this – or more specifically into a parody of Luis de Góngora’s baroque reworking of pastoral poetry in Los Soledades.  Now I wonder which other passages are actually borrowings from Horace or whoever.

Honestly, if I were performing the play I would cut all of this learnedness.  I am emphasizing the aspects of the play least likely to attract readers.  Well, there is too much reading as it is; I have always thought that. And come on, it’s the story of Don Juan – seductions, murder, madness, a funny servant, a terrifying supernatural statue along with occasional detours into obscure early modern modes.  It’s a great story.  Subsequent writers have made that clear enough.

I read Roy Campbell’s translation, found in Eric Bentley’s Life Is a Dream and Other Spanish Classics, which contains at least two plays better than The Trickster of Seville.

Spanish poetry and the translations thereof in The Hudson Review

The warm and engaging hosting service of Wuthering Expectations took an unexpected but well-deserved personal day yesterday.  Some pool time in the afternoon, a mani-pedi, a hot stone massage, and then some solid TV watching, catching up with the first season of Treme.  Now, relaxed, energized, Blogger has returned to work refreshed  and alert.

A few comments from yesterday seem to have been temporarily misplaced.  I will be recreate them from my email soon if they do not turn up on their own.  There were some good ‘uns.  Yesterday’s post about Bolaño, Aira, and Argentine literature was pretty good, too.  Actually, that sounds a mite strong.  Let me look back for a minute – yesterday’s post was on a highly interesting subject, and might be worth reading for that reason.

I had planned to spend a few minutes writing about the poetry in the Spanish Issue of The Hudson Review, a magazine that has become, for better or worse, my primary source of contemporary poetry.  For better, I think; I gave Poetry magazine an honest effort a few years ago, but abandoned them just before being bored almost to death, although I do owe them my introduction to Kay Ryan.  My point, my point – the poetry in The Hudson Review is typically excellent, but not so typically by the all-star cast of the Spanish Issue:  Luis de Góngora, Ruben Darío, Gabriela Mistral, Pablo Neruda, Silvino Ocampo.

The Neruda poem, “Ode to my Socks,” is a curious one.  Its translator is William Carlos Williams, who is careful to turn Neruda into WCW, mostly with the line breaks:

I stretched out
my feet
and pulled over them
the
beautiful
socks
and
then my shoes.

Once properly shod, Williams proceeds to eat Neruda’s plums because they are so sweet and so cold and chop down his house because the beams are so inviting.

The lead feature is given to fragments of a 16th century masterpiece, Soledades (The Solitudes) of Luis de Góngora, expertly translated by Edith Grossman, more fruit of her turn to the Spanish Golden Age.  I read the poem several years ago in a different, vaguely remembered translation; even vaguer is a memory of reading part of it in Spanish, which must be wrong.  The long poem, an imitatio of Virgil’s Georgics, is enormously complex, not merely in its syntax so much as its extraordinary range of classical allusions and intricate and obscure metaphors.  Here a traveler has stumbled upon the preparations for a rustic wedding:

        You, oh singular bird,
arrogant splendor – for it is not comely –
        of the remote Occident:
hang the wrinkled nacre of your forehead
down over the kinked sapphire of your neck,
for Hymeneus wants you on his tables.

The exotic, ugly bird now on its way to the wedding (“Hymeneus”) feast is the American turkey.  The nacreous forehead foreshadows the piscatorial second book of the poem, which is about fishermen.   Góngora  demands patience and concentration:

A rebellious nymph, now a humble reed,
obscures  the margins of a small lagoon,
        where a kingbird inspects
even the smallest flake of its flying snow.

The snow is the foamy surf; the nymph is Syrinx; etc., etc.  How wonderful that Góngora’s poem will be available again, soon,  from Penguin Classics.  Who on earth is the audience?

But I suppose I could ask that about many of my favorite parts of The Hudson Review – one of my all-time favorites was an essay about the great pleasures of reading Clarissa!  Any reader widely curious about literature will find a lot to enjoy.

Freedom and writing, those two thrilling gifts - reading and the death of Franco

Another enthusiastic reading list:

I read Proust, and I read about Proust; I read Faulkner, I read Mario Vargas Llosa, Borges, Onetti; I read Raymond Chandler, Julio Cortázar, Flaubert, Stendhal.  Long after midnight, I turned off the light, so excited by my reading that sleep would not come. (34)

Antonio Muñoz Molina, in his essay “A Double Education,” is writing about his life as a student in Granada in 1975.  He is supposed to be, so he believes, doing what he can to fight Franco, dying but somehow never quite dead, smash the state, attend illegal demonstrations, and further revolutionary consciousness.  He is also supposed to go to his classes.  All he wants to do, though, and pretty much all he does, is read fiction, and just the good stuff.  A fellow revolutionary catches Muñoz Molina reading Swann’s Way and calls him a “revisionist,” which is a wounding insult in Marxist fantasy land.

Freedom and writing, those two thrilling gifts, had something in common:  both had to be learned, and they had to be learned the hard way by us Spaniards, because there were no teachers on hand. (37)

The first legal public rally Molina attends is a commemoration of the fortieth anniversary of the murder of Federico García Lorca in the little town where he was born, surrounded by police, just sixty minutes long, all images and slogans “other than Lorca’s portrait and name” forbidden.  This is how Molina learns to be free, and perhaps also part of how he learns to write.

That time, he realizes, made him the writer he is now.  The books, of course, purchased with his scholarship money, and the political activity, but also “two decades of banned international films” that suddenly appeared in the Granada theaters, and recreational drugs, and pornography, and contraceptives, and gay rights’ parades, all of which seemed to simply appear in his world within a year or two of Franco’s death:

You had to learn, and you had to learn fast.  Your hands were full, and your mind had to work at a maddening speed.  But what an opportunity to learn for an aspiring writer: what a need to make some sense of what keeps rushing around you and at the same time to take stock of the long suppressed past and to try to peek into the fast approaching future.  (39)

What a luxury to live in a place and time when no writer’s name is likely to bear as much extra-literary power as Lorca’s.  Muñoz Molina, at the end of the essay, is clear enough that he prefers to recall 1975 rather than to live through it.

Who, by the by, is Antonio Muñoz Molina?  Let’s see.  I have to find the right part of the magazine. He

is the author of over a dozen novels, most recently La noche de los tiempos.  He twice received the Premio Nacional de Literatura in Spain.  He lives in Madrid and New York.

Now you know as much as I do, or perhaps more, since Molina has several novels in English, which you might have read.  Where did I read this memoir?  In the new issue of The Hudson Review, Spring 2011, a special treasure trove titled “The Spanish Issue.”  The rest of the week, more of The Hudson Review, more of “The Spanish Issue.”

Never in unison, but in a kind of satisfying harmony - Edith Grossman on How To Translate

The last two chapters of translator Edith Grossman’s slim new book, Why Translation Matters (2010), are excellent.  So let’s start there.  One is on the mechanics of translating Don Quixote; the other is on translating Spanish-language poetry, and is packed with side-by-side examples.  As a brief guide to How Translation Is Done, one could hardly do better.  The arguments are non-technical, the examples are clear, and the reader who is, in the end, dissatisfied with some of Grossman’s decisions has learned something about how translation really works.

Grossman was commissioned to translate Don Quixote and given a two year deadline.  Best known for her translations of Gabriel García Márquez and other contemporary writers, Grossman says she “repeatedly asked the published whether he was certain he had called the right Grossman” (78).  Accepting the job, she had to confront “centuries of Cervantean scholarship,” at least twenty previous English translations, and four centuries of distance from Cervantes and his language.

Grossman thinks of herself as an actor, playing “the Cervantean part.”   Those of us who recently read Jorge Luis Borges’ “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote” might start at hearing that, but Grossman does have a sort of Menardian conception of translation.  She wanted to “catch a glimpse of Cervantes’ mind”, and is at her best “when I can begin to imagine that the author and I have started to speak together – never in unison, but in a kind of satisfying harmony” (82).  Pierre Menard rejects actually becoming Cervantes as both “too easy” and impossible. Grossman argues that it is plenty hard, and possible, if “metaphorical.”

Grossman has a defense of including the errors of Cervantes that is both sensible (she picked an edition and stuck with it, however imperfect) and ludicrous (incorporating Cervantes’ own corrections would “scholarship[] away that enthusiastic, ebullient quality, what I think of as the creative surge”) (85).

The chapter on translating poetry is in part inspired by Grossman’s first-rate 2006 collection of Golden Age Spanish poetry, which I enjoyed way back here and recommend to everyone.  My great criticism of that book was that it was too short.  Now I can see why.  Her method is not honed for speed.  Grossman essentially memorizes the poems before translating them, since “I believe that of all these poetic elements, the most important is rhythm” (96).  She takes the music and the complexity of the sound entirely seriously.

In the poems Grossman supplies in Why Translation Matters, I can sometimes see what she is doing, and sometimes not.  Here are the first four lines of Jaime Manrique’s “Mambo”:

Contra un cielo topacio
y ventanales estrellados
con delirantes trinitarias
y rojas, sensuales cayenas;
***
Against a topaz sky
and huge windows starry
with delirious heartsease
and sensual red cayenne; (pp. 102-3)

The poem, I am told “recreates the dance rhythm of the mambo” (101) which, I have to admit, I can’t hear in either the original or in Grossman.  Poems are generally rhythmic, right?  Is this one more rhythmic?  But I suspect my ear is faulty.  And I like (both) poems for their imagery and characters – the poem is told by an adult remembering aunts dancing during his childhood, “and I dance hiding in their skirts.”

Grossman makes translating poetry seem like such fun.  If only her book were titled How Translation Is Done.

The collapse of the Golden Age, or, Why there won't be much Spanish literature at Wuthering Expectations

The Spanish Golden Age was an amazing literary period, a strong rival to the contemporary literature of England (that's right, including Shakespeare). Say it started with the anonymous picaresque Lazarillo de Tormes in 1554 and lasted until Calderón de la Barca’s retirement into the priesthood in 1651. Almost a century, which included great poets (the mystic St. John of the Cross and Fray Luis de León, and the baroque Luis de Góngora), playwrights (the prolific Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina, and the magnificent Calderón), and the beginning of the novel, including Don Quixote. And then, after this spectacular creative outburst, it all just dies. With the exception of the Mexican poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, there are no great works of Spanish literature for another 200 years.

What an outrageous statement – how does the Amateur Reader know that? He’s read it all? No, no; he’s just taking the word of the Professionals. I look in my copy of The Penguin Book of Spanish Verse, and see an almost exact 200 year gap, Sor Juana again excepted. After her, nothing until Gustavo Adolfo Becquer in 1860. Or glance at The Cambridge History of Spanish Literature, and compare the entire chapters devoted to Cervantes or Calderón de la Barca to the handful of pages on the 18th century. You have to actually read the chapters to find the accompanying total lack of enthusiasm. For Scholars Only.

What happened? In its decline, Spain took a turn inward, cutting itself off from the European intellectual mainstream, ironically just as recast Spanish drama was invading the French and English stage. The Counter-Reformation was part of the story, channeling writing into religious subjects. Why wasn’t Italy affected the same way, though? Maybe it was, but at least the Italian theater was lively throughout the 18th century. French neoclassicism had a stifling effect on poetry and drama. During the decade when the Napoleonic Wars were fought on Spanish soil, literary production almost ceased entirely. I would not want to say that a culture capable of producing Goya was lacking in creative energy. But something was missing.

Perhaps what is missing is not the books, but translations. In the Columbia Encyclopedia entry on Spanish literature, in the 18th century we see – no, the encyclopedist agrees, the 18th century is hopeless. Let’s move into the early 19th century. Here are some authors – José de Espronceda, Ángel de Saavedra, José Morilla y Moral. Who? Are their books still worth reading? They’re not in English, so I can't find out for myself without an investment in Spanish that is unlikely to occur.

Later, after 1860 or so, a cosmopolitan intellectual spirit had returned to Spain. I have not read much of Becquer, or novelists like Benito Peréz Galdós or the mononymous Clarín. But their books are in English, and I’ve leafed through them, learning at least one thing – I ought to read them some day. They look good. Maybe that’s true of earlier writers as well, but I need the help of an enterprising translator.

I’ve elided the issue of Latin American literature, which looks to me like it follows the same pattern. I’d love to be proved wrong. Anyone know if José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi’s The Mangy Parrot (1816, “first Spanish American novel”) is for non-specialists? The title is promising.