21 - Lope in Translation: Opening the Closed Book

Summary

Just before the end of the First World War Barrett Clark turned his gaze from the conflagration in Europe to bemoan the fact that ‘the drama of Spain, early and modern, has in English-speaking countries been sadly neglected’. Referring to Golden Age theatre in particular, he glumly acknowledged that Lope de Vega, Tirso and Calderón, whom he described as the ‘greatest of dozens of dramatists of the time’, were still a ‘closed book’ to British and American audiences. Nearly ninety years later, Melveena McKendrick's survey of sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury Spanish theatre ends in similar plaintive style:

the dramatic genius of sixteenth and seventeenth-century Spain is virtually unrecognized outside the circle of Hispanic studies. In the mid-1980s, when two of Calderón's plays, Life is a Dream and The Mayor of Zalamea, were put on in London […] British theatre critics hailed the discovery of a remarkable ‘new’ dramatist. More recently the National Theatre's production of Lope de Vega’s Fuenteovejuna elicited a similar response. The fact is that not just two remarkable playwrights but a remarkable theatre to all intents and purposes still awaits rediscovery.

On one level, this is of course an issue of reception. In spite of the creative responses of nineteenth-century translators like Fitzgerald, whose freewheeling versions of six Calderón plays retain much of their playable freshness today, or of pioneering directors like Joan Littlewood, whose memorable mid-twentiethcentury production of Fuenteovejuna, like that of García Lorca's La Barraca, grafted Lope's play into the living tissue of contemporary ideological conflict, a whiff of cultural marginalisation lingered for a long time around a great deal of Spanish writing. In 1965, in his La difícil universalidad española, Guillermo de Torre harked back to the thought of Baltasar Gracián in order to analyse the apparent national self-obsession which pervaded much Spanish writing and which served to foster the belief that it was unwelcomingly introverted, narrowly local, an emaciated literature, like Rocinante, with all its prickly bones sticking out:

Hallaremos quizá la explicación última en el espíritu autocrítico tan desenfrenado —estimulante como fermento interno, desconcertante para quienes lo ven desde fuera — que caracteriza todo lo español; en la acedía, la aspereza con que los españoles juzgan o más bien trituran, a veces, los valores propios, con una violencia, una crueldad de la que es difícil encontrar equivalente en otras literaturas.