Review of 'The House of Bernarda Alba and Other Plays' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
“The House of Bernarda Alba and Other Plays” by Federico Garcia Lorca is a beautifully executed collection of the three best known plays by one of the best Spanish language authors of the twentieth century. This translation for Penguin Modern Classics by Michael Dewell and Carmen Zapata is unique in that it was crafted through bi-lingual productions of the works with Spanish speaking actors. This practical quality makes the translation extremely fluid and captures both the meaning and the essence of the original.
The three works – “Blood Wedding,” “Yerma,” and “The House of Bernarda Alba” – are often classified together as the Rural Trilogy. It is true that all three are set in the backwaters of Spain and deal with the often surreal, melancholy lives of local people. But “Bernarda Alba” feels different than the other two works, which were intended to be part of Lorca’s unfinished Rural Trilogy. …
“The House of Bernarda Alba and Other Plays” by Federico Garcia Lorca is a beautifully executed collection of the three best known plays by one of the best Spanish language authors of the twentieth century. This translation for Penguin Modern Classics by Michael Dewell and Carmen Zapata is unique in that it was crafted through bi-lingual productions of the works with Spanish speaking actors. This practical quality makes the translation extremely fluid and captures both the meaning and the essence of the original.
The three works – “Blood Wedding,” “Yerma,” and “The House of Bernarda Alba” – are often classified together as the Rural Trilogy. It is true that all three are set in the backwaters of Spain and deal with the often surreal, melancholy lives of local people. But “Bernarda Alba” feels different than the other two works, which were intended to be part of Lorca’s unfinished Rural Trilogy. “Alba” is a play with an all-female cast. In the play, the head of the house has just passed away and the mother of the house declares seven years of mourning for the entire household, including five daughters of marriageable age. The young women are trapped in the house as well as their bodies and begin to fight over the advances of an unseen paramour who is lurking and looking for their fortune.
“Yerma” is about a married woman who cannot have children and the desperate lengths she will go to get a child. She longs to have children and become what society recognizes as a true woman but her barrenness drives her insane. “Blood Wedding” (my favorite of the three) has a bitter blood feud between two rival families spill over into violence and murder on the night of a wedding. These are simple explanations of two complex plays. I don’t want to give more description here because I want you to experience them for yourselves.
If “Alba” is realistic in it cruelty and violence, “Yerma” and “Blood Wedding” are more surreal, symbolic, and psychological. They are mystical and deeply connected to themes of the earth and fertility. The characters are individuals but just as easily could stand for allegorical ideas. Both plays have a certain musical rhythm that is lacking in the third work. Lorca, who was also a musician and stage director, used musical techniques from songs to verbal counterpoint to craft theatrical poems that leave the reader with a mood or tone that Lorca described as duende, a heightened state of emotion and deeply rooted melancholy he felt was uniquely present in Iberian literature.
I highly recommend this collection. All three plays are true classics of twentieth-century theatre. I taught “Blood Wedding” in my Modern Western Drama class and it was easily the favorite out of the eight pieces we did.
