by Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600-1681)
translation of La vida es sueño into English by Roy Campbell (~1957)

Life is a Dream, and other Spanish Classics, edited by Eric Bentley (Applause, 1985)

My second spin gave the number 253, which landed me on The Doctor of His Own Honor by Pedro Calderón de la Barca. However, this being the fourth listed of four works by Calderón, I read the first instead: Life is a Dream. “Translated by Roy Campbell,” says Bloom. To my surprise, I found that very edition on my first bookstore attempt, at the Strand Annex, for I think $4. Not bad.

It’s one thing to chat out my thoughts about stuff as I’m reading it, but now, months after the fact, I have to either dig deep to fake some thoughts about something I’ve stopped thinking about, or be reduced to just “reviewing” it, which is a pretty dull business, for me. But better that I should try to catch up then be constantly owing this site thoughts that I no longer have; here then is a very brief review.

Ed. note after finishing: No it’s not! I should never announce things before I write them.

This was a very pleasant read and would probably make for a satisfying time at the theater, provided a suitably period-receptive attitude. I don’t have any particularly nuanced understanding of 17th century literature or drama, so naturally this reminds me of Shakespeare. It reminds me of Shakespeare not just in manner but also in theme and treatment and rhetorical style and wit and a lot of other things, such that despite my lack of knowledge I’m tempted to believe that the comparison isn’t a complete “well duh,” but I could be wrong. In doing some searching on Calderón, I see that it is common practice to say that Calderón’s greatest works are on par with Shakespeare and have comparable depth, but not exactly to say that they had similar techniques. Seemed to me that they did but what do I know. Life is a Dream moved a little faster than the mature Shakespeare works we all know, had a little more silly plot business and a few more sudden shifts of emphasis, but we all know that Shakespeare wasn’t above silly plot nonsense.

Hard to say what’s the style of an era and what’s the style of an individual, especially when the individual is seen as both the representative example and the exceptional example of that era. This is what Charles Rosen says at the beginning of The Classical Style.

The plot is – well, you can read it on Wikipedia or you can take it from me – that when the prince is born, there’s a prophesy that he will bring some kind of disaster to the country, so the king, attempting to beat the prophesy, has his son imprisoned in a cell off in the mountains and tells everyone he died. That’s the premise. During the action of the play, the king decides to test his grown captive son, just to see whether he’s really bad news or not. The prince has been raised by a jailer without knowing who he is or why he’s there, and because of his circumstances has grown up to be an amoral violent wildman. The king decides to test him by having him drugged and reawakened in the castle and told who is. If he behaves badly, they’ll drug him again and return him to his cell, where he’ll be told that it was all a dream. And that’s what happens: he behaves very badly and is returned to his former life and convinced he dreamed it all. In the final act, he ends up being freed again, but now, having mused on this experience, he learns his lesson: since everything could turn out to be merely a dream, he’d be better off behaving humbly and morally.

There’s a lot more plot to it. Though I wouldn’t exactly call it elegant, the additional plotting is well-crafted in that nearly all of it is informed by the themes of will vs. fate and dreams vs. reality.

It struck me then and it strikes me now, though, that the lesson the prince learns is exactly backward. If everything turns out to be a dream, then it doesn’t matter how one behaves oneself. In a dream, why not kill and rape? It’s in reality that one’s actions have consequences for other humans (and, presumably, have consequences in the eyes of God). The prince does not kill out of a lack of humility; he kills because he has finally been unshackled and that’s what his base instincts urge him to do. It seems to me that what he needs to learn is that life is not just a dream; that he is not morally alone in his own mind but is participating in a real world with other humans and with God.

So in practical reality the moral doesn’t work, for me. The only way I can make any sense of the play’s moral logic is to translate the message of “life is dream” into “you can’t take it with you” – when you awake, in this case. As the prince tells himself in Act III,

… Do not thus
Be puffed to pride by these uncertain plaudits
Which, when I wake, will turn to bitterness
In that I won them only to be lost.
The less I value them, the less I’ll miss them.

Which is a fair bit different from the overall message, the paradoxical “be on good behavior because it might not be real.”

The various elements of the play fit together to create a bit of a moral mindbender – the prince is only bad because his father abused him in attempt to avoid his becoming bad; he is only able to actually do evil in the world because his father feels remorse and gives him a chance at freedom; he then learns his lesson which is to be more humble and not feel entitled to freedom; he eventually achieves freedom thanks to rebels who oppose his father’s actions; in the end he wisely places himself at his father’s mercy rather than get revenge (as was the rebels’ plan). Certainly plenty of interesting stuff to think about in there, and much of it expressed in attractive, intelligent poetry. But all the same, kind of confused. This sort of thing always happens when you put prophesies in your plots, I think. Though there was something intriguing about reading these heady Shakespearean (Calderónian) monologues wherein philosophy has taken a turn into the surreal. If you give up on trying to learn anything in particular from it, there’s no question that the piece had a lot of dramatic life to it. The basic hook here – putting someone in a to-them-miraculous situation and then telling them it was all a dream – is very rich.

In this case, Bloom’s recommended translation was superb. I think I came away even more impressed with Roy Campbell than with Calderón. Everything falls very comfortably and fluidly into iambic pentameter, nothing is awkward or unclear, and all the color and imagery feels alive and unforced. The vocabulary was extremely well-chosen: there was no mannered attempt to place the English into the 17th century, but it never felt jarringly as though it belonged to any other time in particular. Both humor and pathos came through intact. I was truly impressed. I don’t think I’ve ever read a verse translation before that accomplished quite as much as this did. Maybe that’s not saying much.

There’s a public domain translation by Edward Fitzgerald but it actually seems to be a complete reworking, with almost no direct relationship to the original Spanish that I can see. So I don’t recommend that. Really, I can’t imagine there being a better version of this play than the one I read. The New York Times seems to agree – here they approve of the Campbell version, whereas this doesn’t sound any good. This sounds like it didn’t quite work, sorry Irene. On the other hand, what does the New York Times know?