Ramón Del Valle-Inclán: An Appraisal of His Life and Works ed. by Anthony N. Zahareas (review)

434 MODERN DRAMA February American public, and in turn, will encourage new dramatists to write significantly for our time. SIGNI FALK Coe College lUMoN DEL VALLE-INCLAN: AN A.PPRAISAL OF HIS LIFE AND WORKS, gen. ed. Anthony N. Zahareas. New York: Las Americas Press, 1968. xxiii+ 856 pp. The first thing that comes to mind on taking up this well-edited and impressive volume is an entirely delusory feeling of deja vu. Surely, one thinks, one has seen this book or one very much like it beforeI Surely this is not the very first comprehensive introduction of Valle-lncIan to· the English-reading publid It is, then, with a sense of shock, even outrage, that anyone at ail familiar with modem Spanish literature realizes that this is indeed the first full-dress treatment of Valle-lncIan's importance in English. RamOn del Valle-Inclan was born in 1866 in Galicia, the northwest corner of Spain, and died in 1936. Both as a novelist and as a dramatist he was a writer of international stature, whose work, although uniquely Spanish in tone and setting, was by no means confined in its importance and influence to the Iberian p€ninsula. He was the originator of a form he called the "esperPento," which, closely related in method and technique to surrealism, sought to portray the world as seen through distorting mirrors. With VaIle-IncIan the deliberate distortions and grotesqueries of the esperpentos often had a more specific politicalor social critical meaning than the French surrealist plays did. Valle-IncIan was as much a chronicler and definer of the Spanish ethos as Cervantes was before him. His profound understanding of the Spanish spirit and his innovations in technique in order to express it on the stage have made Valle-Inclan the most important influence on the contemporary Spanish stage. Buero-Vallejo, Sastre, Olmo, Muniz, Ruibal, Martinez Ballesteros,. and BelIido all acknowledge and show. his influence. Without VaIle-IncIan the Spanish theatre would not be what it is today. In his three most important plays, Divinas palabras (translated by Edwin Williams as Divine Words in Modern SPanish Theatre, edited by Michael Benedikt and George E. Wellwarth), Luces de Bohemia (translated by Anthony N. Zahareas and Gerald Gillespie in the Spring, H)69 issue of Modern International Drama), and Los Cuernos de Don Friolera (The Horns of Don Friolera, translated by Bryant Creel, but as yet unpublished), Valle-lncIan treats the Spaniard's relation to the Church, to the State, and to his sense of honor. That these plays-among the best of the modern theater-are only justbecoming partially available in English is a commentary on our disgraceful publishing practices. Anthony N. Zahareas, together with his assistant editors. Rodolfo Cardona and Sumner Greenfield, has put together an anthology of sixty-three essays on various aspects of Valle-lncIan's work by a group of leading Spanish scholars. About half of these essays are in Spanish. Of the rest the ones of most interest to drama scholars are Zahareas's own essay on "The Absurd, the Grotesque and the Esperpento," Robert Lima's analysis of commedia dell'arte elements in ValleIncIan , Malcolm Griffith's and Paul llie's essays on his use of the grotesque, Gerald Gillespie's analysis of one of the puppet plays, Gillespie and Zahareas's 1970 BOOK REVIEWS 435 analysis of tragic elements in Lights 01 Bohemia~ and Sumner Greenfield's essay on the esperpento. This book is a landmark in modem Spanish drama studies. and it is to be hoped that it will open the way to further study of Valle-Inchin in English. GEORGE E. WELLWARTH Pennsylvania State University CHEKHOV, OBSERVER WITHOUT ILLUSION, by Daniel Grilles, translated by Charles Lam Markmann. Funk and WagnaIls: New York, 1968. 428 pp. $10.00. This translation of a new biography of Chekhov by the Belgian CrItiC Daniel Gilles was originally published in Paris by Julliard in 1967. It is a pleasantly writlen and competently translated work, a trifle verbose, which sketches in considerable detail the life of Chekhov and the literary landscape in which be moved, particularly with reference to Tolstoy and Gorky. For these fcasons it should surely interest the casual...