Three Comedies by Pedro Calderón de la Barca (review)

260BCom, Vol. 38, No. 2 (Winter 1 986) Amescua present no problem at all, those for such major figures as Calder ón (over seven hundred), Tirso (over five hundred) and Lope (almost thirteen hundred) are very unwieldy. In view of this fact, perhaps some hybrid organizational compromise could have improved the overall usefulness of the tool for the intended audience. Though I have some reservations concerning the organization of this Bibliography, I recognize, however, its usefulness for both specialist and student. This volume should appear on every bibliography for Golden-Age courses, and every college library should have a copy on its shelves. Thomas A. O'Connor Kansas State University Muir, Kenneth, and Ann L. Mackenzie, translators. Three Comedies by Pedro Calderón de la Barca. Lexington: Univ. of Kentucky Press, 1985. $25. cloth, $9.00 paper. Continuing their laudable efforts to make Calderón's comedies more accessible to English-speaking readers, begun in 1980 with Four Comedies by Calderón, Kenneth Muir and Ann Mackenzie now offer us new translations of Casa con dos puertas mala es de guardar, Mañanas de abril y mayo, and No hay burlas con el amor. Every translation is to some extent a compromise, and this is nowhere truer than in translations of Spanish Golden Age comedias. Among the difficult choices facing the translator are: should the translation be in verse or in prose? If in verse, what kind of verse? Should the translation be in modern English or should an attempt be made to retain the somewhat archaic flavor of the original? Should topical allusions be translated literally or should other allusions which would be understandable to a contemporary English-speaking audience be substituted? The solutions offered by Muir and Mackenzie in the present volume are, on the whole, very conservative ones. When the choice was between faithfulness to the original text and clarity and ease of performance for contemporary audiences, they have opted for the former. They have translated these comedies almost entirely in blank verse, resorting to prose for a few highly colloquial passages where the alternative would have been an absurdly unnatural doggerel. Blank verse does Reviews261 preserve the artificiality of the original, and Muir and Mackenzie's mastery of the form is extraordinary. The model followed throughout is that of Shakespeare, and Muir has used his familiarity with Shakespeare's plays to great advantage. The drawback of using blank verse is that it has an innate gravity which does not lend itself well to comedy. It is no accident that the most successful—and funniest—passages in this volume are Beatriz's ridiculously pedantic speeches in No Trifling with Love. At other times the blank verse becomes monotonous, and one misses the variety of versification and the suitably playful shorter lines in the original. The Shakespearean diction, though approximating the effect of seventeenth-century Spanish on a modern Spanish audience, makes these plays seem unnecessarily esoteric and remote to contemporary American audiences. Allusions, even when not clearly understood by the translators, are given as they appear in the original and annotated. A good example occurs in Act II of A House with Two Doors Is Difficult to Guard when the gracioso Calabazas exclaims: «I wonder if this mysterious lady is none other than Catalina de Acosta, searching for the whereabout of her statue.» The translators point out in a note that «Catalina de Acosta was a well known actress of the period who may well have played the part of Angela [in Calderón's La dama duende] on stage...Why she should be looking for her statue, however, is more difficult to explain. Clearly some topical joke is involved, perhaps a reference to another role played by this actress, as heroine of some sacred piece in which a religious statue or image was lost, searched for, and recovered, doubtless with divine help.» In a recent article John Varey has explained that Catalina de Acosta was also the name of a woman who was burned in effigy (estatua) for judaizing in an auto de fe held in Madrid on July 4, 1632. He surmises that the joke was therefore the coincidence between her name and that of...