La gran comedia Guárdate de la agua mansa. Beware of Still Waters (review)

Reviews151 through the expansion of which the British Empire was able to expand. A reading of historians rather than propagandists would have shown Cascardi that colonizing efforts usually led to court honors, etc., and helped to democratize the entrepreneurs, soldiers and settlers at a little higher level: «a second chance for the second rate» used to be the witticism . And «dreams of adventure» filled the fiction shelves of readers of all European languages —French, Russian, German, North American — during the nineteenth century. This work has its infelicities. Repeated use of the word «radical» and misuse of the philosophical term «critique» (3 times in 12 lines, 151, winding down from 3 times in 6 lines, 135-6) may confer glamour for some readers, not for others. Contemporary writers are named in the past tense and in the text; is this now the fashion? Certain phrases:«The monster of jealousy rears its ugly head»; «The current specimen of the Habsburg line»; «a needed entrée»; «beginning of renewed problems on that front», to many ears will sound pretty churlish. For all the pretentiousness of allusion in this book, very little may be learned from it. Alan Soons State University of New York at Buffalo CALDERÓN DE BARCA, PEDRO. La gran comedia Gvârdate de la agva mansa. Beware of Still Waters. Translator David M. Gitlitz. San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 1984. xxi and 201 pp. $25.00 cloth, $12.00 paper. This translation is based on the text of Guárdate found in the Ocfava parte of Calderón's works. The facing Spanish text reproduces the edition of the play in Menéndez Pidal's Teatro Selecto de Calderón de¡a Barca (Madrid, 1917), with corrections from the Octava parte. There is an introduction that summarizes the circumstances of the play's first performance, and also provides critical commentary on the play itself. Gitlitz explains the origin of the translation (to stage a Calderonian comedy that had never been performed previously in English), and ends with a table of the Spanish and English metrical strudures. There are two fundamentally different aims involved in any translation of a dramatic text in verse form. First, one may attempt to retain the 152BCom, Vol. 38, No. 1 (Summer 1986) flavor and rhythm of the original text, seeking first and foremost as literal a rendition of the uniqueness of that text as possible. Second, one may esteem more highly the viability of the text in performance, attempting , in Kenneth Muir's words, «to produce a text that actors could speak naturally.» Thus the basic dichotomy so often charaderistic of the antagonistic relationship between academic scholarship and criticism and what we may call «dramatic interests.» What Gitlitz has tackled, and in my view very successfully, is the dialedic of fidelity to the original and playability to a contemporary American audience as the source of his translation's vitality. Since I was present at the play's performance in October of 1981, as part of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's commemoration of the tercentenary of Calderón's death, I can attest to this translation's dramatic viability and vitality. To demonstrate further how significant is this point, I would invite the reader to pick up any 19th-century translation of Aeschylus, Sophocles, or Euripides, and compare it to a modern translation whose primary purpose is dramatic performance and not museum-like reproduction . The former will conjure up specters of trots that helped us get through Caesar's wars and Cicero's tirades against Cataline. The latter, though distinctly foreign, nevertheless has a ring of familiarity that allows the text to bridge temporal distance and cultural alienation. But each traduttore is also a traditore. Two examples will suffice for the moment. In the first, I believe Gitlitz has «read into» the English text his interpretation of Don Alonso's character and motivation (p. ix). The Spanish text reads: y en él quiero de mis padres y abuelos el mayorazgo aumentar: pobre es, yo rico, y es bien que el caudal fundamos de la sangre y de Ia hacienda, porque conservemos ambos el solar de Cuadradillos con más lustre. Gitlitz's translation: With him...