TPS-eCall 1 Introducción

Hare’s statement that ‘the metaphor of the play was stunningly clear’ (García Lorca 2005a: v) calls for examination. Maria Delgado reveals the canonisation of Lorca and his work when she writes: ‘As one of the first martyrs of the Civil War, García Lorca creates a romantic subject for exploitation, and his writings have been read [inter alia] as elegies where his own death has been anticipated’ (2003: 206). The House of Bernarda Alba, as his final play, completed only months before his death in 1936, is particularly open to this type of reverence, dealing as it does with the imprisonment of five daughters by a tyrannical

mother, culminating in the suicide of the youngest daughter. Gwynne Edwards constructs a reading of how this association between the subject matter of the play and its writer’s death can be achieved, using Juan Antonio Bardem’s film Lorca, Muerte de un poeta (Bardem 1990) as an example. The film opens with the execution of Lorca and his fellow prisoners in the Andalusian countryside at dawn. The frame freezes over the shots from the execution squad, and the still picture is accompanied by a male voice-over reciting

Bernarda’s closing speech: ‘Y no quiero llantos. La muerte hay que mirarla cara a cara. ¡Silencio! […] ¡A callar he dicho! [...] ¡Nos hundiremos […] en un mar de luto! [...] ¿Me habéis oído? Silencio, silencio he dicho. ¡Silencio!’ (García Lorca 2004: 207)98. Edwards comments: ’The terrible circumstances of Lorca’s death […] are linked […] to Adela’s suicide […], the dramatist and his character victims of a cold and heartless intolerance’ (2003: 186). I assume that this is the ‘stunningly clear’ metaphor to which Hare refers: Bernarda’s house representing an enclosed and isolated Spain and Bernarda herself a repressive dictator, as Franco was to become. Certainly, this is how the play was staged in its earliest

performances outside Spain, both in its source language and in translation, and subsequently within Spain in its first public production in 1964, eleven years before Franco’s death and consequent end of his dictatorship.

The representation of Lorca’s plays on stage and the accumulation of myth around the legacy of his life and work have been the subject of substantial academic research, amongst which are Edwards on Lorca: Living in the Theatre (2003) and Delgado’s study, Federico

García Lorca (2008). My own research into early productions and translations of La casa de Bernarda Alba reached the conclusion that translation has played a significant part in the

reading of the play as a political metaphor and its presentation as such to audiences both within and beyond Spain (Brodie 2007). However, the inevitability of this metaphor should not be taken for granted. Whilst Lorca’s death at the hands of extreme right wing elements is accepted as fact, the detailed circumstances of his assassination, such as, for example, the degree of authorisation by the Nationalist faction, may never be established, as Lorca’s biographer Ian Gibson has indicated (1990: 446-470). More recently, the lengthy legal

98

‘And I don’t want any crying. Death must be looked at face to face. Silence! […] Shut up, I said! […] We’ll plunge into a sea of mourning! […] Did you hear me? Silence, silence, I said. Silence!’ (My translation.)

dispute over Lorca’s disinterment, and ultimate revelation that the assumed resting place was in fact empty, has revived speculation over the circumstances and motivations of the poet’s death. The findings of the latest publication, Las trece últimas horas en la vida de

García Lorca (Caballero Pérez 2011), were summarised in El Periódico as follows:

El libro intenta también rescatar la figura de un Lorca no partidista, aunque sí firmemente republicano, y niega que fuera un mártir de la izquierda ya que las rencillas familiares pesaron más que las ideológicas en su trágico fin. (Hevia 2011) 99 The particulars continue to be disputed, as indeed are Lorca’s own alleged intentions towards his work. Hare refers to Lorca’s famous pronouncement concerning the play, ‘Reality! Pure realism!’ (García Lorca 2005a: v), as justification for his reading of the play as metaphor, saying: ‘it is clear in which direction he was heading at the time of his death’ (ibid). But Lorca was notoriously unreliable in his allusions to himself and his work. Any claims of political activism made on his behalf by his admirers may be tempered by his own brother’s description of him as ‘the antidote to ideology’ (García Lorca 1989: 114).

Delgado addresses the complex relationship between these ideological and personal narratives in her summary of the play:

a dark, claustrophobic and elusive domestic drama in whose interplay of silence and malicious accusations lie a bitter microcosm of the larger conflicts played out on the country’s political stages which were to erupt in a fratricidal civil war, scars of which still haunt the national psyche. (2008: 38)

This domestic drama thus presents a multilayered representation of Lorca’s engagement with contemporary society, from the dramatization of the neighbouring Alba family in his childhood village of Asquerosa100, to a reflection of the foreboding within his own and wider

99

‘The book aims to re-establish Lorca as a non-partisan figure, although certainly a firm republican, and denies that he was a martyr of the left, given that personal rivalries contributed more heavily than ideology to his tragic end.’ (My translation.)

100

Asquerosa translates into English as ‘disgusting, loathsome’, although the origins of this name are thought to relate to the Arabic denomination of a local river. The village was renamed Valderrubios (referring to the blonde tobacco grown in the area) in 1943.

circles of political and societal upheaval. In retrospect, Lorca’s brother Francisco provided a detailed account of the apparently substantial extent to which Federico had based his play on local characters and incidents, but insisted that ‘onto this [village atmosphere] he projects a plot that has been invented in its entirety’, emphasising his brother’s ‘artistic intentions’ (1989: 236). Catherine Boyle has demonstrated Lorca’s connection through his theatre with ‘the sensibilities of his age and an engagement with a pretty uniform language of crisis, revolving around the questions of the audience, of dramatic writing and of social agency’ (2006: 162). As she explains, Lorca’s theory of the stage, his ‘vocabulary of crisis’, is present throughout his theatrical practice, conveyed in all aspects of the dramatic process. Viewing The House of Bernarda Alba as a metaphor, therefore, acknowledges the densities of Lorca’s language. But the historical subtleties of the context in which Lorca was writing are also relevant in any subsequent reading of his play. The fratricidal civil war, and Franco’s ascendency and dictatorship, were all still in the future at the time of its

composition. The myths and circumstances surrounding its writing, the subsequent political turmoil and continuing scar damage have influenced many later interpretations.

Nevertheless, the ‘stunning clarity’ of any metaphor, either in 1936 or 2005, can be held up for scrutiny against the tensions within this text. Indeed, Hare’s insistence on the play’s metaphorical quality, without any exact stipulation of how that metaphor operates, requires an examination of his translation, both in the detail of its creation and in relation to his dramatic output in general, in order to assess his interpretive intentions. I consider these issues in the following sections.