Hispania

Ramón del Valle-Inclán (1866–1936) was a remarkable innovator who wrote poetry, novels, theater, essays, and art criticism. Although celebrated within Spain for his richly visual, trans-generic, and linguistically virtuosic works, Valle-Inclán is surprisingly little known outside his country. Given that this situation is due, in part, to a scarcity of translations, the publication of Savage Comedies, Christopher Colbath and Luis M. González's translation of Valle-Inclán's dramatic trilogy of the Comedias bárbaras, is to be celebrated.

Although Valle-Inclán designated the three texts [Golden Boy (Cara de plata, 1922), The Blazoned Eagle (Águila de blasón, 1907), and Wolves Rampant (Romance de lobos, 1908)] a trilogy, the thematic first part was published 14 years after the third, at a point when Valle-Inclán's literary experimentation had turned more decisively towards expressionism and the esperpento, a genre the author created to represent his understanding of the grotesque tragedy that characterized Spain in the early twentieth century. Perhaps for this reason, the three parts have not been considered consistently as a whole. For example, in one of the few existing English translations, María Delgado's Cara de Plata, translated literally as Silver Face, was included in an edition with two other dramas from the early 1920s (Valle-Inclán's Plays: Divine Words, Bohemian Lights, Silver Face. London: Methuen, 1993). Colbath and González's edition wisely includes the three Savage Comedies in one edition, affording its readers the full experience of the fall of the trilogy's hero, the nineteenth-century Galician nobleman Don Juan Manuel Montenegro, from initial conflicts with farmers and the Catholic Church in Golden Boy, through the assault on Montenegro and his home in the Blazoned Eagle, to Montenegro's death at the hand of one of his sons in Wolves Rampant.

In maintaining the integrity of the trilogy, the Savage Comedies follows the practice of González's earlier Spanish edition of the trilogy (Comedias bárbaras, Castalia, 2017). The introduction, which roughly follows that provided in González's Spanish edition, situates Valle-Inclán within early twentieth-century Spain, referring briefly to key political and historical points of contact and contextualizing the author within currents of literary modernism that define the [End Page 343] period in Spain and Europe. As Colbath and González point out, like many early twentieth-century dramatists, a search for new theatrical forms led Valle-Inclán to look for inspiration in the plastic arts, architecture, dance, and, importantly, film. Pointing to cinematic features of the trilogy, in particular Valle-Inclán's extensive stage directions, Colbath and González posit a resonance with Sergei Eisenstein's principle of montage, a practice that allows Valle-Inclán to create theatrical spaces through a series of "cinematic stops" that are "sequential, diachronically fluid" and demand that a reader possess a "cinematic imagination" to reconstruct (14–15).

The introduction points briefly to the trilogy's stage history, providing details about major productions in an extensive footnote, to conclude that "there is yet to appear anything like an adequate version [of the trilogy] for the stage" (13). This conclusion, although justified in part, is perhaps a bit hasty and would have benefitted from further discussion of the spate of innovative productions dating from the 1990s, among them the 1991 staging of the trilogy directed by José Carlos Plaza at the Teatro María Guerrero in a production that lasted over six hours. Further discussion of the theatrical potential for the trilogy, or a lack thereof, would have given better grounding to the conclusion that the Savage Comedies are not meant for the stage that is implied in the final lines of the introduction.

Colbath and González explain that in translating the three texts their principal aim was to "be faithful first and foremost to the uncanny and beautiful atmospheres conjured up in...