Either something is authentic or it is unauthentic, it is either false or true, make-believe or spontaneous life; yet here we are faced with a prevaricated truth and an authentic fake, hence a thing which is at once the truth and a lie.
– Stanisław Lem, “Gruppenführer Louis XVI” in A Perfect Vacuum, translated by Michael Kandel, p. 58.
I first read Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s wonderful La vida es sueño (in Roy Campbell’s translation) as a seventeen-year-old freshman and have carried that joy of discovery, and the desire to share that joy, with me for over forty years. I have long wished to see the play on stage and as I became slightly involved with my city’s theatre community I quietly plugged the play to whoever might hear me. With the arrival of the global pandemic, I thought a satisfying plague-year project might be to sit down and translate La vida es sueño myself. And, when all the lockdowns and theatre closures had ended, I would have something a little more concrete to put before people than just saying “Hey, there’s this really great Seventeenth Century Spanish play that would really be super to offer a Twenty-first Century English-Speaking audience. A little volume, which is available on Amazon, is the result of that very satisfying plague-year project.
Calderón de la Barca was, at times, a priest, a soldier, a poet, a dramatist, and a Knight of the Order of Santiago. He was well read in philosophy and the sciences of his day, familiar with Cervantes, Shakespeare, and the Classical literature of Greece and Rome, particularly the Stoic philosophy and dramatic work of Seneca. As Ciriaco Morón Arroyo points out in the introduction to his edition, Segismundo has characteristics of Adam, of Prometheus, of Hamlet, and Rosaura and Clarín have more than a little of Don Quixote and Sancho about them. In La vida es sueño Calderón tightly focusses his wide reading on the problems of free will and the nature of reality, and on the conflict between passion and reason, between chaos and order. Centuries before The Matrix films made the idea of reality-as-illusion a pop culture commonplace, Calderón deeply explored the implications of the question (and many others) in the story of Prince Segismundo, locked in a mountain prison cell since infancy and then released into a bright new world which might be merely a dream or nightmare. And, of course, the idea of being locked away from all the joys of society can’t help but resonate after the plague year 2020.
The play opens with Rosaura addressing the “violent” Hippogriff. Violence in the context of La vida es sueño is not simply people hurting each other or making mayhem; rather, violence is more particularly the incongruity of double natures within one person: the Prince without power; the King who sees himself as liberal and learnèd but in action is a foolish tyrant; the warrior woman in man’s clothing; the Hippogriff (an invention of Oriosto), a hybrid creature of a mare and a griffon (itself a hybrid creature). This violence of opposite natures mentioned in the opening line is a tension to be reconciled by the end of the play. This is a classic problem of Stoic philosophy:
The central issue of Senecan moral philosophy is the control of the passions (affectus) and the attainment of inner peace through rational conformity with nature; this emotional control allows those who possess it to confront all misfortune with courage and equanimity.
– R. J. Tarrant, Introduction to Seneca’s Thyestes, p. 23.
One is reminded of the Jungian ideas growing out of alchemy: the Mysterium Coniunctionis, and the process of individuation. Calderón places his characters in a quite Jungian landscape likely because Calderón and Jung often drank from the same well:
. . . the same problem presented itself to the psychologist that had kept the alchemists in suspense for seventeen hundred years: what was he to do with these antagonistic forces? Could he throw them out and get rid of them? Or had he to admit their existence, and is it our task to bring them into harmony and, out of the multitude of contradictions, produce a unity, which naturally will not come of itself, though it may – Deo concedente – with human effort?
– Carl Jung, Epilogue to Mysterium Coniunctionis
This is the same problem faced by Basil after his foolish attempt to thwart Fate by imprisoning his son from infancy. Instead of trying to bring opposites into harmony, he tries to throw away the forces and deny their existence.
La vida es sueño is named a comedy, and so, it must have and does have a largely happy ending. Identities are sorted out, marriages are arranged happily, and all is well in the kingdom – excepting the unfortunate serving man thrown off the balcony, the soldier executed because he tries to claim his due reward for freeing Segismundo, and, of course, the unhappy clown Clarín. Poor Clarín, who really does no wrong and is thoroughly punished for it. His name means something like “bugle”, hence Fitzgerald’s decision to name the character “Fife” in his eccentric Victorian translation. At some points in history, one might have chosen to name the clown “Trump” in English. But not this year. Clarín is much too gentle and charming to take on that baggage.
The final Act of La vida es sueño involves common people in a populist mob rising in arms against the legal government. They want their next ruler to be the one they expect, not an individual who isn’t like them who is legally selected by some process they cannot quite understand and are certain they don’t like. The mob rises in disorder to insist on a simple order rather than the subtle machinations of an astronomer king. La vida es sueño is a play for this particular plague year.
But La vida es sueño is not a play in praise of modern democracy. Rather, it is a discussion of the forces, internal and external, with which a Prince must contend, and the balancing of those forces which makes a “good” Prince. In the end, as Marón writes, quoting the title of a medieval text by Giles of Rome: “La vida es sueño es . . . un « regimiento de principes»” (p.36).
Sueño in Spanish means both “dream” and “sleep”, so there is a hint of “Life is a Sleep” in the title of the play. English does have a word with the same conjoined meaning, but it is an archaic word at best: swefen is a quite common word in Middle English dream vision poems, most obviously in the opening of Piers Plowman. The words, sueño and swefen distant cousins, both deriving ultimately from the Proto-Indo-European root *swep-, to sleep, swefen through the Germanic languages, sueño through the Romance from Latin somnus and related terms, whence also the Italian sonno, used at the opening of perhaps the greatest dream vision poem, The Divine Comedy:
Io non so ben ridir com’ i’ v’intrai,
tant’ era pien di sonno a quel punto
ce la verace via abbandonai.
Inferno, ll.10-12
Sleep and dreams. So powerful. So constantly returned to in literature. Dante witnesses Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise in a dream. Shakespeare’s Prince Hamlet suggests that the sleep of Death may bring dreams. Prince Segismundo suggests Life is a dream.
All that we see or seem . . .
My translation of Life is a Dream is based on the 27th edition of La vida es sueño edited by Ciriaco Morón Arroyo and published by Ediciones Cátedra. I have made an effort to reproduce Calderón’s elaborate rhyme schemes, but with only an occasional gesture to the frequent feminine rhymes. I have also largely ignored the end-assonance in the passages in Romance metre – English does not lend itself comfortably to such things.
Behind the Hedge 