Valle-Inclan Plays: 1: Divine Words; Bohemian Lights; Silver Face

by Ramón María del Valle-Inclán, María M. Delgado

One of the most significant playwrights and novelists of the early twentieth century



This volume of translations contains Divine Words, a play that draws on pagan, Celtic traditions of the playwright's native Galicia and the repressive Catholicism of Spain to present a distorted picture of rustic life at its cruellest and most hypocritical; Bohemian Lights, the play which first expounded Valle-Inclan's theory of the grotesque (esperpento) and Silver Face, the first in the trilogy of Savage Plays, distinguished by a similar sense of anarchy and amorality."Ramon del Valle Inclan (1866-1936), the most pioneering Spanish dramatist of this century... anticipates most of the key movements in modern drama. He is notoriously unclassifiable but was both an Expressionist and an Absurdist before the event. He created a genre he called 'esperpento' which broadly means grotesque tragi-comedy, and what is fascinating is that he anticipates Beckett, Ionesco, Genet and Arrabal without in any way sacrificing his own radical utopianism. He is one of the seminal figures in modern drama: erotic, anarchic and a Galician poet of the grotesque." (Michael Billingon, Guardian)

Genres: Plays

320 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 1990

About the author

Ramón del Valle-Inclán was born into an impoverished aristocratic family in a rural village in Galicia, Spain. Obedient to his father’s wishes, he studied law in Compostela, but after his father’s death in 1889 he moved to Madrid to work as a journalist and critic. In 1892 Valle-Inclán traveled to Mexico, where he remained for more than a year. His first book of stories came out in Spain in 1895. A well-known figure in the cafés of Madrid, famous for his spindly frame, cutting wit, long hair, longer beard, black cape, and single arm (the other having been lost after a fight with a critic), Valle-Inclán was celebrated as the author of Sonatas: The Memoirs of the Marquis of Bradomín, which was published in 1904 and is considered the finest novel of Spanish modernismo, as well as for his extensive and important career in the theater, not only as a major twentieth-century playwright but also as a director and actor. He reported from the western front during World War I, and after the war he developed an unsettling new style that he dubbed esperpento—a Spanish word that means both a grotesque, frightening person and a piece of nonsense—and described as a search for “the comic side of the tragedy of life.” Partly inspired by his second visit to Mexico in 1920, when the country was in the throes of revolution, Tyrant Banderas is Valle-Inclán’s greatest novel and the essence of esperpento.

Reviews

[irene]

I only read this for school, not really liked it. It was slow, even tho it is really short and I am Spanish and still it was difficult to understand. I know it is form last century, but still, there are other books which are way better. I wouldn’t have read this if it weren’t for a school project, I won’t recommend it.

[Alec Downie]

A Spanish oddity