Pedro Calderón de la Barca. Life is a dream. Silence is gold

Abstract

This review of P. Calderón’s collected plays focuses on a stylistic analysis of Natalya Vankhanen’s new Russian translation of Life Is a Dream [La vida es sueño], considered the crowning glory of Spanish baroque theatre, as well as its interpretation and the dramatic nuances of the translated play in the stage version of the Moscowbased Elektrotheatre Stanislavsky, including their effect on the production’s portrayal of Segismundo. The reviewer stresses the translator’s unique, authorial view of Calderón’s poetic text. It results, firstly, in the translation’s heightened emotional charge, signaled by a profusion of exclamation and question marks and ellipses, and, secondly, in a shift of semantic emphases from the topic of overcoming one’s animalistic instincts to that of discovering the reasons for ‘animalistic’ behaviour in humans. The same topic — the father’s fault for raising a tyrant — is accentuated in Elektrotheatre’s production where Segismundo is shown to become despotic only in the palace upon learning of his mistreatment by the family.