Lorca's Blood Wedding is a classic of twentieth-century theatre. The story is based on a newspaper fragment which told of a family vendetta and a bride who ran away with the son of the enemy family. Lorca uses it to investigate the subjects which fascinated him: desire, repression, ritual, and the constraints and commitments of the rural Spanish community in which the play is rooted. Ted Hughes's version stays close in spirit and letter to the original Spanish. With marvellous directness, he fuses Lorca's vision to his own, and the result is a powerful poetic text which captures all the violence and pathos of the play for an English-speaking audience.
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About the Author
Frederico Garcia Lorca was born in Fuente Vaqueros, near Granada, in 1898. He established himself as the most popular Spanish playwright of his day. His plays include The Butterfly's Evil Spell (1920), Mariana Pineda (1927), The Shoemaker's Wonderful Wife (1930), Blood Wedding (1933), The Love of Don Perlimpin (1933), Yerma (1934), When Five Years Pass (1936) and The House of Bernada Alba (1936). Better known for his poetry, his books of poems include Books of Poems (1921), First Songs (1927), Songs (1927), Gypsy Ballads (1928) and Poem of Deep Song (1931).
Ted Hughes (1930-98) wrote more than forty books of poetry, prose, and translation, including his version of the Oresteia of Aeschylus and the Alcestis of Euripides. He served as Poet Laureate to Queen Elizabeth II, and in the year before his death he was awarded the Whitbread Book of the Year Prize (for Tales from Ovid) and the Forward Prize (for Birthday Letters), and received an Order of Merit.
Ted Hughes (1930-98) wrote more than forty books of poetry, prose, and translation, including his version of the Oresteia of Aeschylus and the Alcestis of Euripides. He served as Poet Laureate to Queen Elizabeth II, and in the year before his death he was awarded the Whitbread Book of the Year Prize (for Tales from Ovid) and the Forward Prize (for Birthday Letters), and received an Order of Merit.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
39 of 39 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Sex, Violence, and Horses,
By A Customer
This review is from: Blood Wedding: A Play (Paperback)
Lorca is often called the 20th century's greatest Spanish dramatist, and his skill with poetry in images of knives, sex, love, blood, horses and the moon illuminates this English translation. While my knowledge of Spanish is limited, the conflict of a Bride longing for but yet resisting another man who has already fathered a child by his Wife is poignantly portrayed in this version. The other man (Leonardo) rides a horse nearly to death, and rides like mad to see his about-to-be-married love beyond the peering eyes of others. His driven horse stands "down there stretched out, with his eyeballs bulging, heaving as if he'd just come back from the end of the world." The conflicts of love and the Bridegroom's Mother, who has lost her husband and her other son to violence, and the building passion, hate, love and the continual imagery of the wild horse--representing Leonardo himself?--build in poetic images and language that begins in the real and subtly transforms to surrealistic images of the moon who exposes the hidden shadows, then returns to the poetically real. In some aspects, the images of horse and rider hint at the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, but a knowledge of them is unnecessary to experience the passion of this play written by a friend of the then young Salvador Dali. The play is worth reading for its visual imagery alone, but it also encompasses a powerful story of passion, betrayal, hate, violence and love.
3.0 out of 5 stars
Not Lorca's Best,
By
This review is from: Blood Wedding: A Play (Paperback)
With a near-elementary plot but stunningly poetic language, Blood Wedding is at once Lorca's simplest and most complex play. The simple tale is as old as literature - probably as old as humanity -, and it is hard for one to care much about it on its own terms. There is indeed a noticeable Greek tragedy influence in presentation - i.e., violence being offstage - as well as plot, though Lorca is as ever strongly rooted in Spanish culture. However, the play has perhaps Lorca's least conventional presentation, making it intriguing. It is deliberately unrealistic; a near-surreal air pervades, and there is relatively little prose dialogue. More importantly, it is very symbolic; tropes and figures do not so much accentuate as become essential to the plot. Blood requires close attention to appreciate, meaning it is not the easiest introduction. Thankfully, the lyrical beauty may pull some readers in, leading them to Lorca's stronger and more enjoyable plays.
0 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
seriously?,
By Andrew Parker (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania USA) - See all my reviews
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Blood Wedding: A Play (Paperback)
This is the most worthless, pointless, and boring book ever. it has no real plot or message/meaning. It is too short to be considered a book and two long to be a poem. Just stupid
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Inside This Book
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First Sentence:
Bridegroom's home. Read the first page Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
bride awake, beggar woman, red wool, little rose Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
First Youth, Little Girl, Leonardo's Wife, Bridegroom Mother, Wife Sleep, Mother-in-law Sleep, Servant Let, Wife He, Bride Stop, Bridegroom Let, Bridegroom Where, Mother Where New!
Concordance | Text Stats Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | First Pages | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
Bridegroom's home. Read the first page Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
bride awake, beggar woman, red wool, little rose Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
First Youth, Little Girl, Leonardo's Wife, Bridegroom Mother, Wife Sleep, Mother-in-law Sleep, Servant Let, Wife He, Bride Stop, Bridegroom Let, Bridegroom Where, Mother Where New!
Concordance | Text Stats Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | First Pages | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
Citations (learn more)
This book cites 3
books:
100
books
cite this book:
See all 100 books citing this book
- Bodas de sangre by Federico Garcia Lorca in Copyright
- Tales from Ovid: 24 Passages from the Metamorphoses by Ted Hughes in Front Matter
- Federico Garcia Lorca (Poesia) (Spanish Edition) by Federico Garcia Lorca in Copyright
- Four Major Plays (Oxford World's Classics) by Federico Garcia Lorca on 19 pages
- Blood Wedding and Yerma (TCG Translations) by Federico García Lorca on 11 pages
- The Theatre of García Lorca: Text, Performance, Psychoanalysis (Cambridge Studies in Latin American and Iberian Literature) by Paul Julian Smith on 8 pages
- Spanish Theatre, 1920-1995: Strategies in Protest and Imagination 3 (Contemporary Theatre Review) by Delgado on 5 pages
- Studying Plays by Simon Shepherd on 4 pages
See all 100 books citing this book
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