Blood Wedding: A Play (Paperback)

by Federico Garcia Lorca (Author), Ted Hughes (Translator)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
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.


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.

Product Details

• Paperback: 60 pages
• Publisher: Faber & Faber (February 6, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0571190065
• ISBN-13: 978-0571190065
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #359,127 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

38 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sex, Violence, and Horses, June 6, 1999

By A Customer

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 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Chose to perform, May 14, 1998

By A Customer

This will be a very brief review, but basically we have chosen this book to perform for or theatre studies cat. It is a really good play, and I recomend it to anyone who likes reading plays.

2 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Blood Wedding, June 12, 2000

By	hey (Detroit, Michigan) - See all my reviews

This is going to short, but I found the play below standards set by the author. There is weak imagery combined by poor, ineffective dialogue, yet there are nice character settings. There is a nice story line combining fire and passion in Leonardo's case with love for the bride, yet it is let down by the poor use of language. It is good for reading before bed, but other than that, I'd say "NO", like the "Just Say NO" drug ads.