Yerma E-Book

Federico García Lorca

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Serie: NHB Drama Classics
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Seitenzahl: 99

Beschreibung

The NHB Drama Classics series presents the world's greatest plays in affordable, highly readable editions for students, actors and theatregoers. The hallmarks of the series are accessible introductions (focussing on the play's theatrical and historical background, together with an author biography, key dates and suggestions for further reading) and the complete text, uncluttered with footnotes. The translations, by leading experts in the field, are accurate and above all actable. The editions of English-language plays include a glossary of unusual words and phrases to aid understanding. Yerma tells the tale of an impassioned childless woman living with her husband in rural Spain. Tortured by her incessant longing to conceive a child, she is driven by madness to commit a heinous crime. This edition, translated and introduced by Jo Clifford, also contains a chronology and suggestions for further reading.

Leseprobe

DRAMA CLASSICS

YERMA

by

Federico García Lorca

translated and introduced by

Jo Clifford

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Title Page

Introduction

Lorca: Key Dates

Dedication

Characters

Yerma

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

Introduction

Federico García Lorca (1898–1936)

Lorca was born on 5 June 1898. The year was a hugely significant one in Spanish cultural and political history: it gave its name to a whole generation of writers who used the events of this year as a rallying cry in efforts to convince the Spanish people of their country’s deplorable state and the desperate need for re-evaluation and change. They were called the ‘Generation of ’98’, and they included Azorín, Baroja and Ángel Ganivet.

The historical event that inspired this movement was the disastrous war with the United States which led to the loss of Cuba, Spain’s last remaining colony. This apparently distant event was to have huge repercussions for Lorca. Cuba had been Spain’s principal source of sugar; Lorca’s father was to be astute enough to plant his land with sugar beet, and with the aid of a series of successful land purchases, he was to become one of the richest men in the Fuente Vaqueros district.

A long-term consequence of this was that Lorca himself never needed to earn his own living. There’s no question this wealthy background contributed both to the large volume, and the technical and emotional daring of his work. As it happened, Blood Wedding in particular was hugely successful; but the financial security of his position left him absolutely free to write as he wanted, without regard to the demands of the commercial theatre of his day.

However, the most immediate consequence for the young Lorca was that he spent his childhood as the rich son of the wealthiest landowner of a mainly poor village.

Perhaps the best way for us to imagine the impact on Lorca’s sensibility is to think of our own feelings towards the desperately poor of the Third World – or the homeless that many of us pass each day on the street. The contrast between his wealth and the poverty of so many of those around him left a deep impression on Lorca, which he was to express in later life in his autobiographical essay ‘My Village’.

The plight of one family affected Lorca particularly deeply. One of his friends in the village was a little girl whose father was a chronically ill day-labourer and whose mother was the exhausted victim of countless pregnancies. The one day on which Federico was not allowed to visit their home was washing day: the members of this family had only one set of clothes, and they had to stay inside their house while their only clothes were being washed and dried. Lorca wrote:

When I returned home on those occasions, I would look into the wardrobe, full of clean, fragrant clothes, and feel dreadfully anxious, with a dead weight on my heart.

He grew up with a profound sense of indignation at this kind of injustice:

No one dares to ask for what he needs. No one dares . . . to demand bread. And I who say this grew up among these thwarted lives. I protest against this mistreatment of those who work the land.

The young man who wrote this protest at the end of his adolescence maintained a profound anger right to the end of his life. In an interview he gave in 1936, he stated: ‘As long as there is economic injustice in the world, the world will be unable to think clearly.’

He continued the interview with a fable to illustrate the difficulties of creating valid art in a situation of economic injustice:

Two men are walking along a riverbank. One of them is rich, the other poor. One has a full belly and the other fouls the air with his yawns. And the rich man says: ‘What a lovely little boat out on the water! Look at that lily blooming on the bank!’ And the poor man wails: ‘I’m hungry, so hungry!’ Of course. The day when hunger is eradicated there is going to be the greatest spiritual explosion the world has ever seen. I’m talking like a real socialist, aren’t I?

For Lorca, the art of creating theatre was totally bound up with the process of creating a better society:

The idea of art for art’s sake is something that would be cruel if it weren’t, fortunately, so ridiculous. No decent person believes any longer in all that nonsense about pure art, art for art’s sake. At this dramatic moment in time, the artist should laugh and cry with his people. We must put down the bouquet of lilies and bury ourselves up to the waist in mud to help those who are looking for lilies. For myself, I have a genuine need to communicate with others. That’s why I knocked at the door of the theatre and why I now devote all my talents to it.

This passionate anger at the injustice of human society, and equally passionate determination to create art that might remedy it, were fuelled not simply by his childhood experiences. As an adult, he had travelled to New York, and witnessed at first hand the devastating impact of the Wall Street Crash:

It’s the spectacle of all the world’s money in all its splendour, its mad abandon and its cruelty . . . This is where I have got a clear idea of what a huge mass of people fighting to make money is really like. The truth is that it’s an international war with just a thin veneer of courtesy . . . We ate breakfast on a thirty-second floor with the head of a bank, a charming person with a cold and feline side quite English. People came in there after being paid. They were all counting dollars. Their hands all had the characteristic tremble that holding money gives them . . . Colin [an acquaintance] had five dollars in his purse and I three. Despite this he said to me: ‘We’re surrounded by millions and yet the only two decent people here are you and I.’

And when he writes so angrily of the ‘thwarted lives’ of those whose existence is dominated by money, it is clear Lorca is thinking not simply of the plight of the rural poor, but also of the bourgeoisie to which he himself, and many of us, now belong.

He is concerned not simply with the suffering that a wealthy middle class inflicts on those beneath them on the social scale; he is equally concerned with the suffering they inflict upon themselves. The ‘thwarted lives’ he saw in his village are not simply those of the poor.

And Lorca reflected this very clearly in Yerma: for the comparative wealth possessed by the families involved in the wedding contract brings them no happiness. All the main characters in the play seem trapped by the conventions and the demands of the society they inhabit.

Yerma: What Happens in the Play

Act One Scene One Yerma is dreaming. Someone is singing a lullaby: a shepherd leads a child to her by the hand.

She wakes to the childless reality of the real morning. Her husband Juan is going out to work in the fields. It quickly becomes clear that her desire for a child is at odds with his desire for money. He leaves her in sadness.

Maria, a young woman who has recently got married, comes in, full of excitement. She has just discovered she is pregnant. Her joy deepens Yerma’s sense of longing.

Yerma has agreed to sew some baby clothes for Maria. When Victor enters and sees her sewing, he assumes it is because she has become pregnant, and congratulates her. We understand from the way they are together that they have desired each other for many years, and have been forced to repress this desire.

Act One Scene Two Yerma is on her way back from taking her husband his food in the fields. The first person she meets is an old woman totally in touch with the earth. Yerma asks her for advice. The old woman asks if there is real desire between her and her husband. It becomes clear Yerma has married – and remains with – her husband out of duty.

The old woman seems to sense the hopelessness of Yerma’s position and leaves her without giving the advice Yerma asks for. Then Yerma meets two young women. One has left her baby alone in the house; Yerma instils her with fear for her child’s welfare.

The other is a rebel who is glad not to have children and utterly rejects the traditional values Yerma so unquestioningly follows.

Then she encounters Victor, and is profoundly moved by his song. Profound erotic currents rise to the surface as they speak; but Juan’s arrival interrupts them.

Juan tells Yerma he is spending the night in the fields because it is his turn to receive the water for irrigation. His farm is clearly more important to him than she is, and the act ends with her left alone, rejected and angry.

Act Two Scene One The village women have been washing their clothes in a stream. They are a kind of Chorus whose individual voices comment on Yerma’s situation and judge her in it.

We learn her behaviour is beginning to cause scandal in the village and that Juan has brought in his two sisters to watch over her.

Gossip is cut short by the arrival of the two women themselves. The flocks of sheep are being gathered together: they are like an army. But one person’s flock is missing: Victor’s.

The women break into a lyrical song of motherhood, and the joy a new child can bring into the world.

Act Two Scene Two Juan is at home with his two sisters. Yerma is out getting water. Juan is angry that his sisters have let her out; he wants her kept in. When Yerma returns home, he reproaches her for her continuing unhappiness. She reproaches him, even if indirectly, for their lack of children. He goes in to eat; she remains on stage, and lyrically expresses her longing for fulfilment as a wife and a mother.

Maria comes in with her child. Yerma holds him; sees he has the same eyes as his mother, and weeps.

The rebellious young woman of the first act comes in to tell Yerma that her mother, the local wise woman and witch, is ready to take her to the graveyard tonight to perform a magic ceremony that will give her a child.

Victor enters. He and his family are leaving the village, and he has come in to bid Juan and Yerma farewell. Juan has bought Victor’s herd; Juan’s affairs are prospering, but his and Yerma’s emotional life is clearly sterile.

When the two men have gone, Yerma slips out with the young woman to go to the house of her mother the witch.

Juan’s two sisters come onto the stage in the gathering darkness to look for her. As they call after her, for the first time we hear her name spoken out loud: Yerma!

It is crucial the audience understand what the name means: barren, sterile – a word for wasteland.

Act Three Scene One Yerma is in the house of Dolores, the witch, after performing the fertility ritual in the graveyard. Dolores is impressed by the courage Yerma has shown, tells her the ritualistic prayers she must repeat, and assures her she will have a child.

Yerma is desperate: aware of the frigidity of her husband, but trapped by the demands of her conventional values. Dawn is beginning to break, but it’s as if she cannot bear to return to her emotionally cold home.