Thursday, June 07, 2012

Lope de Vega

Lope de Vega was a Spanish contemporary of Shakespeare's.

Reportedly he was on one of the ships of the ill-fated Armada that sailed to attack England.
His reputation in the world of Spanish literature is second only to that of Cervantes, while the sheer volume of his literary output is unequalled, making him one of the most prolific authors in the history of literature.
That "sheer volume" includes about 1800 plays, typically in verse.
Many of his works are lost, possibly as many as 1,000 to 1,300 of them.
Talk about prolific. But how many are available in English? Not as many as I would like. I'm thinking I could find online Spanish texts and feed them through translation software. But feeding golden age Spanish verse through a translation program gives you stuff like this:
As scene opens: Cyrus and Mithridates, the two in habit of villains.

MITHRIDATES:
Take away I have the life.

CYRUS:
Take, father, the Cudgel ;
that I suffer, raised,
but I can fall.
And my own Spanish, at its very best,
is not up to the test.

1 comment:

Charlie McDanger said...

Ay, que lástima!