A fair copy of the Spanish-American philosopher and poet George Santayana’s translation of Segismundo’s opening soliloquy from La vida es sueño (Life Is a Dream) by the Spanish playwright Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600-1681), a prolonged reflection on mortality which provided a kind of dramatic climax of the Golden Age of Spanish culture.
‘Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600-1681) was a Spanish soldier as well as playwright. In 1651 he became a priest. He wrote several dramas based on the point of honour. Most of his works written at the end of his life proclaim the vanity of life and the emptiness of human existence. The philosophical play La vida es sueño is considered his masterpiece’ (Holzberger, ed., The Letters of George Santayana: 1921-1927).
Santayana’s translation was published in the London Mercury, IX, November 1923. The present manuscript is referenced in a letter from Santayana to Charles Augustus Strong dated ‘April 28, 1923’, with Santayana reporting: ‘… have sent my translation of Calderon to the London [across] Mercury’.
Evidently the setting copy, with a pencil instruction to set the initial letter in a ‘3-line’ capital. Rust stains, small holes and creasing from old paperclip to at top left of each leaf, faint folds, otherwise very good.
Provenance: from the collection of Arthur A. Houghton, endower of the Houghton Library, with his neat leather book label to the inside of the chemise.
