I. Jornada primera
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A Golden Age verse play for B2
Life Is a Dream La vida es sueño
Pedro Calderón de la Barca, 1881
Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s complete play in verse, first printed in 1636, not an adaptation, from an 1881 Madrid edition. In the catalog it is B2: about 17,600 words and 11 words per sentence on average. Three jornadas (acts) about Prince Segismundo, who has grown up chained in a tower; the verse and the 17th-century Spanish make it slower to read than the numbers suggest.
- B2
- 17 553 words
- 3-5 hours
Will this text hold?
B1
Earlier
At B1 the verse will be hard going: the lines are short, but the word order is inverted and the vocabulary is rich in metaphor. Start with the MovaReader B1 retelling of the play, then come back to the original.
B1B2
This text
You can manage it at B2 if you read slowly: each speech is a run of short lines, so translate single words and a few whole sentences, and Segismundo’s long monologues repay a second reading.
Check this passageC1
With room to spare
At C1 the play reads freely; what still slows you down are the Golden Age forms and the stacked metaphors, not the grammar.
Start readingThe average sentence has 11 words, fewer than the 12 of the catalog’s B1 retelling of the same play, because the verse breaks speech into short lines and clauses; by jornada it is 13, 9 and 12. One word in twenty has 9 letters or more, fewer than in Niebla (one in fourteen). By the catalog’s measure, which counts sentence length and long words, that is B2, level with Niebla (13 words per sentence) and Cuentos de la selva (15). These numbers understate the real difficulty: the play is in verse and in 17th-century Spanish, with forms such as dispertar and mesmo, inverted word order and long metaphors, so it reads slower than a B2 novel of the same size. This is the catalog’s assessment, not a certificate.
- 17 553
- words
- 11
- words in an average sentence
- 3-5
- hours of reading
- 1881
- Luis Navarro
Luis Navarro, 1881. Project Gutenberg
What it is about, without the ending
King Basilio of Poland, a student of the stars, has read in them that his son Segismundo will become a tyrant, and from birth he keeps him chained in a tower in the mountains, watched over by the old Clotaldo. One night Rosaura, a woman dressed as a man, and her servant Clarín, a jester, lose their way there and find the prisoner. Soon Basilio decides to put his son to the test: Segismundo will be taken to the palace in his sleep to wake as a prince, and if he behaves cruelly he will be returned to the tower and told that it was all a dream. Rosaura meanwhile pursues a matter of honour of her own. How the test ends, and what becomes of Segismundo, is not revealed here.
Compare two places
La vida es sueño
II. Jornada segunda
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Choose an underlined word.
Read a stanza as one sentence
Read by thought, not by line: Apurar, cielos, pretendo, ya que me tratais así, qué delito cometí contra vosotros naciendo is one sentence, “I want to find out, heavens, what crime I committed by being born, since you treat me this way”. Calderón puts the verb pretendo early and the object late, so wait for the full stop before you translate. Tratais is the old vosotros form, today tratáis.
Subjunctive and old spellings
Reprimamos is the nosotros subjunctive used as an appeal, “let us restrain”, and por si alguna vez soñamos means “in case we ever dream”. Dispertar is the old spelling of despertar (to wake up): the text is never modernised, so expect forms like dispertar, mesmo and ménos throughout the play.
Chapters
Translation while you read
The book stays free on every plan. Reader, €1 a month, removes the daily limit on words and sentences.
Reader
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In the first scene Rosaura plays on words: “Y apénas llega, cuando llega á penas” (he has barely arrived when he arrives at sorrows); translating the whole sentence in Reader shows the pun between apénas and á penas, which word-by-word lookup misses.
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Is this the original or a learner adaptation?
It is the original, not a learner’s adaptation: Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s complete play in verse, all three jornadas, first printed in 1636. The text comes from Project Gutenberg and follows the 1881 Madrid edition of Luis Navarro (Teatro selecto, volume 1), without the critical study and the other plays printed in that volume. For a simpler B1 version of the story, see the MovaReader retelling of the play (adaptation).
Is there an audiobook?
Life Is a Dream has no audiobook on MovaReader: here the play is read on screen. The translation appears when you tap a word, and you will need it most for old or rare words such as desvelos or dispertar.
Can I translate a whole sentence?
Yes, with the Reader plan. In this play it helps most where one thought runs across several lines, as in Rosaura’s pun “Y apénas llega, cuando llega á penas”. Without the plan, single words are translated up to the daily limit.
How many hours does it take?
The whole play takes about 3-5 hours: the pace of someone reading with translation of new words, slower than a native speaker’s. There are three chapters, the jornadas, of about 5,100, 6,500 and 5,900 words, so one jornada makes an evening.
Where does the text get easier?
It stays fairly even. Sentences average 13 words in the first jornada, 9 in the second and 12 in the third, and long words stay at about one in twenty throughout. The difficulty comes from the verse and the 17th-century forms rather than from one hard stretch; Segismundo’s long monologues are the densest passages.
Will my place in the book be saved?
Yes. Once you sign in, the reader keeps your last place and the words you opened, so you can come back to the play where you left off. Each of the three jornadas also opens from the contents on this page.