Lorca's "Burla de Don Pedro a Caballo"

Abstract

This refrain from an old Spanish popular song may be the source of Lorca's Burla de Don Pedro a caballo;1 it must have haunted those who heard it, just as the strange estribillo of his romance has haunted many readers. The treacherous murder of the young knight of Olmedo is a part of Spanish history; it has been the inspiration for popular ballads and for several poetic and dramatic works of known authorship. The theme was especially popular during the period of Lope de Vega; he was the most successful of the authors who treated it, first in serious and later in comic form. Of the known versions that have been traced, Lorca's appears to be the first in which the story of the murder has been treated as a burla, intended perhaps as an ironic comment on man's fate. In his romance, certain elements of which resemble Lope's description of the murder in El caballero de Olmedo, Lorca uses the historical event only as a point of departure and recreates the legend within the frame of his own poetic system. The world of external reality is transformed into a phantasmagoric universe in which the reader as well as the knight is submerged bajo el agua. This is accomplished in apparently simple language that is richly evocative, and through multi-sensory imagery and complex metaphors. The fusion of fantasy and reality is so complete that the narrative becomes imprecise; the murder is related in a series of dream-like scenes set in an atmosphere of moonlight, shadow, and deep water. Lorca evokes much of the action through metaphors; he creates the setting by treating the lagunas in which the tragedy is consummated as separate divisions of the poem, markedly different from the main narrative in style and meter. The general tone of the poem is strangely ironic: the heroic knight undergoes a complete loss of dignity, and his death, treated as insignificant, results in almost immediate oblivion. This romance seems to be the least discussed of the Romancero gitano, but it merits comment. The element of mockery is relatively rare in Lorca and certainly not the dominant note of the Romancero gitano, in which the oppressed gypsy is elevated to the dignity of the gitano legitimo. Why then should a legendary figure be treated as less important than his horse, and the account of his death be called a comical history? Some explanation for this may be found in the tradition of the romances of Don Bueso, of which the name Don Pedro is the modernized form.2 Men6ndez Pidal has traced the figure from a thirteenth century epic, in which he appears as a French knight defeated and killed by Bernardo del Carpio, to a sixteenth century romance of which he is the hero. By the late sixteenth century, however, Don Bueso appears as a comic rather than a heroic figure; era famoso tipo de parodia entre los literatos.3 One such romance, dating from 1588, appears in the notes to the MacDonald edition of Lope's El caballero de Olmedo and is connected with the text.4 These comic versions are mentioned not to establish a thematic relationship to Lorca's poem but to show the tradi-