“Con acciones de hombres/no agradan mal las mujeres,” wrote Lope de Vega, and scholars of the comedia have long noted the popularity of the mujer varonil onstage (qtd in Lundelius, Ruth. “Paradox and Role Reversal in La serrana de la Vera.” The Perception of Women in Spanish Theater of the Golden Age, edited by Anita K. Stoll and Dawn L. Smith, Bucknell UP, 1991, pp. 220–44). In the typical plot, the rebel dama who temporarily challenges the gender roles of her society returns to the social fabric in a conciliatory conclusion. In Lope’s La serrana de la Vera, the mujer bandolera must finally come down from the mountain to marry. Luis Vélez de Guevara’s 1613 play by the same name, rendered as The Mountain Girl from La Vera in an excellent new translation by Harley Erdman, instead presents us with Gila, a serrana who queers the comedia tradition, poses questions of gender and national identity, and remains unreconciled at the tragic end of the drama.Mountain Girl allows readers of English to encounter the marvelous, masculine excess of Gila for the first time. As told in various ballads from fifteenth-century romanceros, the serrana of the Extremaduran village of Garganta la Olla invites men to her mountain cabin, sleeps with them, and then murders them to protect her reputation. Dead men tell no tales, but the narrator of the ballad has been fortunate to escape. The male speaker frames the narrative, and the serrana is contained within a song that both dramatizes and defuses her threat to men.Converting the traditional ballad into drama, Vélez turns the focus from the male victim to the serrana and provides a backstory and an afterlife for the legendary figure. Written for the comic actress Jusepa de Vaca, Gila is a model of outsize masculinity. She enters on horseback, brags of a successful hunt, forces a fencing master to cower beneath her sword, wrestles a bull to the ground in front of the Catholic Monarchs, aims her rifle right at a Captain, and, in classic mujer esquiva fashion, disdains all talk of marriage. Vélez presents her as an example of masculinity in a conventionally beautiful female form (before her dramatic arrival onstage, the villagers sing of her feminine charm). On first seeing Gila, Captain Don Lucas says in an aside: “I am speechless. Such an/Impressive show of manliness –/I have never seen such a thing,/Not even in a man” (53). The central conflict of the drama is the social opposition to Gila’s “impressive show” of hypermasculinity.That opposition arrives in the standard patriarchal form of father and husband. If the first act is a monument to Gila’s character, the second act is a violent counterreaction against her. Captain Don Lucas, slighted because Gila’s father Giraldo refused lodging to his soldiers, enacts revenge by way of a marriage proposal. Though she first resists the threat to her liberty, Gila assents with ambitions of power and fame: “That is the one and only reason, señor,/I can ever consent to be at your side:/To imitate our great Queen Isabella,/Who alongside her noble partner Ferdinand/Undertakes the most heroic deeds” (139). Seducing and then abandoning her, Don Lucas destroys her honor according to the gender norms of her society and squelches her chances at a heroism that, as with her admired Catholic Monarchs, would surpass gendered categories.Gila then becomes the murderous serrana of the ballad, dwelling in a solitary hut in the sierra and slaying every man who passes to avenge her honor. In a metanarrative moment that focalizes the story through a female perspective and reminds readers of the play’s folkloric origin, she hears a stray traveler singing her ballad. Yet she throws him from a cliff, as she has done with two thousand others who now are only visible as crosses dotting the mountainside, and as she will soon do to Don Lucas. She chooses only to spare King Ferdinand, telling him, “You alone have earned my pardon,/And I do not break my solemn vow/Since the King is God on earth,/And represents God’s justice,/You are therefore not a man” (199). In the end, the Brotherhood capture her, tie her to a stake, and pierce her with their arrows, leaving only her destroyed body to be commented on by the living characters at the end of the play.Within the few thousand lines of this comedia, Vélez presents a radical challenge to gender roles and Spanish identity. Erdman’s translation is faithful to the thematic threads and generic shifts of the play, while rendering Vélez’s verse into a modern English that is easy on the ear. He writes in the introduction of “how [the language] might work in the voices and bodies of actors today” and conceives of his version as a “sibling” rather than a “distant mirror” of the original (28). Through Erdman’s efforts, English speakers can now witness the force of Gila and the strangeness, by turns comic and violent, of Mountain Girl. This facing-page edition also provides bilingual readers with a window into the translation process and how Erdman navigates the complex dramatic and political valences of the play.Erdman reads Gila, who refuses the demands of conventional femininity, as genderqueer, and Darci Strother has argued that Gila wishes not to “be a man, but rather to be herself, a unique hybrid of male and female characteristics” (“Constructing a Goddess: Gila’s Role in Vélez de Guevara’s La serrana de laVera.” A Star-Crossed Golden Age: Myth and the Spanish Comedia, edited by Frederick A. de Armas, Bucknell UP, 1998, pp. 162–76). The translation excels when illustrating the intricacies of Gila’s gender identity. When Giraldo offers her marriage to Don Lucas, she responds: “Until this moment, father, I had always/Seen myself as a man, and very much one./But now I perceive, with this proposed marriage,/I am forced to become a woman./This disillusion is my grave misfortune,/My suffering. I do not want to marry./As long as I am unwed, I remain a man./I aspire to be free. I cannot imagine/Anyone subjecting or subduing me” (137). Foregoing the rhyme pattern of the Spanish, Erdman’s verse translates the pathos of Gila’s predicament with repeating off rhymes for the key oppositional terms of “woman” and “man”: “one,” “disillusion,” “misfortune,” “remain,” and “imagine.” Likewise, the internal rhyme of “free” with its alliterative alternative of “subjecting or subduing me” articulates Gila’s conflict in two clear lines.Gila challenges the orthodoxy of gender categories through her expression of same-sex desire as well as her feats of masculine excess and acciones de hombres. In lines marked for excision (perhaps to avoid controversy) in Vélez’s original manuscript, Gila confesses her love to Queen Isabella: “For many days I have been/Hopelessly in love with you . . . Were I a man, I would lose myself/For you, in fact, I am lost/Already, lost, God help me.” Isabella responds that Gila is “as beautiful a being/As there possibly can be” (93–95). While she consents to Don Lucas out of an aspiration to perform heroic acts, Gila’s fondness for the Queen emerges from a recognition of their mutual greatness. Instead of condemning Gila’s rejection of traditional femininity, the Queen admires her in kind. Even when Gila is to be executed, Isabella is briefly jealous of Ferdinand’s attention to her, and Isabella’s final words in the play, as she sees Gila’s punished figure, are: “My heart goes tender” (247).Though critics have focused primarily on gender in the play, Erdman’s translation also demonstrates Vélez’s inquiry into national identity. Setting a traditional ballad against the first monarchs of a unified Aragon and Castile and telescoping Spanish history so as to align the 1482 Battle of Alhama with the 1497 death of Ferdinand and Isabella’s only son, the drama presents Gila as an exemplary figure of Spain. Both Isabella and Gila are compared to Evadne, the woman warrior of ancient Argos (139, 159). Giraldo tells Gila, “May you be an enduring/Example to Spanish women!” while Ferdinand echoes and revises this sentiment, saying of her body at the end, “May it be a lasting example/To the entire Spanish nation” (53, 247). Gila remains suspended in what Margaret E. Boyle calls these “shifting meanings of exemplarity” (“Women’s Exemplary Violence in Luis Vélez’s La serrana de la Vera.” Bulletin of the Comediantes, vol. 66, no.1, 2014, pp. 159–75).Mountain Girl does not simply alter the arc of the mujer varonil plot, substituting tragedy for comedy, or public execution for marriage bonds. Nor does it present Gila’s remarkable mastery of masculine pursuits purely to exhibit her penetrated body at the end as just comeuppance at the hands of state power. Referencing Heather Love’s work, Erdman calls the play “an epic exploration of failed sociality” (21). As Gila’s destroyed body is explicitly compared to the martyred Saint Sebastian, there is no reconciliation. The failure is not in the nonconforming individual’s inability to access a social position; it is in the incapacity of the culture to accommodate a figure such as Gila. The question of her exemplarity involves not solely issues of gender conformity but cultural identity, social inclusion, and justice. By dramatizing how strict gender norms and inherited patriarchal codes damage a society, this play goes far beyond its seventeenth-century Spanish context, and Erdman’s translation has already been produced onstage as Wild Thing, directed by Gina Kaufman, at UMass Amherst and at the Chamizal National Memorial in El Paso.Mountain Girl of La Vera is an example of the diversity of the Hispanic classical theater tradition, presenting new readers and audiences with a mujer varonil whose masculine action is more than a temporary costume in service of a marriage plot, and queering any sense of necessarily conciliatory or conservative endings in the comedia.