Picnic on the Battlefield

by Fernando Arrabal, Barbara Wright (Translator)

Paperback

Published January 1, 1971

About the author

Fernando Arrabal Terán (born August 11, 1932 in Melilla, Spain) is a Spanish playwright, screenwriter, film director, novelist and poet. He settled in France in 1955, he describes himself as “desterrado,” or “half-expatriate, half-exiled.”

Arrabal has directed seven full-length feature films; he has published over 100 plays, 14 novels, 800 poetry collections, chapbooks, and artist’s books; several essays, and his notorious “Letter to General Franco” during the dictator’s lifetime. His complete plays have been published in a number of languages, in a two-volume edition totaling over two thousand pages. The New York Times theatre critic Mel Gussow has called Arrabal the last survivor among the “three avatars of modernism.”

In 1962 Arrabal co-founded the Panic Movement with Alejandro Jodorowsky and Roland Topor, inspired by the god Pan, and was elected Transcendent Satrap of the Collège de Pataphysique in 1990. Forty other Transcendent Satraps have been elected over the past half-century, including Marcel Duchamp, Eugène Ionesco, Man Ray, Boris Vian, Dario Fo, Umberto Eco and Jean Baudrillard.

Reviews

[irene cortés · Rating 3 out of 5]

me aburría en inglés

[patri · Rating 4 out of 5]

Me lo leí en clase y me gustó porque, aunque sea un relato breve, expresa el absurdo de la guerra de una forma bastante creativa. Es una obra entretenida y fácil de leer, y eso que yo no soy una gran fan de leer teatro, y menos en clase. Puede que sea porque estoy desinformada, pero no entiendo el odio hacia el autor. No le doy cinco estrellas porque hubo partes que solo entendí porque mi profesora me explicó, y porque sin ella no le hubiera visto la misma profundidad a la obra.

[「美佳」liesolitte · Rating 4 out of 5]

SRA. TEPÁN.—Hemos pensado que te aburrirías, por eso te hemos venido a ver. Tanta guerra te tiene que aburrir.