Yerma by Federico García Lorca
Published 1934 · 15,000 words · about 1 hour at an average pace · Drama, Tragedy, Poetry
How hard is Yerma to read?
Yerma scores 60 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 60 out of 100
- Rural Andalusian speech with a compressed poetic vocabulary of water, earth, wool and stone, and choral verse passages in folk metre.
- Sentence structure: 54 out of 100
- Short prose exchanges alternating with sung verse; the sentences are simple and the pressure is in what is repeated.
- Abstraction: 64 out of 100
- A single obsession pursued at the level of elemental need, with the pilgrimage scene moving into ritual abstraction entirely.
- Information density: 48 out of 100
- A small cast, one village and one problem, developed across six scenes with almost no external incident.
- Narrative indirection: 58 out of 100
- Yerma says what she wants constantly, but the play never establishes whose body is at fault, and the washerwomen's chorus supplies the village's version instead.
- Symbolic density: 84 out of 100
- Water and dryness, wool and stone, the washerwomen at the stream and the horned masks of the romería form a single sustained figure for the whole play.
- Ironic distance: 58 out of 100
- The honour code that keeps Yerma from taking the one available remedy is the same code the whole village praises her for, and Lorca never comments.
- Resolution withholding: 56 out of 100
- The killing ends the play, but the audience is left with a woman announcing her own barrenness as a permanent fact rather than any resolution.
- Structural complexity: 54 out of 100
- Three acts of two scenes each, moving from domestic realism to a choral scene at the stream to a masked ritual, with time jumping years between acts.
How Yerma is regarded
Yerma holds a literary regard score of 80 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.