Today is the 124th birthday of the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca. His ability to arrange words in ways that can break your heart eighty years after they were written is beautiful. In his short 38 years on earth, he wrote beautiful poems, dated the premier surreal artist of the 20th century, and was executed for his political and/or sexual preferences. The world is a better place because he was in it and still feels the loss that he has left.
NAME: Federico García Lorca
OCCUPATION: Playwright, Poet
BIRTH DATE: June 5, 1898
DEATH DATE: c. August 19, 1936
EDUCATION: Residentca de Estudiantes
PLACE OF BIRTH: Fuente Vaqueros, Spain
PLACE OF DEATH: Viznar, Granada, Spain
CAUSE OF DEATH: Execution
REMAINS: Unknown
BOYFRIEND: Salvador Dali (dated 1925-28)
BEST KNOWN FOR: Federico García Lorca is considered one of Spain’s greatest poets and dramatists. One of his most successful poetry collections was The Gypsy Ballads.
The eldest of four children born to a wealthy landowner and his schoolteacher wife, Lorca grew up in rural Andalusia, surrounded by images and social conditions that influenced his work lifelong. At age 10 he moved with his family to Granada, where he attended a private, secular institute in addition to a Catholic public school. Lorca enrolled in the University of Granada but was a hapless student best known for his extraordinary talents as a pianist. He took nine years to complete a bachelor’s degree. Despite plans to become a musician and composer, he turned to writing in his late teens. His first experiments in prose, poetry, and drama reveal an intense spiritual and sexual malaise along with an adolescent devotion to such authors as Shakespeare, Goethe, the Spanish poet Antonio Machado, and the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío, father of Hispanic Modernismo, a late and decadent flowering of Romanticism.
In 1919 Lorca moved to the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid, a prestigious and socially progressive men’s residence hall. It remained his home in the Spanish capital for the next decade. His fellow residents included the filmmaker Luis Buñuel and the artist Salvador Dalí, who later became a close companion. In Madrid, Lorca also befriended the renowned older poet Juan Ramón Jiménez and a circle of poets his own age, among them Rafael Alberti, Jorge Guillén, and Pedro Salinas.
A consummate stylist, Lorca sought throughout his career to juxtapose and meld genres. His poems, plays, and prose often evoke other, chiefly popular, forms of music, art, and literature. His first book, Impresiones y paisajes, a prose work in the modernista tradition, chronicled Lorca’s sentimental response to a series of journeys through Spain as a university student. Libro de Poemas, an uneven collection of predominantly modernista poems culled from his juvenilia, followed in 1921. Both efforts disappointed Lorca and reinforced his inherent resistance to publication, a fact that led to frequent delays in the publication and production of his work. Lorca preferred to perform his poems and plays, and his histrionic recitations drew innumerable admirers.
The Spanish stage director Gregorio Martínez Sierra premiered Lorca’s first full-length play, El maleficio de la mariposa, a symbolist work about a lovesick cockroach, in Madrid in 1920. Critics and audiences ridiculed the drama, and it closed after four performances. Lorca’s next full-length play, the historical verse drama Mariana Pineda, opened in 1927 in a production with sets by Dalí and received mixed notices.
In the early 1920s, Lorca began experimenting with short, elliptical verse forms inspired by Spanish folk song, Japanese haiku, and contemporary avant-garde poetics. He wrote a prodigious series of brief poems arranged in thematic “suites,” later collected and published in 1983 under the title Suites. In 1922 Lorca collaborated with the eminent Andalusian composer Manuel de Falla on a festival of cante jondo in Granada. The endeavor heightened Lorca’s interest in popular Andalusian song, and in a blaze of inspiration he wrote a series of poems based on songs of the Andalusian Gypsies (Roma). Even more compressed than Suites, Poema del Cante Jondo, offers a radical synthesis of the traditional and the avant-garde. The series signaled Lorca’s emergence as a mature poet. His collaboration with Falla further prompted Lorca to investigate the Spanish puppet theatre tradition, and in 1923 he wrote Los títeres de Cachiporra, the first of several versions of a puppet play inspired by the classic Andalusian Grand Guignol.
From 1925 to 1928, Lorca was passionately involved with Salvador Dalí. The intensity of their relationship led Lorca to acknowledge, if not entirely accept, his own homosexuality. At Dalí’s urging, the poet began to experiment more boldly with avant-garde currents in the art world, notably surrealism, although he refused to align himself with any movement. In poems such as Oda a Salvador Dalí, Canciones, and a series of abstruse prose poems, Lorca sought to create a more objective poetry, devoid of private sentiment and the “planes of reality.” He joined his contemporaries in exalting Don Luis de Góngora, a 16th-century Spanish poet known for his dispassionate, densely metaphorical verse. Lorca and his fellow poets commemorated the tricentennial of Góngora’s death in 1927 and became known thereafter as the “Generation of 1927.” Lorca also sought to articulate in public lectures his own evolving aesthetic.
Meanwhile, Lorca continued to mine the popular Spanish tradition in his plays La Zapatera Prodigiosa, a classic farce, and El Amor de Don Perlimplín con Belisa en su Jardín, a “grotesque tragedy” partially drawn from an 18th-century Spanish comic strip. Both plays reveal themes common to Lorca’s work: the capriciousness of time, the destructive powers of love and death, the phantoms of identity, art, childhood, and sex.
In 1928, with Dalí’s encouragement, Lorca publicly exhibited his drawings. A gifted draughtsman blessed with a startling visual imagination, Lorca produced hundreds of sketches in his lifetime.
The publication in 1928 of Romancero Gitano, a poetry sequence inspired by the traditional Spanish romance, or ballad, catapulted Lorca into the national spotlight. A lyrical evocation of the sensual world of the Andalusian Gypsy, the collection enthralled Spanish readers, many of whom mistook Lorca for Roma. The book’s first edition sold out within a year. Throughout the work’s 18 ballads, Lorca combines lyrical and narrative modes in fresh ways to form what he described as a tragic “poem of Andalusia.” Formally, the poems embrace the conventions of medieval Spanish balladry: a nonstanzaic construction, in medias res openings, and abrupt endings. But in their wit, objectivity, and metaphorical novelty, they are brazenly contemporary. One of the collection’s most famous poems, Ballad of the Spanish Civil Guard, reads, in part:
Los caballos negros son.
Las herraduras son negras.
Sobre las capas relucen
manchas de tinta y de cera.
Tienen, por eso no lloran,
de plomo las calaveras.
Con el alma de charol
vienen por la carretera.
Black are the horses,
the horseshoes are black.
Glistening on their capes
are stains of ink and of wax.
Their skulls—and this is why
they do not cry—are cast in lead.
They ride the roads
with souls of patent leather.
Lorca’s sudden fame destroyed his privacy. This, coupled with the demise of his friendship with Dalí, the collapse of another love affair, and a profound spiritual crisis, plunged Lorca into severe depression. He sought both release and newfound inspiration by visiting New York and Cuba in 1929–30.
Lorca’s stay in the United States and Cuba yielded Poeta en Nueva York, a series of poems whose dense, at times hallucinatory images, free-verse lines, and thematic preoccupation with urban decay and social injustice mark an audacious departure from Lorca’s previous work. The collection is redolent of Charles Baudelaire, Edgar Allan Poe, T.S. Eliot, and Stephen Crane and pays homage to Walt Whitman:
… hermosura viril
que en montes de carbón, anuncios y ferrocarriles,
soñabas ser un río y dormir como un río
con aquel camarada que pondría en tu pecho
un pequeño dolor de ignorante leopardo.
… virile beauty,
who among mountains of coal, billboards, and railroads,
dreamed of becoming a river and sleeping like a river
with that comrade who would place in your breast
the small ache of an ignorant leopard.
In Cuba, Lorca wrote El Público, a complex, multifaceted play, expressionist in technique, that brashly explores the nature of homosexual passion. Lorca deemed the work, which remained un-produced until 1978, “a poem to be hissed.” On his return to Spain, he completed a second play aimed at rupturing the bounds of conventional dramaturgy, Así que Pasen Cinco Años, and he assumed the directorship of a traveling student theatre group, La Barraca, sponsored by the country’s progressive new Republican government.
With the 1933 premiere of his first Andalusian tragedy, Blood Wedding, an expressionist work that recalls ancient Greek, Renaissance, and Baroque sources, Lorca achieved his first major theatrical success and helped inaugurate the most brilliant era of Spanish theatre since the Golden Age. In 1933–34 he went to Buenos Aires, Argentina, to oversee several productions of his plays and to give a lecture series. While there he befriended the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, with whom he collaborated on a tribute to Rubén Darío. Despite his new focus on theatre, Lorca continued to write poetry. With others in the Generation of 1927, he embraced a “rehumanization” of poetry, as opposed to the “dehumanization” José Ortega y Gasset had described in his 1925 essay “The Dehumanization of Art.” Eloquent evidence of Lorca’s return to the personal are Divan del Tamarit, a set of love poems inspired by Arabic verse forms; Seis Poemas Galegos; and Sonetos del Amor Oscuro, an 11-sonnet sequence recalling a failed love affair. The three collections underscore Lorca’s abiding insistence on the interdependence of love and death:
No hay nadie que, al dar un beso,
no sienta la sonrisa de la gente sin rostro,
ni hay nadie que, al tocar un recién nacido,
olvide las inmóviles calaveras de caballo.
There is no one who can kiss
without feeling the smile of those without faces;
there is no one who can touch
an infant and forget the immobile skulls of horses.
Divan del Tamarit also expresses Lorca’s lifelong interest in Arab-Andalusian (frequently referred to as “Moorish”) culture, which he viewed as central to his identity as an Andalusian poet. He regarded the Catholic reconquest of Granada in 1492 as a tragic loss. Divan del Tamarit responds to a widespread revival of interest in Arab-Andalusian culture, especially literature, in the 1930s.
In 1934 Lorca responded to the goring and death of a bullfighter friend with the majestic Lament for a Bullfighter, a work famous for its incantatory opening refrain, “A las cinco de la tarde” (“At five in the afternoon”). The four-part poem, his longest, confirms Lorca as the greatest of Spain’s elegiac poets.
A las cinco de la tarde.
Eran las cinco en punto de la tarde.
Un niño trajo la blanca sábana
a las cinco de la tarde.
Una espuerta de cal ya prevenida
a las cinco de la tarde.
Lo demás era muerte y sólo muerte
a las cinco de la tarde.
At five in the afternoon.
It was exactly five in the afternoon.
A boy brought the white sheet
at five in the afternoon.
A frail of lime ready preserved
at five in the afternoon.
The rest was death, and death alone
at five in the afternoon.
During the last two years of his life, Lorca premiered Yerma, the second of his Andalusian tragedies, and completed a first draft of The House of Bernarda Alba, his third tragedy. Childhood events and personalities inform both Bernarda Alba and Doña Rosita la Soltera, the most Chekhovian of Lorca’s plays, as well as Don̄a Rosita’s intended sequel, the unfinished Los Sueños de mi Prima Aurelia. In 1935 Lorca undertook his most overtly political play, El Sueño de la Vida, a technically innovative work based on recent events in Spain.
Lorca was at work on Aurelia and Bernarda Alba in the summer of 1936 when the Spanish Civil War broke out. On August 16, he was arrested in Granada by Nationalist forces, who abhorred his homosexuality and his liberal views, and imprisoned without a trial. On the night of August 18 or 19 (the precise date has never been verified), he was driven to a remote hillside outside town and shot. In 1986 the Spanish government marked the 50th anniversary of Lorca’s death by erecting a monument on the site of his murder. The gesture bears witness to Lorca’s stature as the most important Spanish poet and playwright of the 20th century, a man whose work continues to influence writers and artists throughout the world and to speak to readers everywhere of all that is most central to the human condition.
Is the subject of books:
Federico García Lorca: A Life, 1989, BY: Ian Gibson
Lorca: A Dream of Life, 1998, BY: Leslie Stainton
Author of books:
Impresiones y Paisajes (1918)
Libro de Poemas (1921, poetry)
Canciones (1926, poetry)
Romancero Gitano (1928, poetry)
Poema del Cante Jondo (1931, poetry)
Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías (1935, poetry)
Seis Poemas Galegos (1935, poetry)
Poeta en Nueva York (1940, poetry)
Divan del Tamarit (1940, poetry)
Suites (1983, poetry)
Sonetos del Amor Oscuro (1984, poetry)
Wrote plays:
El Maleficio de la Mariposa (1920)
Mariana Pineda (1927)
La Zapatera Prodigiosa (1930)
Así que Pasen Cinco Años (1931)
El Amor de don Perlimplín con Belisa en su Jardín (1933)
Bodas de Sangre (1933)
Yerma (1934)
Doña Rosita la Soltera (1935)
La Casa de Bernarda Alba (1936)
Waldina 