Federico García Lorca
Spanish writer
born June 5, 1898, Fuente Vaqueros, Granada province, Spain
died August 18 or 19, 1936, between Víznar and Alfacar, Granada province
Main
Spanish poet and playwright who, in a career that spanned just 19 years,
resurrected and revitalized the most basic strains of Spanish poetry and
theatre. He is known primarily for his Andalusian works, including the
poetry collections Romancero gitano (1928; Gypsy Ballads) and Llanto por
Ignacio Sánchez Mejías (1935; “Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías,” Eng.
trans. Lament for a Bullfighter), and the tragedies Bodas de sangre
(1933; Blood Wedding), Yerma (1934; Eng. trans. Yerma), and La casa de
Bernarda Alba (1936; The House of Bernarda Alba). In the early 1930s
Lorca helped inaugurate a second Golden Age of the Spanish theatre. He
was executed by a Nationalist firing squad in the first months of the
Spanish Civil War.
Early years
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.
Early poetry and plays
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 (1918; Impressions and Landscapes), 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 (“Book of Poems”), 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 (The Butterfly’s
Evil Spell in Five Plays: Comedies and Tragi-Comedies, 1970), 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 (written 1923; Eng. trans. 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. (Virtually all of Lorca’s poetry—that
contained in the volume under discussion and in the other Spanish
volumes mentioned in this biography—has been translated in Collected
Poems, 1991). In 1922 Lorca collaborated with the eminent Andalusian
composer Manuel de Falla on a festival of cante jondo (“deep song”) in
Granada. The endeavour 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 (written 1921–25, published 1931; Poem of
the Deep Song), 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 Billy-Club Puppets”), 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” (1925–26; “Ode to
Salvador Dalí”), Canciones (written 1924, published 1926; Songs), 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 (written 1924, premiered 1930; The
Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife), a classic farce, and El amor de don
Perlimplín con Belisa en su jardín (written 1925, premiered 1933; The
Love of Don Perlimplín with Belisa in Their Garden in Five Plays:
Comedies and Tragi-Comedies, 1970), 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.
Romancero gitano
The publication in 1928 of Romancero gitano (written 1921–27; Gypsy
Ballads), 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 a Gypsy. 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.
Later poetry and plays
Lorca’s stay in the United States and Cuba yielded Poeta en Nueva York
(published 1940; Poet in New 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 (“The Audience”), a complex,
multifaceted play, expressionist in technique, that brashly explores the
nature of homosexual passion. Lorca deemed the work, which remained
unproduced 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 (1931; Once Five Years Pass), and
he assumed the directorship of a traveling student theatre group, La
Barraca (the name of makeshift wooden stalls housing puppet shows and
popular fairs in Spain), 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 (written 1931–1934, published 1940; “The
Divan at Tamarit”), a set of love poems inspired by Arabic verse forms;
Seis poemas galegos (written 1932–1934, published 1935; “Six Galician
Poems”); and Sonetos del amor oscuro (written 1935, published 1984;
“Sonnets of Dark Love”), 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 (1934),
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
(written 1934, premiered 1935; Doña Rosita the Spinster), the most
Chekhovian of Lorca’s plays, as well as Don̄a Rosita’s intended sequel,
the unfinished Los sueños de mi prima Aurelia (1936; “The Dreams of My
Cousin Aurelia”). In 1935 Lorca undertook his most overtly political
play, El sueño de la vida (“The Dream of Life”), 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.
Leslie Anne Stainton
