Federico García Lorca

gigatos | June 9, 2022

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Summary

Federico García Lorca (IPA: ) (Fuente Vaqueros, June 5, 1898 – Víznar, August 19, 1936) was a Spanish poet, playwright and theater director, a leading figure of the so-called Generation of ”27, a group of writers who tackled the European artistic avant-garde with excellent results, so much so that the first half of the twentieth century is called the Edad de Plata of Spanish literature.

An avowed supporter of the Republican forces during the Spanish Civil War, he was captured in Granada, where he was staying at the home of friends, and shot by a squadron of Francoist militia. His body was then thrown “into a ravine a few kilometers to the right of Fuentegrande.”

Childhood

García Lorca was born in Fuente Vaqueros, in the province of Granada (in Andalusia), on June 5, 1898, the son of Federico García Rodríguez a wealthy landowner, and Vicenta Lorca Romero (1870-1959), a teacher, his father”s second wife, of frail and failing health, to the point that nursing his child would not be herself, but a wet nurse, wife of his father”s capataz, and who would nevertheless exert a profound influence on his son”s artistic training: Indeed, she soon left teaching to devote herself to the education of little Frederick, to whom she transmitted her passion for the piano and music:

His mother will also transmit to him that deep awareness of the reality of the destitute and that respect for their pain that García Lorca will pour within his own literary work.

Federico spent a childhood intellectually happy but physically plagued by illness in the serene, rural environment of the patriarchal home of Fuente Vaqueros until 1909, when the family, which in the meantime had grown by three more children-Francisco, Conchita and Isabel, while a fourth, Luis, died at the age of only two from pneumonia-moved to Granada.

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Studies and knowledge in Granada

In Granada he attended the “Colegio del Sagrado Corazón,” which was run by a cousin of his mother”s, and in 1914 he enrolled in the University, first attending the faculty of law (not out of personal aspiration, but to follow his father”s wishes) and then moving on to the faculty of letters. He became acquainted with the city”s gypsy quarters, which would become part of his poetry, as shown in his Romancero of 1928.

He meets for the first time during this period the man of letters Melchor Fernández Almagro and the jurist Fernando de los Ríos, future Ministro de Instrucción Pública during the period called the Second Spanish Republic: both of them (and especially the latter) will help young Federico”s career in a concrete way. In the meantime, he began studying the piano under the guidance of maestro Antonio Segura and became a skilled performer of both classical and Andalusian folklore repertoire. With Granada musician Manuel de Falla, with whom he formed an intense friendship, he collaborated in the organization of the first Fiesta del Cante jondo (June 13 – 14, 1922).

The interests that mark the poet”s spiritual formative period are literature, music, and art, which he learns from Professor Martín Domínguez Berrueta, who will be his companion on the study trip to Castile, from which the prose collection Impresiones y paisajes (Impressions and Landscapes) will be born

In 1919, the poet moved to Madrid to pursue his university studies and, thanks to the interest of Fernando de los Ríos, gained admission to the prestigious Residencia de Estudiantes, confidentially called “la resi” by its guests, which was considered the place of the new culture and young promises of ”27.

At the University he formed friendships with Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, as well as with many other prominent figures in Spanish history. Among them was Gregorio Martínez Sierra, the Director of the Eslava Theater, at whose invitation García Lorca would write, his debut play, The Maleficio of the Butterfly.

At the Residencia García Lorca he remained nine years (until 1928), except for summer stays at the Huerta de San Vicente, the country house, and some trips to Barcelona and Cadaqués as a guest of the painter Salvador Dalí, to whom he was bound by a relationship of esteem and friendship that would soon involve the sentimental sphere as well.

The publication of the Libro de poemas, the preparation of the collections Canciones and Poema del Cante jondo (Poem of the Deep Song) dates from this period (1919-1920), which was followed by the play El maleficio de la maríposa (The Evil of the Butterfly, which was a failure: it was performed only once, and as a result of its poor success García Lorca decided not to have it published) in 1920 and in 1927 the historical drama Mariana Pineda for which Salvador Dalí designed the set design.

This was followed by the Surrealist-influenced prose Santa Lucía y san Lázaro, Nadadora sumeringa (The Sunken Swimmer) and Suicidio en Alejandría, the plays El paseo de Buster Keaton (Buster Keaton”s Walk) and La doncella, el marinero y el estudiante (The Girl, the Sailor and the Student), as well as the poetic collections Primer romancero gitano, Oda a Salvador Dalí and a large number of articles, compositions, miscellaneous publications, not to mention readings in the homes of friends, lectures and the preparation of the Granada magazine “Gallo” and the exhibition of drawings in Barcelona.

Letters sent during this period by Lorca to close friends confirm that the feverish activity marked by social contacts and relationships that the poet was experiencing at that time actually concealed an intimate suffering and recurring thoughts of death, a malaise greatly affected by not being able to live his homosexuality peacefully. To the Catalan critic Sebastià Gasch, in a letter dated 1928, he confesses his painful inner condition:

The conflict with the intimate circle of relatives and friends reaches its peak when the two surrealists Dalí and Buñuel collaborate in the making of the film Un chien andalou, which García Lorca reads as an attack on him. At the same time, his acute but reciprocated passion for the sculptor Emilio Aladrén comes to a painful turning point for García Lorca when Aladrén begins his own affair with the woman who will become his wife.

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The scholarship and the stay in New York.

Fernando de los Ríos, his protector friend, learned of young García Lorca”s conflicted state and granted him a scholarship, and in the spring of 1929 the poet left Spain and went to the United States.

The U.S. experience, which lasts until the spring of 1930, will be fundamental for the poet, resulting in one of Lorca”s most successful productions, Poeta en Nueva York, centered on what García Lorca observes with his participatory and attentive gaze: a society of too heated contrasts between the poor and the rich, the marginalized and the ruling classes, connoted by racism. A belief in the need for a distinctly more equitable, non-discriminatory World is reinforced in García Lorca.

In New York, the poet attended classes at Columbia University, spent summer vacations, invited by friend Philip Cummings, on the shores of Lake Edem Mills and, later, at the home of literary critic Ángel del Río and at the farm of poet Federico de Onís in Newburg.

Upon returning to the metropolis at the end of the summer, he saw some Spanish friends again, including Léon Felipe, Andrés Segovia, Dámaso Alonso, and the bullfighter Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, who was in New York with the famous singer La Argentinita, but on March 5, 1930, at the invitation of the Institucíon hispanocubana de Cultura, García Lorca left for Cuba.

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The experience in Cuba

The period spent in Cuba is a happy one. The poet forges new friendships among local writers, gives lectures, recites poetry, attends parties, and contributes to the island”s literary magazines, “Musicalia” and “Revista de Avance,” in which he publishes the surrealistic prose Degollacíon del Bautista (Beheading of the Baptist).

Also in Cuba, he began writing the plays El público and Así que pasen cinco años (Until Five Years Pass), and his matured interest in Afro-Cuban motifs and rhythms helped him compose the famous lyric Son de negros en Cuba, which turns out to be a love song to the black soul of America.

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The return to Spain

In July 1930 the poet returned to Spain, which, after the fall of Primo de Rivera”s dictatorship, was experiencing a phase of intense democratic and cultural life.

In 1931, with the help of Fernando de los Ríos, who in the meantime had become Minister of Education, García Lorca, with actors and performers selected by the Escuela Institute of Madrid with its Museo Pedagocico project, carried out the project of a traveling popular theater, called La Barraca, which, touring the villages, represented the classical Spanish repertoire.

He met during these years Rafael Rodríguez Rapún, secretary of La Barraca and engineering student in Madrid, who would be the deep love of his plays and poems and to whom he would dedicate, though not explicitly, the Sonnets of Dark Love, published posthumously.

García Lorca, who is the creator, director and animator of the small theater troupe, dressed in a simple blue jumpsuit to signify any rejection of stardom, takes his highly successful theater on tour in rural and university circles and performs it without interruption until April 1936, a few months after the outbreak of the Civil War.

It was during this tour with La Barraca that García Lorca wrote his best-known plays, and referred to as the ”rural trilogy”: Bodas de sangre, Yerma and The House of Bernarda Alba.

Theatrical activity did not prevent García Lorca from continuing to write and making several trips with his Madrid friends, to old Castile, the Basque Country and Galicia.

Upon the death of his friend banderillero and bullfighter Ignacio Sánchez Mejías on August 13, 1934 (after he had been injured by a bull two days earlier), the poet dedicated the famous Llanto (Lamentation) and in the following years published Seis poemas galegos (Six Galician Poems), plans the poetic collection of Diván del Tamarit, and brings to completion the plays Doña Rosita la soltera or El lenguaje de las flores (Unmarried Woman Rosita or The Language of Flowers).

In early 1936 he published Bodas de sangre (on June 19 he completed La casa de Bernarda Alba after helping, in February of that year, along with Rafael Alberti and Bergamín, to found the “Association of Antifascist Intellectuals.”

Meanwhile, political events are precipitating. However, García Lorca rejects the possibility of asylum offered to him by Colombia and Mexico, whose ambassadors foresee the risk that the poet could be the victim of an assassination attempt because of his role as an official of the Republic. After rejecting the offers, on July 13 he decided to return to Granada, to the house in the Huerta de San Vicente, to spend the summer there and return to see his father.

He gives a final interview, to Madrid”s “Sol,” in which there is an echo of the motivations that had prompted him to reject those offers of life outside Spain just mentioned, and in which García Lorca nevertheless clarifies and reiterates his aversion to the positions of nationalistic extremism, typical of that right-wing that would shortly take power, establishing the dictatorship:

“I am an integral Spaniard and it would be impossible for me to live outside my geographic limits; however, I hate those who are Spaniards for being Spaniards and nothing else, I am a brother to all and I find execrable the man who sacrifices himself for a nationalist, abstract idea, for the mere fact of loving his homeland with a blindfold on. The good Chinese I feel closer than the evil Spaniard. I sing Spain and feel it to the core, but first comes that I am man of the World and brother of all. That”s why I don”t believe in the political frontier.”

A few days later the Francoist rebellion erupted in Morocco, which quickly struck the Andalusian city and established a climate of fierce repression.

On August 16, 1936, the socialist mayor of Granada (the poet”s brother-in-law) is shot. Lorca, who had taken refuge in the home of his Falangist poet friend Luis Rosales Camacho, is arrested the same day by former CEDA representative Ramón Ruiz Alonso.

Numerous speeches are raised in his favor, especially by the Rosales brothers and Maestro de Falla; but despite the promise made to Luis Rosales himself that García Lorca would be set free “if there are no complaints against him,” Governor José Valdés Guzmán, with the support of General Gonzalo Queipo de Llano, secretly gives orders to proceed with the execution: late at night, Federico García Lorca is taken to Víznar, near Granada, and at dawn on August 19, 1936, he is shot on the road near the Fuente grande, along the road from Víznar to Alfacar. His body was never found. His killing provoked worldwide disapproval: many intellectuals expressed words of outrage, including those of his friend Pablo Neruda.

A Francoist police document dated July 9, 1965, found in 2015, stated the reasons for the execution: “Freemason belonging to the Alhambra lodge,” “practiced homosexuality and other aberrations.”

The failure to find Lorca”s body, however, ignites an intense controversy about the details of this execution. Controversy even now far from resolved.

In 2009 in Fuentegrande de Alfacar (Granada), technicians commissioned by Andalusian authorities to conduct a specific study to locate the mass grave, where the body was supposedly dumped, ascertained with the use of georadar the actual existence of a mass grave with three internal separations, where six bodies would rest.

On October 29, 2009, at the urging of the Andalusian government, excavation work began on the identified site with the aim of locating any remains of the poet; this was to cover an area of about 200 square meters for a duration of about two months.

Along with García Lorca”s remains were expected to be found those of at least three other people: anarchist banderilleros Joaquín Arcollas and Francisco Galadí and republican teacher Dioscoro Galindo. According to authorities in the autonomous region of Andalusia, tax inspector Fermín Roldán and furniture restorer Manuel Cobo would also be buried in the same area and possibly in the same mass grave. In 2011, however, the government of Andalusia halted the search due to lack of funds. Finally, on September 19, 2012, the Court of Granada dismissed the exhumation request, thereby halting all search activities.

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Lorca under the Franco dictatorship

Franco”s established dictatorship imposed a ban on his works, a ban that was partly broken in 1953, when an Obras completas-heavily censored-was caused to be published. That edition among other things does not include his last Sonetos del amor oscuro, written in November 1935 and recited only for close friends. Those sonnets, with a homosexual theme, will even be published only from the year 1983.

With Franco”s death in 1975, García Lorca was finally and rightly able to return to being that most important exponent of his country”s cultural and political life.

In 1986, the English-language translation made by singer and author Leonard Cohen of García Lorca”s poem “Pequeño vals vienés,” and set to music by Cohen himself, reached the top spot within Spain”s best-selling album chart.

Today, García Lorca”s memory is solemnly honored by a statue in Madrid”s Plaza de Santa Ana by sculptor Julio López Hernández.

Although there are important editions of Lorca”s complete works, there is still no definitive text that would put an end to the doubts and questions that arose around the books that were announced and never published, and the question of the genesis of some important collections has not yet been resolved.It can be said, however, that the production that we know of, together with the recently found unpublished materials, is sufficient to offer us a clear testimony to the man”s correspondence with his poetry.

At first, Lorca manifests his talent as oral expression following the style of the jester tradition. Indeed, the poet recites, reads, and performs his verses and plays before friends and students at the university even before they are collected and printed.

But García Lorca, although a brilliant and exuberant artist, maintains toward his creative activity a stern attitude demanding of it two essential conditions: amor y discipline.

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Impressions and landscapes

In the prose collection Impresiones y paisajes that came out in 1918 after his trip to Castile and Andalusia, García Lorca affirms his great gifts of insight and imagination. The collection is dense with lyrical impressions, musical notes, critical and realistic annotations around life, religion, art and poetry.

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Libro de poemas

In Libro de poemas, composed from 1918 to 1920, Lorca documents his great love of song and life. He dialogues with the landscape and animals with the modernist tone of a Rubén Darío or a Juan Ramón Jiménez by surfacing his anxieties in the form of nostalgia, abandonment, anguish, and protest by asking questions of an existential nature:

In these verses we seem to hear the background music that, modulating the heart”s sorrow, reflects the situation of uncertainty experienced and its detachment from the adolescent stage.

A moment of great significance for Federico Garcia Lorca”s artistic life is his meeting with the composer Manuel De Falla in 1920. Thanks to his figure Lorca came close to the Cante Jondo, which blending with his poetry gave rise to the collections of Canciones Españiolas Antiguas, harmonized on the piano by Lorca himself.

The period from 1921 to 1924 represents a very creative and enthusiastic time even though many of the works produced would not see the light of day until years later.

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Cante jondo poem

The Poema del Cante jondo, written between 1921 and 1922 would not come out until ten years later. In it are all the motifs of the Andalusian world rhythmed on the musical modes of the cante jondo on which the poet had worked with maestro de Falla on the occasion of the celebration of the first Fiesta del Cante jondo to which Lorca had dedicated, in 1922, the lecture Importancia histórica y artística del primitivo canto andaluz llamado “cante jondo.”

The book is intended to be a poetic interpretation of the meanings attached to this primitive song that explodes in the obsessive repetition of popular sounds and rhythms, as in the songs of siguiriya, soleá, petenera, tonáa, and liviana, accompanied by the sound of the guitar:

“The cry of the guitar begins.It is useless to silence it.It is impossible to silence it.It cries monotonously like water cries, like the wind cries over the snowfall.”

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Primeras Canciones, Suites – Canciones

In Primeras Canciones but especially in Canciones, the poet, on musical-like variations expressed in a cipher language, demonstrates all his skill in capturing the world of childlike tenderness.

Missing from these lyrics is any trace of eloquence, and there is a greater quickness of gaze and synthesis that succeeds in capturing the image of a landscape that seems suspended between dream and reality:

In these verses the colors, the sounds of the gypsy world are represented through a special light that animates the objects.

Thus in the short poem Caracola (Shell) in which the poet, through inner echoes and rhythms, relives the happy time of fantasy and childhood:

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Romancero gitano

Lorca”s popular success came in 1928 with Romancero gitano, which describes the Andalusian world”s feeling of fatality, mystery, and pain.

The work consists of eighteen lyrics and includes four thematic cores: that of the human world in which the gypsies fight against the Guardia Civil; that of the celestial world represented by the romances of religious iconography; that of the dark forces; and lastly that of the reality of historical-literary matrix.

Uniting these four worlds is the figure of the gypsies with their fierce character and pagan primitivism toward whom Lorca feels he has a common component that makes him share in their suffering and rebellion.

The Romancero is distinguished by its repetition of traditional Spanish verse (the estribillo popular) and bold metaphors.Recalling and making its own, innovating, the use of romance as a form of writing and setting for his work.In it, the poetic word succeeds in capturing, harmoniously with the language and psychology of the gypsy world, the object in a mythical dimension:

“Green that I love you green, green wind, green branches, the ship on the sea and the horse on the mountain”.

In Romancero, through the wind, the colors, the symbolic references, the whole emotional universe of the young García Lorca is present, whose direct poetry makes the land of Andalusia vibrate.

Following Romancero gitano, which was received with much popular favor but disapproved of by Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel for its excessive traditionalist lyricism, there is a brief period in which the experience of poetic prose of a Surrealist character should be situated, including Oda to Salvador Dalí, along with some theatrical drafts in which the poet tries to overcome the biographical element but never fully adheres to the Surrealist movement.

Ode to Salvador Dalí

In his ode to his friend Salvador Dalí, Lorca opposes the aesthetics of the “aseptic square root flower” with the image of the everyday rose as his ideal of beauty and life:

and urges him not to forget the importance of the feeling of love and its human truth:

Poeta en Nueva York

The book Poeta en Nueva York, composed between 1929 and 1930 but published posthumously in 1940, and which some identify as his most accomplished work, comprises ten groups of lyrics, including the Ode to Walt Whitman and compositions born in the Cuban period, and constitutes an outgrowth of his earlier poetics, enriched with bold surrealist imagery.

Poeta en Nueva York is a poetic collection of great literary complexity due to the elaboration of poetic language and the multiplicity of perspectives contained in its two essential themes: the city and the poet. Through the theme of the city Lorca expresses the feeling of protest against modern civilization and the metropolis in which he identifies the symbol of human anguish and alienation. By 1931 New York had appeared to him as:

Indeed, the poet describes the North American city as a crushing and relentless mechanism, to whose victims García Lorca looks with a moved and sensitive eye. In particular, poems such as New York oficina y denuncia or Panorama ciego de New York reflect his incendiary critique of dehumanization, disrespect for nature, and the marginalization of the dispossessed, who in Romancero gitano were precisely represented by the gypsies, while in this book they are mainly the black community:

The other theme, related to one”s personal history, elaborates a feeling of nostalgia for the past and lost happiness:

Due to the complex publishing history of the manuscript, its original state, and its later manipulations, it is difficult to know to what extent the current structure corresponds to the poet”s intentions. In any case, two structures can be seen within the work: one external and one internal. The first is marked by the titles of the different sections, which present this collection as the poetic chronicle of the journey to New York and Havana: the journey covered in the sections roughly coincides with the one García Lorca undertook in the period between 1929 and 1930, with his arrival in New York, his move to the Vermont countryside, his return to the city and his trip to Havana; while most of the key aspects of the second appear in some of the epigraphs.

The sections are therefore titled as follows:

These are perhaps the most intimate poems in his entire oeuvre, comparing the bitterness of his life in the metropolis with the happiness of his childhood (1910 (Intermedio)). He also expresses his disappointment over a love breakup (Tu infancia en Menton).

Dedicated to Ángel del Río. In this section he shows his solidarity with the blacks of America, denouncing their social situation and claiming their identity, whose vitality and primal purity he praises.

Dedicated to Rafael Rodríguez Rapún. This is the most descriptive section of the North American city in which the poet expresses the impression made on him by living in the great metropolis, the mechanized and industrialized society, and the dehumanization of the capitalist economy.

Dedicated to Eduardo Ugarte. The poet writes during his stay in Vermont and his depression is accentuated here due to the loneliness and mountain climate.

Dedicated to Concha Méndez y Manuel Altolaguirre. Written during his stay in the country in the summer of 1929: the poems in this section allude to facts and people the poet met while on vacation.

Section dedicated to Rafael Sánchez Ventura in which the themes of death and loneliness appear again, dwelling in particular on the consequences of the latter.

Dedicated to Antonio Hernández Soriano. The poems in this section were written upon the poet”s return to New York City after his vacation, with the intention of denouncing the lack of solidarity of the American capitalist system and its lack of ethics, themes especially highlighted in the poem Nueva York (Oficina y denuncia).

Dedicated to Armando Guibert, two poems appear in this section, Grito hacia Roma and Oda a Walt Whitman. In these the author compares and denounces the lack of love on the part of the Church, compared to the pure and authentic love personified in Walt Whitman.

The poems in this section have a more cheerful tone than the others: this is partly due to the inspiration the poet draws from the musicality of the waltz, the rhythm of which he tries to be reproduced by the use of the refrain, and partly it might be due to the departure from the metropolis.

This section, dedicated to Fernando Ortiz, features a single composition, Son de negros en Cuba, in which a cheerful tone is maintained and a greater optimism about life is noted.

As the author himself explained in a lecture, the creation of this external structure is intended to make the work more accessible and understandable to the general public. In the same, the author also alludes to the desire to convey the stereotypical image of the traveler who feels lost in the big city and seeks relief in the countryside, experiencing happiness in leaving the metropolis and arriving in Cuba, although even the countryside turns out to be different from the idyllic place he imagined.

With the five epigraphs in the work, which establish a dialogue with Cernuda, Guillén, Aleixandre, Garcilaso, and Espronceda, Lorca introduces the second theme of the collection: amorous unhappiness. Here is the list:

In the first section, he describes how love goes from fury over abandonment to oblivion.

The epigraph, at the opening of Tu infancia en Menton, refers back to Guillén: the poet, grieving over love betrayed, seems to turn back to the past, although he does not give up seeking a happiness even though he knows it cannot have the purity of the first time.

Opening the third section, the epigraph from Aleixandre repeats the pain of a broken love.

The quote from Garcilaso opens the Poema doble of Lake Eden.

The quote from Espronceda can be read in the incipit of Luna y panorama de los insectos (Poema de amor) and seems to allude to the value of freedom that scorns death.

The epigraphs hint at a complex world and a wealth of meanings that cannot be encapsulated in a single interpretation, thus making El poeta en Nueva York one of the author”s most complex works.

Seis poemas gallegos

Seis poemas gallegos is a doubly unique work in the Garcíalorchian panorama: it is in Galician, a language different from the poet”s own, and there are no other examples of it within his literary output. It is therefore particularly interesting to know how it came into being.

Lorca first visited Galicia in 1916 on a study trip organized by one of his professors: he visited Santiago de Compostela, A Coruña, Lugo, Betanzos and Ferrol. At the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid he met the Galician musicologist Jesús Bal y Gay, with whose help he became acquainted with the musical folklore of that land, at a time during which García Lorca was also reading with great passion the “cancioneiros galego-portugueses” and Galician authors such as Rosalía de Castro, Manuel Curros Enríquez, Eduardo Pondal, Luís Amado Carballo and Manuel António.

In 1931 he met Ernesto Guerra da Cal, a Galician nationalist who has resided in Madrid since childhood, and who introduced him to the Galician entourage in the Spanish capital.

In May 1932 García Lorca makes his second trip to Galicia, to give a series of lectures. In Santiago de Compostela he befriends Carlos Martínez-Barbeito.

In August 1932, he made a third trip to Galicia, a trip related to the tour of performances that his theater company, “La Barraca,” was making in various towns and villages in the region, and in November he gave a series of lectures with Xosé Filgueira Valverde, and published in Lugo”s Yunque magazine the first of his “poemas galegos,” Madrigal â cibdá de Santiago, written with the help of Francisco Lamas and Luís Manteiga.

In 1933, Lorca met Eduardo Blanco Amor, at that time a correspondent for the Argentine daily La Nación; the journalist went out of his way to make Lorca known in Argentina, so much so that when Lorca traveled through the South American country, he received a warm welcome from the people, especially those of Galician origin. As a thank you, Lorca writes Cántiga do neno da tenda, and once back in Spain he will maintain a strong friendship relationship with Blanco Amor, who will spend several times his time at Lorca”s home in Fuente Vaqueros. It is also thanks to Blanco Amor”s help that Federico García Lorca is able to publish his compositions in Galician with the book Seis poemas galegos of 1935, for the types of Nós editorial: the poems are compositions that on the one hand possess the same characteristics of spontaneity as those contained in Canciones, Lorca”s book of (1927), but at the same time, have rhythms proper to the literary tradition of Galicia. As for García Lorca”s difficulty in writing in a language different from his own, there are two versions that have succeeded one another over the years: that of Ernesto Guerra da Cal, who in the last period of his own life claimed to be the author of the Galician transposition, a claim that found support from Xosé Luís Franco Grande, and the opposing one of Eduardo Blanco Amor, according to whom the poems were in all respects to be attributed to García Lorca. It is the latter thesis that has been borne out in subsequent investigations by various scholars.

Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías

Following the death of his fallen bullfighter friend in the bullring, García Lorca wrote the four-part Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías (1935).

The poem, after the bursting beginning of the first part (“La cogida y la muerte” – The cogida and the death -, introduced and punctuated by the famous “cinco de la tarde” that chimes in all the clocks of the world), gradually takes a more sedate tone (in the second part, “La sangre derramada” -The Blood Spilled – and in the third part, “Cuerpo presente” -Present Body) -, and yields at the end to elegy and regret for the dead friend rising to remember his greatness beyond death (in the fourth and last part, “Alma ausente” -Absent Soul -, which thus ends):

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Diván del Tamarit

The Diván del Tamarit, written between 1932 and 1934 and published posthumously in 1940, represents the end of the long inner monologue to close in the silence of personal drama with verses now devoid of any school or manner in which the poet seeks his inner truth.

WEEPING CASIDA

I have closed my windowbecause I don”t want to hear the weeping,But behind the gray wallsnothing but the weeping is heard.There are very few angels singing,Very few dogs barking;A thousand violins fit in the palm of my hand.But the weeping is an immense dog,The weeping is an immense angel,The weeping is an immense violin,The tears gag the wind.And nothing but the weeping is heard.

Sonetos del amor oscuro

On March 17, 1984, the eleven Sonnets of Dark Love will be published in the newspaper “ABC,” which constitute the document of private homosexual passion expressed through the classic sonnet form.

The sonnets will be commented on by poet Vicente Aleixandre, who had heard their first compositions in 1937, as a “marvel of passion, enthusiasm, happiness, torment, pure and ardent monument to love . .”

Francisco Umbral in his essay Lorca, poeta maldito published in 1978 writes: “… all of Lorca”s dramaturgy is nothing but the representation of his radical and personal inner tragicity.”

Lorca”s play is in fact a dramatic representation of the author”s personal ontological conflict experienced through characters who denounce his own anxieties and attempt to rebel against the same prejudices.

Early comedies

The theme of dreaming and escapism, which will assume a fundamental role in Lorca”s later dramaturgy, is addressed in the naïve youth drama El maleficio de la mariposa a verse drama about the impossible love between a cockroach and a butterfly, which is not at all well received by audiences, however, and which would explain why Lorca later always claimed that it is Mariana Pineda, from 1927, his first script for the theater.

Also dominant in this last work, however, is the theme of the desire for freedom in which Mariana identifies love and the beloved.

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The farce comedies

La zapatera prodigiosa (The Wonderful Shoemaker) and El amor de don Perlimplín con Belisa en su jardín (The Love of Don Perlimplín with Belisa in his Garden) are two delightful comedies cut from the puppet theater that Lorca particularly loved, and which, together with Los títeres de cachiporra (The Wooden Puppets) and Retablillo de don Cristóbal (Don Cristóbal”s Little Theater), carry on the poet”s intimate dialogue between lyricism and drama.

These farce comedies, as the subtitles announce, move to the ballet rhythm with infinite grace and represent, with the predominant theme of escapism from the grayness of everyday reality, a literary variant that resolves itself into happy tragicomedy.

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More mature works

Bodas de sangre, Yerma, La casa de Bernarda Alba are works that reveal a mature Lorca who is more attentive to social problems.

In these works, female characters aspire to love and struggle and rebel against the hypocrisies of life and choose as an alternative to squalor and misery, despair and death.

In the first tragedy, Bodas de sangre, the betrothed elopes on her wedding day with her lover Leonardo; in Yerma, the protagonist from whom the play takes its name rejects her infertile state and kills her husband, a symbol of male selfishness; in the third, Adela, Bernarda Alba”s youngest daughter, prefers suicide to renouncing love, and silence is created around her, the same silence that weighs on the female character in Doña Rosita la soltera or El lenguaje de las flores, the play that was performed in 1935.

Rosita is a young spinster living immersed in loneliness and regret of missed love, stopping with her imagination at the promise of love wrecked with years and distance.

The Surrealist play Así que pasen cinco años (1930-1931), as the subtitle “Leyenda del tiempo” puts it, is an allegory of time where the contrast between the longing to love and the unfulfilled feeling stands out.

The latest works

El público, composed in 1930, and the 1936 fragment Comedia sin título (Comedy without a Title) remained unpublished until the 1980s and address, one, the theme of homosexuality, the other, the function of art and social revolution.

Lorca opens himself to a symbolic and surreal theater that is described as “impossible” and “unrepresentable” for his time and current morality, and in which he boldly anticipates themes of great relevance today.

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