Por el amor de Lorca

(His name is Federico García Lorca, and Spanish naming customs dictate that you refer to people by both last names, so “García Lorca” instead of just “Lorca,” but, for example, my Lorca professor only calls him “Lorca,” and “lorquiano/a” is the oft-utilized adjective form…I’ve never heard anyone call him “García Lorca,” although that’s how Wikipedia’s article refers to him. I’m not sure what’s meant by all this, but I’m just going to call him Lorca as well.)

My favorite class I’ve been taking here is my class on Lorca. Lorca was a Spanish poet and dramaturge from the twenties and thirties who was swiftly executed upon the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Although he spent fruitful stints of his life in Madrid, New York, and elsewhere, Andalucía and Granada, specifically, were always foremost to his identity. He believed there was no such soul as in this soil.

It’s such an amazing opportunity to be studying a writer’s work while also actually being at ground zero, the landscape all his works are set in and draw from. My professor is incredible (I write down every word she says—was it really a revelation to me that a red rose symbolizes love? No, but I wrote it down anyway), and I am absolutely taken with Lorca’s work.

I think he’s most famous for his plays, but so far in this class we’ve only read some of his poetry, the earliest stuff written in his teens and twenties, and a selection from his very first book, Impressions and Landscapes, where he waxes poetic about Granada.

(The book’s publication, in his late teens, was financed by his father—he came from a very rich family—and immediately vanished into obscurity; he later completely disavowed it. The language is a bit overly ornate and sweeping, characteristic of a young, developing writer trying to make a statement [there I am, too!], but he does make some interesting observations. I remember early on in my time here climbing up to the top of the Albayzín and looking over the city, thinking the only thing that could make this place better would be if there were an ocean here. I immediately recanted, because having a port would completely change the flavor of the city; but sea, or at least very prominent water [although Granada has two rivers, one is a trickle and the other is flanked by concrete walls, nothing to look at] is so essential to me in cities I love. Not long after, I read this selection by Lorca, and he addresses this very thing in such an interesting way. Málaga and Sevilla, for instance, he says, have water, and so they sprawl outwards, unfettered; but Granada is enclosed, kept tiny and restrained within its hills; and so it turns miniature in its scope and focus. He goes on to extrapolate how this geographical positioning has taken root in the mindset of the Granadinos, even up to their excessive usage of diminutives in speech. [My professor, who is from Málaga, says this is very true, and hasn’t changed in the time since Lorca described it: Granadinos will use diminutives for practically any and all nouns, while to her Málagan ears it quickly becomes excessive and ridiculous.])

So far, then, we’ve only read his poetry up to his mid-twenties. And I absolutely love it. It’s one of those things where you’re not even sure why you like something so much, but you do. (And thank God for speaking Spanish—maybe other translators can do better [probably—I’m a terrible translator, I can never get over using the most literal translation, especially if there’s a direct English corollary], but I’ve tried translating some of his poems and they just come out terribly. But in Spanish they’re so wonderful. A lot of it, of course, has to do with the rhyme and rhythm, which doesn’t transfer.) It’s been interesting to read his works in the way that we have, which is chronologically, and get to see the development of his style.

His first book of poetry (also published by his father, also later disavowed), The Book of Poems, written when he was just my age, maybe a little younger, is obviously very Romantically-inspired, with lots of Biblical and mythological references, narratives, heavy rhythmic beats/phrasings/rhymes, and dramatic emotions. One poem, Mar (Sea), which I loved at first reading, seems determined to call up every possible classical figure with a troubled relationship to light—Lucifer, Prometheus, Icarus, maybe others I’m forgetting—before it moves on to all those associated with water. The symbology now feels excessive to me, but at first reading I was completely swept away. I’ve come to appreciate his later work as better, but there are still poems from this first book that I love. At the very bottom of this post, in a postscript, I’ll give you an example, Corazón nuevo, which is lovely in Spanish but which loses all magic when translated (again, this may just be my poverty as a translator).

Later we moved on to Suites, which is my favorite poetry collection of his we’ve looked at, though which was never published in his lifetime. He started working on it while a university student in Madrid, and then one summer he had his revelation with Gypsies, set aside Suites, wrote Poema del cante jondo instead (“Poem of the deep song”), and never got around to finishing Suites. It’s amazing how different Suites’ style is from the first book: much more clean, concise, and direct, yet much more subtle, too.

The Gypsy obsession? Well, the summer in question, the young Lorca, who was an accomplished musician (in piano and classical guitar), paid some Gypsies to teach him flamenco. At that time flamenco was exclusively confined to Gypsies (I think Lorca gets a lot, if not all, of the credit for popularizing/mainstreaming it)—it was actually quite scandalous for this white, upper-class, classically-trained boy to go off and associate this way, as you might imagine. But Lorca was entranced by the way these Gypsies, most of whom were illiterate, uneducated, etc., played so instinctively. And there’s nothing like flamenco. (If you’ve never heard it, it’s really actually quite strange: keening, dark, often arrhythmic or syncopated, very mournful.) He also was just obsessed with Gypsies as a symbol, of this insulated culture with its own laws and traditions, which had that essential connection to nature and the land that he so prized, and which was very homegrown Andalucían. Poema del cante jondo, then, is his incorporation of Gypsy and flamenco themes into his poetry, trying to put the music to words.

Well. You probably don't want his whole biography. Just last Thursday we had our midterm in the class, and the first part of the test was actually just “write an essay about everything you know about Lorca.” I’d actually put in several hours’ worth of studying for the test, unusual for me in subjects that I know well, and had basically ended up memorizing my notes. So on the test I furiously wrote six pages that were akin to simply recopying my notes: the exactness is a little embarrassing, but full points guaranteed. So if you ever do want a full, detailed biography of the man up till his late twenties, which is only as far as we’ve got, let me know…  ;)

The real point of this post was to talk about my Lorca-filled day yesterday. A day all about Lorca? Nothing could be more perfect!

There are never classes on Friday, so that’s when teachers schedule our class excursions for. Yesterday, then, we got on the bus at 9:30 to go to Valderrubio.

Valderrubio was actually the site of Lorca’s second childhood home, where his family moved when he was seven, and where he would return to through his university years during the breaks. But back when he and his family were living there, the town wasn’t called Valderrubio. It was called Asquerosa. Which is pretty outrageous. “Asquerosa” in Spanish means “disgusting.” It’s not even a rare or archaic word; if you wanted to say, for example, that your food is gross, you could say “¡qué comida asquerosa!” I was baffled as to how anywhere could end up with a name like this, but as I learned yesterday, the name derived from the Spanish-izing of an older, similar-sounding Arabic name. Lorca himself, during his college years, was embarrassed to tell his friends the name of his hometown, and when friends would ask for his address to write to him on vacations he would give them an alternate address in a different town. The townspeople in general hated the name too, and in 1943 they were finally able to successfully petition to change the name to Valderrubio, which makes reference to the town’s at-that-time thriving tobacco industry. (I don’t know what the “valde” prefix means exactly, but “rubio” means blond, and taken together it has something to do with a “blond” kind of tobacco leaf or plant or something.)

Visiting Lorca’s family’s house at Valderrubio was such an amazing experience! Everything was perfectly in its place like it would have been a hundred years ago, all the furniture was original… I was fangirling so hard when we got to go to Lorca’s actual bedroom and, oh my God, there was the bed he actually slept in, and his actual desk (beautiful wood) where, for example, he wrote Suites; the ceiling was painted blue, with a little design around the trim, as he had written home asking them to do for him once (they had the letter in question hanging above the desk)… Elsewhere in the house was his piano, which had the most beautiful deep, cherry-colored stain in its wood… The house on the whole was quite large and exquisitely maintained. Even if it hadn’t been Lorca’s house I think it would have been fun to tour, to get to peak into the lives of Spanish people in the early 1900’s. (One interesting historical note was the room in the attic solely devoted to “matanzas,” where several families would get together for a day to slaughter their pigs and then separate out the carcass into all its varied parts and purposes. Such a lot of work! But everyone had their part to play. It was the children’s job to stir up the blood for making blood sausage.)

My favorite part of the day was something extremely unusual. We were in the kitchen, a nice little room with a fireplace, table, lots of iron utensils hanging about, and a pretty window overlooking the outside patio. To one side of the kitchen there was one of the children’s rooms, which you could see into, but you were blocked from actually going into by a sheet of clear glass or plexiglass the length of the doorframe. Our tour guide, an elderly man with an intermittent dry cough, had finished giving us his spiel about the room, and had started turning off the lights and drawing the curtains over the window, and those nearest to the stairs had started going up to the next floor where the tour continued, as we all assumed we were moving on, when suddenly, a loud voice made us all jump. 

Seeing the origin of the voice was no less startling: there, standing in the doorframe to his little sister’s bedroom off the kitchen, was LORCA HIMSELF! I’ve never seen anything like it. The sheet of glass or plexiglass that blocked you from entering the child’s bedroom was actually a screen, and somehow he was projected within it; but I’ve never seen a projection like that, it was like a hologram, he was so shockingly, impossibly, three-dimensional and real. He was fully life-sized, dressed in his suit, hair slicked back, standing a few feet from us, chatting with us. I don’t even remember what he talked about (the manner of projecting his voice was unsettling, too—I couldn’t tell where the speakers were); I was too fixated on seeing him right there, in the flesh, in the ghost, whatever. It was miraculous. (The tour guide’s darkening of the room beforehand was now explained.) Of course, it was actually an actor (depicting him in his mid-twenties—he lived to his late thirties), but if I could take that screen and project actors in the roles of all my literary heroes I think I would die from happiness; it’d be a dangerous thing, a Mirror of Erised (Harry Potter reference) to lose myself in… Although the actor was jovial, and I was so glad to see him, I was also heartbroken, too: here you are, Federico, young and healthy, but no, you’re dead, murdered…

Nothing could top that experience. Also memorable, though in a different sense, was the ten-minute movie we watched in the little movie screening room they’d built nearby. The film wasn’t in the slightest bit educational; it was a very surrealist, fantasy, symbolic thing, images taken from his poems, etc.; which I couldn’t decide how I felt about. Well, I think I enjoyed it, but I think it was pointless. The same actor who had come to life for us in the kitchen was the star of the production. Here he was, walking through the fields and light-filled forests around Valderrubio, searching for his reflection in a stream, lying in his bed at his family’s house (the actual house, the actual bed), playing a piano in the middle of a wood, pensive and melancholy. All that was lovely, except for the strange and disturbing supposedly-cherubic little child dressed in white who kept cropping up, apparently meant to be representative of the childlike nature of the poet’s soul, but instead lending very weird undertones, especially when splayed out on top of the piano almost suggestively while the adult Lorca played. There was a night sequence, a children-playing-and-singing-songs sequence, a pregnant-woman sequence (taken from Lorca’s play Yerma, but I’m not sure why it was in there), and above all, a very distracting corresponding light show in the auditorium itself at the same time. So, I’m not sure why we watched the movie, but I got to see more of the actor who looked so much like Lorca, and that was worth it.

We spent about two and a half hours there (wow, time flies!) and then drove just a couple minutes down the road to Fuente Vaqueros, where Lorca was born and lived his very first years of life. I assume Fuente Vaqueros had a less formative impact on his life, but unlike the unfortunately-titled Asquerosa, Lorca was proud to claim Fuente Vaqueros’ name, and openly told people that was where he’d been born.

The home in Fuente Vaqueros was much smaller than that of Valderrubio (maybe that was why they moved?), but cozy and delightful in its own way. We only stayed about half an hour there before getting back on the bus and heading back to Granada.

After lunch—it was only three o’clock by that time—I decided to very fittingly spend a lovely afternoon in the Parque (park) de Federico García Lorca which is five minutes’ walk from where I live. It’s one of the city’s only parks (maybe the only, if you don’t count Carmen de los Martíres), and certainly the largest. That, actually, much more so than missing water, is the biggest omission for me here in Granada: the lack of parks, green places, places to escape to where one can be alone in nature… Even the Parque de Federico García Lorca isn’t very green, nor does one feel alone. It has benches upon benches, but they’re all close to some main path where people will be passing by. Although when I went yesterday few people were out, I couldn’t get privacy anywhere for more than five minutes. Which is too bad.

Still, I like the park, which has lots of pathways, a duck pond, a thriving feral cat population (unusual: most of the city is overrun by dogs, but all with owners; cats are pretty rare to see, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen one I could be sure wasn’t feral), some trees and bands of green; lovely, currently-blooming quince in abundance (one of my favorite flowers); and these strange granite blocks with water at their base (they may be fountains? But turned off when I’ve seen them) which have panels in the water that tell, in both Spanish and English, the strangest, Surrealist poetry-narratives, all of which have to do with the “thousand Naga kings that live in the ocean.” Super random. Also in the park, and the reason for which the park is there, is a large white house that was—you guessed it!—Lorca’s family’s (summer) house. I heard from someone in the know that tours are free on Wednesdays. Something to keep in mind.

So, I settled down on one of the hundreds of benches, ate a bar of my favorite chocolate, enjoyed the pleasant weather, journaled a bit, and memorized five of my favorite Lorca poems. It was a Lorca day! How marvelous.

After an hour and a half spent enjoying myself there I hiked up to the Albayzín, did what I usually do, which is try to get lost/find somewhere I haven’t been before and fail at it (it’s all so small I’ve been everywhere, I always know where I am), and had a good time. It threatened rain all afternoon but never made good on it, so much the better for me.

At the end of the semester for this Lorca class we’re going to have to do a creative project based off of some aspect of Lorca’s life or work. I think I’m going to do graphic/comic-strip format representations of some of his poetry. It’s basically what I do in class already, anyway, doodling the symbols in the margins of my notebooks… It’ll be a lot of fun. At some point I’ve really got to read some of his plays, since that’s what he’s most known for. We read something in class called “Diálogo del Amargo” (literally, “dialogue of Bitter,” but here, ‘Bitter’ was the main character’s name), written in script-format, but only in an avant-garde way (you could never have actually performed it, nor was that the point) that just completely blew me away. It was only three pages and it was awesome. I can’t even describe what it was about. No doubt about it, this guy was a genius.

Well, I think it’s obvious what (who) my current obsession is. Love to all!

~-~

Postscript: Here’s Corazón nuevo, a poem from Lorca’s first book of poems, written in a completely different (inferior) style from his later work, but still dear to me; and my translation, so you can see just how awful I am at translating/how it just doesn’t work:

Mi corazón, como una sierpe,           My heart, like a snake,

se ha desprendido de su piel,             has shed its skin,

y aquí la miro entre mis dedos           and here I behold it between my fingers

llena de heridos y de miel.                 full of wounds and honey.

Los pensamientos que anidaron        The thoughts that nested

en tus arrugas, ¿dónde están?           in your creases, where are they now?

¿Dónde las rosas que aromaron       Where are the roses that gave fragrance

a Jesucristo y a Satán?                      to Christ and to Satan?

¡Pobre envoltura que ha oprimido    Poor covering that has oppressed

a mi fantástico lucero!                       my fantastic, bright star!

Gris pergamino dolorido                   Painful gray parchment

de lo que quise y ya no quiero.    Of what I once wanted but want no longer.

Yo veo en ti fetos de ciencias,            In you I see the fetuses of sciences,

momias de versos y esqueletos          mummies of verses and skeletons

de mis antiguas inocencias                of my former innocences

y románticos secretos.                       and romantic secrets.

¿Te colgaré sobre los muros             Shall I hang you on the walls

de mi museo sentimental,                  of my sentimental museum,

junto a los gélidos y oscuros             beside the frozen and shadowed

lirios durmientes de mi mal?             sleeping lilies of my darkness?

¿O te pondré sobre los pinos             Or shall I put you in the pine trees

—libro doliente de mi amor—            —pained book of my love—

para que sepas de los trinos               so that you may know of the trills

que da a la aurora el ruiseñor?         that the nightingale gives to the dawn?