García Lorca, Federico

born June 5, 1898, Fuente Vaqueros, Granada province, Spain

died Aug. 18 or 19, 1936, between Víznar and Alfacar, Granada province

Spanish poet and dramatist.

García Lorca studied literature, painting, and music and later was a founder, director, and musician for La Barraca, a theatrical company that brought classical drama to rural audiences. He was an established experimental poet when he became famous for The Gypsy Ballads (1928), a verse collection lyrically combining his musical, poetical, and spiritual impulses; as in many of his later works, its themes and images were drawn from folk traditions. Of his many poems of death, "Lament for the Death of a Bullfighter" (1935), written for a friend, is his most famous poem and the finest elegy in modern Spanish literature. His dramatic trilogy consisting of Blood Wedding (produced 1933), Yerma (produced 1934), and The House of Bernarda Alba (produced 1936) is the best known of his masterpieces. As if fulfilling the premonition of violent death that haunts his works, he was shot without trial by fascists during the Spanish Civil War.

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▪ Spanish writer

Introduction

born June 5, 1898, Fuente Vaqueros, Granada province, Spain

died August 18 or 19, 1936, between Víznar and Alfacar, Granada province

 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 (Machado, Antonio), and the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío (Darío, Rubén), 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 (Dalí, Salvador), 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 (Martínez Sierra, Gregorio) 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 (Falla, Manuel de) on a festival of cante jondo (“deep song”) in Granada. The endeavour heightened Lorca's interest in popular Andalusian (Andalusia) 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 (Dalí, Salvador). 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 (Góngora y Argote, Luis de), 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.

(“Ballad of the Spanish Civil Guard,” excerpt. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC, from Collected Poems by Federico García Lorca. Translated by Will Kirkland. Translation copyright © 1991 by Will Kirkland. Introduction and notes copyright © 1991 by Christopher Maurer. Spanish texts copyright © 1991 by Herederos de Federico García Lorca.)

      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 (Whitman, Walt):

… 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.

(“Ode to Walt Whitman,” excerpt, reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC, from Poet in New York by Federico García Lorca. Translation copyright © 1988 by The Estate of Federico García Lorca, and Greg Simon and Steven F. White. Introduction, notes, and translation of letters copyright © 1988 by Christopher Maurer.)

      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 (Ortega y Gasset, José) 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.

(“Ghazal of the Flight,” excerpt, reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC, from Collected Poems by Federico García Lorca. Translated by Catherine Brown. Translation copyright © 1991 by Catherine Brown. Introduction and notes copyright © 1991 by Christopher Maurer. Spanish texts copyright © 1991 by Herederos de Federico García Lorca.)

      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 Doa 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

Additional Reading

Biographies of Lorca include Leslie Stainton, Lorca: A Dream of Life (1998); and Ian Gibson, Federico García Lorca: A Life (1989), both of which utilize primary sources and interviews. Eduardo Molina Fajardo, Los últimos días de García Lorca (1983); and Ian Gibson, The Assassination of Federico García Lorca, rev. and rewritten ed. (1979, reissued 1983), provide amply documented accounts of Lorca's arrest and murder. Of the numerous memoirs of Lorca by friends and family, Francisco García Lorca, In the Green Morning: Memories of Federico (1986, reissued 1989; originally published in Spanish, 1980); José Mora Guarnido, Federico García Lorca y su mundo: testimonio para una biografía (1958, reissued 1998); and Carlos Morla Lynch, En España con Federico García Lorca: páginas de un diario íntimo, 1928–1936, 2nd ed. (1958), are notable for the depth and intimacy of their portraits. Perceptive overviews of his oeuvre are provided in Federico García Lorca, Collected Poems, ed. by Christopher Maurer (1991); Poet in New York, rev. ed., edited by Christopher Maurer, trans. by Greg Simon and Steven F. White (1998); and Three Plays: Blood Wedding, Yerma, The House of Bernarda Alba, trans. by Michael Dewell and Carmen Zapata (1992). Brian Morris (C. B. Morris), Son of Andalusia: The Lyrical Landscapes of Federico García Lorca (1997), is a brilliant study of the myriad ways the region of Andalusia infused Lorca's writing. Andrew A. Anderson, Lorca's Late Poetry: A Critical Study (1990), provides an astute analysis of Lorca's poetic output in the 1930s. Other important critical studies are Luis Fernández Cifuentes, García Lorca en el teatro: la norma y la diferencia (1986), a historical and critical assessment of the evolution of Lorca's theatre; and Eutimio Martín, Federico García Lorca, heterodoxo y mártir (1986), a groundbreaking study of Lorca's juvenilia.In his introductions to Lorca's works in Spanish, Mario Hernández offers insightful critical commentary and illuminating contextual details.Leslie Anne Stainton

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