OPINION:
POET IN SPAIN
By Federico Garcia Lorca
Translated by Sarah Arvio
Alfred A. Knopf, $40, 576 pages
“Lorca is constantly in the Spanish news; he is a subject in himself, like the presidency or the economy or the weather,” writes Sarah Arvio, translator of a new volume of his work. You don’t have to spend long in Spain to learn that her observation is true.
Every bookshop window displays his books and often his picture. Statues and plaques identifying his hangouts are common. And any museum that commemorates the brutal Civil War (1936-1939) highlights the murder of Mr. Lorca in 1936.
Memories of the war and the dictatorship that followed are still close and raw in Spain, and they help fuel the Lorca obsession. “The country that killed its greatest poet must find out whom he loved and how he died and where his body lies,” observes Ms. Arvio, noting, however, that recent excavations of two potential burial sites revealed nothing.
While the longing to discover more about Mr. Lorca’s assassination motivated these excavations, her “Poet in Spain” — a large selection of his poems and his play “Blood Wedding” — shows even had Lorca lived in peaceful times, he would still be an extraordinary and exemplary figure in Spanish literature.
Born to a wealthy family 1898, he grew up in Granada and on the family estates nearby. As he child he loved puppet theater, drawing and playing the piano. School not so much. He did not do well academically, nor at university in Madrid. But he wrote constantly, and while living in Madrid’s Residencia de Estudiantes he befriended numerous artists and intellectuals, notably film-maker Luis Buuel and painter Salvador Dali, with whom he was in love for a while.
He also published his first collection of poems “Impresiones y paisajes” (“Impressions and Landscapes,” 1918). It was an immediate success.
“Libro de poemas” (“Book of Poems,” 1921) followed. In the same year he wrote “Poema del cante jondo” (“Poem of Deep Song”), a sequence based on the music that underpins flamenco. Fearing these ancient songs would disappear, he and composer Manuel de Falla had collected them from the Andalusian countryside. The songs are improvisations; the music and words repeat over a narrow range; the rhythms are broken. Mr. Lorca adopted these strategies in his sequence, for example in “The Guitar”:
“The guitar begins/ to sob / There’s no way to hush it / It can’t be hushed / It sobs monotonously / the way water sobs / the way wind sobs / over the fallen snow / It can’t be hushed”
Mr. Lorca’s interest in Spanish traditional expression also underlies “Primer romancero gitano” (“The First Book of Gypsy Ballads,” 1928), whose passionate narratives Sarah Arvio characterizes as “exquisite, daring, and strange.” Perhaps the most renowned begins:
“Green I want you green / Green wind green branches / Boat on the sea and / horse on the mountain/ Shadow on her waist / She dreams at her railing /green flesh green hair / eyes of cold silver / Green I want you green / Under the gypsy moon / things are seeing her / but she can’t see them”
These ballads made Mr. Lorca famous. “Green I want you green is probably the most adored line of poetry in Spanish” explains Sarah Arvio. “If someone says the word “green” someone else chimes in, “I want you green.”
Mr. Lorca was also admired and beloved in his lifetime. Describing himself as “a redneck from Aragon” and Mr. Lorca as “an elegant Andalusian,” film-maker Luis Bunuel wrote that nonetheless they became devoted friends. “We used to sit on the grass in the evenings and he would read me his poems. He read slowly and beautifully, and through him I began to discover a wholly new world.”
Others new to Mr. Lorca’s poems will discover that world in Sarah Arvio’s translations. The Spanish originals are printed alongside her English versions. The language is rarely difficult, even when the ideas or references are obscure. Themes and motifs repeat. Mr. Lorca writes of love, most dramatically in his last homoerotic “Dark Love Sonnets,” which were not published until 1983, shortly after the decriminalization of homosexuality in Spain.
He also writes of Andalusia’s cities, and of its birds and scenery and plants. His plays such as “Blood Wedding,” expose the rigidity of patriarchal customs that controlled women’s lives. In addition to plays and poems, Mr. Lorca also wrote many essays — yet he was only 38 when he was killed.
Sarah Arvio’s introduction to her translations is illuminating, not only providing an outline biography of Mr. Lorca and a brief history of his publications, but setting his work within the traditions of Spanish prosody, and explaining her own strategies as a translator.
Those already familiar with Mr. Lorca’s work will enjoy working through her translations — inevitably they are interpretations too — while newcomers will find her book an accessible and immensely useful introduction to a poet of enormous gifts and tremendous influence in Spain and South America.
Claire Hopley is a writer and editor in Amherst, Mass.
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