Collected Poems: A Bilingual Edition
1056
Collected Poems: A Bilingual Edition
1056eBook
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Overview
A revised edition of this major writer's complete poetical work
And I who was walking
with the earth at my waist,
saw two snowy eagles
and a naked girl.
The one was the other
and the girl was neither.
-from "Qasida of the Dark Doves"
Federico García Lorca was the most beloved poet of twentieth-century Spain and one of the world's most influential modernist writers. His work has long been admired for its passionate urgency and haunting evocation of sorrow and loss. Perhaps more persistently than any writer of his time, he sought to understand and accommodate the numinous sources of his inspiration. Though he died at age thirty-eight, he left behind a generous body of poetry, drama, musical arrangements, and drawings, which continue to surprise and inspire.
Christopher Maurer, a leading García Lorca scholar and editor, has brought together new and substantially revised translations by twelve poets and translators, placed side by side with the Spanish originals. The seminal volume Poet in New York is also included here in its entirety.
This is the most comprehensive collection in English of a poet who—as Maurer writes in his illuminating introduction—"spoke unforgettably of all that most interests us: the otherness of nature, the demons of personal identity and artistic creation, sex, childhood, and death."
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466898653 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Publication date: | 08/14/2018 |
| Series: | FSG Classics |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 1056 |
| File size: | 8 MB |
About the Author
Federico García Lorca, one of Spain’s greatest poets and dramatists, was born in a village near Granada in 1898 and was murdered in 1936, at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War.
Christopher Maurer, the editor of García Lorca's Selected Verse, Poet in New York, and other works, is the author of numerous books and articles on Spanish poetry. He is head of the Department of Spanish, French, Italian, and Portuguese at the University of Illinois-Chicago.
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INTRODUCTION
Federico García Lorca (1898–1936) was a charismatic and complicated figure: preeminent poet of absence; renewer, with Miguel de Unamuno and Ramón del Valle-Inclán, of the modern Spanish stage; stern, inspired mediator — perhaps the most successful in modern Europe — of poetry and theater ("Theater," he once said, "is the poetry that rises from the page and becomes human" [OC III:630]). And he was much else besides: pianist, actor, director, lecturer, conversationalist, and maker of unforgettable drawings. Some of his friends thought of him as a creative force of almost "cosmic" dimensions. He was an "extraordinary creature," the poet Jorge Guillén once wrote. "And in this case 'creature' means more than 'man' ... [He was a] creature of Creation, the crossroads of Creation, a man immersed in Creation who partook of deep creative currents" (xvii). There is something elemental about Lorca. He seems to lead us urgently and directly to the central mysteries of human existence. In the thirteen plays and nine books of verse he was able to complete between 1917 and 1936 — an amazingly short career — he spoke unforgettably of all that most interests us: the otherness of nature, the demons of personal identity and artistic creation, sex, childhood, and death.
Born in 1898, the eldest child of a wealthy farmer and an intelligent, sensitive village schoolmistress, Lorca spent the first ten years of his life in a southern village in the midst of the river plain — the Vega — of Granada, the loveliest, most fertile countryside of Spain. Reading his correspondence, whose lyrical intensity sometimes rivals that of his poetry, one marvels that custom never blinded him to the poignant beauty of those rural surroundings. "If you were here," he writes to his friend the musicologist Adolfo Salazar in 1921 from Asquerosa, a village to which he returned often as a young man, "you would be spinning like a top, trying to see in all four directions at once.
A few days ago, a greenish-purple moon came out over the Sierra Nevada, and across the street from my house a woman sang a berceuse that was like a golden streamer tangling itself in the landscape. At sunset, above all, one lives in the midst of pure fantasy, in a half-effaced dream ... there are times when everything evaporates and we are left in a desert of pearly gray and pink and dead silver. I cannot tell you how enormous this vega is, and this little white village in the dark poplars. At night our flesh hurts from so many stars, and we are drunk on breeze and water. I doubt that even in India there are nights so charged with fragrance, so delirious. (EC 123)
Lorca's family was the wealthiest in Fuente Vaqueros, the poet's native village. But the family's liberal convictions and Federico's own curiosity as a child helped him to surmount social barriers and brought him into contact with the poverty and misery of rural Andalusia. A brief autobiography (PrI 447), probably written in 1918, records his anguish over the suffering of the rural poor. In one chapter he remembers having been told by the mother of one of his friends, "Don't come to see us tomorrow, because we have to do the washing."
What deep, mute tragedy! I couldn't visit them because they were naked. Trembling in the cold, they washed their rags — the only clothes they had ... And when I returned home and looked at my closet, full of clean, fragrant clothing, I felt a great uneasiness, a cold weight in my heart.
On another occasion, he watches one of his friends, the six-year-old son of a goatherd, die a painful death from an undiagnosed ailment:
One day he felt a strange, gnawing pain in his stomach, and was unable to move. His parents attributed it to his having eaten too much green fruit, and left him to his punishment ... But the pain only worsened ... An old woman who lived nearby invented a remedy ... cutting open a live toad and placing it on his stomach, and giving him mule dung cooked up with beetles.
Held down by several men, the screaming child is forced to swallow the revolting mixture. "Opening his mouth, which was full of bloody foam," he gives up the ghost. No consolation is offered to the boy's mother, only sarcasm from the woman who had concocted the medicine: "Such a delicate child! He wasn't fit to belong to a poor family" (PrI 390–91).
However melodramatic his account of these incidents, there is no doubt that Lorca was deeply troubled by social inequality. While living in the village he was always being reminded of his family's relative wealth (others dressed badly, but "on winter mornings I always went to school in a little red cape, with a black fur collar"). That feeling grew even more poignant when the family moved to Granada in 1910. Whenever he returned to the village as a young man, Lorca felt doubly estranged. In 1918 he writes:
The children who were in my grade school are field workers now, and when they see me, they almost don't dare to touch me with those great flinty hands of theirs, dirty from work. Why don't you come running and firmly shake my hand? Do you think the city has changed me? It hasn't. My body grew along with yours, and my heart beat to yours. Your hands are holier than mine. (PrI 439)
A longing for social justice, and bitter resentment of the Catholic Church for doing so little to alleviate suffering, are constant preoccupations in Lorca's earliest writing. "You are the miserable politicians of Evil," Lorca exclaims, condemning the Church in an essay of October 1917.
You are the exterminating angels of the light. You preach war in the name of the Lord of Hosts, and you teach men to hate whoever does not share your ideas ... The world you have educated is a stupid one whose wings have been trimmed ... We must rescue Jesus' idea from your ruinous machinations. ("Mística en que se trata de Dios" [Mystical Treatise on God], PrI 151)
Throughout his life, he would be haunted both by the failure of Rome to fulfill its evangelical mission (see "Cry to Rome" in Poet in New York) and by the poverty of the Spanish countryside. When the Second Republic was declared in 1931, Lorca traveled all over the country, both as lecturer and as director of a student theater troupe, La Barraca, to introduce drama, poetry, and modern painting to rural and provincial audiences. Some of his poetry and plays (Poet in New York, Play Without a Title) condemn the urban middle class's indifference to suffering. The popular success of one of his books, The Gypsy Ballads, seems to have helped him heal the social estrangement he had sometimes felt in childhood and adolescence. In a letter to his parents a year before his death, he tells of a reading of the Ballads in Barcelona:
The way I was received by the workers was extremely moving. It seemed so true, this contact with the real people. I was so moved I had a lump in my throat and could hardly speak ... When I read "Ballad of the Spanish Civil Guard," the whole theater rose to its feet and shouted, "Long live the poet of the people!" And then I had to undergo more than an hour and a half of people standing in line to shake my hand: artisans, old workers, mechanics, children, students. It was the loveliest act I have experienced in my life. (EC 816)
GRANADA
Lorca's love of the countryside — "I am tied to the land," he once said, "in all my emotions" (OC III:526) — is an important element in his character. Equally important is his love of Granada. During his adolescence, Granada was one of the most charming of Spanish provincial capitals. In the 1920s, Gerald Brenan writes (230), it was
a quiet, sedate, self-contained country town, little troubled, except during the month of April, by tourists, and very different from the busy expanding place it is today. Its charm lay, of course, in its situation — the immense green plain, the snow-covered mountains, the elms and cypresses of the Alhambra hill, the streams of noisy, hurrying water. These made up something one could not expect to find anywhere else. But the city was also attractive for its own sake. Its streets and squares and vistas and public gardens might be too unobtrusive to catch the passing tourist's eye, but they had plenty in the way of character and variety to offer the resident. And then beyond them there was always the flat green countryside, with its great glittering olive trees and its clear racing streams bordered with blue iris and its groves of poplar poles by the river. There was a lyrical quality about the place, an elegance of site and detail, of tint and shape, that evoked Tuscany or Umbria rather than the harsh and tawny lion-skin of Spain.
More than a lyrical "setting" to be appreciated and savored, more than an exquisite backdrop, Lorca's Granada developed into a fruitful aesthetic idea, an image of his own character, sexuality, and poetry.
Central to that image is a sense of elegy and absence, the melancholy certainty that "life" is temporally and spatially elsewhere. Even the natural beauty of the city seemed evanescent and fleeting:
It is an astounding wealth. A wealth that stylizes everything, and where nothing can be captured. Granada is certainly not made to be painted, not even by an Impressionist. It is not pictorial, just as a river is not architectural. Everything flows, plays, and escapes. It is poetic, musical. A city of fugues without a skeleton. Melancholy with vertebrae. That is why I can't live here. (EC 385)
For at least a hundred years, since the days of Washington Irving, Gautier, and Dumas, it had been impossible to see Granada without seeing what it was not: what it had ceased to be. This feeling arose, in part, from an awareness of Granada's diminished role in history. The Alhambra had been the last redoubt of the Moors when they were definitively conquered and expelled by the Catholic monarchs in 1492: "a terrible moment," Lorca once remarked, "though they teach us the opposite in school. For an admirable civilization was lost, with poetry, astronomy, architecture, and delicacy that were unequaled in the world" (DS 130). The city's "colorful" Arabic heritage, and especially the legend of the Alhambra, had been the subject of much Spanish poetry, good and bad, from Romantic poets like José de Zorrilla to Modernist ones like Francisco Villaespesa and Salvador Rueda.
Turning his back on a long poetical tradition of sultans and moonstruck Moorish princesses, of turbans and pearly alcázars, of geraniums and carnations and Andalusian "passion," Lorca preferred to see Granada in contrast to the sensual urgency and plenitude of Seville ("Seville is Don Juan ... it is man in the full complexity of his sensuality and emotion" [SG 67]). In one of the loveliest of Spain's traditional poems, a ballad steeped in Arab tradition, Granada is addressed as a bride by those who conquered her from the Moors:
If you would let me, Granada,
But in Lorca's peculiar vision, Granada is not ruled by a feminine spirit. The genius loci is the "effeminate archangel" depicted in St. Michael (Granada) in The Gypsy Ballads. That poem, inspired by a Baroque statue in a local shrine, dwells on the strangeness of an archangel who is usually seen as a warrior, but is dressed, here, like an "ephebe,"
his petticoats frozen in spangles and lace.
The idea of enclosure — St. Michael is depicted "in the alcove of his tower" — arises often when Lorca speaks of his native city. Granada's timid soul, he insists, has always fled from the forces of nature — wind, driving rain, ocean, stars — and, with a love of small, intimate things, has taken refuge from the elements in the interior courtyard, the convent or monastery, the salon, the tiny chamber, the carmen (the walled house and garden thought by the Arabs to be an image of paradise). In his lecture "Paradise Closed to Many, Gardens Open to Few," on the masterpiece of the Baroque poet Pedro Soto de Rojas, Lorca writes that Rojas "encloses himself in his garden, and discovers water jets, dahlias, finches and gentle breezes" (SG 65).
To Lorca, Granada is not the unending firmament, but a single star framed in a window. Not the roar of the ocean, but the ocean one hears in a shell:
Someone brought me a seashell.
Singing inside is a sea from a map.
Someone brought me a seashell.
Even the wind seems tamer in Granada than elsewhere. Lorca writes of breezes that "dance on the fingertips" (SG 100), and one of the Suites evokes
The breeze so wavy like the hair of certain girls.
And all over Granada — and throughout Lorca's poetry — there is water. Not the abundant water of Versailles but "water with tempo, rather than murmur, water that is well measured and precise as it follows its geometrical, rhythmic course through the irrigation ditches" (SG 99).
Water taps its silver drum.
Water pent in wells, mortally still in river pools and reflecting ponds, scooped up and lifted on waterwheels, channeled through ditches and subterranean rivers (the paving-over of the Darro River in the early twentieth century left a psychological scar on the city); water pulsing skyward with swordlike movements and "rivers standing up": the water jets of the Generalife.
It would be tempting to gather all these images of Granada into an image of Lorca's sexuality: of his unremitting rejection and fear of heterosexual love. In his work, for example, pent-up water is often a symbol of death, of infertility and sexual frustration. It is in one of the letters — a note to Salvador Dalí's sister Ana María, written after an emotionally liberating vacation by the Mediterranean in Cadaqués — that he comes closest to linking the "tame" water of Granada with sexual repression and denial.
The weather is good, and the señoritas of Granada go up to their whitewashed terraces to see the mountains and not see the ocean ... In the afternoon they dress in gauze and vaporous satiny things and go down to the promenade where the fountains flow like diamonds and there is an old anguish of roses and amorous melancholy ... the señoritas of Granada have no love for the sea. They have enormous nacar shells with painted sailors and that is the way they see it; and great conch shells in their salons, and that is the way they hear it. (EC 362)
Even the presence of kitsch seems revealing: the useless objects, the "enormous nacar shells with painted sailors" are as sad and deathly as the fragile, untouched bodies of the señoritas. It is hardly surprising that the heroine of Lorca's drama Doña Rosita the Spinster, an elegy of unrequited love set in turn-of-the-century Granada, is surrounded by useless objects, many of them in miniature.
The case of Doña Rosita, the aging spinster who waits in vain for the return of her lover from America, is paradigmatic. In Lorca's view, the inhabitant of Granada is better suited for meditation than for action. In Granada, "the day has only one immense hour, and that hour is spent drinking water, revolving on the axis of one's cane, and looking at the landscape ... Two and two are never four in Granada. They are always two and two" (OC III:302).
As a young man, surrounded by a group of brilliant friends — the tertulia that gathered for conversation at the Alameda Café — Lorca protested energetically against this sense of historical "uselessness" and inaction. Two especially significant acts of rebellion were the cante jondo (deep song) festival he organized with the composer Manuel de Falla in 1922 and the short-lived literary magazine gallo, which he founded and directed in 1928.
The festival — an amateur competition designed to defend the aesthetic value of cante jondo (the Andalusian folk music also known as flamenco) and rescue it from commercial adulteration — created a controversy in the local and national press, for the question of deep song seemed to be bound up with the Spanish identity. Those who opposed it argued that the festival would only reinforce certain gypsyesque stereotypes about Spain and Spanish music. Falla and Lorca made their stand for cante jondo not as folklore but as living proof of Granada's "universality." Here, they argued, was an ancient musical tradition, one that had influenced French and Russian composers, from Glinka to Debussy, as well as modern Spaniards, from Albéniz and Granados to Robert Gerhard and Frederic Mompou (SD 10). Not even the Alhambra, Falla thought, was as truly universal.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Collected Poems"
by .
Copyright © 2002 Herederos de Federico García Lorca.
Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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Table of Contents
Preface
Introduction, by Christopher Maurer
From BOOK OF POEMS
(Translated by Catherine Brown)
POEM OF THE DEEP SONG
(Translated by Cola Franzen, Christopher Maurer, and Robert Nasatir)
SUITES
(Translated by Jerome Rothenberg)
Appendix to SUITES
SONGS, 1921-1924
(Translated by Alan S. Trueblood)
THE GYPSY BALLADS, 1924-1927
(Translated by Will Kirkland and Christopher Maurer)
ODES
(Translated by William Bryant Logan, Greg Simon, and Steven F. White)
POET IN NEW YORK
(Translated by Greg Simon and Steven F. White)
TRIP TO THE MOON
(Translated by Greg Simon and Steven F. White)
"Childhood and Death"
Poems from EARTH AND MOON
(Translated by Greg Simon and Steven F. White)
THE TAMARIT DIVAN
(Translated by Catherine Brown)
SIX GALICIAN POEMS
(Translated by Catherine Brown)
LAMENT FOR IGNACIO SÁNCHEZ MEJÍAS
(Translated by Galway Kinnell)
[SONNETS OF DARK LOVE]
(Translated by Angela Jaffray)
OTHER SONNETS, 1923-1936
(Translated by Christopher Maurer)
UNCOLLECTED POEMS
ard(Translated by Christopher Maurer)
Notes to the Poems, by Christopher Maurer
Bibliography
The Translators
Index of Titles and First Lines
Índice de títulos y primeros versos