Selected Poems: new edition

FEDERICO GARCÍA LORCA

SELECTED POEMS

translated by Merryn Williams

Federico García Lorca, Spain’s greatest modern poet and dramatist, was murdered by Fascist partisans in 1936, shortly after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. He was by then an immensely popular figure, celebrated throughout the Spanish-speaking world, and at the height of his creative powers. After his death, with his work suppressed, he became a potent symbol of the martyrdom of Spain.

The manuscript of Lorca’s last poems, his tormented Sonnets of Dark Love, disappeared during the Civil War. For fifty years the poems lived only in the words of the poets who had heard Lorca read them, like Neruda and Aleixandre, who remembered them as ‘a pure and ardent monument to love in which the prime material is now the poet’s flesh, his heart, his soul wide open to his own destruction’. Lorca’s lost sonnets were re-discovered in Spain during the 1980s, and this was the first book to include English translations of these brooding poems.

Merryn Williams’ edition draws on the full range of Lorca’s poetry, from the early poems and the gypsy ballads to the agitated Poet in New York sequence and the Arab-influenced gacelas and casidas which followed his American exile. It includes the Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, Lorca’s great elegy for his bullfighter friend, as well as the full text of his famous lecture on the duende, the daemon of Spanish music, song, dance, poetry and art.

In these remarkable translations, Lorca’s elemental poems are reborn in English, with their stark images of blood and moon, of water and earth; of bulls, horses and fish; olives, sun and oranges; knives and snow; darkness and death.

FEDERICO GARCÍA LORCA

Selected Poems

TRANSLATED BY

Merryn Williams

CONTENTS

Title Page

Introduction

Selected Bibliography

(1919-1925) – Early Poems

Sueño

Dream

Baladilla de los tres ríos

Little Ballad of Three Rivers

Paisaje

Landscape

La guitarra

The Guitar

Pueblo

Village

Saeta

Saeta

Camino

Journey

Malagueña

Malagueña

Nocturnos de la ventana (4)

Nocturnes of the Window (4)

Arco de lunas

Arc of Moons

Canción de jinete (1860)

Song of the Rider (1860)

Canción de jinete

Song of the Rider

La luna asoma

The Moon Comes Out

Murió al amanecer

He Died at Dawn

La soltera en misa

The Spinster at Mass

Despedida

Farewell

Suicidio

Suicide

Granada y 1850

Granada and 1850

Dos marinos en la orilla

Two Sailors on the Beach

Canción del naranjo seco

Song of the Barren Orange Tree

Oda a Salvador Dalí

Ode to Salvador Dalí

(1924-1927)Romancero Gitano – Gypsy Ballads

Romance de la luna, luna

Ballad of the Moon, Moon

Preciosa y el aire

Preciosa and the Wind

Reyerta

The Fight

Romance sonámbulo

Somnambular Ballad

La monja gitana

The Gypsy Nun

La casada infiel

The Faithless Wife

Romance de la pena negra

Ballad of the Black Sorrow

San Miguel (Granada)

St Michael (Granada)

San Rafael (Córdoba)

St Raphael (Córdoba)

San Gabriel (Sevilla)

St Gabriel (Sevilla)

Prendimiento de Antoñito el Camborio en el camino de Sevilla

The Arrest of Tony Camborio on the Road to Sevilla

Muerte de Antoñito el Camborio

The Death of Tony Camborio

Romance del emplazado

Ballad of the Doomed Man

Romance de la Guardia Civil española

Ballad of the Spanish Civil Guard

Thamar y Amnón

Thamar and Amnón

(1929-30)Poeta en Nueva York – Poet in New York

Vuelta de paseo

Back from a Walk

1910

1910

El rey de Harlem

The King of Harlem

Iglesia abandonada

Abandoned Church

Danza de la muerte

Dance of Death

Asesinato

Murder

La aurora

Daybreak

New York (oficina y denuncia)

New York (office and denunciation)

Grito hacia Roma

Cry to Rome

Oda a Walt Whitman

Ode to Walt Whitman

Adán

Adam

Son de negros en Cuba

Song of the Negroes in Cuba

(1936)Diván del Tamarit – Diván del Tamarit

Gacela del amor imprevisto

Gacela of Unforeseen Love

Gacela de la terrible presencia

Gacela of the Terrible Presence

Gacela del amor desesperado

Gacela of Desperate Love

Gacela del niño muerto

Gacela of the Dead Child

Gacela de la muerte oscura

Gacela of the Dark Death

Gacela de la huida

Gacela of the Flight

Casida del herido por el agua

Casida of One Wounded by the Water

Casida del llanto

Casida of the Weeping

Casida de la mujer tendida

Casida of the Reclining Woman

Casida de la rosa

Casida of the Rose

Casida de las palomas oscuras

Casida of the Dark Doves

(1935)Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías – Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías

1.La cogida y la muerte

The Tossing and the Death

2.La sangre derramada

The Spilled Blood

3.Cuerpo presente

The Body Laid Out

4.Alma ausente

Absent Soul

(1935-1936)Sonetas del amor oscuro – Sonnets of Dark Love

Soneto de la guirnalda de rosas

Sonnet of the Garland of Roses

Soneto de la dulce queja

Sonnet of the Sweet Complaint

Llagas de amor

The Wounds of Love

Soneto de la carta

Sonnet of the Letter

El poeta dice la verdad

The poet speaks the truth

El poeta habla por teléfono con el amor

The poet speaks to the loved one by telephone

El poeta pregunta a su amor por la «Ciudad Encantada» de Cuenca

The poet questions his lover on the ‘enchanted city’ of Cuenca

Soneto gongorino en que el poeta manda a su amor una paloma

Gongorine sonnet in which the poet sends his loved one a pigeon

[¡Ay voz secreta del amor oscuro!]

‘Ah, secret voice of dark love’

El amor duerme en el pecho del poeta

The loved one sleeps on the poet’s breast

Noche del amor insomne

Night of Sleepless Love

(1933)Juega y teoría del duende – Theory and Function of the Duende

Index of English titles and first lines

Index of Spanish titles and first lines

About the Author

Copyright

INTRODUCTION

In the 85 years since Lorca’s murder his plays have been performed throughout Europe and America with great success. His poetry, apart from ‘Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías’ and some of the gypsy ballads, was, until recently, less well-known to anglophones. Yet all over the Spanish-speaking world he is recognised as one of the very greatest modern poets. His ‘Sonnets of Dark Love’, lost for nearly half a century, have added to his reputation and now several English translations exist.

Federico García Lorca was born on 5 June 1898, a few months after another great poet-dramatist, Brecht. His father, Federico García Rodríguez, was a landowner in Fuente Vaqueros, Andalucía; his mother, Vicenta Lorca Romero, had been a schoolmistress. The family had grown moderately rich through the sugar beet boom, but their relations had been landless labourers. There were four younger children, one of whom, Luis, died in infancy. This may be why the image of the dead child reverberates through Lorca’s work.

The poet remembered his early years as a magic time. He grew up in what was then one of the most beautiful parts of Europe, and in a small friendly community scarcely touched by industrialism:

I love the countryside. I feel myself linked to it in all my emotions. My oldest childhood memories have the flavour of the earth…Were this not so I could not have written Blood Wedding.

According to his brother Francisco, the people really did talk as they do in the plays: ‘One time Dolores was describing the birth of a spring and in her picturesque and vivid speech she said …and imagine, a bull of water rose up.’ (Lorca would use the bull/water image in his ‘Ballad of the Doomed Man’). Illiterate nurses and servants transmitted a rich oral culture to the middle-class children they cared for. Lorca as an adult remained fascinated by the ancient lullabies and ballads of Andalucía. Ultimately their message was a harsh one, ‘alone you are, alone you always will be’.

The history of southern Spain was intensely real to the child. When he was eight, he saw a Roman mosaic uncovered in the fields; when he was ten, the family moved to Granada, a city full of fountains, exotic flowers, views of the Sierra and marvellous Arab architecture. The people of his region included many gypsies and descendants of Moors and Jews who had been forcibly converted to Catholicism in the 15th century. Lorca believed that his own blood was mixed and identified with the ethnic minorities, as we now call them:

Coming from Granada gives me a fellow feeling for those who are persecuted. For the gypsy, the negro, the Jew, the Moor, whom all granadinos carry inside them.

The city was beautiful, but dominated by a middle class which was bigoted and philistine. Lorca felt afterwards that the move to Granada marked the end of his childhood, as hinted in the poem ‘1910’. The boys at his new school called him ‘Federica’ and despised him for his clumsiness (one leg was shorter than the other, which got him out of doing military service). He was a remarkably gifted musician and wanted to study in Paris, but his father insisted he should train for a conventional career. Like the boy in ‘Suicide’, he probably went through agonies because he could not do his geometry. But in his late teens he began to write poems and read them to the groups of lively young people who hung about the cafés of Granada. Young as he was he was a born performer and intensely charismatic.

In 1919 he moved to Madrid, officially to study law (in which he managed with great difficulty to get a degree). He lodged at the Residencia de Estudiantes, a famous institution run on liberal non-sectarian lines. Here he met other brilliant young Spaniards, including Luis Buñuel the future film director, and wrote an avantgarde play, The Butterfly’s Evil Spell, which was booed off the stage. Without being involved in politics, he and his friends believed that deep changes were needed in Spain. The country was much more backward than the rest of Europe; the contrast between rich and poor was glaring; the Catholic church had unacceptable privileges and the cultural establishment seemed to them hopelessly behind the times.

His sympathy for the avant-garde was strengthened by his friendship with Salvador Dalí, whom he met in 1923. Lorca was excited by his ‘huge, extraordinarily expressive squares of burning paint’ and was also in love with him, a love which was not fully returned. By this time he had realised he was homosexual (yet another persecuted minority with which he identified), and that made his life difficult. He could never tell his parents, but most acquaintances were aware of it and some were openly hostile. An early poem, ‘Escena Trasmundo’ (‘Scene – Trasmundo’), pictures him being told to behave like a normal young man:

Toma el anillo de bodas

que llevaran tus abuelos.

Cien manos, bajo la tierra

lo estan echando de manos.

Take the wedding ring

  your grandparents used to wear.

A hundred hands underground

have now not got it.

He answers:

Voy a sentir en mis manos

una immense flor de dedos

y el simbolo del anillo.

No lo quiero.

I’m going to feel in my hands

a giant clump of fingers

and that symbolic ring.

I don’t want it!

For all his love of children, he knew he had to accept his condition and refuse to continue the family line.

Modernist in some respects (he liked to claim he had been born in 1900, to stamp himself as a man of the new century), he was still deeply rooted in the traditional culture of Spain. He was a friend of the composer Manuel de Falla, with whom he organised a flamenco festival in 1922. His early poems were very simple lyrics which went straight to the hearts of ordinary people. He preferred to read them aloud rather than print them, so his reputation was high among fellow-writers at a time when he had published very little. Meanwhile he resisted getting a job, assuring his father that he would soon make a breakthrough as a playwright.

The first breakthrough came when his play, Mariana Pineda, was staged in 1927. In the following year he published Gypsy Ballads, which had a vast and immediate success. He still did not, though, possess a settled income and remained humiliatingly dependent on his parents.

Accounts of him give the impression of a great charmer, multitalented (he was an expert pianist, played the guitar, drew and sang), unathletic, impractical and a natural victim. One memory is from an old peasant woman:

He wasn’t brave… He was a very kind person. When he was around nobody went hungry.

Another, from an English acquaintance:

On the surface he seemed lively, even gay, but what struck me most was the sad look in his eyes, the kind of sadness that one sees in the eyes of an animal, not because they are hurt or suffering from anything in particular but a kind of elemental sorrow for the nature of things.

That dates from 1929 when Lorca was passing through England (his only visit) en route for New York. He had had some sort of crisis, was suffering from a serious depression and wanted a complete break with the Old World. But the United States, where Wall Street was about to crash, did not make him feel any better; he went into culture-shock and spent the next nine months writing the extraordinary poems which were collected, after his death, in Poet in New York. It left him with a hatred of industrial capitalism and an abiding sympathy for black Americans. He was glad to head for Cuba, where his Gypsy Ballads were already famous, and then to go home.

Next year, 1931, Spain became a republic and Lorca, like most intellectuals, believed that they were at the start of a new and hopeful age. As well as other very necessary reforms, the new government was anxious to spread education and culture. ‘Illiteracy blinds the spirit’, as a Civil War poster would say. He became director of a student theatre