The continuing legacy of Poet Frederico Garcia Lorca ( 5/6/1896 -19/8/36 )

Frederico Garcia Lorca  poet, playwright, musician and social activist was born on 5 June 1898 in the village of Fuente Vaqeurtos in the province of Granada, a man ahead of his time, avant gardist, homosexual and restless traveller, the most  gypsy of poets , a term he rejected, friend of surrealists, developing his own ingenious style, full of lyrical freshness and spontaneity. His poems  painted a vivid and intrinsic poetical portrait of Spain and the region of Andalucía in particular. A poet of the universal, who used his voice to speak about love, death, passion, cruelty and injustice, and also the most international, saying - ' I sing to Spain, and I feel her to the core of my being, but above all Iam a man of the world and brother of everyone.' 

It should be remembered that before being a poet, Lorca was a musician. “First of all, I am a musician,” he once said in an interview. “I’m crazy about songs,” he said in another. His musical training came before any other, but above all, his passion for music palpitated at an early age and marked his entire life, including his conception of poetry. The musicality of Lorca’s lyrics was his hallmark, as can already be seen in some of his early books, such as First Songs and Songs. These contain short compositions that correspond in many cases to poetic structures of popular songs. The elements of folk music run through his poetry and find their maximum splendor in Gypsy Ballads and Poema del cante jondo.  Lorca was always grateful to one of his great teachers, Antonio Segura. This pianist from Granada was his piano teacher when the Lorca family moved from Fuente Vaqueros to Granada. According to the poet, Segura was the one who introduced him to “folkloric science.”

 Lorca, who deeply admired Beethoven, had extraordinary musical skills, that is to say, a magnificent ear and a wonderful technique at the piano. Thanks to Segura and his own instinct, from a very young age he developed a love of the folklore that he imbibed from the wet nurses who were part of the household and who told him stories and sang lullabies. From all this, Lorca emerged a wonderfully musical being — to the point that at the Madrid Student Residence he captivated everyone when he played the piano, even more so than with his poems. To talk about Lorca is, therefore, also to talk about music. 

These days, this link can be seen in a stupendous play, Federico García, directed and performed by Pep Tosar at Teatro Pavón in Madrid. The production evidences that the best way to explain Lorca is by using narrative elements such as flamenco guitars, singing and dancing. He was the poet of rhythm and of the duende, the spark that illuminates music. The string of musical admirers who have drawn on Lorca for their creations is long and seemingly endless: Camarón de la Isla, Paco de Lucía, Enrique Morente, Lole and Manuel, Carlos Cano, Leonard Cohen, Patti Smith, Ben Sidran, Ana Belén, Lagartija Nick, Los Planetas… And yet, the point is not to underscore that unbreakable relationship between Lorca and music, but to highlight his musical universe, his contribution to Spanish popular music.

In 1919, at age 21, Lorca moved from his hometown Granada to Madrid to study Philosophy and Law at the Residencia de Estudiantes. At university, he  became associated with a group of artists who would become known as Generación del 27, including the painter Salvadore Dalí, the filmmaker Luis Bunuel, and the poet Rafael Alberti  and began publishing poetry in various volumes.

In 1927, his play Mariana Pineda ,which had scenic designs painted by Dalí , opened to great acclaim in Barcelona. Lorca rose quickly, assuming his position as eccentric poet and dramatist, but struggled with the balance of his public and private lives. His homosexuality was a point of contention and allegedly damaged his friendship with Dalí.

Following the advice of his family, Lorca left Spain in 1929, on the RMS Olympic transatlantic cruiser, and headed for New York City. At that time he'd also published "Canciones" (1927) and "Primer romancero gitano" (1928); this is his most accessible and popular book. During this trip he writes "Poeta en Nueva York", one of his most famous books. His New York poems are harsh and difficult at times, at others erotic and exhilarating. In 1930 he travels to Cuba, where he'd write a considerable part of his texts.

He returned to Spain after a year abroad and became director of the student theatre La Barraca. Between 1933 and 1936 he wrote his most prolific work: Blood Wedding, Yerma and The House of Bernarda Alba, completed just two months before his untimely death. These three popular works became known as the rural trilogy, exploring class, status and gender conventions.

In 1933 he traveled to Argentina to promote the staging of some of his plays by Lola Membrive's theatre company, and to give a series of conferences. His stay in Argentina was a great success: his staging of "La dama boba" by Lope de Vega attracted over 60 thousand people.

In 1933 he also co-founded the "Asociación de Amigos de la Unión Soviética", and between that year and 1936 he wrote "Divan de Tamarit" and "Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías", which moved the whole Hispanic world. His theatre company La Barraca travelled across rural Spain, presenting his plays in village squares and small towns. Like his poetry, they found inspiration in the popular traditions of the south, and in particular in the flamenco music of Andalucia.

Over his short career in the public eye, Lorca built a reputation both at home and abroad as a passionate individual who  believed that the purpose of theatre was to question and challenge societal norms, and express the individualism at the core of the artist’s heart.

‘A nation that does not support and encourage its theatre is — if not dead — dying; just as a theatre that does not capture with laughter and tears the social and historical pulse, the drama of its people, the genuine colour of the spiritual and natural landscape, has no right to call itself a theatre, but only a place for amusement,’ he said.

‘The artist, and particularly the poet, is always an anarchist in the best sense of the word. He must heed only the call that arises within him from three strong voices: the voice of death, with all its foreboding, the voice of love, and the voice of art.’

By the time Lorca returned from Buenos Aires, where he’d been lecturing and directing the Argentine premiere of his play Blood Wedding, Spain was paralysed by political tensions. Death
had spilled out of the plaza de toros—the bullfighting arena—into the plazas of cities and villages, where the Nationalist uprising left bodies rotting in the streets. 
After being airlifted by Nazi Junkers transports across the Strait of Gibraltar, Franco’s army beat an unrelenting march northward toward Madrid, with the aid of German and Italian tanks and planes. Taking orders from superiors and incited by the sinister broadcasts of Lieutenant General Queipo de Llano in Seville, the uprising machine-gunned innocents, raped and branded women, and carried out mass executions of peasants. The soldiers of the Foreign Legion, who called themselves the bridegrooms of death, collected the ears of enemies, just as Franco had once done as a young soldier in Africa. Their battle cry was: “¡Viva la muerte!”—Long live death! 
In Lorca’s hometown of Granada, where he had fled to thinking he would be safer than in his adopted Madrid, long-simmering hatreds and rivalries boiled over,  and almost immediately after he had arrived, the area was seized by the Nationalist Fallangists. Falangist Escuadras Negras—Black Squads—began conducting summary executions, revealing a bloodlust among neighbors that rapidly left ravines threaded with shallow graves. 
In spite of carefully cultivating an apolitical stance,  someone once asked Lorca about his political preferences and he answered he felt Catholic, communist, anarchist, libertarian, traditionalist and monarchist at the same time. He never joined any of the political parties and never discriminated or severed his relationship with any of his friends for political reason  but despite this his association with the Republic made him a marked man. His plays also dealt with repression, and some anti-Catholic opinions in interviews made him a high profile target.
The conflict at the heart of his writing is between freedom and repression, represented by the Civil Guard that terrorised rural Spain for so long.

"Black are the horses.
The horseshoes are black.
On the dark capes glisten
stains of ink and wax.
Their skulls are leaden
which is why they do not weep.
Hunchbacked and nocturnal
where they go, they command
silences of dark rubber
and fears like fine sand..."

When push came to shove, after years of seeing deprivation in his country and abroad, it was clear where his sympathies lay, once saying 

" I will always be on the side of those who have nothing, and who are not even allowed to enjoy the nothing they have in peace. "

Despite going into hiding, the Fallangists hunted him down. Lorca was arrested on the same day his brother-in-law was assassinated. He was arrested and imprisoned, without trial and charge, and mercilessly tortured. On August 19th at around 3.00 a.m he was handcuffed to another prisoner ( a teacher). shortly before  dawn he was taken out along with the teacher and two bullfighters ( members of the Anarchist Trade Union CNT), three guards struck Lorca's body with the butts of their rifles, then he was shot, his body riddle with bullets. Some say he was  murdered because of his sexuality,  as well as his politics. The body of Frederico Garcia, one of the greatest poets and playwrights  of the twentieth century and  one of Spain's most prodigious sons was unceremoniously dumped in a hastily dug hole, soon to be a mass grave. Despite years of efforts his body  has never been found.The fascist forces then tried to erase his memory, burning and banning  his books. Lorca’s writing, considered deeply homoerotic, was banned until 1954.and the ban on all of his works was not fully rescinded until after the death of dictator General Franco in 1975.

 Few artists, have represented and embodied their nations collective spirit more than Lorca , which makes  the tragic account of his death all the more heartbreaking.

Throughout his all too short but trailblazing life, death had been his central artistic theme, it seems he had foretold his own violent death, when he wrote  ' Then I realised I had been murdered. They  looked for me in cafes, cemeteries and churches - but they did not find me. They never found me. They never found me.'

He traced the Spanish tradition of bullfighting to the same fatalistic attraction to death. “Spain,” Lorca wrote, “is the only country where death is a national spectacle, the only one where death sounds long trumpet blasts at the coming of spring.”

One thing is for certain his life would not be forgotten. As Spain moved to democracy, Lorca rose to the fore again, his writings finding a new generation, his plays are mounted frequently all over the world and his voice still  belong to humanity. An emblem who gave his  life for Spain, a martyr of it's people. He once said ' I will always be on the side of those who have nothing and who are not even allowed  to enjoy the nothing they have in peace.' 

During the last decade there have been several failed attempts to locate the poets grave with many believing that finding  the final resting place of Lorca, a voice of pluralism and tolerance, can help reconcile Spain with its tragic past. But many years after his death, and despite his short life,  his voice continues to ring out, where bullets were unable to silence him.

Today Frederico García Lorca is remembered as a martyr,  an international symbol of the politically oppressed, representing  all the dead of the Spanish Civil War and representing all victims of the terrible crimes committed by Franco's dictatorship , where Lorca was one victim of many. More than four hundred thousand Spaniards spent time in concentration camps between 1939 and 1947. And over the next three decades, Spaniards continued to be persecuted for political reasons; thousands were executed by firing squad and garrotte. Half a million fled the country. And in the jittery, transition to democracy after Franco's death, politicians adopted a don't look back policy, and in 1977, Spain's parliaament passed an amnesty law that sealed the past in what became known as the pacto de olvido, or pact of oblivion. 

Dictators can kill poets but Lorca remains one of the most influential creative voices of his time, who pioneered for a ‘new morality, a morality of complete freedom,’ through his work as a writer and artist. Lorca's work  is profoundly and revealingly Spanish, but at the same time universally human, and his poetical celebrations of passion, and desire live on. 

Frederico Garcia Lorca - Sonnet

I know that my profile will be serene
in the north of an unreflecting sky.
Mercury of vigil, chaste mirror
to break the pulse of my style.

For if ivy and the cool of linen
are the norm of the body I leave behind,
my profile in the sand will be the old
unblushing silence of a crocodile.

And though my tongue of frozen doves
will never taste of flame,
only of empty broom,

I'll be a free sign of oppressed norms
on the neck of the stiff branch
and in an ache of dahlias without end.

Largo espectro de plata conmovida
el viento de la noche suspirando,
abrió con mano gris mi vieja herida
y se alejó: yo estaba deseando.

Llaga de amor que me dará la vida
perpetua sangre y pura luz brotando.
Grieta en que Filomela enmudecida
tendrá bosque, dolor y nido blando.

¡Ay qué dulce rumor en mi cabeza!
Me tenderé junto a la flor sencilla
donde flota sin alma tu belleza.

Y el agua errante se pondrá amarilla,
mientras corre mi sangre en la maleza
mojada y olorosa de la orilla. 

 Frederico Garcia Lorca -  Before the Dawn

But like love
the archers
are blind

Upon the green night,
the piercing saetas
leave traces of warm
lily

The Keel of the moon
breaks through purple clouds
and their quivers
still with dew

Aye, but like love
the archers
are blind!