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The New York Review of Books Review
Austere
Fireworks
By Michael Wood
Collected Poems: A Bilingual Edition Four Puppet Plays, 'Play Without a Title,' The Divan
Poems and Other Poems, Prose Poems and Dramatic Pieces Line of Light and Shadow: The Drawings
of Federico García Lorca The House of Bernarda Alba Federico
García Lorca is one of the best-known poets of the twentieth century and one
of the best-loved Spanish poets of any time, but he remains a curiously
elusive figure, restless and changing in his work as in his life. Does he
belong to tradition or to the avant-garde? Are his strengths his simplicity
and closeness to the popular imagination, or his elegance, sophistication,
and learning? Did the author of so many delicate children's songs also create
all those poems and drawings riddled with ugly sexual fear? Can the poet of
the darkly tormented homoerotic sonnets really have produced the shrill
railing against "fairies" that stains the "Ode to Walt
Whitman"? Is there a way to get from the haggard drama of The House
of Bernarda Alba to the Pirandellian high jinks of The Public? The
answer to all these questions is yes. The alternatives are not alternatives,
they are Lorca. But that is another way of saying how elusive he is; and was
to himself. An early poem speaks of an "uncertain heart"— este
corazón mío ¡tan incierto! The phrase sounds like the expression of a youthful
hesitation but it turns out to have been a prophecy, a preview of a long
habit. Lorca
was born near Granada in 1898. His family was well-to-do and numerous, and
his childhood seems to have been both sheltered and colorful. He was
unathletic— in his biography of Lorca Ian Gibson remarks that "there is
no record of anyone ever having seen Lorca run"— and none too keen on
school: "docile and undisciplined," as his brother later put it.
But he was sociable and imaginative, and greatly gifted musically, becoming a
friend and protégé of the composer de Falla. Lorca thought of Granada as an
inward-looking place, a city living in its defeated past, but accounts of its
artistic life make it sound fairly lively. After attending the university
there Lorca moved to Madrid, where he met Buñuel, Dalí, and a spirited crowd
of aesthetes and pranksters. Lorca wrote profusely from an early age, and
acquired a considerable reputation as a poet and a playwright, but he was
reluctant to publish books, and what he did publish scarcely represented his
rapidly shifting interests. He was tired of his most famous volume, Romancero
Gitano (Gypsy Ballads), by the time it appeared in 1928; and his huge
success as a playwright— at one point he had three plays on simultaneously in
Madrid— made him want to rethink the theater. He traveled in North and South
America to huge acclaim— he was a tremendous performer of poems, songs,
lectures, and a fine pianist— but seems never to have been able to convert
his fame into confidence. It is this brilliant uncertainty that makes his
work seem both miraculous and uneven; troubled when it looks calm, oddly
smooth and authoritative when it announces anguish. Pablo
Neruda's ode to the poet (published in Residence on Earth II,[1] 1935) ends on a curiously enigmatic
note: Ya sabes por ti mismo muchas cosas, / y otras irás sabiendo
lentamente, "You know many things through yourself [on your own, or
by your own experience], / and others you will be getting to know
slowly." Much of what Lorca might have got to know was withheld from him
by his early death— he was assassinated by Nationalist thugs at the beginning
of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. Neruda could not have foreseen that, but
his lines do seem worrying as well as promising: as if Lorca already knew too
much and too little, as if what he had yet to learn could only come hard, a
ruination of what was not quite innocence. Of course Neruda may only have
meant to celebrate the poet's knowledge of the multifarious, brightly colored
world, but even that world, in the poem, is chiefly a place of tears and
goodbyes and emptiness, and Neruda's very praise of Lorca's vision swerves to
bitterness: "Federico, / you see the world, the streets, / the vinegar…." Collected Poems
is a bilingual edition with a very good introduction and excellent notes by
Christopher Maurer. It is actually Volume II of Lorca's collected poems in
English. Volume I, also edited by Maurer, was the bilingual Poet in New
York, translated by Greg Simon and Steven F. White (Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 1988). The present volume includes in full all the other books of
Lorca's poetry, with the exception of the early Libro de Poemas, (Book
of Poems), from which there is a selection. The translations in this volume
are by Francisco Aragon, Catherine Brown, Will Kirkland, William Bryant
Logan, David K. Loughran, Jerome Rothenberg, Greg Simon, Alan S. Trueblood,
Elizabeth Umlas, John K. Walsh, Steven F. White, and Maurer himself; and as
one might expect of the work of so many hands, the styles are quite varied.
Most of the translators, as Maurer says, have shunned the
"poetical." Overall
the work is both ingenious and accurate, setting a very high standard for
translation of verse from Spanish. Occasionally— a dozen times perhaps in
this very large volume— the translators give in to the mysterious impulse to
meddle rather than render. Dogs become mongrels, water becomes sea. Why would
anyone want to make a music box on the wind, una caja de música / sobre la
brisa, a "music box grinding away"? Or write "where poplars
thrive" for among the poplars? "Headless and blind" where the
Spanish has only headless? Or want to offer variation where Lorca plainly
offers repetition? "Look" and "stare" for the repeated look;
"fading," "starved," and "die" for a line that
simply repeats die? Children and childhood recur again and
again in Lorca's work. There is a sense of wanting to go back to a loved
place and a time before torment, but even the place and the time are haunted;
fragile, always invaded paradises. The poems make the very happiness of
Lorca's childhood seem streaked with anguish, and childhood becomes a
metaphor for what even childhood cannot possess. Passion is "like a lost
child / in a forgotten tale," literally like an abandoned child in a
story which has been erased: twice lost. When Lorca writes of the child
"all the poets / have lost," he means, I take it, both the
Wordsworthian infant poets generally forget or betray and the particular child
he himself was. In
one sense Lorca never abandoned his own childhood, and his weakest poems are
those where he is trying hardest not to let go; where he gets only a
childlike effect, or seeks too consciously to mime beliefs that are much
simpler than his own. But in a deeper sense he never stopped looking for his
childhood, and in that quest lies much of what is most powerful and most
lyrical in his writing. A wonderful 1929 poem begins "Para buscar mi
infancia, ¡Dios mio!" "To look for my childhood, my God!"
and ends by seeing childhood as a rat fleeing through a dark garden. Another
poem of the same year evokes the poet's "eyes of 1910": Aquellos
ojos mios de mìl novecíentos diez, and describes what those eyes did and
did not see: a vision of loss, dust, and disguise. A slightly earlier poem
sees a lover's childhood as a world of fable gone beyond all recall, leaving
only its magical memory, and the (marvelously phrased) índíces y señales
del acaso, "traces and signs of what might be," literally the
marks and signs of the maybe. Childhood
represents what can be damaged or abolished, but it also evokes
possibilities, all too often cancelled possibilities. "My garden,"
Lorca said in a letter, "is the garden of possibilities, the garden of
what is not, but could (and at times) should have been, the garden of
theories that passed invisibly by and children who have not been born."
The heroine of the play Yerma longs for the baby she cannot have,
while Adam, in a famous sonnet, dreams not of his posterity but of his barrenness,
his role as first and last man, his children a mere vision of what is not, a
burned-out possibility, neutra luna de piedra sin semilla / donde el niño
de luz se irá quemando, "a neuter moon of seedless stone / where the
child of light will burn." In
a remarkable letter, written when he was twenty-three, Lorca says, with a
touch of whimsy and a good deal of anxiety, that he hasn't been born yet: The other day I was meditating upon my past… and none of the dead hours belonged to me. It wasn't I who had lived them…. There were a thousand Federico García Lorcas, stretched out eternally in the attic of time. And in the storehouse of the future I beheld another thousand, all nicely pressed and folded and piled one on top of the other, waiting to be filled with helium and fly aimlessly away…. I live on borrowed things, what I have inside me isn't mine, and we'll see if I am born. Lorca did wonders with his borrowed
things, but when was he not borrowing? Critically, the question about what he
knew and did not know becomes a question of how knowing the poems are: a
question of tone or pitch rather than information, or if you prefer, of the
quality of Lorca's imitations of innocence, and of his success in keeping
knowledge at bay. So much of his work skirts a tourist Andalusia, all
flamenco and fans and moonlight, and it is often acclaimed for just that
reason. Christopher Maurer in his introduction to the Collected Poems
sees a note of parody in much of Lorca's writing in this gypsy or folkloric
vein, a hint of "the emotionally overwrought style of the cante jondo."
Sometimes the poems seem not to parody but simply to pastiche the flamenco
world, to offer a slender and elegant reprise of its favorite numbers. But
often Lorca manages something altogether more startling: the effect of an
original folk song, as if he had managed to disappear into the voice of a
culture. At such moments what counts is the poet's stylistic discretion, his
ability to let motifs speak for themselves. Saber callar a tíempo,
knowing when to be silent, is how a distinguished scholar described the art
of the traditional Spanish ballad, and Lorca's mastery of this art is nowhere
better seen than in the well-known "Memento": Cuando yo
me muera, The
poem manages to seem surprised at its own refrain, as if death, however
familiar as an idea, were incredible as a fact; a graceful traditional theme
turns into an actual threat. The Spanish gets very delicate results through
the mood of the verb, a quite ordinary usage which requires that future
events following the word "when" take a subjunctive, suggesting the
chance that such things might not happen; and through the courtesy of
"if you wish," which means both "if you want to," and
"if you would be so kind." We
see the same effect in this song: Córdoba. And
in the Gypsy Ballads: La luna
vino a la fragua Well,
the gypsies of dream and bronze perhaps belong to an eye which is not a
gypsy's, and the effect of a slight distance is perhaps even more common in
Lorca than the effect of speaking for a culture. In spite of Lorca's great
facility, these are often very considered poems, precisely poised between
mannerism and sentimentality. En la mitad del barranco This
has all the elements of a gypsy fight out of Mérimée, but the coolness of the
voice, its interest in the beauty of the bloody knives, and its
characterization of the light as like a playing card—the very implication of
hardness found in playing cards—turns the whole scene into a highly stylized
engraving. It has the tension of flamenco itself when it seems not
overwrought or dripping with emotion but on the contrary drastically
contained and formal, full of desperate implication. Lorca
himself associated this kind of terseness or precision with Spain.
"Spain," he said, "is the country of profiles…. Everything is
drawn and delimited in the most exact way." We get a similar sense when
Lorca describes un horizonte de perros, "a horizon of dogs,"
barking in the distance. The dogs belong to the world of the folk song, but
the vision is that of a modern draftsman. The
following shows the risk of this effect, I think, how easily it might (but
doesn't here) topple into winsomeness, a winking at the reader across the
apparent simplicity of the line: El día se
va despacio, For
instances of the risk not coming off we might think of La tarde está /
arrepentida, / porque sueña / con el mediodía, "The evening is /
penitent, / still dreaming about / noon. Or: La iglesia gruñe a lo lejos /
como un oso panza arriba, "The church growls in the distance / like
a bear turned on its back." But Lorca has other voices too. That of
the formal lament, for example, or the classical sonnet; or the excited and
anguished free verse of Poet in New York. And we tend to forget how light
and funny he can be, as in the Suites. "If the alphabet should
die," one poem says, "then everything would die…. The whole of life
/ dependent on / four letters." We look at you through a magnifying
glass, the poet says to Venus: "the renaissance and me." Newton's
apple falls on his nose, and the great man "scratches / his Saxon
nostrils." Among
the later verse, some of the most subtle appears in the Diván del Tamarit
(The Divan at Tamarit), a graceful homage to Moorish Spain. Here are simple
singing lines, an appearance of peace; and all Lorca's tortured themes,
desperate love, dead children, absence, bitterness, sorrow, murmuring just
beneath the surface, or even at the surface: Siempre,
siempre: jardín de mi agonía, … The Tamarit poems and some others
appear in Edwin Honig's volume. The translations are rather more hit-and-miss
than in the Collected Poems, but there are some fine moments—"you
were snow, stirring my heart"—and Honig does a better job on the
difficult "Dialogue of Amargo," where a traveler on the way to
Granada, accepting a ride and the gift of a knife, appears to accept his
death, and to know he accepts it. But in the context of Lorca's work in
English translation, the most interesting feature of this book is its
containing four puppet plays, and the intriguing Play Without a Title,
to which I shall return. Lorca's
puppet plays appear early and late in his career, and are literally written
for performance by hand-held puppets. One notable performance took place in
the Lorca family house in 1923, with Lorca working the puppet Don Cristóbal,
and de Falla providing the music, which included the first Spanish
performance of (part of) Stravinsky's Histoire du Soldat. Lorca
performed a version of Don Cristóbal's Puppet Show in Buenos Aires in 1934,
with a new preface written for the occasion, in which the chief puppet
recalls his earlier association with the poet. Don Cristóbal is said to be
"the mainstay of the theatre"—"All theatre starts with
you"—and also to be Falstaff's father. There is a popular Spanish puppet
tradition going back to the time of Cervantes—Don Quixote notably interrupts
a puppet show—but the avant-garde had also taken it up during the twentieth
century. Lorca's
puppet plays are lyrical and mocking. Their plots concern marriage and
romance and the discomfiture of villains. They show Lorca at his most
lighthearted and charming, but also at his most discreetly experimental, able
to get delicate emotions out of the mockery of emotion. Stage directions
instruct characters to cry "comically" or "in perfect
rhythm." The theater knows it is theater—"everything takes on an
intensely theatrical bluish tinge"—and catches real feelings by refusing
to simulate them. "O what a burden it is," the puppet says,
"to love you as I love you!" We sense the burden because the puppet
cannot, because there is no actor between us and the metaphor, and we are
moved by the cliché rather than in spite of it. There is a similar moment in
another mood when the bullying Don Cristóbal, seemingly a Spanish version of
Punch and Judy rolled into one, is said to be "so brutal that even his
shadow tears things to bits." I know people like that. Line of Light and Shadow is a thematic exploration and
catalogue raisonné of Lorca's drawings, 381 items, all reproduced on a small
scale, many in their original size. The drawings are scrupulously related to
relevant poems, situated in Lorca's life and among his influences. Mario
Hernández thinks Lorca learned to work with his limitations as a graphic
artist, and this must be true; but a certain false naiveté remains in this
work, precisely the quality the poems flirt with but often manage to exchange
for something more austere. It
is not, I think, the trembling line that makes the drawings interesting, as
Lorca himself seems to have thought; it is the frankness with which they
picture his obsessions. Among all the gypsies and sailors and clowns and
saints, full of the fragile charm of a shaky Picasso, are works of real horror,
profoundly disturbing representations of the artist's encounter with disgust
and fear. "Venus," for example, drawn in Buenos Aires in 1934,
represents a version of the armless Venus de Milo, the words "Love"
and "Moon" apparently trickling from her mouth, while a fountain of
(apparently) blood and tiny hands gushes from her vagina. The words
"sexual water" are typed above the woman's round, schematic
breasts—this is the title of the poem by Neruda that Lorca meant the drawing
to illustrate, although the fluids in Neruda drop rather than sprout. There
is awe here, I take it, even a sort of admiration for the fertile but
unmotherly goddess; but the swarming hands seem inescapable, and the blood at
the center of the picture makes violent demands, but what demands? We
should perhaps associate this drawing with the play Yerma, also
completed in 1934, in which a childless woman throttles her sterile husband,
describing her act as the killing of her son. The implication is that this
harsh husband is the only child she will ever have, and also that in killing
him she is killing her own longing, as if she had had a child and stifled it;
or were killing all the children she could ever have. She, like Venus, is
fertile and murderous; but the play, unlike the drawing, appears to endorse
desire rather than horror. The
slightly earlier "Sexual Forest" shows a pattern of dark vertical
squiggles, rather like newts, life forms of some sort perhaps, or abstract
trees. The creatures all appear to be urinating. Among them are disembodied
mouths, some vomiting. Helen Oppenheimer[2] associates this drawing with the Paisaje
de la multitud que orina, "Landscape of a Pissing Multitude,"
in Poet in New York, and certainly the poem has the same mood of murky
sexual adventure, all night and trees and ambush and risk. The picture
communicates more energy, though, and more whispering secrecy. Most
troubling of all is "Death of Saint Rodegunda," 1929, where
a monstrous saint, a drooping cartoon-like figure, appears to be vomiting and
menstruating at the same time. She is half-lying on what looks like an
operating table, she has wounds in her chest, and she has two heads and two
sets of eyes, as if she were watching herself suffer, or as if she had become
her own terrifying ghost. Maurer says cautiously that "Lorca's interest
in this sixth-century saint, Queen of the Franks, to whom he gives a
martyrdom of his own invention, has never been satisfactorily
explained," but perhaps it isn't an explanation we are looking for.
Saint Rodegunda looks like an icon of sought-out erotic martyrdom, a
surrender to the very fears the other pictures present, with death as a
desperate reward. The
drawing itself (or a drawing of the death of Saint Rodegunda) appears in
Lorca's filmscript "Trip to the Moon," just after a double exposure
of a camera movement up and down a set of stairs, and just before a woman in
mourning falls down the stairs. There is vomiting in the filmscript, too, and
it ends with a series of mocking clichés about love and death. Earlier in the
film the words Help Help Help appear "moving up and down above a
woman's genitals." This seems to take us back to the Venus drawing, and
some kind of panic about the origins of life. I don't profess to understand
this, but the material certainly clusters significantly together. Similar themes occur in more mastered
form in the first of the so-called "Sonnets of Dark Love," with its
plea for blood and suffering, and its relish of wounds. Pero
¡pronto!, que unidos, enlazados, These
eleven sonnets were written in 1935, but "many" of them, Maurer
says with uncharacteristic vagueness, "remained unpublished in Spanish
until December 1983." The sonnets were then published in an anonymous
limited edition, followed, in 1984, by a version authorized by the poet's
family. They appear in Collected Poems, and also in a very good new
version by Merryn Williams, in her Federico García Lorca: Selected Poems (Newcastle:
Bloodaxe Books, 1992). The poems are explicit about their unhappy passion,
and the gender of a past participle in one of them makes clear that the lover
is male. Perhaps that was enough to keep Spanish publishers quiet for so
long. The
sequence is called "Sonnets of Dark Love" because the poet Vicente
Aleixandre remembered Lorca's using the title at a reading a few months
before his death—and also, we might say, because the phrase itself occurs
twice in the poems. Ian Gibson is skeptical of Aleixandre's claim that the
darkness has to do with love's torment and not specifically with homosexual
love; and certainly darkness in the poems appears to involve deviance and
denial, as well as sorrow. But
the sequence, although still anguished and devoted to the mixing of religious
and erotic images, seems after the first poem to portray a passion which is
more resolved, less guilt-entangled, certain of its direction if not of its
object. A sonnet in the manner of Góngora ends Así
mi corazón de noche y día Only
the "dark love" hints at something other than absence, and the
following poem, "Ay voz secreta del amor oscuro," "O
secret voice of dark love," finally, bravely says what I take it the
drawings are unable to say, about homosexual or any other kind of sexual
desire: "I am love, I am nature." This is of course the cry of the
passionate Adela in Lorca's equally dark House of Bernarda Alba. This
play remains for many the essential Lorca. It was written in the last months
of his life, and portrays the stark tyranny of the old order in Spain. The
matriarch Bernarda Alba buries her husband and rules over her house and five
daughters with iron indifference to all emotions and needs. The girls are
hysterical and frustrated, and Adela, the youngest, manages to have a
relationship with the almost mythical male Pepe el Romano. The play ends in
violence and death. There is certainly a political climate here, but liberty
is claimed and lost, driven to suicide, in the name of sexual feeling, and
what is noteworthy about Bernarda's oppression of her daughters is the
arbitrariness of it. As Paul Julian Smith says in his subtle chapter on Lorca
and Foucault in The Body Hispanic (Oxford University Press/Clarendon
Press, 1989), Bernarda Alba's power is without origin and apparently without
end. And without plausible social motive. She doesn't care about her
neighbors or the values she upholds, she cares only about herself upholding
them, cares about order because it is her order. It is as if the superego
itself had been turned into an object of worship; the very mode of repression
which makes Venus so alluring and alarming. The
recent television production of the play, shown on PBS and on Channel 4 in
the UK, was a well-adapted film of a stage version directed by Nuria Espert
and Stuart Burge. Glenda Jackson was appropriately snarling as Bernarda, and
Joan Plowright splendidly rebellious and conniving as Bernarda's canny
housekeeper. The production didn't quite catch the claustrophobic horror that
prevailed in Mario Camus's film version (1987), which was literally haunted
by the shape of the unreachable Pepe el Romano, the man the girls dream of,
and which was full of the prying, spying effect a camera gets so well, and
discreetly punctuated by flamenco singing and stamping, the hoarse, shaken
voice and rhythm of disaster. Lorca
said he was interested in a documentary effect in The House of Bernarda
Alba—"these three acts are intended to be a photographic
documentary"—but he probably meant this as a metaphor rather than a
literal ambition. His brother, Francisco García Lorca, suggests that a
photograph in this context would be like an engraving, an image Lorca also
uses to describe scenes in his plays: close to reality but also stylized,
like a wedding group.[3] But the play is not so much stylized
as lyrical about its darkness, and is marked by a number of self-consciously
literary lines, so that the characters suddenly seem to realize that they are
not only in a play but in an Important Play ("I shall put on the crown
of thorns of those who are loved by a married man"). Lorca himself said
there was "no literature" in the play, "not a drop of
poetry"; and we can agree that for a literary and poetic play it's
pretty sober. But it is a play which very much needs the theatrical illusions
it fosters, and it is all the more interesting therefore to know that Lorca
was working at the same time on his Play Without a Title, which in its
experimental shape and overtly theatrical content looks back to The Public,
written in 1929–1930, but first published in 1976, and not performed in Spain
until 1987. Play is included in the Honig volume, and both works are
available in a translation by Carlos Bauer (New Directions, 1983). It is customary to think of Lorca's
chief theatrical alternative to the lyric naturalism of Yerma and The
House of Bernarda Alba as the rather prettified surrealism of Once
Five Years Pass (1931), a play dedicated, as Francisco García Lorca says,
to "the emotion of time" but also muddled, I think, by all the
things it finds it can't say. The Public and Play Without a Title are
different matters entirely. These plays are closer to Brecht than to
surrealism, and ask what happens when an illusion, theatrical or otherwise,
meets the sort of reality it is designed to deny, or meets a stronger
illusion. The Public
has horses as well as humans for its characters, mythological figures as well
as contemporary ones. It celebrates and agonizes over male homosexuality, and
dreams of a theater which would reach the unmasked, incontrovertible truth.
The play is set in a theater, and its plot, insofar as it has one, concerns
the putting on of a play and the various ways a public can behave or be
imagined to behave. At the end, in what seems to be a tragically despairing
resolution, a conjuror coolly takes over from the defeated theater director.
The idea of an open air theater gives way to "the true theater,"
the theater beneath the sand. Even this, though, isn't the liberated truth
the characters long for; only the sort of truth you find under the sand. Love
and truth are increasingly equated as the play goes on, but equated as
impossible or at best ambiguous. There is a riot at a performance of Romeo
and Juliet because the spectators have seen that the lovers (the actors,
the characters) really care for each other. On the contrary, someone else
says, the spectators are outraged because the lovers clearly don't care for
each other, they cannot love. It is horrible, another character says, to get
lost in a theater and not to be able to find the way out. But how could
theater save us from theater? The Public
doesn't get us out of this labyrinth, but it does suggest that illusion and
truth may both be processes, fictions we make real (or not), and that such
practices, on stage and off, are what theater helps us to examine. Play Without a Title is much shorter, and does not explicitly address so many
tangled themes. But it does pursue the question of the possibility of love
and truth, and the role of theatrical illusion in our understanding of the
world. A group of actors is rehearsing A Midsummer Night's Dream, the
rehearsal merges with a performance, the spectators comment and get agitated,
there is a riot involving shooting and aerial bombardment, and the play ends
with the theater in flames. There is a truth in A Midsummer Night's Dream,
one of the characters says, but it is a "terrible…destructive
truth," the truth of arbitrary magic, suggesting that "love…is an
accident [una casualidad] and has nothing to do with us at all."
The theater might show us this truth, and then lend us an illusion to deal
with it. But can the old theater do this? Or the new one? We don't get an
answer in this play, either, unless the riot is an answer. The poet asks, Lorca wrote, not for
benevolence but for attention. Attention to the work is the implication, but
an interesting ambiguity lingers. Children, too, ask for attention. As a
person Lorca seems to have needed more attention than most, and his art was
one way of getting it. He told his fellow poet León Felipe that he wrote
"so that people will love me." But his work itself is not
attention-seeking, or only attention-seeking. At its best it doesn't clamor
or demonstrate, it frames and explores. Its subject is not Lorca's own moods
or even ours, but the complex construction of feeling, the content and
context of our love or our fear or our grief. There is an austerity even in
Lorca's fireworks, and his baroque lament for a dead bull-fighter ends with
the unadorned asperity of absence, the abandonment of this and all bodies to
the common anonymity of death, evoked in a pile of perros apagados,
literally extinguished dogs, as if they (and we) were casually snuffed out
like lights. I
think, too, of an exchange in Yerma, where her friend María says she
is saddened by the heroine's envy. "What I have is not envy," Yerma
says. "It is poverty." Yerma's poverty is that of the childless
woman in a fertile rural world. She is not barren but uncherished, the Venus
of Lorca's drawing seen as an image of tragic lack. Perhaps her husband is
afraid of her very desire, her immense appetite for the possible. Yerma does
not want what others have, she only, fiercely wants what she herself needs: the
child who would not be mere absence or hope, the child that all poets lose. Notes
[1] In Residence on Earth, translated by
Donald D. Walsh (New Directions, 1973). [2] The Drawings (London: The Herbert
Press, 1986). [3] Francisco García Lorca, In the Green
Morning: Memories of Federico, translated by Christopher Maurer (New Directions,
1986). |