''The clock says “When will it be morning?”
The sun says “Noon hurt me.”
The river cries with its mouthful of mud
And the sea moves every way without moving.''
Above requiem by Ted Hughes says how much Lorca was and still is a major poet of the poets!
Federico Garcia Lorca was an emblematic member of the Generation of '27, a group consisting of mostly poets who introduced the tenets of European movements, such as symbolism, futurism, and surrealism into Spanish literature.Lorca was executed at 38 by Nationalist forces at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War.His body has never been found.
Generation of '27 was the last generation of Spanish authors before the outbreak of the Civil War, which would wipe out almost totally the cultural and literary life of Spain for its duration and most of the following dictatorship.Some, like García Lorca, were killed; others like Miguel Hernández were put in jail; and most of them left on exile.
Review Of Sarah Arvio's Translation By Dwight Garner
Lorca was a great explicator of duende, the idea that an artwork should brim with authenticity and death-awareness and skin-prickling and foot-stamping awe and soul.
He evoked duende perhaps most fully in his Gypsy Ballads,
published in 1928. It's a canonical book in Spain. Here was a highly
cultivated poet reworking Andalusian folk culture and myth. The high-low
effect was startling. It was as if Robert Lowell had made a murderous
little book that drew its inspiration from Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music.
There are consolations. Arvio is a supple translator, and she has delivered a personal book. She has felt free to shift Lorca's poems around in sequence, as he himself often did when putting together his books. Most notably she has shorn the poems of punctuation, as Lorca sometimes did in his drafts.
....At other moments, her translations are both less accurate and less felicitous than those in Maurer's edition. The opening lines of Reyerta (Brawl or Feud), for example, read this way: "En la mitad del barranco / las navajas de Albacete, / bellas de sangre contraria, / relucen como los peces."
Dwight Garner finish' his review by saying, ''The poet Ted Hughes, who once translated “Blood Wedding,” observed that “Lorca cannot be Englished.” Perhaps. But his life and work offer mysteries we’re still profitably untangling.''
The untangling can go many ways as the Spanish civil war was fought between the progressive and reactionary forces of our own time.Lorca was explicitly socialist and gay.Salvador Dali was both his friend and muse.The day he got arrested prior to the murder by the nationalist militia, his brother in law Manuel Fernández-Montesinos was also killed for taking the mayoral post of Granada. Spanish civil war and what happened to Lorca is very much the same what's going on in many parts of the Muslim world.Knives and bullets taking over the pen, religious fever replacing the enlightenment.The way Spain kept searching for Lorca's unfound grave shows how much of it lost in the murder of this great soulfull poet.
From "The Fable And Round of the Three Friends",
Poet in New York (1929), García Lorca
Source : Wikipedia, New York Times
The sun says “Noon hurt me.”
The river cries with its mouthful of mud
And the sea moves every way without moving.''
Above requiem by Ted Hughes says how much Lorca was and still is a major poet of the poets!
Federico Garcia Lorca was an emblematic member of the Generation of '27, a group consisting of mostly poets who introduced the tenets of European movements, such as symbolism, futurism, and surrealism into Spanish literature.Lorca was executed at 38 by Nationalist forces at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War.His body has never been found.
Generation of '27 was the last generation of Spanish authors before the outbreak of the Civil War, which would wipe out almost totally the cultural and literary life of Spain for its duration and most of the following dictatorship.Some, like García Lorca, were killed; others like Miguel Hernández were put in jail; and most of them left on exile.
 |
| Lorca standing 4th on the left with Generation Of '27 |
''The
poet and playwright Federico García Lorca is, after Cervantes, the most
commanding figure in Spain’s literature. He died young.... This early
death has rendered him a permanent political and cultural object of
desire.
During
his lifetime Lorca feared what he called “stupid fame.” It’s hard to
say what he would make of the flourishing industry of works (ballets,
operas, films, novels, pop songs, poems) that reference and adapt his
life and work.
Lorca was a great explicator of duende, the idea that an artwork should brim with authenticity and death-awareness and skin-prickling and foot-stamping awe and soul.
The poet and translator Sarah Arvio is here now with Poet in Spain, a new translation of Lorca's poems into English. It is the first major undertaking of its kind since Collected Poems: A Bilingual Edition (1991), the work of several translators and edited by Christopher Maurer.
Unlike
Maurer, Arvio omits Lorca's intemperate, political and
Whitman-inflected New York poems, written after he visited the city in
1929 and 1930. (These were published after his death under the title Poet in New York.) She focuses instead entirely on what she calls his "moonlit earthbound Spanish poems".
About
Lorca's New York poems versus his Spanish ones, Arvio writes, "To my
ear, these voices are so different they could almost be the voices of
two different poets." The crucial word here is "almost". The absence of
these vital poems immediately renders Arvio's book less necessary than
Maurer's in terms of seeing this complicated poet whole.
There are consolations. Arvio is a supple translator, and she has delivered a personal book. She has felt free to shift Lorca's poems around in sequence, as he himself often did when putting together his books. Most notably she has shorn the poems of punctuation, as Lorca sometimes did in his drafts.
....At other moments, her translations are both less accurate and less felicitous than those in Maurer's edition. The opening lines of Reyerta (Brawl or Feud), for example, read this way: "En la mitad del barranco / las navajas de Albacete, / bellas de sangre contraria, / relucen como los peces."
Arvio
gives us this translation: "Halfway down the gully / the blades from
Albacete / glisten like fishes / flush with fighting blood."
In Maurer's book, it is: "Halfway down the gorge / knives of Albacete, / beautiful with enemy blood, / shine like fish."
Beautiful with enemy blood. That isn't just a gorgeous phrase, ripe with meaning, but it comports more exactly with Lorca's Spanish.....''Dwight Garner finish' his review by saying, ''The poet Ted Hughes, who once translated “Blood Wedding,” observed that “Lorca cannot be Englished.” Perhaps. But his life and work offer mysteries we’re still profitably untangling.''
 |
| Young Dali on the left, Lorca in the centre. |
Then I realized I had been murdered.
They looked for me in cafes, cemeteries and churches
.... but they did not find me.
They never found me?
No. They never found me.
They looked for me in cafes, cemeteries and churches
.... but they did not find me.
They never found me?
No. They never found me.
“
”
Poet in New York (1929), García Lorca
Source : Wikipedia, New York Times
