Federico García Lorca 
by Neftali Olmo, MD
 

Data: (b. June 5, 1898, Fuente Vaqueros, Spain--d. Aug. 19 or 20, 1936, Granada), 
Spanish poet and dramatist, noted for his poems of death and for his dramatic trilogy: Bodas de sangre (1933; Blood Wedding), Yerma (1934), and La casa de Bernarda Alba (1936; The House of Bernarda Alba). He was assassinated by the Nationalists shortly after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War.

Life

Lorca's father was a farmer, his mother a schoolteacher. Struck by his musical gifts, his mother became his first piano teacher.

When the family moved to the city of Granada, Lorca attended a Jesuit school there. At his father's urging, he then read law at the University of Granada but soon abandoned law to study literature, painting, and music. A precocious composer and excellent performer, he was "the musician" to his friends. To their surprise, in 1918 he published Impresiones y paisajes ("Impressions and Landscapes"), a book of prose inspired by a trip he had taken into Castile. The book suggested that Lorca soon might become known as "the writer."

In 1919 he entered the residencia de estudiantes (residence of scholars) at the University of Madrid, a large university that had become the cultural centre of the Spanish capital. There he became friends with artists and writers of his own generation, including the painter Salvador Dalí, the filmmaker Luis Buñuel, and the poet Rafael Alberti; there he also met well-known older figures such as the poet Juan Ramón Jiménez.

During his first two years at the residencia, Lorca's poetry became known in literary circles throughout the whole of Spain. Yet he had published hardly any of his work. "Verse is made to be recited," he said; "in a book it is dead." And so, at the residencia and elsewhere in Madrid, like a medieval troubador, he read his poetry and plays. Thus, throughout his career, his works were often composed and passed on by word of mouth long before they were published.

At the same time that he was composing the experimental poems that would later be published as Libro de poemas (1921; "Book of Poems"); Primeras canciones (1936; "First Songs"); and Canciones (1927; "Songs"), he was also writing his first play, El maleficio de la mariposa (Butterfly's Evil Spell), which opened in 1920 at the Eslava Theater in Madrid. It closed after the first night.

Lorca found the true bent of his genius when he collaborated with the distinguished composer Manuel de  Falla on the folk music festival Fiesta de Cante Jondo at Granada in 1922. In the traditions of folk and gypsy music, Lorca seemed to find a resolution of his musical, poetical, and spiritual impulses. Poema del cante jondo (written 1922, published 1931; "Poem of the Cante Jondo") and Romancero gitano (written 1924-27, published 1928; The  Gypsy Ballads) were to be the lyrical expression of this resolution.

In the 18 poems of Gypsy Ballads Lorca combined the ancient magic of a traditional literary form--the Spanish ballad (romance)--with startling new images. The description, for example, of the Guard riding ominously toward a gypsy village, in 

La Balada de la Guardia Civil
 Los caballos negros son.
     Las herraduras son negras.
     Sobre las capas relucen
     manchas de tinta y de cera.
     Tienen, por eso no lloran,
     de plomo las calaveras.
     Con el alma de charol
     vienen por la carretera.

"The Ballad of the Spanish Civil Guard," 

Black are the horses.
The horseshoes are black.
On the dark capes glisten
stains of ink and of wax.
Their skulls are leaden,
 which is why they don't weep.
With their patent-leather souls
they come down the street. 

Federico García Lorca, Selected Poems, translated by A.L. Lloyd. Copyright 1955 by New Directions Publishing Corporation. 

While Lorca was writing Gypsy Ballads, he was also writing plays. His first dramatic success came in 1927 with the Barcelona production of Mariana Pineda, a poetic and romantic verse drama, with scenery by Salvador  Dalí. The same year and the same city also saw the first public exhibition of Lorca's drawings.

The publication of Gypsy Ballads in 1928 brought Lorca sudden international fame but little happiness. Displeased about the creation of what he called "the myth of my gypsy-hood" and tormented by an emotional crisis that he described as "one of the most painful states I have had in my life," he sought relief and a new source of inspiration in the United States and Cuba in 1929-1930.

The trip inspired Poeta en Nueva York  (Poet in New York), published posthumously in 1940. In this work, Lorca's horror at what he saw as the death in life of a mechanized civilization is conveyed by the jarring combination of brutal, tortured images:

Con una cuchara
arrancaba los ojos a los cocodrilos
y golpeaba el trasero de los monos.
Con una cuchara.

By 1931 Lorca was back in Spain, where he began the poems to be published as Diván del Tamarit (1936; "Divan of Tamarit") and again wrote for the theatre. Expressing the passionate enthusiasm for marionettes that he had had since childhood, he wrote two puppet plays: Los títeres de cachiporra (The Billy Club Puppets) and Retabillo de Don Cristóbal (The Puppet Play of Don Cristóbal). Even these puppet farces were clouded by melancholy.

The advent of the Republic in Spain made it possible for Lorca to plunge fully into the theatre. The Ministry of National Education subsidized La Barraca, a troupe of students who, from 1932 to 1935, brought masterpieces of the classical theatre to uneducated workers and peasants. As the founder, driving spirit, director, and musician for La Barraca, Lorca staged plays by Lope de Vega, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, and Miguel de Cervantes, thereby acquiring immense theatrical experience.

The result was the first of a trilogy of folk dramas, Bodas de sangre, staged in 1933. The theme was inspired by a news item: a bride had fled on her wedding day with the man whom she secretly loved, and the rivals had killed each other. In Lorca's play the characters become pawns in a tragedy of fate. They are trapped in a conflict between primitive passions and civilization's unyielding code of honour--a conflict that ends in death.

In 1934 the goring and subsequent death of a bullfighter who had been Lorca's friend inspired Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías (published 1935; "Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías"). Lorca's greatest poem, the finest elegy in modern Spanish literature and one of the finest in all literature, it beats with the hollow, haunting, dirgelike refrain, repeated over and over again: 

"A las cinco de la tarde" :

A las cinco de la tarde.
     Eran las cinco en punto de la tarde.
     Un niño trajo la blanca sábana
     a las cinco de la tarde.
     Una espuerta de cal ya prevenida
     a las cinco de la tarde.
     Lo demás era muerte y sólo muerte
     a las cinco de la tarde.

     ("At five in the afternoon")

At five in the afternoon.
It was exactly five in the afternoon.
A boy brought the white sheet
at five in the afternoon.
A frail of lime ready prepared
at five in the afternoon.
The rest was death, and death alone
at five in the afternoon.

Later in 1934, Yerma--the second in Lorca's folk-drama trilogy and, along with Bodas de sangre, one of the few successful poetic tragedies of the 20th century--was produced. The play--"a tragic poem"--is about the torment of a woman who, despairing over her childless state, kills her sterile husband. On an evening in June 1936, at the home of friends, Lorca read the final play of the trilogy, La casa de Bernarda Alba. Almost entirely in prose, the play is about four sisters who, shut up by their tyrannical mother in a house of mourning, burn with hatred and lust.

In July, alarmed by the outbreak of the Civil War, Lorca left Madrid for Granada. But his fate fulfilled the premonition of violent death that haunts his works. During the night in Granada, Lorca was shot to death without trial by the Nationalists.

Assessment.

No matter how localized the subject of Lorca's work, the themes that recur in them are universal: love and lust, death, motherhood, a brotherly compassion for the poor and humble, and, above all, cruelty, violence, and death resulting when primordial passions are frustrated by convention. The elemental passion in Lorca's poetry is expressed largely through concrete, voluptuous, sulfurous, vibrating, sometimes surrealistically juxtaposed images and symbols. He is a poet who must be ranked among the greatest of the 20th century. ( M.A.)
 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Biographies include 

Ian Gibson, Federico García Lorca: A Life (1989), based on primary documents, and 

Ian Gibson, The Assassination of Federico García Lorca, rev. ed. (1979, reissued 1983), an exhaustive study of the last years of Lorca's life;

Francisco García Lorca, In the Green Morning: Memories of Federico (1986), his brother's memoirs of the poet's childhood and youth, followed by informative analyses of Lorca's major plays; and 

Arturo Barea, Lorca: The Poet and His People (1944, reissued 1973). 

Studies of Lorca's works include 

Manuel Durán (ed.), Lorca: A Collection of Critical Essays (1962, reprinted 1977); 

Edwin Honig, García Lorca, rev. ed. (1963, reprinted 1981); 

Carl W. Cobb, Federico García Lorca (1967); 

Richard L. Predmore, Lorca's New York Poetry: Social Injustice, Dark Love, Lost Faith (1980); 

Robert Lima, The Theatre of García Lorca (1963); and 

Gwynne Edwards, Lorca: The Theatre Beneath the Sand (1980).
 

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