Appreciating Federico García Lorca

 I knew of Federico García Lorca before prison, but it was there I got to read his plays. Hard to believe that a Spaniard dead for almost a century would still be able to hold a person's attention. He did. Do try to read him.

Meanwhile, Noël Valis's Why Lorca Matters explains his qualities and importance in much greater depth:

From a similar setting, the Young Man in one of Lorca’s most experimental plays, When Five Years Pass, postpones life till death catches up with him, even as the character’s grasp of his identity continually slips away, in the same way memory does. He is a ghost, shifting among multiple time frames and spaces, multiple masks. He does not know how to live, one of the fundamental questions Lorca explores in much of his work. Concealed beneath the Young Man’s avoidance of life is fear of desire, of homosexual impulses he cannot recognize. If uncontrollable desire is fatally bound up in death in plays like The House of Bernarda Alba or Blood Wedding or a poem like “Sleepwalking Ballad,” the frustration or extinction of desire (also seen in Bernarda Alba as well as When Five Years Pass and Yerma) follows a similar path. For Lorca how we live also speaks to how we die. Thus, two men fighting over the same woman both kill each other in Blood Wedding, giving birth to a mother’s grief in the last line, “the dark root of a scream.” Lorca’s characters—often socially marginalized—find their own actions and desires not only bewildering but painful. Similarly, the first poem in Poet in New York ends with “Stumbling into my own face, different each day. / Cut down by the sky!” 

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In his talk on the untranslatable notion of duende, the spark of creativity, of “everything that has black sounds in it,” Lorca wrote, “a dead man in Spain is more alive as a dead man than anywhere else.” But immediately after he says, “his profile cuts like the edge of a razor.” This dead man is the incarnation of a wound, as though death could continue doing damage posthumously, or alternatively, as if being alive bore the incurable wound of death. Also worth noting is the exceptional, incomparable character Lorca grants to a dead man in Spain, just as he does for Sánchez Mejías. In both cases, the grace or gift each one possesses ultimately turns into a disability, a wound. But that grace is life itself. 

SCH 10/14