Something about Lorca seems to lull readers into biographical readings. Michael Wood, for example, opens his article on the Spanish poet in the New York Review; “The death of a writer changes his writings, fills them with apparent hints and prophecies.
If the writer is Spanish, the hints of death itself are overwhelming, and the prophecies often seem uncanny. Assassination is mentioned nine times in Lorca’s Poeta en Nueva York, for example—once actually in the eerie phrase Comprendí que me habían asesinado, “I realized I had been assassinated.” The effect of this, of course, is to lend a weird pathos to the squalid occasion in 1936 when Lorca was taken out to a road near his native Granada, and literally assassinated. But another effect is to make the poems themselves seem curiously shallow, metaphorical in the thinnest, most literary sense, only metaphorical, the work of a man who doesn’t know (or care) what assassination really means.
This is, of course, a brutally cruel way to read the work of a man who was not ‘only’ metaphorically, but literally assassinated. The whole tone of Wood’s article feels strangely dismissive, almost resenting the poems for the politics they often invoke, going so far as to ask “what if Lorca has been a fascist?” (what if the world was made of pudding?).[1]
Then again, Lorca’s fans are not necessarily much better. In a poem for the American Poetry Review, Yusef Komunyakaa asks what might have become of Lorca’s friendship with the Harlem Renaissance writer Nella Larsen and her wider connections
Yes, I say, I know
what you mean.
Then we’re off,improvising on what
ifs: can you imagine
Langston & Lorcahypnotized at a window
in Nella Larsen’s
apartment..
‘What ifs’, yes.. but besides the romantic possibilities in these transnational connections, to read Lorca’s actual comments on his time in Harlem, in both his poems and his prose, is to encounter a mixture of exoticised fascination and outright hostility. In one lecture, he describes his shock at encountering a child riding a bicycle; “Can a little black girl really ride such a thing? Is it yours? Where did you steal it?” (p.188) If - as seems to be the tendency - we’re sticking to biographical readings, such comments rather significantly shape how one would read his words in poems such as ‘The King of Harlem’;
Blacks! Blacks! Blacks! Blacks!
…
Wait in your king’s jungle shade
until hemlock, thistles, and nettles disturb the last rooftops.Then, blacks, and only then
will you be able to frantically kiss bicycle wheels,
place pairs of microscopes in squirrels lairs,
and dance fearlessly at last while the bristling flowers
cut down our Moses in the bulrushes that border heaven. (p. 37)
His racialised juxtapositioned between ‘our’ technological civilisation and the unihibited naturalism of ‘the blacks’ is essentially a 20th century edition of the ‘noble savage’ myth. It seems trivialising to rhapsodise about a possible-history of Federico cruising Harlem’s jazz clubs with Langston on the basis of such myths.[2]
i suspect at least some of the trouble here emerges from the difficulties of interpreting surrealist-ic verse. From what I can tell, scholars seems ambivalent on whether Lorca was a ‘true’ Surrealist or not. Though he was part of ‘the Generation of ‘27’ and close friends for a time with Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel, the most famous of the Spanish Surrealists, his dramatic split from those two after they confronted him over his sexuality apparently makes some scholars pause.[3] Flicking through Poet in New York will quickly make the resemblance with the more lyrical ends of Surrealist writing evident, e.g.;
I killed the fifth moon
and the fans and applause were drinking water from the fountains.
Warm milk inside the new mothers
was stirring the roses with a long white sorrow. (p. 19)The air can tear dead snails
from the elephant’s lung
and blow the stiff, cold worms
from budding light or apples. (p. 107)
It can be hard to make sense of such references, fleeting images, disappearing as fast as they emerge, never coalescing into some kind of neat defining metaphor, an overarching symbolism by which a central meaning might be discerned. Meaning is not centralised in these poems. It flits from line to line, ushered along from page to page like the poet through the New York streets. See how easy it is to let biographical details fill in where interpretation fails? But to do so is to miss the defining pleasure of Lorca’s verse; letting yourself get caught up in his rhythms, dancing from word to word, enjoying the ideas as they brush and frot up against you, but not clinging on too tight.
Then again, if there’s any point where Lorca’s meaning could not be clearer, it is in his ‘Ode to Walt Whitman’;
But yes [I raise my voice] against you, urban faggots [Spanish: maricas],
tumescent flesh and unclean thoughts.
Mothers of mud. Harpies. Sleepless enemies
of the love that bestows crowns of joy. (p.161)
He carries on in such tones for another 22 lines. The poet is determined that the reader not mistake the rugged yet respectable manloving of his idol, Whitman, for the degenerate freaks and fairies of the New York bars - as well as a whole itinerary, resembling a scientific taxonomy, of local homocults he has encountered on his travels. If Lorca flirts with savagery and sensuality, ultimately he strives to maintain it as only a landscape in which his intrepid, creative masculinity can exercise itself, safely distinct from his own poetic genius.
And yet. The author is dead, buried by a fascist death squad in some unknown ditch near Fuente Grande. In the grave - especially the mass grave of fascist murder - it is hard to tell the body of the pious middle class Catholic from any other common faggot. And i don’t mean that entirely dismissively. After all,
We have to travel through…
landscapes full of graves that yield the freshest apples,
so that uncontrollable light will arrive
to frighten the rich behind their magnifying glasses -
…
- and so that fire will consume those crowds still able to piss around a moan
or on the crystals in which each inimitable wave is understood. (p. 59)
Travelling through that landscape, multitudes moaning around waves of piss (an intriguingly frequent theme of Lorca’s…), consumed in uncontrollable fire that frightens the rich, we might read these poems from those fruitful graves, and find some very different pleasures than any intrepid Whitman-esque adventurer.
Because we demand our daily bread,
alder in bloom and perrenially harvested tenderness,
because we demand that Earth’s will be done,
that its fruits be offered to everyone. (p. 153)
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[1] ‘The Lorca Murder Case’, Michael Wood, New York Review, 24.11.1997: link. You definitely shouldn’t read this for free via this link: here.
[2] ‘Cante Jondo’, Yusef Komunyakaa, American Poetry Review, Volume 25, No. 1, Janurary/February 1996: link.
[3] Some more details of this confrontation can be read below. i am personally slightly sceptical of the author’s insistence that Lorca is a secret abjected origin for Spanish Surrealism - is it not cheapening to reduce his significance to his status in a movement he appears to have distanced himself from? Anyway: link.
Lorca references are Poet in New York, translated by Greg Simon and Steve F. White, edited and with an introduction by Christopher Maurer (Penguin: London, 1988)
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