A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z
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Life and Works: Spanish poet dramatist, musician, amateur, and theatrical director, a talented artist and a member of the “Generation of 1927”, a group of writers who advocated avant-gardism in literature. Federico García Lorca is the most well-known modern poet in Spain. Perhaps because of the difficulties in translating poetic subtleties into other languages he may be better known for his plays in Britain and elsewhere. His murder by the Nationalists at the start of the Spanish civil war brought sudden international fame, accompanied by an excess of political rhetoric which led a later generation to question his merits; after the inevitable slump, his reputation has recovered (largely with a shift in interest to the less obvious works). He must now be bracketed with Antonio Machado as one of the two greatest poets Spain has produced this century, and he is certainly Spain's greatest dramatist since the Golden Age. Federico García Lorca was born the 5th. June, 1898, in Fuente Vaqueros, an Andalucian village near Granada. Lorca was the son of Federico García Rodriguez a landowner whose fortunes rose and fell with the sugar industry and his wife, Vicenta Lorca Romero, who had briefly been a school-teacher. The family home, the Huerta de San Vicente, is now a museum house. From the age of eleven, Lorca lived with his family in the city of Granada, but spent the summers in the countryside. He later wrote, "I love the land. All my emotions tie me to it. The first memories I have are of the earth." To the Moorish city of Granada, the author returned several times in his poetry and drama. Up to 1916/17, Lorca was more interested in music than literature and he trained as a classical pianist. It was not until the death of his piano teacher in 1916 that he began to write. He had, however, been fascinated by the theatre from an early age. He began writing poems in his late teens, reciting many of them in the local cafes. García Lorca read law at the University of Granada .In 1919 he left to study law at the Residencia de Estudiantes - a college based on the Oxbridge system - in Madrid. There he met and became friends with film director Luis Bunuel and painter Salvador Dali, among other writers as Juan Ramón Jiménez and Pablo Neruda. His relationship with Dali was particularly close and he spent Easter 1925 with Dali's family at Cadaques - his first visit to Catalonia. In 1927, Dali collaborated on the Barcelona production of Lorca's historical drama Mariana Pineda. Their friendship influenced their art, but they were later to become estranged. In the 1920s he became a close friend of the composer Manual de Falla, who interested him in folk music. In 1922 they organised Spain's first amateur festival of Andalusian "Cante jundo" (or flamenco music) in order to preserve it from commercial bastardisation and where he found inspiration for his work from the traditions of folk and gypsy music.He tried to connect culture with its roots and discovered that the cante jundo had been brought from India by gypsies. In 1923 García Lorca earned a degree in law. Deep Song (1931, Poema del cante jondo) and Primer romancero gitano (1924-1927), published in 1928, made García Lorca the poet of Andalusia and its gipsy subculture. In these works the author old ballads and mythology, and used them to express his tragic vision of life. In 1926 García Lorca wrote The Shoemaker's Prodigious Wife, after finishing Mariana Pineda. Its first performance was in 1930. His first play El Maleficio de la Mariposa (1920) was not a success, but his first poetry volume Libro de Poemas (1921) gave an indication of his talents. His brother, Francisco, helped him select the poems for inclusion from his total output since 1918. In 1925, Lorca met and fell in love with Emilio Aladren, a sculptor in Madrid. When this relationship failed, Lorca grew depressed. His Andalusian poetry had made him famous throughout the Hispanic world, but by 1927 he was complaining that he was regarded only as a "gypsy poet". "I don't want to be typecast", he said, and he left Spain, accompanying an old family friend to New York. In 1929, they sailed on the SS Olympic, a sister ship of the Titanic. On reaching America, Lorca enrolled in English classes at Columbia University, living in Manhattan and, for a while, in Vermont. Unable to speak English he suffered a deep culture shock. His suicidal mood was recorded in posthumously published Poet in New York (1940, Poeta en Nueva York), in which he offered his dark vision of the modern, urban world and proved that he was not just a folk poet. The work demonstrated a change of tone, reflecting mortality and rebellious disgust in surreaIist terms. Lorca was fascinated by the various races in New York and his Oda al Rey de Harlem is full of rhythms suggesting the jazz scene. The book also includes the Ode to Walt Whitman in which he shows his contempt for maricas ("fairies") and their blatant effeminacy in contrast to the closeted virile men with whom he sympathised.. The poet condemns the frightening, physically and spiritually corrupted city, and escapes to Havana to experience the harmony of a more primitive life. He then spent three months in Cuba. He gave lectures and charmed everyone with his enthusiasm. In 1931, the Second Republic was established in Spain and Lorca contributed enthusiastically to its cultural programme. He became director of La Barraca, a touring theatre company that performed the classics, Cervantes, Calderon and Lope de Vega, in venues where people had little chance of seeing theatre. García Lorca's experiments in the theater - he rebelled against the realistic theater of the middle class - involved such puppet plays as Títeres de cachiporra (1949) and El retablillo de Don Cristóbal (1938). In 1933 he wrote two surrealistic dramas, El Público, an attack on commercial theater and the entire social order, and Así que pasen cinco años, an allegory of lost time. He searched for alternative audiences or to provoke middle-class ones. In his own work he explored controversial issues like homoeroticism, the class system and the role of women in society. He wrote less poetry and more drama. "Theatre is poetry that rises from the book ...," he said. Blood Wedding, the first part of García Lorca's famous rural trilogy, was performed in 1933. The love triangle, blending drama and poetry, closely resembled a classical Greek tragedy, in which death hovers over the whole play. Yerma, the second part, was performed in 1934, and portrayed a deadly conflict in a barren marriage. The heroine strangles Juan, her husband, who do not understand her yearning to love and bear children. The House of Bernarda Alba, written just before García Lorca's death in 1936 and published in 1945, depicted a tyrannical mother, Bernarda Alba, and her daughters. The House of Bernarda Alba is starker: deliberately prosaic, more readily interpretable as social criticism (i.e. of the pressures of convention, the imprisoning effect of mourning customs, the frustration of female sexuality by the need to wait for an acceptable match), but it is so dominated by the title character - who tyrannizes her five daughters - that it emerges as the study of a unique individual rather than a typical woman. Each tragedy has one outstanding female role, those of Yerma and Bernarda having been written for the great tragic actress Margarita Xirgu. His Sonnets of Dark Love was inspired by Rafael Rodriguez Rapún, an engineering student who was the secretary of La Barraca, and whom he met in 1933. García Lorca's central themes in his works are love, pride, passion and violent death, which also marked his own life. At the start of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 he went to Granada which he regarded as relatively safe. On 16th. August, 1936 he was arrested by Falangist soldiers on the orders of the Nationalist Civil Governor, held for two days, tortured, and shot. Although he had no political affiliations Lorca was known to be a friend of left-wing intellectuals and an advocate of liberty and his homosexuality may have infuriated his captors. He was buried in an unmarked grave near Viznar. Although his remains are presumed to lie with those of hundreds of fellow victims in a shallow trench among the grove of olive trees adjacent to the Fuente Grande spring, the actual whereabouts of Lorca's grave are unknown to this day. When he was assassinated in 1936, Garcia Lorca was at the peak of his creative activity. He was one of the 4000 members of the intelligensia murdered by the Nationalists at the outset of the Spanish Civil War. |
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Selected works of Garcia Lorca:
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