Lorca's Duende [by Sharon Dolin]

From Friday's Horse Show with a View of Mojácar Pueblo 

There is a town called Lorca in Andalucía, but Frederico Garcia Lorca was not born there. He was born in Fuente Vaqueros, which means Fountain of Cattlemen, in 1898. When I first knew I was coming to Andalucía, I did buy a guidebook for the region. But what I read first in order to prepare myself as a poet was a biography of Garcia Lorca by Leslie Stainton. I asked myself, What has drawn and continues to draw me to the poetry of Lorca? The answer is simple: Repetition and Death. When Lorca was two, his mother gave birth to Lorca’s first brother, Luis, who died 20 months later of pneumonia. Lorca’s obsession with death probably began at that time when he was nearly four. So death must have hung over the household of his early years and, as Stainton writes, Lorca never forgot the death, writing in his twenties of  a baby lost in limbo: “my little brother Luis / in the meadow / with the tiny babies.”

Then, of course, there is duende, which “does not appear if it sees no possibility of death, if it does not know that it will haunt death’s house . . . .” (“Theory and Function of the Duende,” trans. Christopher Maurer). The more time I spend in Spain and reading Spanish poets, the more essential do I find the notion of duende, an untranslatable mysterious dark power, as the cure for too much bloodless intellectual American poetry. Perhaps it is a function of the academy—the fact that most poets now get a degree in poetry writing. (“But intelligence is often the enemy of poetry, because it limits too much, and it elevates the poet to a sharp-edged throne where he forgets that ants could eat him or that a great arsenic lobster could fall suddenly on his head . . . .”) I’m thinking of David St. John’s admonition to his student in his post from last week: to follow the heat. Translation: Follow the duende. And it can be destructive. “[I]n all ages Spain is moved by the duende, for it is a country of ancient music and dance where the duende squeezes the lemons of death—a country of death, open to death.” I will have more to say about the duende in future posts. Suffice it to say that “Theory and Function of the Duende” should be required reading for every poet.

Repetition, which always fascinated me and accounts in part for poetry’s encantatory power, seems to be inextricably tied together with Death, especially in Lorca, because the desire of repetition as a response to Death is to stop time. “All arts are capable of duende, but . . . [it] is in music, dance, and spoken poetry, for these arts require a living body to interpret them, being forms that are born, die, and open their contours against an exact present.” Repetition may, in part, succeed or at least give the sound of stasis, be the “exact present” of duende, as in Lorca’s “Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias.” Here’s the first stanza:

Cogida and Death

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.

                        (trans. Stephen Spender and J. L. Gili)

Now this is a late poem, from 1935, just a year before Lorca’s own death. In a year, Franco’s Nationalists would sweep through Andalucía. One wonders if a presentiment of Death wasn’t already in the air. Throughout his teens and twenties, Lorca would stage his own death before his friends, going limp and asking his friends to participate in elaborate rituals. One of my favorite poems of his, so stunning in its simplicity and its appeal, was written when Lorca was in his early twenties:

Farewell

If I die,
leave the balcony open.

The little boy is eating oranges.
(From my balcony I can see him.)

The reaper is harvesting the wheat.
(From my balcony I can hear him.)

If I die,
leave the balcony open!

(trans. W. S. Merwin)

Orange and green: Lorca’s expressionist color palette. Green is always associated with the moon and death; orange, with the daytime and life. In “The Moon Rising”:

Nobody eats oranges
under the full moon.
One must eat fruit
that is green and cold.

(trans. Lysander Kemp)

In “Dance of the Moon in Santiago,” a late poem, every other couplet is a variation on

            It is the moon that dances
            in the Courtyard of the Dead!

(trans. Norman Di Giovanni)

So Death and Repetition do the dance.

 Gacela of the Dark Death

I want to sleep the dream of the apples,
to withdraw from the tumult of cemeteries.
I want to sleep the dream of that child
who wanted to cut his heart on the high seas.

I don't want to hear again that the dead do not lose their blood,
that the putrid mouth goes on asking for water.
I don't want to learn of the tortures of the grass,
nor of the moon with a serpent's mouth
that labors before dawn.

I want to sleep awhile,
awhile, a minute, a century;
but all must know that I have not died;
that there is a stable of gold in my lips;
that I am the small friend of the West wing;
that I am the intense shadows of my tears.

Cover me at dawn with a veil,
because dawn will throw fistfuls of ants at me,
and wet with hard water my shoes
so that the pincers of the scorpion slide.

For I want to sleep the dream of the apples,
to learn a lament that will cleanse me of earth;
for I want to live with that dark child
who wanted to cut his heart on the high seas.

(trans. Stephen Spender and J. L. Gili)

Comments

[DL]

Terrific post. And what a fascinating and fruitful subject is repetition. I mean to reread Kierkegaard on the subject. And even as I write that sentence, I feel as if I have said it before.

[Christopher]

What a wonderful blog!

Yes, you're so right about incantatory repetition in Lorca. I hadn't thought to associate it with death, but yes, exactly! His paralellism also reaches him from the traditional song, which is part of his poetic DNA! Here's another poem in which all those elements are present:

Rider's Song

Cordoba,
Distant and lonely.

Black little horse, big moon,
olives in my saddlebags,
even though I know the roads
I'll never get to Cordoba.

Across the plain, through the wind,
black little horse, red moon,
death is watching me
from the towers of Cordoba.

Ah, how long the road!
Ah, my brave little horse!
Ah, but death awaits me
before I get to Cordoba.

Cordoba.
Distant and lonely!