I hope you had more sleep than I did last night.
But Lorca is very exciting, so I know that he will wake me up,
and I hope, by extension, you.
I have some prepared notes, and I call it an informal lecture.
I'm going to be reading and also welcoming your interruptions
from my reading.
So please don't feel that you have
to wait until the last second if you want to shout something out
at me.
I delight in that.
I'm presenting this as I have read that Lorca
presented his lectures.
He tried to make it sound as if he was making it
up on the spot, but he had prepared very seriously
for long hours.
Not that I am trying to be in his skin.
That would be most difficult indeed.
I understand that it's darn near impossible
to fill the skin of a genius.
But I am here as his great admirer,
and I hope by the end of the hour that you will be too.
So you've been listening to the recording of "Nights
in the Gardens of Spain," from which I've borrowed my title
for today's presentation, which is a composition by Manuel de
Falla-- that's F-A-L-L-A--
who wrote carefully and slowly and, unfortunately for us,
too few pieces, but who our subject today,
Federico García Lorca, admired enormously.
They were old and dear friends.
So this presentation today is my Federico García Lorca,
not a scholar's, or an academician's, or a Doctor
of Spanish Literature's, or a Spaniard's.
I hope to give you an impression from my heart.
And I wish that literally, as I think
Lorca himself might have wanted it,
that my heart might press against you
and leave an imprint.
In this case, an intimate sketch,
a living impression of a man who's changed my life
and so many, many others'.
My first acquaintance with Lorca was when I was a child.
Notice how I say Lorca rather than Lorca's poems,
as though I'd met him, but this seems so natural
when it comes to Lorca.
His generosity calls this forth.
Here's the poem that made its way miraculously
into our house.
Lorca was 27 when he wrote it, and I was 10 when I heard it.
It's called "Song of Amargo's Mother."
This isn't the one that I have handed out.
The one that I have handed out, I'll
discuss with you at the end.
"Song of Amargo's Mother."
"They carry him placed upon my sheet, upon my oleander
and my palm leaves.
The 27th day of August with a tiny little knife of gold.
The cross.
And so much for that.
He was so dark and so very bitter.
Neighbor ladies, bring me a brass pitcher
filled with lemonade.
The cross.
Don't anybody weep, for Amargo is in the moon."
"Song of Amargo's Mother" frightened me terribly,
for it presented a familiar world of numbers and lemonade,
but it was a sad song and violent.
Someone was dead, and his mother didn't want anyone to weep.
I knew nothing about Spanish Catholics,
but I knew the moon where he apparently now lived.
And I dreaded the 27th of August for many years.
In our New York apartment building,
my mother had many friends.
I knew they would carry lemonade to her
if she needed it as desperately as this mother apparently did.
It seemed ominous that my mother would drink lemonade,
an innocuous, frivolous kid's drink
but entirely appropriate under the circumstances
of death, which by now I had accepted as my fate.
I also took personally the tiny, little, gold knife.
I don't know why the little couplets he wrote in
seemed familiar, but I imagined real poetry skipped like that--
some words, white space, more words, more space.
The music and the emptiness filled me.
And also, by some coincidence, the only leaves
I knew and loved were palm leaves.
We drove to Florida most winters and sat under them.
The thought of my mother on a park bench having lemonade
brought to her because I was dead still scares me.
Yet I understood with certainty, I
was not with Amargo in the moon where I
imagined things were far worse.
The last line always brought me back
to life and to poor Amargo and his brave mother.
And then something outside of my experience entirely--
the cross--
sailed over the heads of the words of the poem
and lodged in the adult world where I was expected.
The tiny, little, gold knife had come from there.
So I knew that the magic went in two directions.
Lorca still has the ability to send me
in several directions at once, including deep into childhood
and far ahead of what I think I know.
I still love a colloquial poem lit
with the passionate moonlight and an intrigue of knives.
But there is more to it than symbolic legend and folk
romance.
With this introduction to death and to the idea
that a young person could be dark and bitter,
I took a closer look at my father, and my mother,
and my brother before leaving home.
Today, let's take a close and personal look at Lorca.
In his writing, force, magic, and surrealism
allowed him to break out of the confines of accepted behavior,
and many of these techniques are still
found to be useful in the art community today.
However, he used not only popular but also sophisticated
techniques in a quest for a very personal voice.
He's not, strictly speaking, a surrealist poet
or a poet of local color as is sometimes thought.
Lorca studied poetic traditions as far back
as early Arabic poems, and he flung himself into the world
and sometimes into the arms of contemporary artists.
His style is more complicated than it appears.
Those writers in the room trying to borrow
his exciting adjectives and weird juxtapositions, beware!
He has tapped into imagery and figures
of speech that are urgent by immersing himself
in Spanish lullabies, gypsy song, ancient music,
and theater, all of which we'll see in a moment.
He's not writing about folksy stuff,
not, as he says, about short jackets and tambourines,
but about pain.
Listen in to the poem "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 wheat.
From my balcony, I can see him.
If I die, please leave the balcony open."
Fresh and haunting.
This isn't a narrative, but it's dramatic.
Lorca is immediately apprehendable.
And as accurate as a surgeon in a surgical theater
is Lorca in his own theater, a theater
we will hear from shortly.