By approaching nature and its tragic relationship
to human nature through popular legends
and by metaphors that he dug out of history and culture,
his plays and his poetry reach right through our defenses
to touch us in a deep place.
He was able to move a standard narrative form, the ballad,
for example, beyond story into emotional territory.
We can't simply laugh, or shrug, or feel confusion.
We can't dismiss his work.
But because his art is both complicated and simple,
because he's both a magnifier and a distiller,
he remains an enigma, as alone as on the day he was taken away
and shot in the head by fascists outside the village of Víznar.
Why was it that this man was such a threat to the highest
level of civil authority?
Perhaps it's true, as Lorca thought,
that sensitive theater can alter a people's sensitivity
in just a few years.
How else is it that a playwright, poet, puppeteer,
piano player, and prankster ends up
shot in the middle of a morning?
To this day, no one is saying exactly where, exactly when.
I wish I could introduce you to Lorca
by taking you into his parents' house
and letting you listen in while he
plays the piano on a dry, hot Andalusian afternoon.
Or even farther back, let you eavesdrop
on the family's housekeeper dressed as a Moor in curtain
and towel, and plastered in rice powder,
as she tells the story to Federico
and his brother, Francisco, while they
listen half enthralled, and half making fun of her.
Yes, here are the playful, nimble-minded Lorca boys,
cocky, laughing it up.
All this and much more recounted by his biographer,
Leslie Stainton, to whose book I send you
in my short bibliography in your paper.
You will see in her book, Lorca as a young man,
entertaining his friends for hours in cafes.
Late into the night, reciting poems, telling stories.
Lorca, the prankster, and the sensuous Lorca.
And Lorca, the homosexual, grappling with his identity.
Lorca, Salvador Dalí's intimate.
And the more serious Lorca, after his early success,
distressed and reticent about fame, escaping to New York.
Overwhelmed with, as he says, "the death that's
nothing but rottenness," when he sees Wall Street.
And thrilled by the great, black city of Harlem
while studying at Columbia.
Who is this man?
Dead at 38, small in stature, staring out at us
from black, soft eyes.
He was born in Fuente Vaqueros, Granada, on June 5, 1898.
A childhood ailment prevented him
from speaking until he was three,
and from walking until he was four.
And he walked all his life with a bit of a limp.
This reminds me of the beautiful elegy he read at the Cubist
painter María Blanchard's funeral.
Speaking movingly of her difficulty with her body,
and the humiliations she endured from apparently having been
pushed down a flight of stairs.
And how she nevertheless lived taking in the needy,
mending her own shoes by hand.
The elegy is another one of Lorca's
great, empathetic writings.
And in it, he refers to her as a world, "a dark pillow
on which my head is resting."
And then, he says famously, "but I'm not
telling you this for you to meditate
on its truth or falsehood.
It's myth that creates the world."
But I digress.
Lorca's influence, no doubt, especially
as he was a great fan of Cervantes' "Don Quixote."
But I will not take you around on a little skinny horse.
It is Granada that gives Lorca his roots in classic Roman
and Greek cultures, Arab and gypsy cultures,
and Spanish poetry.
He learns the guitar.
He learns the piano.
He writes a lovely, little book, Impressions and Landscapes,
after a tour with his class.
Lorca is no provincial, however.
His roots are deep in Spanish soil, generally.
So it's not merely simple when he
says in his most widely anthologized poem,
"green, how much I want you, green.
Green wind, green branches, the ship upon the sea,
and the horse in the mountain.
With the shadow on her waist, she dreams on her balcony.
Green flesh, hair of green, and eyes of cold silver.
Green, how much I want you, green.
Beneath the gypsy moon, all things look at her.
But she can't see them."
But this is no simple nature poem or erotic song.
This is a poem that turns very dark and dangerous, listen.
"Friend, I want to die decently in my bed.
Don't you see the wound I have in my throat?
And the friend answers, 'your white shirt bears 300 dark
roses.'
And now, the two friends go up toward the high balustrade,
leaving a trail of blood, leaving a trail of tears.
Small lanterns of tin were trembling on the roofs.
A thousand symbol tambourines piercing the dawn."
And this poem does not end well.
No, it does not.
"The night became as intimate as a little square.
Drunken civil guards knocked on the doors."
We shall meet these civil guards again in just a moment or two.
Lorca moves to Madrid where he studies
at the progressive Residencia.
Students here can make their own programs.
And Lorca chooses to be more the Troubadour,
than the intellectual.
Because he's essentially dramatic,
he loves to talk, he loves to listen,
he loves to give recitals.
In fact, he never shut up.
The great Edwin Honig, who wrote the seminal work on Lorca,
refers to him as histrionic, by which he means in the same way
that Tennessee Williams is, with a bit of brilliance and a bit
of flair.
Lorca, for example, recited poems out loud
as a means of writing them.
Please, understand these are not memorized and presented.
These are composed and conceived in public.
And this is how Lorca became known very early
on without publishing much.
For the writers in the audience, I do not recommend this.