No question then of how important
the fight that goes on inside such a Spaniard as Lorca
is, the fight to live, to create that's
haunted by that familiar opponent, death.
His poetry, his plays, and his actions
are understandably intimate and intense because he's
engaged in battle.
One cannot go back to frivolous creations or evasive behavior
in art or in life after understanding that death sets
the whole of life in front of you at every instant.
The Spanish bull is always in the room facing you.
And it is a fight to the finish, except that the bull turns out
to be inside you.
This is what Lorca has taught us.
And it is as spiritual a message as any zen
teaching or other religious doctrine
about the meaning of life.
People who find Lorca amusing because he gives humans
animal qualities, or gives life to inanimate objects,
or find Lorca simplistic because he's fond of nursery rhymes
should listen more closely because this is no mere slight.
The moon came to the forge wearing a bustle of nards.
The child is looking, looking, looking.
The child is looking hard.
In the troubled air, the wind moves her arms,
showing lewd and pure, her hard tin breasts.
This is elemental terror and wonder.
What does it mean to put a child in that poem.
But nothing is explained, it's all in another realm.
I think of this realm as I think of dream and love
as otherworldly, but where all that is important in this world
resides.
How we get there, some of us go by means of spiritual guides.
And what we understand has to do with how much we can take.
And by take, I mean handle, because it cannot be removed.
Lorca's poetry is symbolic activity
because he's down deep where communal signs
and symbols live.
His writing is lively because it's words come out
of primeval acts and pictures.
This adventure down becomes a necessity and a style second.
Such linguistic activity is essentially
a violent world but organic and akin to the world of memory.
This is the realm in which we are synonymous with nature
rather than antagonistic to it.
Lorca's dramas, you see eventually I have come around
to the dramas, are consumed with lyric intensity and tragedy.
Like his poems, like Greek theater
where god, blood, and passions drive characters
to their limits, like the giant Sophocles or later Shakespeare.
And these are not mere comparisons.
Lorca metes out monumental fates.
A bride runs off with her cousin with whom she has previously
had a relationship, and who has now
himself married another woman.
The title predicts the very worst: "Blood Wedding."
Or in another play, a widow is left with five daughters.
The eldest of whom is being courted
by a shady character who in fact has fallen
in love with the youngest.
When the mother finds out, she tries to kill the man.
And her youngest, thinking him dead, hangs herself.
Or again in the play "Doña Rosita" the spinster,
a young woman lets her life pass by waiting for the great love
of her life to return while he has begun a whole other life
in South America.
You will forgive me for simply condensing these.
Go and read them, or better yet see them.
The words Lorca wrote with seem still
covered in the grime of his excavation, the disorder.
He is drawn not only to tragedy but also
to that ancient form of comedy, the farce,
where characters are vessels for morality lessons.
Such a one is the prodigious shoemakers wife.
Who is much younger than her husband
and complains about him until he disappears.
At which point, of course, she misses him desperately.
When he returns disguised, she confesses to this stranger
how much she misses her husband, whereupon all is restored,
or is it that she learned her lesson?
This remains ambiguous for her and by extension the audience
who have been in on the mistaken identity,
and had fun with the wife's ironic situation,
but must leave the theater thinking of the serious matters
of desire and responsibility.
Another paradox Lorca is drawn to early on
is the ancient Arabs' lyric obsessions with erotic love,
in a context of the notion of chastity.
As Honig explains, alongside the qaṣīda, or short lyric,
grew the tradition of the ballad.
These are realistic stories of battles,
of love influenced by the Gypsies.
Tragedy, desire, purity, these are usually discordant sounds.
But here they are companions.
Listen in.
The subject, "The Civil Guard."
Which by now you should be afraid of.
Here they are approaching on horseback.
"Because their skulls are made of lead, they do not weep.
With patent leather soles, they come down the road,
they come down the road."
Lorca accuses them of brutality and cowardice.
They've been responsible for many of his friends' deaths.
We know too, they'll be responsible for his.
Elemental song, rough language.
Here's one more, in a lament for the famous bullfighter,
Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, "Blood Death Music."
"At 5:00 in the afternoon, it was exactly 5:00
in the afternoon, a boy brought the white sheet at 5:00
in the afternoon.
A frail of lime already prepared at 5:00 in the afternoon.
And the rest was death and death alone at 5:00
in the afternoon."
And it continues, "every other line howls the hour."
This is not a poem for language poetry.
Set this triangle of purity desire and tragedy
ringing in language from the electric industrial world
and you have full on Lorca.
Metals, jewels, bugs, garbage, nails, weapons, stones, sand,
dragons, copper bells, we travel a strangely familiar landscape
looking for Lorca.
And now, if you'd like, let's look at one poem
that I have passed out.
And if you have any questions, after
that I would be delighted to try to answer them.
The poem before you, you have heard a stanza of already.
I was afraid to read it all at first,
hardly knowing who is here , because of how powerful it is.
Now that we have spent nearly, I don't know how long,
40 minutes together?
I feel that perhaps I can read the whole thing to you.
This is slightly different translation from the great poet
and translator WS Merwin.
And again, I am reading this, not in the Spanish,
god forgive me, OK.
"Gacela of Unforeseen Love."
"No one understood the perfume of the dark magnolia
of your womb.
No one knew that you tormented a hummingbird
of love between your teeth.
1,000 Persian ponies fell asleep in the moonlit plaza
of your forehead.
While through four nights, I embraced
your waist, enemy of the snow.
Between plaster and jasmines, your glance
was a pale branch of seeds.
I saw it in my heart to give you the ivory letters that
say always, always, always.
Garden of my agony, your body elusive always.
The blood of your veins in my mouth.
Your mouth already lightless for my death."