Federico Garcia Lorca

NOTES ON FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA

  

Lorca was a tragic figure – a Spanish Andalusian poet who was executed by General Francisco Franco's fascist squads at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 (when Lorca was 38 years old), a war that Hitler used as a trial run for further violence, a training ground for his own army.  Franco put down the leftists in Spain and continued until the early 1970s as Spain's dictatorial ruler.  Truth and art are often casualties of war, and Garcia Lorca's bitter end proves it.

Still, he left behind a lot of writing, and what's included in our anthology is the "Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias."  Mejias was not only a bullfighter but a Renaissance man, learned and cultured.  That's the capacity in which FGL knew and mourned him.  A traditional elegy laments and memorializes a beloved person – consider Milton's "Lycidas" for his Cambridge University friend Edward King, or Tennyson's In Memoriam AHH for Arthur Henry Hallam, or Shelley's "Adonais," an elegy for John Keats.

Structurally, the poem is interesting, with its deep-song refrain of "at five o'clock in the afternoon."  That time is the point at which ISM's whole life comes together and ends.  He was gored by a bull and it took a while for him to die.  Gangrene was involved.  The first section concerns the events leading up to "five" when ISM passes away from his wounds.

In translation as in the original, there's a mixed quality to the poem.  The images are both starkly material and beautiful – the processes that lead to death aren't pretty, and FGL confronts that fact.  To get any lasting value from his friend's death, and properly pay his respects, he must regard death as a brute fact and acknowledging the dissolution of the body is part of that.  Near the poem's beginning, FGL covers the things one does in Spanish culture when a person is about to die.  A lot of what's recounted in this vein is not aesthetically pleasing, of course: death lays eggs in the wound, gangrene sets in, and so forth.  There is an element of realism here not entirely unlike Flaubert's description of Emma Bovary's death by arsenic poisoning.

In the second section, which begins with the speaker's perspective – "I will not see it" – we come to an attitude of defiant refusal, or denial.  He hasn't yet accepted the fact that ISM is dead; he must accept this w/o flowery rhetoric eventually.  At line 78, we get a sense of the perspective of ISM himself; that perspective is confusing, rendered in alienation: "he sought for his beautiful body and encountered his open wound."  He looks for what he was, but he has already been transfigured.  The body and its processes begin to open out into death itself, blood spurting on the ground and everywhere. 

Blood is mentioned often, and it spills out into the natural environs.  Natural dissolution has begun and must take its course.  See line 124: "Now he sleeps without end …. now his blood comes out singing …."  The second section ends with such references, and still the speaker says, "I will not see it."  Blood is life's source, but here exsanguination connects the human body with the natural environment.  Perhaps the need here is to face up to the stark reality, the eternity, of death itself.  Blood may connect us, but to say that isn't to say that the conscious self or ego survives the dissolution of the body.  Consciousness seems here to be extinguished utterly: ISM "sleeps without end" (   ).  Admitting this will be the precondition for paying a worthy tribute to the bullfighter. 

So if consciousness doesn't last, what does?  Sections 3 and 4 seem like they're going to continue the theme of dissolution: "We are here …" and "All is finished," etc.  But they are moving us forward along with the poet.  One of the striking things about confronting the body of a beloved person is that the body becomes stone-like in its coldness; a dead person becomes like stone.  ISM lies upon the stone as if he becomes one with it – the opposite of a soft, living body.  But the stone won't dissolve anytime soon, while the body will quickly perish and decay. 

In the last few sections, it's revealed that much of what we try to do by way of memorializing the dead winds up instead paying tribute to the obliteration of the beloved.  An old gravestone becomes a marker of forgetting rather than remembrance.  In ancient cemeteries, they used to dig up the bodies buried long before to make way for the newly dead.  Hamlet is a fine example of that: the sexton is digging up an already-occupied space (Yorick, among others) to make way for the body of Ophelia. 

In the last part of the poem, we are told that "the bull does not know you …" and that ISM has "died forever," which becomes the refrain.  But FGL sings of him and his great qualities, among them the willingness to confront the prospect of death.  "No te conosce nadie, pero yo te canto."  What is known, then, what is being sung?  Not about you but you.  FGL apparently agrees with the traditional claim that poetry can do something stone can't.  See Shakespeare's Sonnet 55 to the fair young man, which begins

Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme;
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Than unswept stone besmear'd with sluttish time.

Still, it isn't so much Mejias the bullfighter but an archetype of excellence that will be sung and that will survive.  The poet only gets to that point by admitting that the living, breathing person is in fact gone.  Once that's achieved, he comes round to the task of properly memorializing him as an archetype of grace, excellence and courage.  Death is the absolute limit that must be confronted, which on the poet's part entails a rejection of sentimentality and flowery rhyme.