Book of Poems (Selection) Libro Federico Garcia Lorca

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.-Tosca element in Sardou’s play and Puccini’s opera, is a good example of the melodrama which was to make Lorca’s later rural-Andalusian prose plays so powerful and so popular.) A volume of lyric poems written between 1921 and 1924 was published with the title Canciones (Songs).And lastly, he participated in the tercentary-of-death celebrations that rehabilitated the sublime Baroque poet Luis de Góngora, and that helped give the “generation of 1927” (writers of approximately the same age as Lorca) its sobriquet.The trip for seven from Madrid to Andalusia for the Góngora hommage was financed by a torero of high culture, with many literary friends, Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, who, incidentally, in this same year of 1927, became the lover of Lorca’s old friend La Argentinita.In 1928 Federico became the cofounder and the copublisher of both issues of the avant-garde magazine gallo (rooster).In the same year, he published the thrilling Romancero gitano (Gypsy Ballads), deservedly his most popular work.These poems, reviving the form and technique of Spanish medieval and Renaissance narrative ballads, had been written between 1923 and 1927.An old acquaintance of Lorca’s, the Granada law professor Fernando de los Ríos, an ardent socialist (and anathema to the dictator then governing Spain, Miguel Primo de Rivera), was now invited to lecture at Columbia University in New York.Lorca accepted his invitation to go along and enroll as a graduate student.He let it be known that he was trying to become more cosmopolitan, but he may have actually been escaping, both from his father’s pressure (his successes hadn’t been lucrative) and from romantic disappointments.For one thing, Luis Buñuel (the future great filmmaker) had estranged Dalí from him, luring the Catalan to Paris, and Lorca was convinced that the (now famous) short experimental film the two had made together in 1928, Un chien andalou (An Andalusian Dog), specifically targeted him and held him up to ridicule.Lorca was in the New World from June 1929 to June 1930, spending some of the time in Vermont and the last three months in Cuba.The bitter Expressionistic or Surrealistic poems inspired in him by the metropolis weren’t published until after his death—Poeta en Nueva York (The Poet in New York), Mexico, 1940 (except for the “Oda a Walt Whitman,” which was published in Mexico in 1934 in an edition of fifty copies).The Harlem poems in Poeta, like Lorca’s earlier poems about downtrodden Gypsies, seem to stem from a well-to-do young man’s guilt feelings about impoverished and marginalized minorities, but the unmistakably heartfelt tones may stem from Lorca’s very real “outsider” status as a gay in the prim, macho Spain of his day.At the very end of the year 1930, Lorca’s play La zapatera prodigiosa (The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife) had its premiere in Madrid.But he was never able to achieve a production of the highly experimental, often openly homosexual play he had written in Cuba, El público (The Audience; generally nontranslated as The Public).It has been suggested that he undertook his rural Andalusian tragedies (his greatest theatrical successes) as a relatively safe bet, in view of the brick wall El público had run up against.In 1931 he published the Poema del cante jondo (Poem of Cante Jondo), written in 1921 and 1922.The same year also witnessed the beginning of the Second Spanish Republic.While Fernando de los Ríos, Federico’s old friend and mentor, was minister of education, he pushed through a scheme for a mobile theater to tour the provinces, bringing culture to the masses.Lorca was recruited as one of two directors in 1932.From then until 1935, with increasingly long interruptions when his personal projects finally took off and occupied more of his time, he was associated with La Barraca (The Cabin), as this student theater was called, directing and adapting (sometimes with huge tendentious cuts) Spanish classic plays.Madrid in 1933 was the site of the premieres of two plays: the fanciful tragicomedy Amor de don Perlimpín con Belisa en su jardín (The Romance of Don Perlimpin and Belisa in His Garden; generally referred to in English as Don Perlimpin) and the enormously successful Bodas de sangre (Blood Wedding), the work that finally began to earn real money for its author.That same year, in Barcelona, an expanded version of La zapatera prodigiosa was staged.Oddly enough, it was at this time that Federico decided to move in with his parents again (they were now in Madrid).Before the year was over, Lorca had also made an absolutely triumphant journey to Buenos Aires, where he directed his plays and gave lectures.The year 1934 was signalized by the highly successful premiere of Yerma in Madrid.Also in that year, Lorca’s friend and patron Ignacio Sánchez Mejías was gored in the bullring and died because of inadequate medical attention.Lorca’s stirring ode, Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías (often known in English as Lament for the Death of a Bullfighter), was published in 1935, with a dedication to La Argentinita.Also in 1935: a minor off-Broadway production of Blood Wedding in English in New York; the premiere in Barcelona of Doña Rosita la soltera; o Lenguaje de las flores (Doña Rosita the Spinster; or, Language of Flowers); and the publication of Primeras canciones (First Songs), poems written in 1922.In 1936, Bodas de sangre was published.Lorca was planning a trip to Mexico, to direct his plays there as he had done in Argentina [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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