In celebration of gay history month and our week long look at queer wordage, we’d like to take a moment to mention Spanish poet, Federico Garcia Lorca.
Though his brief life was cut short at the start of the Spanish Civil War, Garcia Lorca made a definite impact on the country’s art circles. Friends with artist Salvadore Dali and director Gregorio Martinez Sierra, who gave him his first break as a playwright. From there, Garcia Lorca build a successful career as a master story teller.
Unfortunately, Garcia Lorca also suffered from a deep depression from the cognitive dissonance surrounding his homosexuality. An unrequited love affair with sculptor Emilio Aladren only complicated matters.
As he succumbed to depression, Garcia Lorca lost a number of his friends, but kept himself busy by studying at Columbia University in New York City. Upon his return to Spain, Garcia Lorca directed a university theater company. From Madrid he headed to Granada, where he was arrested and subsequently executed by the fascist government.
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Read one of Garcia Lorca’s poems, “Ditty of First Desire.”
Ditty of First Desire
In the green morning
I wanted to be a heart.
A heart.
And in the ripe evening
I wanted to be a nightingale.
A nightingale.
(Soul,
turn orange-colored.
Soul,
turn the color of love.)
In the vivid morning
I wanted to be myself.
A heart.
And at the evening’s end
I wanted to be my voice.
A nightingale.
Soul,
turn orange-colored.
Soul,
turn the color of love.
unpoetaloco
As a lorquista (Lorca scholar), needless to say I was excited when I saw this post. Please forgive me if I make a few comments. First, when referring to Lorca, it is standard to say simply “Lorca.” As a rule, in Hispanic culture, people are known by their first (paternal) surname, in his case, GarcÃa. Lorca, however, considered the name too common and chose to be referred to by his mother’s surname. His friends, of course, called him Federico. As a child, however, Lorca recounted that his classmates to ridicule him called him Federica (the feminine form).
Lorca did, indeed, go to New York because of his depression related to Aladren. He was also very hurt by the film Un Chien Andalou, which Dalà had collaborated on with Luis Buñuel. Too, Dalà had sharply criticized Lorca’s Gypsy Ballad Book, which was published in 1928, calling it “provincial.” Lorca could not understand why Dalà had betrayed him.
There is no evidence that Lorca actually studied anything at Columbia. He enrolled in an English class, but never attended. Telling his parents that he would be a student was mostly a ruse. After all, they were paying for the trip, and they were also worried about Lorca’s emotional state.
He went to New York at the invitation of Federico de OnÃs, a professor at Columbia. He spent the majority of his time in Harlem, at various cocktail parties at which he was the guest of honor, and writing the wonderfully surrealistic poems that were published posthumously as Poeta en Nueva York.
On the boat ride to New York, he met a young American poet, Phillip Cummings, who invited him to visit him and his family in Vermont. While in Lake Eden Mills, Lorca wrote his most introspective poetry, in which he was clearly trying to come to terms with his homosexuality.
In Double Poem of Lake Eden Mills, he writes:
I want to cry because I have the
longing, like the boys who sit on the
last row, because I am neither a
man, nor a poet, nor a leaf, but a
wounded pulse that probes things from
the other side.
I want to cry saying my
name, rose, child and fir on the
shore of this lake, to tell my
truth as a man of blood killing
in me the mocking and the suggestion
of the word.
His Sonetos del amor oscuro (S0nnets of Dark Love), which are the only truly homosexual poems Lorca wrote, that we know of, have still not been published officially. His estate refuses to allow them to be published. They have been published clandestinely.
There is considerable suggestion that much of his unpublished work was destroyed by his family. Although they knew about Lorca’s homosexuality, because of his tragic death, they did everything possible to protect his reputation, and anything homosexual was considered a stain on that reputation.
Thanks for bearing with me. I hope I wasn’t too pedantic.
Brandon
props to poetaloco for telling some more of the back story! and thanks queerty for this great segment…i love homowords!